INTRODUCTION

In “Homage to Joe Sacco”, an introduction to the 2001 edition of the graphic novel

Palestine, Edward Said writes, “In ways that I still find fascinating to decode, comics in their

relentless foregrounding – far more, say, than film cartoons or funnies (neither of which mattered

much to me) seemed to say what couldn’t otherwise be said, or wasn’t permitted to be said or

imagined, defying the ordinary processes of thought, which are policed, shaped and reshaped by

all sorts of pedagogical as well as ideological pressures. I knew nothing of this then, but I felt

that comics freed me to think and imagine and see differently.” Said’s praise of Palestine reflects

the genre’s dissident presentation of narrative, which defies traditional modes of conveying

memoir and historical accounts. Sacco’s graphical depictions of the Palestinian people exemplify

this, as his presentation of the region through cartoon images provides a renewed perspective of

the Israel-Palestine conflict. Palestine chronicles Sacco’s experiences in the West Bank and the

Gaza Strip from December 1991 through January 1992. Through flashbacks to the expulsion of

the Arabs, the emergence of the Intifada, and the events of the Gulf War, his graphic novel

chronicles the historical plight of this nation alongside vignettes of the daily struggles of

individual Palestinians. Palestine is not groundbreaking in its depiction of socially conscious

subject matter, nor does its content challenge popular conceptions of the comic genre. It is part of

a broad spectrum of historically relevant graphic novels that have emerged in the past several

decades, rendering them admissible participants in both the autobiographical and historical

genres. Challenging associations of comics with the archetypal superhero or Sunday funnies,

these works expand the parameters for acceptable themes and tropes for the medium.

In 2000, Marjane Satrapi, the primary author considered in this thesis, employed this

graphic medium as a vehicle for autobiography in her four-part French-language series

Persepolis. Within an international context marked by strained Western-Iranian relations, the

Iranian-born contemporary graphic novelist utilized her series to convey not only her own life

narrative, but also the foundations of present-day animosity between former allies. The

overthrow of Iran’s British and American-backed Pahlavi Dynasty during the 1979 Revolution

ushered in the Islamic Republic that governs the country today. Under the leadership of

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an Islamic cleric who became the highest-ranking political and

religious authority in the country, a theocratic constitution was ratified and amicable relations

with the United States and other “Western” nations were terminated (Pollack, 152). Originally a

French-language graphic novel, Persepolis depicts Satrapi’s life in Iran during the Iranian

Revolution and at the beginning the Iran-Iraq War, the nearly decade-long conflict between Iran

and Iraq that would produce hundreds of thousands of casualties for both nations. It follows her

subsequent high schools years in Vienna, her return to Iran where she attended college and

married an Iranian, and her eventual permanent exile in France. This thesis will examine the two

English language editions, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a

Return, published in 2003 and 2004 respectively. I will refer to the work’s author as “Satrapi”

throughout this thesis, while her avatar in the graphic novel will be cited interchangeably as

“Marjane” and “Marji”, her childhood nickname.

As a comic book conveying Satrapi’s childhood and early adulthood in Iran, Persepolis

finds itself at the intersection of two relatively recent literary phenomena, namely the emergence

and acceptance of the graphic novel as a serious literary aesthetic and the current proliferation of

neo-Orientalism in the works of Middle Eastern authors. Situated under the larger genre of comic

books, graphic novels have become the fasting growing literary medium in the United States,

going beyond the subject matter of their traditional predecessors to tackle serious themes in an

artistic manner. One need only look at Art Spiegelman’s Maus, with its anthropomorphized

mice, cats, and dogs, to see the medium achieve its full visionary and dramatic potential. A

Pulitzer- prize winning graphic novel that depicts the experiences of the author’s father during

the Holocaust, Maus is one of the most referenced predecessors to Persepolis, and a discussion

of Satrapi’s graphic novel would be incomplete without a consideration of Spiegelman’s piece.

Its narration of a survivor’s experience in Poland during World War II exemplifies the socially

conscious and historically relevant themes that would emerge in its successors, and Persepolis

will be presented as part of a legacy tracing back to Spiegelman’s magnum opus.

