The Revolution Reflected in Marji

            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.