Religion, Repression, and Modernity

Theme Analysis

Persepolis explores the intersection of religion and modernity, as well as the impact of
religious repression on the religious feeling and practices of those who must endure it. At
the beginning of the story, when Iran is ruled by the Westernized, American-backed dictator
Shah, Marjane defines herself as “deeply religious” even as she and her family think of
themselves as also being “very modern and avant-garde.” In fact, her religion at the start
seems like a type of freedom. Religion, Islam and Zoroastrianism, and its many stories and
traditions allow Marjane an escape not only into fancy and imagined glory—she sees herself
as the last prophet—but also into ideas of social equality, aid for the weak, and the end of
suffering. In pre-1979 Iran, Marjane does not see religion and modernity as incompatible: in
her self-written holy book she adds a commandment that “everybody should have a car.”
Indeed, God, who comes into the book as his own character, provides Marjane with much
comfort, companionship, and meaning.

But the Revolution, which many Iranians supported because they wanted freedom from the
decadent, violently oppressive, and foreign-backed Shah, ended up bringing to power a
regime of conservative religious hardliners who saw modern Western-style culture as
incompatible with Islam. This new government—the Islamic Republic of Iran—soon passed
laws that rigorously regulated all behavior on strict religious grounds and outlawed
consumption of or interaction with essentially anything seen as Western, such as American
music or clothing. Much of the graphic novel depicts how the Satrapi family, devoted as it is
to Western ideas and practices, must hide these affinities behind closed doors (smuggling in,
making, or buying Western luxuries like wine and posters of rock bands), while outwardly
professing their devotion to the religious values defined by the rulers of the nation so as not
to suffer terrible consequences that could range from beatings to torture to execution.

Further, Persepolis shows how, while Iran ostensibly became more religious under the
Islamic Republic, the government’s attempts to force their religious practices onto the
populace actually causes Marjane and others to lose their personal religions. After the
execution of Anoosh at the hands of the Revolutionaries, Marjane yells at God to leave her,
and he disappears as a character from the graphic novel. Under the new regime, she can no
longer explore and think about religion on her own terms, and instead religion gets co-opted
for nationalistic and political reasons. For instance, Mrs. Nasrine, the family maid, shows
Marjane and Marjane’s Mother the plastic key painted gold given to her son by his teachers.
The key, given to the poorer boys of Iran, represents their guaranteed entry to heaven if they
are to die as soldiers in the Iraq-Iran War. Religion, here, becomes a tool used by the
government to not only justify but make schoolboys want to go to a war that is almost
certain death for them. Seeing such a usurpation of religion, Mrs. Nasrine expresses that
though she has been “faithful to the religion” all her life, she’s not sure she can “believe in
anything anymore.” Further, Persepolis depicts the hypocrisy of many of the representatives
of the Islamic Republic, who declare their religious allegiance to the laws but also take
bribes or overstate their devotion for the chance at extra money or promotion. The
state-sanctioned religion makes shows of religion valuable as a means of career
advancement, but does not inspire true religious values in many of even its most powerful
adherents. Ultimately, the graphic novel portrays the repressive religion imposed by the
Islamic Republic as actually standing at odds with the heartfelt religious feeling and belief
experienced by an individual.

Nationalism, Heroism, and Martyrdom

Theme Analysis

When the Revolution comes, Marjane, like her family, rejoices. After decades under the
despotic American-backed Shah, she and her family believe that this moment will ensure
that the Iranian people will finally be free to decide for themselves who will lead their
country and how. Put another way, Marjane is an Iranian patriot and a nationalist, in the
sense that she believes profoundly in the value and need for an independent Iran ruled by
Iranians. Marjane’s love for her country and belief that it should be free is so great that she
feels the urge to fight for it, and glorifies those who do fight for it—particularly those people
who die in the name of the cause: martyrs. Marjane, just a child at this time, thinks of
heroism in romantic terms, and sees martyrdom especially as extremely positive and
desirable. In fact, Marjane hopes her own family members will be heroes and she is
disappointed that her father is not a hero. She is ecstatic when it turns out that Anoosh, her
uncle, has had to flee to the USSR to protect himself from the Shah’s government against
which he was fighting.

