The University News

Issue date: 2/11/08 Section: Culture

"The Complete Persepolis," a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi is an utterly human and personal story. Satrapi successfully mixes the emotions of childhood and the journey to adulthood with political and social turmoil.

It is Satrapi's memoir of her life in Iran before, during and after the revolution and the Iran-Iraq war.

Persepolis is named after the capital city of ancient Persia. Satrapi is concerned with remembering the past and this makes her story seem too nostalgic in parts.

At first, Persepolis seems deceptively simple.

In the graphic novel format, the spare yet charming childlike drawings illustrate the story easily. But the content is far from simple and the novel never offers easy answers for its characters or readers.

Persepolis is told in vignette-like sections, each section being a mini story in the larger tale. Throughout the book the focus remains on Satrapi's relationships and experiences. Her father, mother and grandmother are important secondary characters and the main support in Satrapi's life. Satrapi's grandmother is particularly influential and doles out humor and choice words of wisdom.

The story begins in Tehran in1980, when Satrapi was ten, with the introduction of the mandatory veil in her school.

With a child's point of view, Satrapi explains her and her peers' natural and often hilarious reactions to the social effects of the confusing regime change.

Satrapi believed, in the complete confidence of childhood, that she was destined to be the last prophet of Islam.

To her, God was a grandfatherly, wise being and she held daily conversations with him. Her parents, who were more political than religious, also educated her in politics and philosophy through books.

Her favorite was a comic book called "Dialectic Materialism" with a drawing of Karl Marx, who she describes as looking like God but with curlier hair. As violence on all sides of the revolution progressed and when her favorite uncle was executed, both her political heroes and God became empty.

For little Satrapi, God and political comics could not truly explain her or her country's turmoil. Her parents, who had supported the revolution, saw the hope of a socialist democracy clouded by radical fundamentalists.

Under increasing oppression and nationalist propaganda, a newly adolescent Satrapi rebels by telling off her teachers and trolling the black market for Iron Maiden tapes.

Continued...

Page 1 of 3 next >

Article Tools