In the past week, we started reading Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical narrative Persepolis, which talks about the author’s childhood in Iran, the Islamic Revolution and the fall of the Shah. The graphic narrative is filled with hundreds of drawings and all of them are black and white.

Satrapi once said: “I was never planning to make a comic, but then I was in an art studio in Paris and discovered what comics were, and actually the fact was that this was really the medium that fit me the best because I love to write and I love to draw and so it really was the best for me. From the second, I made the first page I knew this is what I should be doing.”
I was really interested in why she chose to publish her graphic narrative in black and white and here are some of the reasons I came up with:

Firstly, black and white portrays the stark contrast between the east and the west and between Iran and the western world. Marji was always caught between the two worlds and in the graphic narrative, this is often portrayed in the way that Marji chose to dress – either in the burqa with the veil or in western clothes. Secondly, black could represent power and authority. In the graphic narrative, black tends to portray darkness, sadness, depression, dominance and difficult times that Marji and her family went through. White, on the other hand, represents peace, happiness, freedom and religion.
Lastly, Persepolis is written in the eyes of a young girl that knows either good or bad. The two colours are used efficiently to represent this judgement, where white represents the good and black represents the bad.

In Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi effectively conveys her visual ideas through the use of two colours. The simplistic approach shows, that to her there are two extreme sides.

http://asiasociety.org/marjane-satrapi-i-will-always-be-iranian