Analysis Of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis

Literature is often seen by people as an expression for authors to express their life and troubles they have been through. Marjane Satrapi also does this, although she mainly tries to show how children, secularists, nationalists and even Muslims were excluded, marginalized and silenced in this period of time, during the Islamic revolution in the 1980’s. Her literary work, Persepolis, works as an expression for the ones who were oppressed during the Islamic revolution.

Marjane Satrapi grew up under oppression, this is already shown from the first page of the graphic novel. On the first pages of the novel she introduces herself, she introduces herself by showing what the troubles of the Islamic revolution were by using the symbol of the veil.
In Persepolis she not only describes herself being oppressed but also her parents. Her parents also experience a struggle with the current ruling Islamic Party. Her parents live a wealthy life, they drink alcohol, read intellectual books and have party’s. The Guards of the Revolution, which hate these signs of wealth, supervise this behaviour. They do this by executing secularists. At one time Marjane’s parents were stopped by the police since the police was convinced that they had been drinking alcohol and they threatened them by saying they would do a house search (page 110). Immediately when her parents came home they started pouring alcohol down the toilet, Marjane helped with this. In another frame they taped down the windows to protect them from Iraqi bombings. Also they closed of their windows with black curtains to prevent that their neighbours would see the party’s they were having (page 105). The cartoons are in black and white, because of this, this contrast described becomes very clear to the reader. In one frame, on the last page of the novel, Marjane is send to Austria by her parents. They do this to protect their only child form the dangers and the horrors of the
In the very first frame of the novel the veil is already shown. The Iranian women had to wear the veil, because of the religious oppression they experienced. “We really didn’t like to wear the veil, especially since we didn’t understand why we had to” (page 3). Marjane’s mother chooses not to wear the veil. When she was walking on the streets without wearing her veil she was accosted by two men of the new fundamentalist regime. “They insulted me, they said women like me should be pushed up against the wall and fucked. And then thrown in the garbage...and if I didn’t want that to happen, I should wear the veil” (page 74). After this part in the story the oppression of the veil seemed to