Yet as Marjane starts to come to grips with the actual consequences of martyrdom and
heroism—Anoosh, for example, gets executed by the new regime because of his former
political activities—her positive feelings about heroism and martyrdom begin to fade. Even
more importantly, as the Revolution results in a new regime even more oppressive than the
Shah’s, and an Iran ruled by Iranians turns out to be no better and in many ways worse than
an Iran ruled by foreign powers, Marjane is forced to grapple with the very notion of
nationalism. What country or which people should be the object of her nationalism? Though
before and just after the Revolution she complains that her father is “no patriot” because of
his pessimism, as she grows up and sees the actions and impact of the Islamic Republic she
begins to recognize her own country’s stubborn foreign policy and ideologically-driven
warmongering for what they are. She realizes that the boys sent off to war as martyrs are
being brainwashed and used, their lives wasted, in service to nationalism. She sees that just
as nationalism can overthrow a dictator, so it can also be used to prop up a dictator. And yet,
at the same time, when she hears the Iranian National Anthem, Marjane is “overwhelmed”
with emotion. Facing this conundrum in her feelings about her country, Marjane begins to
understand that she can both love her country and hate it at the same time. She begins to
understand that a country is not one monolithic culture, one monolithic religion (her
neighbors are Jewish, for example), nor one monolithic people: she sees how the people in
Tehran make fun of southern Iranians, how the country is very much divided, and how there
are many competing narratives about Iran’s past, present, and especially future. Much of the
book’s aim, as Marjane explains in her preface, is to give readers at least one narrative about
Iran: her own.

Violence, Forgiveness, and Justice

Theme Analysis
The historical body count by the end of Persepolis is enormous: from the start of the
Revolution to the end of the Iraq-Iran War over a million people die—on the battlefield, in
the streets, and in prison cells—killed by the Shah and by the Islamic Republic that replaces
the Shah. By the end of the book, Marjane expresses her sorrow that “we could have avoided
it all”, indicating a belief that much of the damage done to the Iranian people was a result of
the Iranian regime’s own actions: its warmongering with Iraq, its radicalization of young
soldiers, its religious fanaticism, its valorization of martyrdom. Official, legally sanctioned
punishment for infractions as small as an improperly worn veil or the possession of
forbidden party fare could be shockingly severe, including torture and death, and the people
who carry out these punishments are usually agents of the regime. As such, Marjane claims,
“it was really our own who attacked us.”

Marjane must therefore contend with the reality of the complicity of the people around her.
In the early days after the end of the Revolution, Marjane and her friends find out
that Ramin’s father was part of the secret police under the Shah that killed many people.
They decide to get revenge by holding nails between their fingers and attacking Ramin.
However, Marjane’s mother teaches her that one cannot blame and punish the child of the
perpetrator, who has nothing to do with the crimes committed. She claims that one must
forgive, and Marjane takes this to heart. Later, however, after seeing the deaths perpetrated
by the new Islamic Republic, she contradicts herself somewhat, saying that “bad people are
dangerous, but forgiving them is, too.” This comment suggests the realization of an
impossible situation, the realization that despite what the storybooks might say, forgiveness
is not a cure-all, that forgiving bad people won’t magically turn them good. At one point,
Marjane’s mother claims, “Don’t worry, there is justice on earth.” But the book seems to
constantly question the veracity of this claim. In Persepolis little justice is to be found.

