For the past couple of weeks in our ASTU class, we had been continuing our discussion on the graphic memoir “Persepolis”. The class material has moved on from the book, but there is one more aspect of the book that I want discuss in this week’s blog.
The storyline of Persepolis conveys messages from various themes: history, feminism, family, war and peace… and also religion. In the book, religion is swirling around Marji’s world. The Islamic revolution – the main focus of the book – was triggered from religion. Religion remains relevant throughout the story, so it is natural to think that Marji becomes deeply influenced by it.
As expected, at the beginning of the story, Margi is deeply religious. As she proclaims: “I was born with religion” (Persepolis, page 6, frame 2). She has big discussions with God every night, and he has high aspirations of her becoming a prophet. She would embrace God’s nomination, and tell her grandmother how, once she becomes prophet, she would solve everything that she deems problematic, from inequality in society, to fixing her grandmother’s knees.
However, God’s presence starts to fade in time. In the year of the revolution, Marji decides she needs to start an action, so she “put [her] prophetic destiny aside for a while” (10, frame 2). At this point, she has already left her aspirations of becoming a prophet. Despite all of this, God comes to see her from time to time. She still had space for God in her heart. One night, Marji overhears her parents talking about a theatre being burnt down (16, frame 1). She tells God, who is present, that she wants to join her parents to go demonstrate. In the next frame, God leaves the room without telling her; and he would not come back for the night.
From that moment, God’s appearance in the book becomes scarce. He appears in one frame in page 25, where he asks Marji “What are you doing?” (25, frame 8), a question of which she does not reply to, and another appearance in the last frame of page 53, where he is embracing Marji who is lost in the understanding of what “justice” is. This insinuates that, though God’s presence was not as big as it used to be for Marji, he still was somebody she could rely upon from time to time.
Then came Marji’s encounter with uncle Anoosh. She idolized her uncle, because he had gone through many hardships, including escaping to the USSR, and being thrown in jail for nine years. His presence, which was bigger than God to her, took out the existence of God in her life. God no longer appeared in any of the frames until Anoosh gets executed, and Marji, being in a miserable state, kicks God out of her life. She goes on in the book, saying “And so I was lost, without any bearings… What could be worse than that?” (71, frame 1).
So why did Marji eliminate God from her life, if he was the only one lest that she could rely on? It seemed odd to me at first. Then, I realized why she could not have had God with her anymore: because religion was what brought this tragedy to her life, and the thought of God was directly related to religion. Ironically, it seems, God was eliminated by religion.
At first, Marji’s faith was spontaneous. Religion was not oppressive, and her parents were not sources of religious ideas, as they were “very modern and avand-garde” (6, frame 1). Then, the revolution happened, and a different, oppressive religion was pushed into her life, directly affecting her surroundings, forcing her to abandon her religiousness and God. However, I believe what young Marji did not understand at the time, and what the grown-up Marjane Satrapi, as an author did realize, is that those two religions – one coming from her own mind, and one from an outer source – are completely different things. In the latter half of the book, she despises religion, as it oppresses her and her family, but the author perhaps did not want the reader to comprehend Marji’s thoughts on religion as one sided, but instead, conflicted and agonizing. She did not intend to scrutinize religion as a whole, but instead, the oppressive natured religion that was pushed into her life at a young age, by showing that she, too, was very religious at one point in her life.
Works cited: “Persepolis – The Story of a Childhood”