I make an important distinction between comics and graphic novels in this thesis. Though

they are related genres, and graphic novels fall under the larger umbrella of “comics”, their

varying modes of production, themes, and intended audiences underscore the key differences

between them. Written for an adult audience, graphic novels treat serious subject matter in an

artistic way that makes use of high-quality paper and production techniques not available to the

creators of traditional comic books. This has resulted in crisp full-color publications that appeal

to a more avant-garde and cultivated readership. Unlike comics, for which multiple issues must

be read in order to comprehend the entire narrative, graphic novels are not serialized. Rather, any

sequels are encompassed within new and complete novels that have a distinct beginning, middle,

and end, as seen in Persepolis.

Persepolis is also contextualized amongst a recent wave of autobiographical works by

Middle Eastern authors. Many of these writers are also Iranian women and have propagated

Orientalist tropes that set a backward and juvenile East against Western conceptions of its own

moral and intellectual superiority. As Ali Behdad and Juliet Williams remind us, there has been a

craving, “for ‘authentic’ and ‘expert’ information about Islam and the Middle East” in the United

States (Behdad, 284). Produced in large part by Middle Eastern authors, whose questionable

credentials are based often solely on their cultural heritage, these works are frequently clouded

by a blatant political agenda and manipulated by the interests of market-savvy publishers.

Behdad and Williams view the phenomenon of neo-Orientalism as a modern manifestation of

classical Orientalism that provides a fresh interpretation of otherness. Much like classical

Orientalism, neo-Orientalism posits Western moral and cultural superiority over an Oriental

other. Though predominantly a North American phenomenon, it is not limited to the United

States or produced exclusively by Western academics and authors. As Behdad and Williams

explain, “Middle Eastern writers, scholars, and so-called ‘experts’ not only participate in its

production, but also play an active role in propagating it” (Behdad, 284). Classical Orientalists

were typically male European scholars and artists, but neo-Orientalists are more likely to be

ordinary Middle Eastern subjects who derive their sense of authority from their ethnic or national

backgrounds. Diverging with classical Orientalism’s prioritization of cultural and formalistic

concerns, neo-Orientalists explicitly engage with politics of the region, in the process presenting

a fallacious historical narrative, denying the imperialist relation of Western powers to the Middle

East, promulgating superficial generalizations about Islamic societies, and, of particular

significance to this discussion of Persepolis, redeploying the trope of the veil from a metonymy

for the enigmatic space of the harem into a signifier of Muslim women’s lack of civil rights and

liberties. Unlike many of these so-called “experts” who superficially attempt to satiate this public

desire for genuine accounts of Middle Eastern culture, Satrapi divorces herself from neo-

Orientalist discourse by rejecting the traditional tropes and arguments that have encouraged an

infantilization of the Eastern Other and advocated unabashed engagement with Middle Eastern

politics, instead offering a non-political work that underscores the graphical narrative of her

memoir over a blatant political agenda.

I go beyond an examination of the social and cultural implications of Satrapi’s work to

also consider the aesthetic capabilities of her narrative, as the comic genre’s distinctive

presentation of time and space promotes Satrapi’s subversion of neo-Orientalist conceptions of

Iranian society. The stability of temporal and cultural boundaries is profoundly undermined in

the process, as clear and defined conceptions of identity are interrogated throughout her

narrative. Satrapi’s complication of these abstract perimeters is manifested visually throughout

Persepolis, as the comic aesthetic allows her to both create cross-cultural visual parallels and

interweave multiple temporalities and spaces within single pages and panels to amplify both the

tangibility and the vitality of the past in her current graphic endeavor and the artificiality of

societal and ideological barriers between Iran and Austria. The subversion of cultural and

temporal boundaries in her work ultimately contributes to Satrapi’s larger endeavor of

destabilizing neo-Orientalist conceptions of East and West, as antiquated impressions of an

Orient-Occident binary are rendered obsolete.