Children, War, and Growing Up

Theme Analysis

The memoir follows its protagonist, Marjane, from childhood to young adulthood, and as
such it traces the effects of war and politics on her psyche and development. By her own
admission, Marjane thinks that the moment she comes of age occurs when she smokes a
cigarette she stole from her uncle. However, by this point Marjane has encountered so much
sorrow, death, and disaster, with enough grace, dignity, and sympathy, that her tiny act of
rebellion against her mother’s prohibition of cigarettes comes across as hopelessly
childish—as more of a defense mechanism against the repression enacted by the state than
an act of maturity. What might have, during peaceful times, been seen as a rite of passage
into adulthood becomes muddied by the heightened stakes of the war, and Marjane must
grapple with growing up quickly even as she still retains many of her immature instincts.
War both stunts and quickens her growth, and brings out both the weepy and sensitive child
and the strong and willful adult in her.

Persepolis shows children to be extremely malleable ideologically and behaviorally during

war precisely because children do not yet have the capacity to understand the complexity of
the situations around them. For example, we see how many boys easily become radicalized
and come to believe in the heavenly benefits of martyrdom because they are naturally
trusting of authority. In fact, the graphic novel opens with Marjane professing the fact that
she and her friends did not understand the meaning of the veil newly imposed by the
Islamic Republic; they only knew it as a change from the time before, when they did not
need to cover their hair. This alerts us to the fact that for a child born into this new rule, the
rule will seem perfectly normal, just as not wearing a veil felt normal for Marjane before the
Revolution. Children, thus, take their cues about what is normal in the world from the adults
around them, and Marjane and her friends throughout Persepolis emulate in reality or
imagination the roles of soldiers, torturers, demonstrators, prophets, heroes, and political
leaders. Rather than thinking rationally or sophisticatedly about all the different players in
this societal moment of crisis, Marjane at first follows or reveres anyone with power and
popular appeal.

However, the graphic novel literally illustrates her growth into young adulthood as she
becomes continually confronted with the contradictions and confusions of life. Marjane’s
growing up is complicated by the fact that the Iranian government understands that the
children of today are the adults of tomorrow, and so wants to influence children to become
adults who will support the Islamic Republic. Marjane’s school thus becomes a microcosm of
the wider world in which the government’s ideology gets thrust onto the populace. Not only
must the girls wear veils, whereas once they did not, but after the Revolution they must also
tear out the photo of the Shah—a man whom they were once told to adore. This confusion
leads Marjane to understand that she cannot simply follow the opinions of others—she
must make up her own mind about the political realities and questions surrounding her. She
must grow up.

The Personal vs. the Political

Theme Analysis

Persepolis is a story about Marjane Satrapi, her family, her friends, and the people she
knows—and also about the nation of Iran. These two stories cannot be unspooled from each
other—one cannot be told without the other, and no individual in the story can exist or be
understood outside of the context of the historical change happening in Iran around him or
her, no matter how much he or she might try. From the start, Marjane’s story is about how
the individual engages with the political—as her parents demonstrate against the Shah
during the Revolution—and how the political encroaches on the personal—as after the
Revolution Marjane must suddenly wear the veil at school. Indeed, what Marjane at one
point pinpoints as the source of the Revolution—class differences—she recognizes in her
own family home: the family maid, Mehri, does not eat dinner at the table with them.

The question, then, becomes one of degrees: if one cannot escape the political in one’s life,
how much should one participate in the political sphere, and does one actually have a choice
in the matter? For the Satrapis, the question manifests itself in questions over how much
risk they want to take to protect their rights—do they want to demonstrate and possibly be
beaten, for example? The Satrapis' solution is to try to recede as much as they can, to appear
like good citizens of the Islamic Republic even as they privately hold parties, make wine, and
buy imported goods. Yet even these choices are political acts, as they are forbidden and
might lead to arrest.
Though Marjane cannot outwardly rebel much beyond improperly covering her veil, she
finds small ways to resist the oppressive rules imposed on her by the Islamic Republic. The
personal and the political, then, become inexorably intertwined in Iran. To assert one’s
individuality in clothing or spoken opinion becomes a political act. Furthermore, Marjane
expresses that government policies really affect people’s behaviors: “It wasn’t only the
government that changed. Ordinary people changed too.” Under such a repressive regime,
what once felt like an enormous separation between the public sphere and the private one
considerably narrows. By the end of the graphic novel, Marjane’s mother is both covering
the windows to protect against flying glass—a consequence of the ongoing warfare,
indiscriminate in its destructiveness—and from the eyes of prying neighbors, who might
inform the authorities about the family’s Western ways, which would be an individually
targeted and motivated act.

