First, I will set the scene of the Iranian Revolution and its media landscape, delving into media's role in both revolutionizing and oppressing Iranian citizens at the time, the presence and absence of the visual, and the role of international news coverage. I argue that the graphic novel "Persepolis" presents a necessary counter-visuality of the Iranian Revolution's dominant visual narratives, reclaiming the authority and authenticity of personal memory. Yet Satrapi has clearly forged a cohesive, and very distinctive, style of her own, one that successfully deploys the expressive visual language of the medium. Her style shows influences from various sources, not only the cartooning style of her mentor, David B., but also the tradition of Persian miniature painting and probably the satiric political cartoons that at one point appeared in newspapers and magazines in her native country.
Satrapi’s relative unfamiliarity with comics before producing the Persepolis volumes seems to have contributed to her eclectic approach to the medium. By choosing to present her story through the medium of comics, Satrapi further establishes a dialogue with the Other, in the form of her engagement with the established Western attitudes and aesthetic values that surround the production and reception of comics. In narrating her own memories, Satrapi critically intervenes in the culture and politics of censorship and compulsory veiling under the post-revolutionary Islamic regime and touches upon the important psychological consequences of such tactics of repression. Indeed, as Amy Malek notes, many Iranian readers have praised Satrapi’s work “for preserving the communal memory of a generation” (375). Satrapi’s assertion at the end of her introduction to Persepolis-“One can forgive but one should never forget”-applies as much to Iranians as to Western readers and reflects her attention to the Self as the other important implied audience for the text. While the didactic aspects of the two Persepolis volumes cannot be denied, another, perhaps less appreciated, aspect of Satrapi’s work resides in its critical dialogue with Iranian culture.
Implicit in this aim is a distinction between the Iranian Self and the Western Other, with the latter constituting Satrapi’s major implied audience. As Satrapi indicates in her introduction to the first volume, in creating this narrative of her life, she hoped to provide non-Iranians, particularly those in the West, with a more accurate perspective on Iran. Her critically acclaimed graphic memoir Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, which spans the years immediately before and after the Revolution, and its sequel, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, have found an abundant readership around the world.
Born a decade prior to the Islamic Revolution, Marjane Satrapi grew up in the midst of turmoil.
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