Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

by Marjane Satrapi

Pantheon Reprint 2004, 160 pp. (paper)

 

 

 

 

 

by Agnes McDonald

 

Marjane Satrapi’s award-winning memoir Persepolis leaps to the eye from shelves in bookstores and libraries. Its brilliant (blood?) red cover echoes the passion Satrapi felt for her homeland. Iran was friendship, family, her ideals and beliefs wrapped in a package and with her inside. Like many young people, she kept these strongly determined beliefs without examination, without discrimination. Yet, this led to disillusionment as the political environment of her world, even of Marjane’s home and school, began to reflect the new order of the Islamic Revolution. Wearing a coal-black burka was required of her. She wanted to burn it, but was threatened by her teachers (who belonged to the Guardians of the Revolution), that she could be imprisoned, even executed. How her life had changed.

Life in Tehran began to demand more secrecy and overt conformity. Even within her family, which now enforced more rules, such as the refusal to let her go on the street alone. She was warned not to talk in public about her family, who in previous times were Marxists. Even they began to tend toward an apparent though superficial conformity; but it seemed to Marjane that gradually their beliefs had changed. She did not agree with the Persian philosophy of resignation, or that every soldier who died fighting was a martyr. Death, for many, had become glorious, but Marjane wanted to live.

Now she had to “kiss childhood goodbye.” Posters and videos from the West were confiscated. Her father had his Western tie ripped from his neck by a policeman.

Her family members and their friends began to disappear, hopefully to other countries, and political suspects began to be watched closely. Not being allowed to have passports, those caught trying to sneak across the border to Turkey, Russia or Sweden were imprisoned, even executed. From prison her uncle Anoosh called her to him as he awaited execution for trying to escape the country.

Finally, as war with Iraq led to an Iraqis attack, children were permitted to leave the country. When grown, they could come back and be soldiers! No passports required.

Her parents bade her goodbye, sadly. She never saw them again.

In this vivid story in black and white, Satrapi grieves over the fate of her country in a way that anyone who loves their country would. Satrapi presents her Iranian childhood as a universal one of the alien and the expatriate. It is hard not to identify with this young girl for whom the world has gone awry and all that remains are memories.

For many, this is the human condition and its absurdity. She tells her story with wit and courage and poignancy. Women in any country or society who have been looked upon as second-class citizens will recognize themselves in this book. Also, teenagers of both sexes even in America or other western countries are under their parents' thumbs though girls yearn for more privileges and the same treatment as boys. This practice is changing in America except in cults, survivorship societies, and in the Mormon Church, along with a few other such religious groups. Today in the U.S. women young and old are largely treated with respect equal to men because of access to public education and protection under civil law. All they must do is to be brave in order to claim it.

 

Agnes McDonald is a Wilmington, N.C. poet and a writing teacher.