PERSEPOLIS’ NEGATION OF NEO-ORIENTALIST BOUNDARIES

Satrapi’s rejection of neo-Orientalism in Persepolis is dependent on her subversion

of boundaries between East and West, past and present. The stability of cultural and temporal

perimeters is profoundly undermined in the process, as rigid and consistent conceptions of

identity and space are interrogated throughout her narrative. This heterogeneity of identity

manifests itself in the first pages of her graphic novel, setting the underlying conflict for the

remainder of the series. At the beginning of Satrapi’s work, a young Marji explains the

ideological conflict between her personal piety and the contrasting avant-garde mores she has

acquired from her upbringing, stating, “I really didn’t know what to think about the veil. Deep

down I was very religious but as a family we were very modern and avant-garde” (Childhood, 6).

The panel depicting this is divided in half vertically, illustrating the left half of Marji’s body

unveiled and surrounded by a background of gears, a ruler, and other scientific and technical

instruments. Conversely, the right half of Marji’s body is veiled and presented amidst a backdrop

of stylized artwork (Fig. 1). Satrapi exhibits this inherent synthesis of elements traditionally

associated with the East and West on the very human form, suggesting that the complicated

boundaries and perimeters throughout Persepolis are not only external and tangible, but

internalized as well. Marji rejects compartmentalization within neo-Orientalist conceptions of the

typical woman in an Islamic society. Though the religious component of her identity is

illustrated as a critical aspect of her character, it is far from being her sole defining characteristic.

Simultaneously a pious figure holding secular views and a modern intellect who is deeply

religious, Marji rejects the boundaries of defined identity constructs, in the process undermining

set notions of East-West archetypes. Consequently, Satrapi complicates neo-Orientalist

characterizations of both Islamic societies in general as “backward” and Muslim women in

particular as repressed and in dire need of liberation, refusing to be confined within a single

ideological framework.

A consideration of Satrapi’s contemporaries is key to an understanding of how she

deploys her aesthetic. A recent wave of memoirs by diasporic Iranian authors, particularly

female ones, has contributed to the canon of neo-Orientalist works challenged by Satrapi. In

recent years, these memoirs have proliferated the American literary market and sought to combat

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the sinister associations that have come to define post-Revolution Western perceptions of

Iranians. Nima Naghibi enumerates works like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A

Memoir in Books (2003), Roya Hakakian’s Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in

Revolutionary Iran (2004), and Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up

Iranian in America and American in Iran (2005), to emphasize the manner in which the

autobiographical genre has directly challenged stereotypes of modest and repressed Iranian

women and allowed them to come to terms with the 1979 Iranian Revolution and their new lives

as members of a diaspora. Seeking to dissociate themselves from the label of “Other”, though,

these authors have continually recapitulated an image of a backward Islamic Iran against an

enlightened and democratic West.

Specifically with regard to Reading Lolita in Tehran, Naghibi emphasizes the manner in

which Nafisi’s work serves as a foil to Persepolis, amplifying Satrapi’s own ardent rejection of a

neo-Orientalist binary that celebrates the perceived progressiveness of the Occident against

misconceptions of Middle Eastern society:

[Satrapi’s] text plays the increasingly mobilized stereotypes of the Islamic Republic as

oppressive and backward against the Western conviction over its own progressive

liberalism in ways that contest both of these scripts... While Persepolis defies easy

categorization, Lolita places itself squarely within a conservative, canonical Western

literary critical tradition. While Persepolis forces the Western reader to work hard to

understand the complexities of contemporary Iranian political and social dynamics, Lolita

serves up the usual fare of the oppression of Iranian women under a fundamentalist state

for the uncritical consumption of Western readers (Naghibi, 224-225).

Naghibi ultimately argues that Persepolis uses perceived similarities between East and West in

order to subvert expectations about the familiarity and universality of Satrapi’s themes. Whereas

he uses apparent commonalities to contend that Satrapi’s true intent is to disrupt such notions of

familiarity, I suggest that Satrapi intentionally uses the most “alien” of images to reject outdated

notions of otherness, particularly as perceived in a neo-Orientalist light, and to interrogate

whether the most seemingly foreign of elements in her work are truly disparate from aspects of

Western culture. Specifically, I analyze those images that have become inextricable from popular

depictions of the 1979 Revolution, including women wearing the chador and mass protests. I will

go beyond Persepolis 1 to examine how Satrapi deliberately uses the second installment in the

series, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, to undermine the seemingly stable boundaries

between Eastern and Western cultural and ideological tenets, rejecting conceptions of a distinct

Oriental “Other” in favor of an elucidation of cross-cultural correspondences.

