Persepoli by Marjane Satrapi

Introduction

In the book Persepolis, the narrator, author and main character, Marjane (Marji) Satrapi talks about her life growing up in Iran after the Islamic Revolution and during the Iranian-Iraqi war. The novel is separated into two books, Persepolis 1 and Persepolis 2. Both books are split into sections based on occurrences that happened in Satrapi’s life. Each section title represents something deeper than what the comic is literally saying. The titles of each sections are metaphors for what the section is about. Persepolis 1 is describing her childhood during the revolution and gives us a great understanding of what happened in Iran in the 1980s.

Section Titles

THE VEIL

The first section of the book is called “The Veil” which introduces 10 year old Marji who’s being introduced to the changes of a conservative regime taking over Iran. The veil represents the girls having to mask their identity and who they are. She is forced to wear a veil, which she does not understand and is also forced to go to a single gendered school after her co-ed, secular school was segregated. In that school she is having her personal and cultural identity masked and is also literally masked by having to hide his face. She is forced to mask her personality and was even reprimanded for her individual thoughts. In the first two frames of the first section (Figure 1), Satrapi illustrates herself and her classmates and when you glance at the frames without reading the text all of the girls look the same. They seem to not have any personal identity, you cannot tell one from another.

Marji is not the only one being oppressed by the veil. There were women holding demonstrations against the veil because of its ability to mask t...

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...HEROES

The 3000 political prisoners that were incarcerated by the Shah for communist revolutionary acts, were released including two family friends who told stories of the awful torture that he received by Iranians who were “trained by the CIA” and of the deaths of his companions. Marji and Laly, the daughter of one the prisoners, saw them as heroes. She feels shame because her own father is not a “hero” of the revolution (Figure 5).

Conclusion

The way that Satrapi phrased each of the section titles, foreshadows what is going on in that section. She uses common words to explain what will happen in the sections and then gives it more depth in each frame of the comic afterward. The section titles allude to a deeper meaning that what is at first thought and I find that very creative.

Works Cited

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York, NY: Pantheon, 2003. Print.