Good day fellow citizens,

It was an interesting week in ASTU as we were introduced to the graphic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Personally, I loved this piece; the comic style genre was exactly the type of assigned reading I needed to close out my first month of university. After analyzing research papers, and reading through intricate course content Persepolis offered a simplified structure to interpret controversial issues that are still directly relevant to our course material as Global Citizens. Not only was it a fun read, but very informative for myself as someone who was quite uneducated on the history of Iran. Because of the way I was influenced by the news as an adolescent I had a particularly flawed view on how I looked at the country of Iran. I had always held Iran and Iraq in the same context, and saw them both as impoverished war grounds and nothing else. Persepolis gave me a brand new, much broader perspective on the way in which I now look at Iran, I found the power struggle they endured throughout history fascinating, but still quite upsetting. For a country with so much potential to be subject to so much violence is really a shame. Throughout reading the graphic novel though, I couldn’t help but notice the prominent role interpretative communities (Shahzad 2011) played in shaping Marji’s political and religious views.

Marji experiences a variety of shifting ideologies throughout Persepolis that she draws mainly from her family and direct community. She developed as a young woman in a very controversial time period which made her subject to a great deal of change. Marji would form her opinions mainly based on her parent’s views with contributions from other family members and family friends. Through basing her strong ideologies off her community Marji was able to reject and challenge the ideals that were being taught in her school not only with course material but also religion. I personally found it very impressive that such a young girl could even form opinions on such big issues, it’s clear that she found a profound interest in what was happening to her beloved country. Most children between the age of ten and fourteen (including myself at that age) wouldn’t seek such in depth reason for what was happening in the world around them; but Marji was so deeply submerged in her interpretative community (Shahzad 2011) that she was able to acquire a high degree of knowledge and apply it to the events that were taking place in Iran.

Thanks again for the listen,

A.J.