Isolation and Western Perception in Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis"
Oppression and misplaced representations of Iranians as Others led Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian in exile, to publish Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood; a graphic novel released in Western countries to communicate the unknowns of Iranian culture. These include the perception of Iranians as being hostile and fanatic fundamentalists, which is only being spread instead of diminished because of faulty stereotypes.
September 11th and the subsequent war on terror placed Iran on the shortlist of ‘Axis of Evil’ powers, suspected of building nuclear weapons, etc. The image of Iranians as ‘evil’ and the icon of their women hidden under black veils became a notable interest for Americans and their instant knowledge base through the sprouting online world in the early 2000’s. One piece of valuable knowledge that eluded Americans was that of an actual Iranian’s perspective inside Iran during the Islamic Revolution and war with Iraq in the 1980’s.
Satrapi, through the experience of living in France, noticed this failure of perspective/representation and decided to describe her experiences in the form of a comic book. Her narrative sold millions of copies and reached the upper echelons of the graphic novel world, like Maus, published in 1991 by Art Spiegelman. The story sold exceedingly well because of Westerners heightened interest in Iranian culture and through the unique characterization Satrapi explored with her main character Marji—her goal being to dissipate the oppressed figure she was seeing while living in exile in a Western country. She creates a character that both sides of the world can identify with, therefore deconstructing the boundaries and stereotypes separating the East from the West.
Edward Said wrote Orientalism in 1978 in which he notes the same struggles as Satrapi by living in a Western country as a native to the Near East. In the introduction, Said claims disunity between his view and the American’s:
My own experiences of these matters are in part what made me write this book. The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny.
Said is disheartened by how the West views the Near East because of the ‘web of racism’ that nobody has bothered to unpack. The fact that Satrapi wrote Persepolis because of her experience of living in an ignorant society shows that neither Said nor Satrapi encountered an anomaly. They therefore try to fight, and more or less overcome this ‘punishing destiny’ from the literature they published in order to provide a closer identification for Westerners. Said later remarks:
No person academically involved with the Near East—no Orientalist, that is—has ever in the United States culturally and politically identified himself wholeheartedly with the Arabs.
This essential quality of identification is important for the power of cultural recognition; without identification, the perception of the Other will be based off stereotypes created by the dominant culture. This misperception creates a confusing binary, and dangerous stereotypes will only continue to grow. If Orientalism is Said’s response to the political cry for identification of Palestine, and the Near East in general, then Persepolis is Satrapi’s response to the cultural roar for identification with Iranian women.
Where Said and Satrapi differ is in their approach to form. Persepolis describes Satrapi’s time from ages nine to fifteen (1978-1984) in which she was living in conflict-stricken Iran. The novel ends on a sad note with Marji moving to Vienna alone because her parents feared for her future in Iran; Marji looks on in terror as her father carries her weakened mother at the airport. The sequel, Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, focuses on teenage Marji as she travels around Europe, returns to Tehran in 1989, and experiences love. This novel ends in 1994 just before Satrapi leaves to live in exile in France. After receiving her Masters in visual communication from Islamic Azad University in Iran, Satrapi published Persepolis six years into her exile.
The graphic novel form allows Satrapi to communicate her ideas visually to the audience she wants most to appeal towards: Westerners. Satrapi fully understands Western audience’s image of her home and people, and includes this rendition in response to the visual narrative she engages. By telling the story through the eyes and thoughts of a young girl in the middle of Iran’s cultural and political crises, it allegorizes the way her Western audience (for the most part) understands the situation in Iran: as naïve children.
Another clue that sheds light on the appeal of Persepolis to a Western audience, America specifically, is the cover of the graphic novel for the English print release. The original French language editions released in 2000 in four volumes features revolutionary-stylized warriors riding horses for the first two covers, with the last two showing Marji riding a horse. Released in 2003 to the U.S., Persepolis centers a veiled Marji in black and white (the same drawing that appears in the first frame) enclosed in a diamond-shaped border surrounded by arrows pointing towards Marji, which beckons the reader inside the book and becomes a metaphorical unveiling.
Americans, since the rise of the Internet and even reality television, adopted a culture of trying to understand the unknown. This cover allowed Americans to “metaphorically unveil” the oppressed and subdued appearance of the Iranian woman in the wake of President Bush’s State of the Union Address in 2002, where he placed Iran on the list of Axis of Evil countries along with Iraq and North Korea. This chance of viewing an oppressed figure inside an ‘evil’ country therefore appeals to the interest of the American that wishes to experience and support the so-called underdog character. America prides itself on coming from a long history of rooting for the underdog; Persepolis becomes part of that tradition by forming an identity of a nation out of the oppression of another.
Satrapi, although appealing to her Western audience, still includes icons and experiences specific to Iranian culture. To the Western audience, tulips have no immediate significance beyond their natural beauty. For Iranians and the history of Persian culture, Tulips are essential. Persian poets as far back as Omar Khayyam in the 12th century described the beauty of Tulips. During the Iranian Revolution and Iran-Iraq war, tulips then became symbols of martyrdom. As seen on the front cover, the tulip appears upside-down. Although an Iranian symbol for beauty and a unified culture, Satrapi grew up in the Iranian counter-culture that celebrated Western products as symbols of hope/escape, effectively damaging and subverting her connection to Iranian culture. She includes subtle clues, like the upside-down tulip, to symbolize the partition with her own identity between the binaries of the East and West.
Persepolis is a classic bildungsroman, featuring of a young girl going through an extreme case of existential crisis at the same time as her home country. There happen to be two essential reasons that made Persepolis popular among American audiences; first is America’s increased interest in Iran due to their ‘evil’ representation position; second is in Satrapi’s exile in France, which associated her understanding of the way in which Westerners falsely viewed Iranians.
Edited: 19 March 2021.