Gender
Theme Analysis

Persepolis opens at the moment in Iranian history when it becomes obligatory for women to
wear the veil and schools become segregated by gender. The Revolution brings many
changes to Tehran, but the changes imposed on women and men in how they dress and
look—women must cover their heads, men must cover their arms and not wear a
necktie—might be the most immediately relevant and personally frustrating. Over the
course of the graphic novel, Marjane begins to understand that to be a woman in her new
society is to be subjugated to a lesser role than the one she expected to have in her younger
years. As a child, she imagines herself a to be the last prophet, explicitly despite the fact that
all the other prophets were men. However, as the graphic novel progresses, she realizes that
though she “wanted to be an educated, liberate woman” this “dream went up in smoke” with
the Revolution. Though she had once wanted to be like the celebrated scientist Marie Curie,
she thinks that “at the age that Marie Curie first went to France to study [chemistry], I’ll
probably have ten children.”

Marjane comes to understand that her destiny as a woman is dependent on the state’s
allowance or disallowance of women’s freedom. Early in the days after the imposition of the
veil, Marjane’s mother gets assaulted for not wearing a veil, and at a demonstration against
the veil Marjane sees women getting beaten up and even a woman getting stabbed. Though
her mother thinks earlier that she “should start learning to defend her rights as a woman
right now,” Marjane understands this to be impractical and dangerous, so she resigns herself
instead to committing small acts of disobedience, like improperly wearing her veil. However,
she continues to speak out against the contradictions and unfairness she notices around her,
which gets her expelled from school. Soon after her parents reveal to her the extent to which
the state believes it has a right to control women’s bodies—it is against the law to kill a
virgin woman, so before executions of virgin women a prison guard will rape the
condemned prisoner. The situation appears both completely hopeless and dangerous to an
outspoken girl like Marjane, and so her parents decide to send her out of the country, to
Vienna, where she will have the freedom to be and grow as pleases and befits her as an
independent woman, an independent person.
Veil
Symbol Analysis

The veil is an extremely vital piece of clothing to Marjane’s identity, not because she feels
pious and wants to wear it and thus asserts it as part of herself, but instead because
she doesn’t want to wear it and must anyway. Persepolis opens with Marjane describing how
she first has to start wearing the veil at school. This moment for her most markedly divides
her pre-Revolutionary life and her post-revolutionary life, when the rise of the Islamic
Republic creates an enormous schism in society between those who are traditionally
religious and those who are not and prefer to dress with Western influences. Marjane,
though she still considers herself Muslim, belongs to the latter category. But the Islamic
Regime dictates the moral code of society, and Marjane must contend with a world that
disallows her regular mode of expression. The veil for Marjane and for many women in Iran
becomes the key symbol of repression, particularly against women.

Bread Swan
Symbol Analysis

Marjane receives her two bread swans from Anoosh, her uncle who spends much of his life
hiding in Moscow from the regime of the Shah or imprisoned by it, and who, shortly after his
release from prison after the success of the Revolution, gets arrested and executed. Anoosh
is a man who spent so much of his life hiding or imprisoned, and yet the bread swan
represents his ability to maintain his humanity in dreadful situations. Having few materials
to work with, he creates a sculpture of a swan from the bread he receives in jail. Despite its
modesty, its splendor comes from the fact that Anoosh has been able to find whatever good
remains in his situation and create a work of art. He has not become embittered or angry,
but instead focused his energies on his sculpture. The bread swan indicates the redeeming
quality of art, and suggests that Marjane’s book functions in a similar sense of redemption
after all the trauma and suffering she experiences.

