Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi (2000)
“A ten-year-old girl watches a revolution devour her country — and draws it in black and white, because that's exactly what it felt like.”
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Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi (2000) · 153pages · Contemporary / Autobiographical · 4 AP appearances
Summary
Marjane Satrapi grows up in Tehran during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Through her child's eyes, we watch a secular, cosmopolitan Iran collapse into theocracy: veils enforced, parties raided, family members imprisoned or executed. Her progressive parents — readers of Marx, admirers of Western culture — try to shield her while teaching her to resist. As the Iran-Iraq War escalates and the regime tightens, Marji's parents make the agonizing decision to send their fourteen-year-old daughter to Vienna alone. The memoir ends with departure — a farewell that feels like the end of childhood, the end of Iran as she knew it, and the beginning of exile.
Why It Matters
Persepolis is the work that established the literary graphic novel as a credible vehicle for serious autobiography and political memoir. Before Persepolis, the prestige literary memoir was a prose form. After Persepolis, images and text together became an accepted mode for complex political testi...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Conversational and direct — Satrapi's written French (translated to English) is deliberately plain, almost anti-literary, letting the images carry the emotional weight
Narrator: A child who knows things the child didn't know at the time — retrospective narration with selective intrusion. Mostly...
Figurative Language: Low in text, very high in images
Historical Context
Islamic Revolution and Iran-Iraq War, 1979–1988: Every chapter is shaped by specific historical events Satrapi experienced directly. The regime's consolidation is not background noise — it is the plot. The Iran-Iraq War is not an external event —...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Satrapi draws in stark black and white with no gray tones. This is a deliberate choice. What does the absence of gray do to the story — and is the world she's depicting actually black and white?
- Marji wants to be a prophet at the start of the memoir. How does the revolution — and specifically Anoosh's death — change her relationship with God and religion?
- The Islamic Revolution claimed to liberate Iran from Western imperialism. How does Satrapi's family experience the revolution — and what does that tell us about who the revolution was actually for?
- Marji's parents maintain a secret social life — parties, alcohol, Western music — behind closed doors while publicly complying with regime rules. Is this hypocrisy, survival, or resistance? Is there a difference?
- Compare Persepolis to Maus. Both use the graphic novel form to tell stories of political violence and survival. What can images do in these stories that prose cannot?
Notable Quotes
“This is me when I was ten years old. This was 1980.”
“I wanted to be a prophet... like all religious kids my age, I also wanted to be Joan of Arc.”
“I had discovered one thing: the revolution is not just what you read in the newspapers.”
Why Read This
Because Persepolis proves that a cartoon can be literature. Because it is the fastest way to understand what a revolution actually looks like from the inside — not from a textbook, not from a news report, but from a child who watched it happen in ...