People are like cameras and their personal experiences can be their lenses that change and modify the actual picture. This evident in Marjane Satrapi’s book Persepolis because the whole book is about a girl growing up, and forming her own opinions. Furthermore, Marjane has to mature in the turmoil of an Iranian-Iraqi war, she also has to survive the brutal Islamic regime governing her. This creates a very particular point of view considering that the parents raising Marjane are against the new form of government, and actively protest, risking their lives. As a result, this rubs off on her creating a very rebellious and dauntless little girl, who isn’t afraid of the new oppressors.
Imagine if everyone had a pre-determined negative image about you? This is what life was like for Marji, the protagonist of the novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. The book is set in the year 1980, in Iran where Islam was a major religion at the time. This is also the time for the Islamic Revolution which kicked the Shau out of office and made Iran a theocracy. In Persepolis, Satrapi challenges negative stereotypes about Iranians through important characters who oppose the Islamic Regime.
During the Islamic Revolution, religion was very important to the fundamentalist Islamic regime that took power over the secular state. In her graphic memoir, Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi, a spiritual young girl, suffers a deep loss of faith due to the oppressive fundamentalist religion in Iran. This loss of faith causes Marji to experience disillusionment and a loss of identity, which greatly shapes her character. Through her experiences with God, Satrapi comments on the difference between spirituality and fundamentalist religion and displays the negative repercussions of an oppressive religious state.
The graphic novel, Persepolis that is written by Satrapi depicts the coming of age story of Marjane and her experiences during and after the Iranian war. Through Marjane’s experiences, the character frequently encounters the hardship and conflict of growing up. However, these hardships are major factors that shape Marjane as a character and establish the context of the novel. Within this novel, Satrapi uses graphic novel conventions and literary devices to convey the conflict of Marjane; with herself, with man (in the form of her teachers), and with the society that is revealed in Persepolis.
Have you ever heard two people having a discussion about a topic, but they have different opinions? Acknowledging the fact that people could have different opinions based on their own perspectives is very important. In Persepolis, Marjane writes as her 10 year old self, sharing what she experienced in Iran, while they were in the middle of a revolution. Throughout the book, she gets older and her perspective changes multiple times over several different topics. Marjane Satrapi’s perspective affects her presentation of imperialism, religion and loss of innocence.
Often times it is a difficult task to tell the difference between what constitutes as right and wrong. Being able to differentiate this for oneself encourages one to create their own system of principals. In the autobiographical graphic novel, Persepolis, the author, Marjane Satrapi, writes of her and her family's experience with the economical and political changes to her society that came with the movement of the Iranian Revolution. Her use of the visual motif of exclusively using black and white colors in her illustrations and the literary motif of people rebelling against their government conveys a clear central idea that differentiating between good and bad and right and wrong, as well as establishing your own set of values is crucial
Effects on the Memoir Persepolis Marjane Satrapi’s novel Persepolis describes experiences during the Islamic Regime that leave people suffering, dying, and fighting for a better government. Marjane Satrapi uses a comic layout to illustrate what is difficult to say in words. Her panel design depicts images of her, her family, and friends as well as how people in the community are reacting to the different events of the revolution. The use of panel design assists the memoir by making Satrapi’s purpose of portraying information more successful. Throughout the novel Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi uses panel design to advance the reader 's’ knowledge of the many situations occurring in Iran that cause distress to many individuals rebelling against the regime.
The role of politics in Marjane Satrapi 's life is a critical one, as seen in her graphic novel Persepolis, which narrates her experiences as a young girl raised by revolutionaries during turbulent times in Iran. Particularly, Satrapi uses juxtaposition between her parents and children to highlight the hypocrisy and myopia of the upper class revolutionaries when it comes to the interpretation and implementation of their political ideology. Satrapi builds the foundation of her criticism through the superficial comprehension her child self exhibits regarding her parents '—and, by extension, upper class communists '—ideals, then warns about the dangers that such lack of understanding presents through child soldiers who are fed ideologies and then sent to war. However, while pointing out the shortcomings of the movement, Satrapi 's use of children as the vessels for comparison entails that there is room for the communist community to develop, like Marji does as she matures from child to teen, and encourage equality through the removal of social barriers created through binaristic thinking to truly promote communist ideals. The first point of juxtaposition is Marji herself, particularly her initial myopic thinking as a child.
Germaine Greer once said, “Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.”, Through the graphic novel Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi gives a voice to those who were oppressed during the Iranian revolution Ensuring that they are not forgotten. With the use of homogenous features and other stylistic devices, Satrapi shows how she and her classmates, her parents, and other nationalists were marginalised, excluded, and silenced during this time period. From early on in the book, the theme of oppression is ever-present. On page 3, Satrapi introduces herself, expressionless and wearing the veil, stating, “This is me when I was 10 years old”.
Everything can be viewed from two perspectives; A fist fight, a murder, bullying, just to name a few situations. This is still the case with Iran and it’s people. Iran and its neighboring countries are often portrayed negatively as terrorist, or failed nations. This is not always the truth, however, and one can learn that through Marjane’s coming of age story, Persepolis. The personal nature of the story is told through Marjane’s loss of innocence, her opinions on religion, and her observation of the prominent gender roles.
Children are constantly learning about themselves and the world around them. As they grow up, their world expands from their home to peers and, eventually, to people and places they know about. Children should learn about themselves and develop a positive self-image if they have to be successful citizens in society. They must learn how different they are as well how alike they are in relation to others. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is the story of Satrapi’s childhood growing up in a tumultuous post-revolutionary Iran.
In Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi uses drawings to portray daily life in Iran and she makes a lot of contradictions between home life, public life, and the repressive exact regimes on the individual spirit. As it is a graphic novel, the author uses the variety of ways to give readers to look at the culture that Marjane had experienced in her life as well as history of Iran, and the culture of women in the Middle East. The graphic novel has its own literary world and leads the reader to reconsider about how a story can be told in a different way. The images in the graphic novel can present a new style of conversation for the author to communicate with the reader. This kind of technique is very similar to a movie or an artwork such as painting, which shows that each panel can be framed with attention with specific perspective, emotion, position, and setting of the characters.
In Persepolis, a bildungsroman genre graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, the main character experienced many events that made her become fully grown up in Iran, yet the turning point was her life in Vienna. A bildungsroman is a novel that describes the process in which the character grows from child to adult, which he or she has a reason to start a journey while the coming of age is difficult, suffering, uncomfortable, and long. There are many particular events where Marjane has many difficulties on the process of maturity. When Marjane is still a child in Iran, terrible historical events happened around her and formed her to become more mature. Although they made her become a mature child, the real part of her life that changed her were her days in Vienna where she really understood the cruelty of the outside world and herself.
The graphic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is an animated ‘identity crisis’ showing how she has trouble reconciling the Eastern and Western values that she has been influenced by. By ‘identity crisis’ I mean Marjane is uncertain about who she is and where she belongs to. The Eastern values would include hierarchy, restraint, collectivism and deference, whereas the Western values would include equality, freedom of expression, individualism and self-assertion. A graphic novel can be defined as a book containing a long story told mostly in pictures but with some writing. I intend to investigate why Satrapi has chosen to use the graphic novel instead of using other styles to present Marjane attempts to reconcile the different values and find
Have you ever read a graphic novel with a variety of worldwide problems? From: racial issues, economic issues, women’s rights, political repression, social issues etcetera. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is the authors memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Marjane Satrapi tells her story through black and white comic strips of her life in Tehran from her childhood ages six to fourteen. Persepolis portrays a memorable portrait of daily life in Iran, as well the perplexing contradictions between home life and public life.
