In the graphic narrative Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi recounts her experiences as a child growing up in Iran during the 1980s through the eyes of her younger self, Marji. Satrapi uses the form of the graphic narrative, and the common events found throughout Marji’s life to relate her story to others, as well as to express themes of memory, forgetting, and remembering. Early in Marji’s life, she depicts God as an elderly white man with a long beard. She goes so far as to compare God’s image to that of Karl Marx. The concept of God is often confusing for children and can be difficult to grasp.  The level of abstraction can be challenging to relate to for children who have not yet made sense of the physical world, let alone a spiritual one. Satrapi demonstrates this relationship through Marji’s expression of God and religion.

I attended a Catholic school from preschool until grade 3.  I went to church every Friday, said grace before lunch, prayed, and had religion class every day.  Being six years old, the information I learned I tended to take extremely literally.  For example, we learned that the church was the house of God.  My six year old brain therefore concluded that Jesus must be staying somewhere inside of his father’s home.  Luckily, there was a man who worked in our church who had shoulder length brown hair and wore sandals on occasion.  I understood these as clear signs that this man was in fact Jesus.  Another example was my belief that all Catholics must wear sandals, or “Jesus-shoes” as my friends and I called them.  In the images we were shown in our religion textbooks, the disciples of Jesus wore brown-strapped sandals.  Evidently, so did a few of my teachers.  Logically, I concluded that all Catholics who truly wanted to follow the teachings of God would wear his sandals.

Of course, the assumptions I made as a young child are wildly inaccurate, but reflecting upon them, I often wonder the effectiveness of teaching the principles of religion to young children.  My impressionable mind, much like Marji’s, was unable to understand much more than reality.  I had yet to make sense of the physical world, meanwhile I was taught about an entirely different world that I clearly did not have the mental capacity to understand.

Satrapi easily captures this concept in the form of the graphic narrative. Her ability to depict precisely how Marji imagined God, as almost a stereotype of what God should be creates tension with the reader.  Her unrealistic depiction, achieved through the visual form, is a reminder that her story is being told through the eyes of a child, involving both imagination, and oversimplification. Due to this simple connection, I can identify with Marji despite the fact her world is far removed from my own. This associations gives importance and weight to Satrapi’s narrative, as Marji develops into a real and relatable person. Additionally, Satrapi’s emphasis on the process of remembering is tied to my own process, as I had to recall my story that connected me to her in the first place. The anecdote I remembered is very similar in nature to the anecdotes told throughout Persepolis.  This connection furthers my understanding of the process of remembering, and deepens the personal connection I feel towards Marji and her story.