CULTURAL AND IDEOLOGICAL BOUNDARIES

From the very outset of her novel, Satrapi promptly quashes any notions of exoticism

associated with her cultural background by literally unveiling the shrouded characters of her

work, indicative of the figurative unveiling that Persepolis will accomplish through its narrative.

In the first chapter, entitled “The Veil”, the first frame depicts a ten-year-old Marjane in the

customary head covering worn by Iranian women in pubic spaces following the Revolution. The

several succeeding frames then briefly describe the circumstances leading up to compulsory

veiling at schools. It is the final frame of the page, though, that instantly disrupts any impressions

of exoticism or oppression, as Marjane and her school friends manipulate the veil in every

manner imaginable, save as a covering for their hair. Deployed as a jump rope, a horse’s reign,

and a monster’s mask, it loses its potency as a religious and political signifier in the childhood

games of Marjane and her peers, games that are universally enjoyed by children East and West

(Fig. 2). Naghibi elaborates upon the frame, explaining, “for Western readers, the veil is one of

the most loaded signifiers of Islam’s oppression of women, but the fact that Marji and her friends

do not read it in this way, and even disregard it so casually, empties this signifier of its dominant

meaning” (Naghibi, 244).

Marjane’s gender is key to neo-Orientalist characterizations of the veil. As Ali Behdad

and Juliet Williams explain, observers have long noted that Orientalism is a thoroughly gendered

phenomenon in which women are classically presented as oppressed subjects in urgent need of

liberation. Far from the archetypal meek Eastern female, Marjane asserts her own agency

throughout her time in Iran, acting as the primary catalyst in the continuation of her education,

her marriage and eventual divorce, and her permanent expatriation from Iran. Though the veil

does limit her activity in the communal spaces of the Islamic Republic, these restrictions fail to

permeate into her private social affairs, inducing what she describes as a “schizophrenic”

existence that is suggestive of the disjointed relationship between popular representations of

Iranian women and their actual experiences. The fragmentation between these two

representations is also indicative of the instability and artificiality of the cultural boundaries

established by the neo-Orientalist canon, as antiquated perceptions of Middle Eastern women

(especially as compared to their archetypal “liberated” Western counterparts) are subverted by

Satrapi in favor of more complex representations that complicate notions of disparate Western

and Eastern cultural and ideological boundaries.

Juxtaposing both volumes of Persepolis, we see the manner in which Satrapi evokes

familiarity with the supposedly alien veiled Iranian women in the Occident itself, toppling

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seemingly rigid cultural perimeters between East and West in the process. Setting out on a covert

mission to find tapes of Western music on the Iranian black market, a young Marjane is

intercepted by two chador-clad figures from the women’s branch of the Guardians of the

Revolution (Fig. 3). Instituted in 1982 to arrest women who were improperly veiled, like the

teenaged Marjane in this scene, their mission was to “put us back on the straight and narrow by

explaining the duties of Muslim women” (Childhood, 133). Apprehending Marjane for her

Western attire, which includes Nike sneakers, a denim jacket, and a Michael Jackson button

worn alongside her headscarf, they are ominous authoritative figures that combat the

consumption of popular Western tastes. It is not Marjane’s attire that is most conspicuous for a

Western audience, though. Looming menacingly over her in their all-black garb as they threaten

to detain her at the headquarters of the Guardians, the authoritative and monolithic officers are a

foreboding portent for all those they detain. Swathed in their chadors with only their faces

visible, they are formidable antagonists to the young Marjane, who is dwarfed underneath their

figures. Ultimately, the female Guardians are the personification of neo-Orientalist visualizations

of women in Islamic societies, apparently unparalleled with anything encountered in the West.

