Certain migrant authors, as for example Marjane Satrapi, the renown Franco-Iranian graphic novelist and film director, have chosen to perform a multimodal authorship by (co)directing adaptations of their own books, re-experiencing the same story through different medium specificities. This process, conceptualized in this paper as “self-adaptation”, is further layered in works of others like Atiq Rahimi, the Franco-Afghan novelist and film-director, who associated the process of adaptation with translation proper, adapting his translingually written French novel into a Persian film. 

Self-adaptation, just as its sister-concept self-translation is described, is more of an artistic strategy highly charged with the presence of the author, no matter generated from authorial anxiety or self-fascination. The salience of “self” gets further complicated if infused with the borderline experience of the migrant, where it gets alternatively fragmented and refurbished in a different scale. Migratory self-adaptation moves therefore in a double direction: adapting oneself and adapting one’s self. 

In this paper I explore different notions of “self” in the process and products of self-adaptation, having works of the above-mentioned authors as points of departure. Apart from gender differences and dissimilarity in their career paths, the two provide an informing comparison pair since they differ significantly in terms of including autobiographical aspects; Satrapi’s work are acknowledged as autobiographies while Rahimi’s novels and films are void of any reference to (his) migrant experience at the level of story. The least would be hence to discuss the representation of the migrant experience in these narratives. Rather, this paper will focus on performative instantiations of the migrant self as the author; the translingual; the double-(or non)-citizen; etc., in textual and contextual layers.