Plastic Key Painted Gold

Symbol Analysis

The plastic key painted gold is a beautiful object from the outside. Mrs. Nasrine’s son is
given the key by his teachers at school, to represent the “beautiful” idea that if he were to die
for Iran in the war against Iraq he would be a martyr and immediately enter heaven. Mrs.
Nasrine, however, sees the key, which being plastic is actually nothing more than a trinket,
as propaganda and brainwashing—she believes that the regime wishes to sacrifice her son
for the cause of a political war rather than putting any real value on his life. The key, then, is
a way for the regime to further the war and people’s enthusiasm for it, but it also comes to
represent in the book how the regime’s promises emphasize beauty and reward but are
often self-serving and hollow. It turns out, also, that only the lower class boys, who are
shipped off to the front, get these keys from their schools. The rich boys do not get fed such
stories of paradise. Thus, the key also demonstrates the great class divide entrenched in
Tehran’s society.
Cigarette
Symbol Analysis

When Marjane reaches her teenage years, she smokes a cigarette in order to rebel against
her mother’s strict rule. Marjane skips school in order to buy an illegal hamburger, and
when she returns her mother yells at her and indicates that to skip school is to throw away
her future. Later that day, Marjane smokes a cigarette as a symbolic gesture against her
mother’s “dictatorship” and feels that she has reached adulthood. This insubordinate
gesture, which is actually quite childish, becomes a way to deal with the heavy stresses of
the war. On the one hand, Marjane wants to be a normal teenager; on the other hand, every
move she makes might have enormous consequences for her future—taking the wrong step
might ensure that, in fact, she has no future. Consequently, the gesture is broader even than
Marjane intends, and is directed against all the repressions in her life: from her parents, who
rightly pressure her to behave responsibly, but also from the regime, which makes life
difficult and restrictive enough that she has to sneak around in order to lead what she
considers a normal life. That Marjane uses the language of the regime—“dictatorship”—to
describe her relationship with her mother indicates just how intertwined her personal life
has become with the larger political issues of her day.

--The above information is from the online resource LitCharts

--The information below is from our class discussions:

Themes:

∙ The role of religion (personal versus public: Marji; ideal versus real: true Isam and what
the Islamic regime imposes on its people; authentic versus hypocritical: Mrs. Nasrine and
Marji’s true piety versus the fake piety of the Islamic leaders, their guards, and the
neighbors )

∙ Freedom and independence from oppression

∙ The loss of innocence (Marji coming to an understanding of the horrors of war and the
fruitlessness of martyrdom; realizing the contradictions within her own family and country)

∙ Coming of age/growing up (similar to the theme of loss of innocence)

∙ Idealism versus reality (what the revolution was meant to accomplish versus what
happens)

∙ Patriotism (Marji realizing that patriotism is not about martyrdom and heroism but also
about supporting your country, while acknowledging its flaws)

∙ History repeats itself

∙ Power and how power corrupts people

∙ Violence and revenge versus forgiveness

Symbols:

∙ the veil (absence of choice; oppression; gender bias)

∙ the key (hiding ugliness of the regime and of war with the false beauty and promise of
heroism and martyrdom; propaganda; manipulation/perversion of religion)

∙ God (Marji’s innocence; personal faith, which later gets ruined because of the Islamic
revolution and the death of her beloved Uncle Anoosh)

∙ alcohol, ties, cassettes, video cassettes, jeans jackets, sneakers (symbols of the West, which
the Islamic regime sees as decadent and immoral)

∙ cigarettes (Marji’s personal rebellion against her mother’s “autocratic” rule)

∙ bicycle (metaphor used for the revolution or any governmental system which won’t work if
all the wheels aren’t working properly—that’s what happens to the revolution—everything
falls apart in the end, and the Islamic hardliners/extremists take control)

∙ passport (escape for Marji, but hopelessness and irony for her family friend who does not
live to see his new passport and dies before he can use it to go abroad for better treatment)

∙ sheep (those blindly following the regime; the young boys who are seduced by the promise
of paradise are one example of the sheep)