Satrapi’s mother intervenes in the middle of all the euphoria and teaches her the importance of forgiveness. In another telling scene, Marji and her friends on learning that their classmate Raman’s father used to be in the Shah’s secret police and has apparently killed a million people, decide to attack Raman with nails between their fingers like American brass knuckles. This is what sets Persepolis apart to be introduced to 20th-century Iranian politics through the impressionable eyes of a ten-year-old is fascinating, to say the least. And, when she gets out, she finds her hands wrinkled up like her grandpa’s. In one scene, the 10-year-old Satrapi on learning how her grandpa had been tortured in prison – sometimes put in a cell filled with water for hours at stretch – stays in her bath for a whole night in an attempt to understand what it would be like to be in a cell filled with water. I want to be justice, love and the wrath of God all in one. The honest and edgy portrayal of the changes sweeping the nation, told from the perspective of a child is enhanced by the bold yet minimalistic drawing style of Satrapi. When the Islamic revolution swept over Iran and the fundamentalists overthrew the Shah, Satrapi was only 10 years old. And, Satrapi puts the medium to clever use, combining political history with memoir writing to narrate the tale of a nation that is now stereotyped for its fanaticism and terrorism.ĭescended from the last Emperor of Iran, Satrapi was brought up in a middle-class Iranian family by communist parents.

In that sense, Satrapi’s graphic novel is more than just a memoir, Persepolis is a Bildungsroman-in-comic-strips that traces the psychological and moral growth of the Iranian-born French graphic novelist from youth to adulthood. The former narrates the childhood of a 10-year old in war-stricken Tehran during the Islamic Revolution, and the latter tells the tale of her return to Iran after the Islamic Revolution when she attends college, marries, divorces and then later defects to France. Satrapi’s novel is divided into two parts, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel, Persepolis, tells the tale of a once wealthy and powerful nation, obliterated and laid to waste by decades of war and tyranny. Persepolis, the ancient capital of the First Persian empire founded by Cyrus the Great, is what the title of the book refers to.

Persepolis comics