Or so it seems. Portraying her high school years in Vienna, emblematic of the West in the

second installment of her series, Satrapi amplifies the cross-cultural parallels between Orient and

Occident, in the process shattering the rigid East-West binary promulgated by neo-Orientalist

thinkers. In her illustrations of the boarding house she resided in during her teenaged years,

which was directed by Austrian nuns, Satrapi abruptly and unexpectedly makes the chador-clad

Guardians of the Revolution less than alien to her Western audience. One particular scene in

which one of the sisters reprimands Marjane for her perceived lack of manners highlights this

parallel and exemplifies neo-Orientalist conceptions of an Eastern “other”. In these frames,

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Marjane carries a pot of spaghetti down to the refectory to eat as she watches television. The

Mother Superior suddenly blocks her view of the television and sharply admonishes her for her

lack of etiquette in eating her meal directly from the pot, stating, “It’s true what they say about

Iranians. They have no education” (Return, 23).

It is in these parallels that Satrapi most formidably mobilizes the graphic novel as the

vehicle for her work, as a solely textual depiction of this scene would prevent her audience from

visualizing the cross-cultural parallels she has just elucidated. One need only glance at the arched

figure and accusing finger of the Mother Superior to recall the looming Guardians of Persepolis

1. Adopting a nearly identical stance as the Guardians of the first book and outfitted in a black

veil and habit that reveal only her face, she is transformed into a double of the Iranian female

officers (Fig. 4). The black background of the Austrian scene further complements the white

spaces of the Iranian episode, suggesting the two scenes are companions to one another. Satrapi

best sums up this relationship in the final frame of the episode, which depicts a young Marjane

angrily leaving the office of the Mother Superior. Portraying her murmuring curses in Persian as

she exits, the sequence concludes with the caption “In every religion, you find the same

extremists” (Return, 178). The fundamental neo-Orientalist conception of fixed East-West

societal boundaries is interrogated and formidably deconstructed in this scene, as Iran and

Austria, emblematic of the East and West respectively, are revealed to have key homologous

elements between them. The religious fundamentalism that was viewed as a distinct phenomenon

in the East, particularly as compared to a supposedly secular and intellectually progressive West,

is revealed to be an established constituent of both cultures, consequently blurring the lines

between Oriental and Occidental society.

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Legendary comic artist Will Eisner underscores the manner in which body posture and

gesture occupy a central position in a graphical work. In his Comics and Sequential Art, he

explains how the different ways in which images are deployed influence the intended meaning of

the text, as they can invoke nuances of emotion and give auditory inflection to the voice of the

speaker depending on their relevance to the audience’s own experience (Eisner, 106-107).

Gestures are typically idiomatic to a region or culture and tend to be more subtle and limited to a

narrow range of movement. Postures, on the other hand, are selected from a sequence of related

movements in a single action. They are then frozen into the panel in a block of time. The artist’s

skill and ultimate success is thus contingent on her effective selection of individual postures and

gestures that are comprehensible to her audience. In the print medium, unlike film or theater, the

comic artist must distill the myriad intermediate movements that constitute a gesture into a single

posture. This selected posture must convey nuances, support the dialogue, and deliver the artist’s

ultimate message or objective, which in Satrapi’s case is the elucidation of veiled cultural

parallels. Satrapi’s success in highlighting the parallels between East and West is thus rooted in

her selection of corresponding postures between the Guardians and the Mother Superior.

Manipulating the temporal features of the medium to achieve the most potent correspondences,

she isolates those frames that accentuate the homologous bodily positions between the women in

Iran and Austria.

Perhaps the most emblematic, and seemingly alien, images of Revolution-era Iran are

those of the mass protests that ultimately precipitated the deposition of Shah Mohammad Reza

Pahlavi. Satrapi illustrates one such instance in which a mass of male and female Iranian

protestors gather to chant “Down with the king!” (Childhood, 18). In creating a parallel of this

image in the West, Satrapi goes beyond homologous bodily positions and facial expressions,

rather using the very same image of Iranian protestors to depict student demonstrations in

Austria the following decade (Return, 74). The panel depicts the same protestors in the exact

same positions as in the Iranian version, the primary difference being the lighter color of their

hair (Fig. 5). This is not a result of negligence or indolence on Satrapi’s part, but rather part of a

conscious and deliberate effort to compel her audience to reevaluate their respective notions of

“otherness”, particularly in regard to an East-West binary that counters misconceptions of

Oriental backwardness with a belief in the Occident’s moral and intellectual superiority. The

supposed distinction between Eastern and Western ideologies is undermined in the process, as

Satrapi ultimately suggests that such boundaries between the two groups are wholly artificial.

