Order 888613: Persepoli

In the graphic memoir Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Marjane Satrapi depicts her autobiographical persona, Marji, as an Iranian child who grows up during the Iran-Iraq war and the Islamic Revolution. Social injustice and the lack of freedom are two crucial problems within the social and cultural context of the story, and Marji’s own struggles with personal freedom often mirror the struggles of the Iranian people under the Islamic regime. In her book The Art of Memoir, renowned memoirist Mary Karr theorizes that successful memoirs involve a “psychic struggle” (91) of the writer, who crafts his or her life story around the evolving conflict with an “inner enemy” (92). According to Karr, this internal struggle is a “journey toward the self’s overhaul by book’s end” (92), which means that the memoirist is journeying toward a significant shift in self-understanding. When applied to Marji’s voyage of self-discovery, Karr’s theory leads to a logical question about what Marji’s inner conflict teaches her about herself by the end of the book, and if it fundamentally changes her. By exploring Marji’s interiority more closely, readers will gain greater understanding about how the internal is presented both textually and visually to readers. Additionally, it is crucial to understanding more about what drives autobiographical narratives. From the first pages of the book, Marji struggles with her inability grant and receive social justice and unlimited personal freedom. Though she does not fully resolve this struggle by the end of the book, her increased self-confidence, independence, and pride in her homeland reveal that the conflict has significantly shaped her identity.

Before examining how Marji’s internal conflict manifests early in the first volume of Persepolis, it is important to acknowledge how interiority can be presented visually as well as textually in a graphic narrative. In his pivotal work on the communication of images in comics titled Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud details how comic artists use a mixture of visual symbols and text to relay a person’s emotions and thoughts: “In dealing with the face itself, the line between the visible and invisible worlds becomes even less clear. The cartoon face is an abstract, but it is based upon visual data. Some indicators of emotion are also visually based, such as the familiar sweat bead” (130:5-6). McCloud continues by acknowledging the symbolic role that these visuals play for readers to understand emotion by seeing them. He then adds, “Even when there is little or no distortion of the characters in a given scene, a distorted or expressionistic background will usually affect our ‘reading’ of characters’ inner states” (132:2). So, a combination of a facial expression, a symbol, and an expressionistic background can all reveal a character’s interiority.

In Persepolis, Satrapi uses both visual and textual elements to reveal her 9-year-old self’s struggles with social injustice and limitations of freedom in her memoir’s very first chapter, “The Veil.” As Karr theorizes in The Art of Memoir, “the split self or inner conflict must manifest on the first pages and form the book’s thrust or through line” (92). Indeed, in this first chapter, Marji is repeatedly depicted as suffering from the injustices that she perceives around her, within her own home and family. In the very first pages of “The Veil,” it is 1979 and 9-year-old Marji is having difficulty understanding and accepting divisions of social class the expectations and unfair judgments that comes with them. Her trouble to coping with these injustices cause Marji to decide to become “a prophet” when she grows up (6:6), thinking a prophet could solve all those problems. In the first panel of Figure 1, Satrapi illustrates her younger self at the dinner table with her parents, whose abstract facial expressions—her mom’s slight smile and her father’s satisfied closed eyes as he drinks—visually inform the reader that they are enjoying their meal together. Yet, Marji’s eyes are wide and blank, staring forward instead of looking at her parents or at her meal. She is not eating, in fact, her arms are at her sides and her silverware is on the table. As McCloud explained earlier, this panel gives us visual symbols to understand Marji’s internal state: she is clearly distressed about something, which is isolating her from those she loves (her parents). The clue to the cause of her distress is shown in the background of the panel, where the families maid, Mehri, sits alone at a table in the another room. A caption at the top of the panel reads, “I wanted to be a prophet,” with borderless text below it that explains, “because our maid did not eat with us” (Satrapi 6:6). Marji views it unjust that her maid cannot sit at their table with them like a member of their family, just as later in the book, she will not understand or accept that Mehri is judged not suitable romantic partner for their neighbor who is also a higher social class than Mehri as a maid (Satrapi 37-39). Additionally, Mehri is sitting in view of the family, with Marji’s back turned to her so she doesn’t have to see the separation, but Marji’s eyes show that she is still very aware of Mehri’s presence behind her in the another room.

Figure 1 (Satrapi 6:6-7)

The second panel of Figure 1 continues Marji’s discomfort with the injustice of her family’s higher social position. In this panel, she drives in the backseat of her father’s Cadillac—an American-made car symbolically associated with wealth and the West—and a man looks on with his mouth hanging open. The car is moving up at an angle driving out of the frame of the panel emphasizes that they are moving toward their higher social position above the common society. All we can see are Marji’s eyes and the top of her head, as though she’s trying to hide from society while in this car. Her eyes are wide open again like first panel of Figure 1, meanwhile, her dad faces forward in fashionable sunglasses. In these two early panels of the first chapter of the memoir, then, readers are already learning from both the graphic and textual elements of the panels that Marji is struggling with her family’s social position and the limited freedoms of others. In just the first few pages of the book, Marji’s internal struggles forecast the inner turmoil that will follow her throughout both volumes of her memoir.

Word Count: 1061

Works Cited

Elahi, Babak. “Frames and Mirrors in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Symploke, vol. 15, no.

1/2, 2007, pp. 312-325.