Written in 2000 and 2004 respectively, The Complete Persepolis is a graphic autobiographical novel of Marjane Satrapi’s childhood and early adult years during and after the Iranian war and revolution. The first novel, Persepolis One, details her childhood experiences in Iran during the Islamic revolution, while Persepolis Two depicts her high school years in Vienna, Austria, and her return to Iran, where she goes to college, marries and divorces before eventually moving to France.
Throughout the novel, there is focus on the idea of witnessing to signify Satrapi’s motivation for sharing her story which revolves around the idea of describing her life from the viewpoint of someone seeing political and social chaos. Satrapi details the transition that happened to her, her family, and friends during the war. She uses Persepolis to display her life experiences of being an Iranian, the impact war and religious extremism had on her and other women, and how social evolution in Iran shaped their lives. In the preface of the book, Persepolis, Satrapi stated the importance of writing Persepolis: ‘I also don’t want those … who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland to be forgotten’ (Satrapi 2). Satrapi acknowledges the trauma that comes with misplaced identity and nationality especially when it happens when one’s country is at war. This paper, therefore, aims to establish how Persepolis reflects identity conflict as being an inevitable casualty of war.
Persepolis One is a bildungsroman that narrates how the young Marjane comes of age in Iran. Resonating around Marjane’s childhood is the theme of innocence, and we get to witness how the little Marjane grows into a rebellious teenager. Typical of every coming-of-age story, the conflict of identity is central to the entire meaning of the novel. The question of identity here is expanded beyond Marjane’s development, but also, into a national development of what we consider Iran as a country. The author reveals counter-historical narratives that are not usually available to the West, a situation that left us wondering about the intensity of the trauma every child growing up in a religious fundamentalist environment and war society must have been through.
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Satrapi describes her evolution as affected by the religious extremism and war in her country. Marjane was born into an upper-class family in Iran. She was living a normal life until the people started protesting to throw off the Reza Shah, the king of Iran. War breaks out and Marjane’s parents were left with no other option than to send her off to Austria at the age of 14. Marjane first demonstrated her loss of innocence when she smokes a cigarette she had stolen from her uncle: ‘with this first cigarette, I kissed childhood goodbye … Now I was a grown-up’ (Satrapi 117). Marjane grows rapidly from an innocent little girl to a mature teenager who now makes her own decision and rebels against society and its rules. A few years before the revolution, Marjane had wanted to become the last prophetess of the galaxy because of the inequality she noticed between herself and her maid in their house (6). Marjane had a holy book where she wrote what would become her rules when she becomes a prophet, and one of her rules is for all maids to eat on the table with others. Marjane was a young, innocent, and sensitive kid with much potential to make a difference in every way she could.
Marjane’s switch of identity when the war started did not only make her forget all the changes she intended making in her society but altogether neglect her dream of becoming a prophet. She changed from the prophet girl to a child who was willing to attack her fellow mate with nails. As a child, Marjane already started to hear stories of prison, torture, and even death. She attentively listens to her father who narrates the story of how her grandfather was constantly sent to prison and made to spend days in a water-filled cell. She also learns about other prison torture stories from her uncle, Anoush. She started to imagine what it looks like to be tortured with an appliance like iron, and what humans look like when cut into pieces (51-52). She witnesses her friend’s house gets bombed. Marjane goes to buy some jeans and learns of an unexpected missile that exploded in her neighborhood. Marjane sets the scene to relate how traumatic situation was when she says:
“A crowd had gathered in front of my street! The bomb had hit my street! … when we walked past the baba – Levy’s house, which was completely destroyed, I could feel that she was discretely pulling me away. Something told me that the Baba- Levy had been at home. Something caught my attention … I saw a Turquoise bracelet. It was Neda’s. Her aunt had given it to her for her fourteenth birthday … the bracelet was still attached to … I don’t know what” (Satrapi 139-142).
Marjane had rushed home to check if the missile had hit her house, she spotted her friend’s bracelet which was still attached to what looked like a feminine hand in the adapted movie version also called Persepolis. Marjane lost her innocence with this experience. She started to think about the history of her country and her government and opines maturely like an adult. Invariably, Marjane also starts to rebel against authorities. She asserts, “After the death of Neda Baba-Levy, my life took a new turn. In 1984, I was fourteen and a rebel. Nothing scared me anymore” (143). As a 14-year-old, the young Marjane starts to act against all that her country stands for.