TEMPORAL BOUNDARIES

Satrapi’s chronicle of Western imperial influence in the region complicates stable notions

of temporal boundaries in a manner that rejects a neo-Orientalist narrative of Iranian history.

Whereas neo-Orientalism claims to be attentive to historical changes in the Middle East while

misrepresenting important aspects of European and American influence in the region, Satrapi

amplifies this problematic relationship from the outset of her graphic novel, elucidating the

intermingled histories of Iran and Western imperial powers by injecting historical figures and

events into her present narrative. A discussion of modern Iranian history would be

inconsequential without a serious examination of the linked fates of Iran and Western powers,

and Satrapi’s cognizance of this fact establishes an accurate historical context within her graphic

novel. By subverting temporal boundaries throughout her work, she quite literally animates the

past throughout her memoir and repudiates neo-Orientalist falsifications of Western imperial

influence in the region.

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Satrapi initiates her exposition of this intertwined history in the introduction to

Persepolis, the only wholly textual section of the work, to illuminate a complicated history

fraught with hegemonic influence by Western powers. Particularly with regard to developments

in Iran after World War II, Satrapi does not shy away from the political climate created in Iran

by external forces. Whereas neo-Orientalists argue that a lack of democratic principles oppress

Eastern populations, Satrapi illuminates how Europe and the United States are culpable in

preventing the Iranian nation from pursuing its own political and economic freewill. The very

lack of agency that Iranians have had in their own national affairs, demonstrated by puppet

regimes installed in the 20th century through Western intercession, calls into question the

motivations of these Western powers and their praise of the “democratic” paragon. This

historical backdrop is not meant to excuse the actions of authoritarian governments in the region.

Rather, it is intended to highlight the origins of the current regime in a manner that demonstrates

that discord in the recent past did not transpire without external sway. By outlining the historical

context in a way that avoids direct engagement with the politics of the region, Satrapi avoids a

key neo-Orientalist fallacy, namely a disregard for the imperialist relation of Western powers to

Iran in the 20th century. This entwinement of past and present ultimately manifests itself on the

illustrated page, as multiple temporalities and geographies occupy the same spaces throughout

Satrapi’s work.

Unlike wholly textual mediums, graphic novels possess the ability to quite literally

juxtapose the past with the present in a manner tangible to the reader, subverting rigid

conceptions of temporal boundaries in the process. The historical undercurrents that weave

throughout Satrapi’s narrative are part of what Hillary Chute describes as a refusal to see “the

past” as past, as historical events permeate into the narrative to complicate strict conceptions of

past and present (Heer, 351). In her examination of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Chute notes how

the temporal and spatial experimentation permitted by comics’ narrative form allows Spiegelman

to illustrate the persistence of historical suffering. The continuousness of history and our inability

to divorce ourselves from past trauma is exemplified throughout Maus in the spatial intrusion of

illustrations of Holocaust atrocities into Spiegelman’s drawings of the present day.

Much as Spiegelman overlays the present with the historical, Satrapi interposes historical

trauma into her current narrative. Reimagining the British partnership with Reza Shah, the

founder of the Pahlavi Dynasty, Satrapi underscores the economic and political factors behind

his ascension to the throne through illustrations of his negotiations with British leaders,

illustrations that are interwoven amongst panels representing the present conversation between

Marji and her father. Whereas Spiegelman’s frames quite literally blend past and present by

incorporating multiple temporalities into a single frame and superimposing historical events over

frames of the present narrative, Satrapi makes just as vigorous a statement by giving past events

distinct frames in this episode. Lacking any distinction from those frames depicting Marji’s

present conversation with her father, they are as relevant to and as much as part of the present

linear narrative as events actually taking place in the present. Entwined amongst those panels

depicting Marji’s conversation with her father, they are an inextricable constituent of the present.

