Comparing Persepolis And Marjane Satrapi's A Far Cry

Society has created a world where people believe that they need to act and look a certain way to be accepted and liked. The media, celebrities, and the culture someone grows up in influence how people perceive themselves. In the film Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and the poem “A Far Cry from Africa” by Derek Walcott, the characters in both must face the difficulty of finding themselves after being impacted by their surroundings. Persepolis is an autobiography of Marjane Satrapi and her struggle to be able to find herself in every culture she is assimilated in. In the opening scene of the film, we see Marjane dressed in attire that would be as “regular clothes” in the eyes of Americans. She is in a French airport and is looking at the flight to Teheran. When the shot goes to Marjane again, we see her in the bathroom looking at herself in a mirror while

In the scene where Marjane and her mother are outside of the grocery store loading up their car, a man comes up to Marjane’s mother and tells her to put her scarf back on, and when she kept minding her own business, the man became irritated. She then responds that he should have more respect towards women which in turn, made him respond angrily, “Women like you, I fuck them against the walls!” Marjane’s witnessing of the oppression of women, specifically to a woman she cares deeply about, can be evidence of the reasons for her rebellious stage later in life. Furthermore, Marjane’s uncle told her about his story of rebelling against and running from the government which led her to become motivated to be like him. As she grew older, she began to have a mind of her own and actually started to think about what was going on around her. This is initially where she began to lose her cultural identity and where the link to westernization becomes