Marjane Satrapi’s 2003 graphic narrative Persepolis story takes place in 1970’s Iran during the Iranian Revolution, an event that would later change the lives of those living in Iran. The Iranian Revolution was a series of events that aimed in overthrowing the Shah and resulted in “the establishment of an Islamic state” (history.com Staff). The identity of an individual’s personal life and political aspects are different, however, the two are linked with each other. Satrapi not only verbally tells the story of her horrid trauma, but she also does it visually to further help her audience understand what is being described.

Not only does Satrapi use written words to let her readers know her state of mind about her home country, but she also use images to visually aid the readers understand her message better. It is interesting that Satrapi decided on using a comic narrative to tell her story.

Although comics are usually non-fiction, Persepolis is. The simplicity of black and white Satrapi decided to do emphasize the fact that she was only ten years old. Furthermore, it extends to the idea of how a child’s mind is usually more pure than of an adult’s due to the fact that adults are more exposed to various sorts of experiences. Satrapi was not able to imagine how torturers burned their victims with an iron (Satrapi, 51) since an iron is an everyday household item that Satrapi is familiar with. Instead, this household item is being used for a different, horrid purpose. Then, Satrapi finds out that a victim, Ahmadi, who is her dad’s friend, has been executed (Satrapi, 52). Satrapi used one-third of the page to draw his cut-up body. The fact that she used up quite a lot of space for it is sure to attract the audience’s attention for them to realize the major problem that is occurring in Iran. On the other hand, the clean cut of the human body extends to the inability for someone inexperience to imaging such trauma. Although Satrapi lived in the time and location of the war, she is still a child. Similarly, not all of Satrapi’s readers are familiar with such events and so, the images help the audience be more familiar of the tragic incidents that happened.

This brings us to the topic of how trauma and violence are represented. Trauma is something that individuals try to avoid experiencing. If someone were to experience trauma, he or she would not want to re-live it. Thus, the traumatic event becoming a repressed memory. In this case, the trauma and horror Satrapi faced was not enough to just be described through words. In Hillary Chute’s article “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis”, she explains how “The visual, Persepolis shows, can represent crucially important stories from a child’s putatively ‘simple’ perspective, because no perspective, however informed, can fully represent trauma” (Chute, 102). The images may be simple but what the images represent still affect the readers emotionally. Event though Satrapi uses more than one method of communication to express her past to her readers, it is still challenging to fully describe what happened during her childhood.

Despite being a child when she was going though the struggles her nation was also facing, Satrapi still manages to remember the events. She sticks to making her comic narrative black and white, but the comic remains to be detailed and it gives the readers an opportunity to imagine the unimaginable since she aims to appeal to a greater audience.

Works Cited

Chute, Hillary. “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis”.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 1/2, 2008., pp. 92-110doi:10.1353/wsq.0.0023.

History.com Staff. “Shah Flees Iran.” History.com. A&E Television Networks, 2017. Web. 12 Jan. 2017.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York, NY: Pantheon, 2003. Print.