The more recent past is perhaps most potently displayed in Satrapi’s work, as casualties

of the Iran-Iraq War directly engage with Marjane in an exceedingly menacing manner. In

Persepolis 2, Marjane begins to acclimate herself to postwar Tehran after her high school years

spent in Vienna. Finding herself in an alien environment where colossal murals honor soldiers of

the Iran-Iraq War and street names with the title of “martyr” bear the names of the war dead,

Marjane states, “ I felt as though I were walking through a cemetery… surrounded by the victims

of a war I had fled” (Return, 97). Indeed, Marjane is quite literally surrounded by these martyrs

of war: in the penultimate panel of the page, ghostly skeletal figures seize her as she walks

through Tehran’s streets, immobilizing her as they oblige her to recognize their presence, and, as

an extension, the irrefutable vitality of the past in her present moment (Fig. 6).

Beyond an assertion of the relevance of historical events to the present, Satrapi’s

illustrations contend the ability of past trauma to accost and emotionally incapacitate those in the

present in a very palpable way. Particularly in light of recent neo-Orientalist endeavors, Satrapi’s

exhibition of the past through the expulsion of temporal boundaries establishes imperialist

influence as a key element in Persepolis, and, as an extension, in 20th century Iran. The result is

an emphatic negation of neo-Orientalism’s fallacious historical narrative of the region.

CONCLUSION

Edward Said explains the predicament of the exile as one “taken up with compensating

for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule” (Said, 144). Commenting on the prevalence

of exiles in the realms of literature, political activism, scholarship, and even chess, Said asserts

that those severed from their native lands subsequently spurn the instability of material realms

and objects to instead make a greater investment in mobility and skill.

The “great premium on mobility and skill” that Said describes is exemplified in

Persepolis, as Satrapi’s mastery of the artistic realm compensates for the disorientation provoked

by her relocation. In very metafictional moments, Satrapi illustrates characters drawing and

painting in the most rudimentary manner in order to communicate, namely in scenarios where

otherwise insurmountable linguistic barriers would have rendered comprehension impossible. A

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teenaged Marjane’s first encounters with her Austrian roommate Lucia are a testament to this, as

her lack of fluency in German makes wholly verbal communication unfeasible. Failing in her

attempts to define the German word “Fernsehen” to Marjane, Lucia utilizes pencil and paper to

draw a rough sketch of a television, instantly leading to comprehension. The first depiction of a

cross-cultural “conversation” in the work, Marjane’s linguistic breakthrough with Lucia

underscores the fallibility of the written word in conveying emotion and thought. By instead

opting for an artistic rendering of the object she wishes to communicate, Lucia highlights the

supremacy of symbols in overcoming linguistic boundaries, as art comes to override verbal

exchange as the foundation for communication in Persepolis.

Perhaps the most metafictional moment of the series takes place in the earliest days of the

Revolution, as a young Marjane converses with her Uncle Anoosh. Describing his time in

Leningrad and his study of Marxism-Leninism, he is immediately astonished when Marjane

begins to discuss dialectic materialism. Asking her how she knows about the subject at such a

young age, Marjane simply replies, “I read the comic book version” (Childhood, 59). Satrapi

consequently underscores the educational merit of a medium so often associated with a juvenile

readership while simultaneously educating her Western audience about Revolution-era Iran with

her own graphic novel. This deliberate move on Satrapi’s part encapsulates the very motivations

behind her graphic enterprise. By rejecting a political agenda that reinforces the misinformed

talking points that have saturated neo-Orientalist discourse, she instead presents a narrative that

informs her audience about a foreign culture while simultaneously extolling the virtues of the

graphic novel in achieving this end.

WORKS CITED

Behdad, Ali and Juliet Williams. "Neo-Orientalism." Globalizing American Studies. Ed. Brian T.

Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. Chicago: The University of Chicago

Press, 2010. 282-299. Print.

Chute, Hillary. "The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis." Women’s Studies

Quarterly 36.1-2 (2008): 92-110. Print.

Chute, Hillary L. and Marianne DeKoven. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.” MFS Modern

Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 767-782. Print.

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