Marjane in school does the exact opposite of all that the rules say. She is caught wearing a bracelet and a pair of jeans by her principal who makes the move to seize it from her. Marjane was defensive about this and says “Over my dead body! It was a gift from my mom’ (143). She wears the bracelet the next day and hits the principal when she tries to take the bracelet from her. This led to Marjane’s expulsion from the school. She gets into another school after a serious struggle. A few weeks into the school semester, Marjane accuses her religious teacher of lying to them in the presence of the whole class and gets herself into trouble with the principal. She goes around rocking Nikes and jean jackets and goes to Iran’s dangerous black market to purchase illegal pop music tapes. Marjane’s growth is complicated because the Iran government believes that children are adults of tomorrow, therefore, the school was the major institution where the exercising of Islamic rules was taken very seriously. Marjane’s school thus becomes an ideological state apparatus serving the interest of the Islamic republic. This leads the girls to a confused state and eventually makes them resistant to authorities.
The young Marjane was sent off to study at Vienna at the age of 14. The complexities of an Iranian identity manifest themselves in several ways for Satrapi in Vienna. She struggles in different ways to assert an Iranian identity that is both proud and independent. At first, it was difficult for Marjane to fit into the Western world. She found everything completely different from how things were done in Iran. At the club she finds the way of dancing and partying strange; “and the party was not what I imagined. In Iran, at parties, everyone would dance and eat. In Vienna, people preferred to lie around and smoke … and then, I was turned off by all these public displays of affection. What do you expect, I came from a traditionalist country” (Satrapi 185). Everything took a different turn for Marjane, she became lost between two identities and had to negotiate her values as an Iranian and a western girl. She eventually decides to blend in and forget about her identity as an Iranian as this was the only way she could fit in:
‘The harder I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my culture, betraying my parents and my origins, that I was playing a game by somebody else’s rules … each telephone call from my parents reminded me of my cowardice and my betrayal. I was at once happy to hear their voices and ashamed to talk to them … if only they knew …if they knew that their daughter was made up like a punk, that she smoked joints to make a good impression, that she had seen men in their underwear while they were being bombed every day, they wouldn’t call me their dream child” (193).
Marjane gets absorbed into Western culture. She starts to wear makeup, adopts a punk hairstyle that has been banned in Iran, and smokes joints. At first, she felt guilty for her radical transition, but as time moved on she completely forgot about her old identity as an Iranian girl. Her first demonstration of this was at a bar where she outrightly denied her identity as an Iranian. When drinking and dancing at a bar, the seventeen-year-old Marjane is asked where she is from by Marc, Anna’s brother, and shamefully lies that she is French. At this point, Marjane gets haunted by the memory of her grandmother who advised Marjane before leaving for Vienna to never forget where she comes from and who she is and to always be proud of herself. In the end, she finds herself heartbroken by Marcus, a guy she loved so much. This experience tears her apart and made her a street girl who ate from the trash.
After the breakdown in Vienna, Marjane returns to Iran as a 20-year-old only to find out home was no longer there. Marjane found herself too Iranian in the Western world, and now too Western in Iran. Throughout her time in Vienna, Marjane experienced much racism and prejudice, and upon returning home, in Iran, she laments that she was a stranger in Vienna and also at home. This created a loss of identity for her as she could no longer recognize herself as being a genuine part of any culture but was lost somewhere in between. Indeed, the tension of Iranian and Western identity is Marjane’s major conflict. In the end, Satrapi asks if Iran will ever be her home again. She eventually migrates to France after realizing that loss of identity was a classic toll war immigrants pay when they leave their country. The conflict of identity also extended to her country, Iran. After the revolution, Satrapi recognizes that Iran was at odds with the person she hopes to be.
The graphic novel allows Satrapi to demonstrate her growth into a young adult, portray how she loses her innocence, and continually gets confronted with contradictions and confusions of life. People get affected by what happens to them and around them, and this often makes them develop new perspectives about life and grow faster than their age. The war made Marjane experience so much sorrow, death, disaster, and other bad experiences that stem from war. This changes the identity of the vibrant and sensitive child into a strong rebellious adult.
Unlike in a prose form, the simple image sequences of black and white enabled Satrapi to capture and trace the politics of her country and its effects on her psyche and development in a simple, personal, and basic representation. The images are touching and convey feelings of innocence and truth, reminding one of the precarity of survival during war. In Satrapi’s article titled “Why I wrote Persepolis,” she asserts that “images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and draw, it seems a shame to choose only one. I think it’s better to do both” (Satrapi 11). Satrapi’s use of a graphic novel to depict her life events made her story captivating, emotional, and an easy read for her audience. We get to enter into the story and experience all she felt.
Works Cited
- Satrapi, Marjane. The Complete Persepolis. Pantheon Books, 2003.
- “Why I Wrote Persepolis.” Dec. 2003, pp. 9-11. https://greatgraphicnovels.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/whyiwroteperspolis1.pdf Accessed on 16th Feb. 2020.
- Persepolis. Directed by Marjane Satrapi, and Winshluss, Tegnefilm, 2007.
