The
stark contrast between the events of the Iranian revolution as westerners heard
about them on the news and the personal touch that comes from seeing them
through a child’s eyes is one of the things that makes Persepolis such a successful graphic novel. It places us in the
middle of the revolution as it unfolds, and this makes it a much more relatable
story. What I found most powerful about the book, however, was not the
description of the repressive regime or of family and close friends being
tortured, but rather the impact the revolution had on Marji.
To
see this, we first have to consider what her life was like before the
revolution became violent. Despite the western image of Iran as a desolate, backward
country, Marji goes to “a French non-religious school where boys and girls were
together.” When wearing the veil becomes obligatory for girls at school, she
reacts just like many western children would, not understanding why this is
being forced on her and playing with it during break times. Her family is
similarly westernized, her father driving a Cadillac, for example. For me
specifically, there was one scene that made her seem much more like me as a
ten-year-old than a victim of a political revolution. When her parents come
home from demonstrating in the streets, she asks them to play Monopoly, but
they say “it’s not the right time.” Her response, that “it’s never the right
time,” is so familiar and adolescent that I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for
her, almost as a friend. All of this serves to make Marji a sympathetic
character who we can easily understand.
Soon,
however, we see the violence and pervasiveness of the revolution reflected in
Marji, as she behaves surprisingly radically for a ten-year-old. When she finds
out that Ramin’s father was in the Savak, for example, she decides to “put
nails between [her] fingers like American brass knuckles and to attack Ramin.” Given
how common violence was at the time, she doesn’t see this as anything special, and
her mother has to stop her from committing such a terrible crime. Later, when she
hears stories of her parents’ friends’ experiences in prison, a similar thing
happens. She decides that to be a hero, one has to be tortured, and suggests playing
a game with her friends in which they torture the loser. She simply doesn’t understand
that this is wrong; she has been so corrupted by the events around her, that she
is completely desensitized to violence, and has mostly lost her sense of morality,
ethics, and justice. To me, this really drove home the harshness of life during
the Iranian revolution, given that at first I saw myself in her, and all the
radical viewpoints she has could just as easily have been mine.
