The first thing you notice in Persepolis is the silence of its images. Before you read a word, you see the stark, high-contrast world Marjane Satrapi has drawn. It is a world reduced to its essential lines: black and white, form and shadow. This visual quiet is deceptive. It’s in this simplicity that the book’s profound and unsettling noise resides. It’s not a story you just read; it’s a space you enter, and it stays with you long after you close the cover.
Simple Art
Why this style? A graphic novel about revolution, torture, and exile could have leaned into graphic detail. Instead, Satrapi chooses a visual language that feels almost like a folk tale. The characters are simple, their expressions clear and direct. But this simplicity isn’t meant to soften the blow. It does the opposite.
When Satrapi draws the victims of a cinema fire, their souls are depicted as white figures rising from a black, burning building. When her Uncle Anoush is executed, we don’t see the violence, but we see him in prison, talking to Marji, a single swan made of bread in his hands. By refusing to show the literal horror, Satrapi forces us to feel its weight. The simple lines make the events feel archetypal, stripped of any sensationalism. The horror isn’t in the blood; it’s in the black ink that swallows the page, in the empty space where a person used to be.
A Child’s Dictionary of War
The story is told through the eyes of a child, Marji. This is not just a narrative device; it’s an argument about how history is lived. Politics are not abstract debates but things that happen to people you love. A revolution means your parents come home late and smell of fear. The new regime means you can’t wear your favorite jacket or listen to Iron Maiden.
I find myself returning to the small moments of rebellion. Marji’s defiant “punk” jacket is more than teenage angst; it’s a small ceremony of the self in a world demanding conformity; an act of rebellion. She pieces together an understanding of the world from overheard conversations, censored news, and family stories. When she declares to her parents, “I want to come with you to the demonstration”, she has no real concept of the danger. She only knows that something important is happening and she wants to be part of her family’s world. This innocence, set against the reader’s knowledge of the brutality to come, creates a constant, quiet tension.
The Two Halves of the Self
More than anything, Persepolis is about the fracturing of a self. There is the private self, inside the home, where Marji’s family discusses politics, drinks wine, and listens to western music. Then there is the public self, which must be performed outside. The veil becomes the most potent symbol of this split, a physical line drawn between the person you are and the person you must pretend to be.
I wonder if the stark black-and-white of the art is also the visual language of this split. There is no grey area in the new Iran, no room for nuance. You are either with the regime or against it. This forces everyone, especially Marji, to live a double life. Her identity is not one thing, but a constant, exhausting negotiation between two opposing worlds. She is fiercely Iranian, yet in love with a culture the state has deemed corrupt. She is a child of revolutionaries, yet must hide her family’s history to survive.
The book doesn’t offer a neat conclusion or a political solution. It ends with a departure, a separation. It leaves you with the ghost of a shape, a life, a country, and the quiet, persistent question of what remains when the two halves can no longer be held together.
#Unself
Last updated: 2025-06-13