Images of a Revolutionary Childhood

By Noy Thrupkaew, The American Prospect. Posted June 24, 2003.

The Iranian regime has its visions of Iran, which it expresses in public art that hangs above Tehran's traffic-snarled streets: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the thunderous-browed father of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, scowls down from a giant mural; young men who perished in the eight-year war with Iraq, barely bearded, gaze out from their martyrs' fields of painted red tulips; protesters throw rocks at an Israeli flag; a Statue of Liberty sports a skull for a head; more mullahs, more martyrs. We Americans have our visions of Iran, too: seething crowds besieging the U.S. embassy, fanatical women in chadors. For us, the images add up to a nation with which we have no official diplomatic relations, only bitter words.

To hear her tell it, Iranian graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi is doing battle with these images -- the ones produced by both the United States and Iran. Her ammunition? The memoir of her childhood, Persepolis, a "comic," as she calls it, that tells the story of her coming of age during the violent birth of the Islamic Republic. She eschews the stereotypes Americans find so familiar (mullahs and chador-clad women) and replaces them with complex portraits of the government's unknown victims and her own defiant, progressive mother. Above all, Persepolis details the adolescence of a young Iranian girl -- rebellious, fiercely intelligent and furious at the hypocrisy of a revolution that promised freedom and delivered tyranny.

Iran is full of many such girls now, said Satrapi, from her Washington hotel room last month. Indeed, young women form a significant part of the pro-democracy protests that have rocked Iran's cities all this week; nearly 70 percent of Iran's population is under 30, and many of these children of the revolution have turned against it. As for why the protests have erupted, Persepolis, in chronicling the revolution from its bloody beginning, suggests ample answers.

Satrapi introduces herself to readers as Marji, a precocious child who's sure that God, a benevolent white-haired, amorphous figure with whom she has bedtime conversations, has selected her as Islam's next prophet. As the story unfolds, Marji's sense of injustice spurs her on: Worried about her grandmother's knees and ashamed of her father's Cadillac and their maid, she decrees in her "holy book" that no old people should suffer, everyone should have a car and maids should eat at the table with everyone else.

What happens when such a child hears of the terrors of the shah's rule? She wants to join the revolutionary protests. When the British- and U.S.-supported leader flees at last, Marji and her family rejoice -- until things begin to go terribly wrong. Chadors come out, schoolchildren are separated by gender and former political prisoners, released after the toppling of the shah's regime, begin dying mysterious deaths. Even the young aren't spared: Marji meets an innocent teenager who is targeted and executed for her communist beliefs.

Marji's exceptional family provides a buffer of sorts. The little girl is the great-granddaughter of the last emperor of Iran; her parents are privileged, intellectual Marxists who give their daughter a comic book on dialectic materialism. "It was funny to see how much Marx and God looked like each other," Marji muses in the book. "Though Marx's hair was a bit curlier." But soon neither Marx nor God can spare Marji the toll the regime will take on her life, transforming her into a dangerously outspoken young woman.

Persepolis beautifully captures the quality of childhood memories -- the misperceptions and misunderstandings of overheard conversations, the moments of piercing clarity into adults' hypocrisy and deception. Satrapi depicts the growing darkness of the Islamic regime in rich, inky black-and-white drawings, a style critics have called faux-naïf. "I don't have any faux-naïf style," Satrapi responds. "I cannot do any better than that!" Nevertheless, some of her drawings reflect the perspectives and styles seen in Persian miniatures and the friezes on Iran's ancient ruins -- a potent combination when paired with the emotional immediacy of her high-contrast images. Satrapi has also drawn her adult self for the back flap of Persepolis -- a figure clad in all black, cigarette in hand -- a striking likeness of the woman Marji has grown up to be, a self-defined "representative of the axis of evil."

"It is not to send myself flowers," Satrapi tells me, laughing, "but I have a sense of justice." The child who rebelled against the Iranian regime now finds fault with U.S. foreign policy; it's not clear which she wants to discuss more, her book or her views on the United States. "How can you talk about human rights and democracy and support China and Saudi Arabia?" she asks. Democracy in Afghanistan? "It's just the same people running the country; they just shaved their beards. Democracy is not a matter of a razor and shaving cream."

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