ART AND IDEAS

MULTIPLE SELVES

the problem of identity in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis 

By Yao Wei

The real and the comic

How we think about our lives sometimes seems a mystery. Most of us just live day by day, week by week, decade by decade, and don’t think about what’s happening as having any greater meaning than that we’re living a life. But that’s not always true, sometimes we’re living in the midst of radical political change that has the power to change how we live and the way we live. Now, does that mean that our lives are inherently political; well, that’s a good question and I’m not prepared to answer it, yet.

I do know that one of the best reflections on this problem is Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel, Persepolis, and the movie based on it. It’s a piece that consciously or maybe unconsciously, if you listen to Satrapi talk, mixes the personal and the political in powerful ways. The film, which she produced in collaboration with French comics artist and filmmaker Vincent “Winshluss” Paronnaud, is based on her autobiographical novel The Complete Persepolis that was published in 2000. Like the novel, the film is set after the 1979 Iranian/Islamic Revolution and tells the coming-of-age story of Satrapi’s life in Iran and later Europe, and how cultural and geographical encounters played a role in influencing and shaping her identity. As the animated version of Satrapi says near the end of the film, “Freedom always comes at a price.” And that price might be a recognition that we can never escape political and cultural change, that the world around us can change us forever.

Trying to grow up

In an age of CGI, full-color animated films dominating the market, the black and white animation in Persepolis stands in stark contrast with its oval heads, curved shoulders, cartoonish features, and exaggerated expressions. Satrapi is writing about herself as a child, so the simplicity of the illustrations has a bit of the quality of a child's diary. Children will rely heavily on the facial expressions of the adults around them to understand how to feel and react to situations. Strangely enough, that’s what happens: we begin to identify with the abstract and symbolic nature of the animation, which makes Satrapi’s unusual life quite relatable.

The specific becomes the universal

When she was fourteen her parents sent her to Vienna, Austria to study and escape the political situation in Tehran. And not only does Marjane physically depart from her native country, but she also has to dissociate herself from her former identity as an Iranian woman, which represents both an external and internal exile. The teenage Satrapi attempts to integrate herself into Western culture in Austria, but her efforts are in vain, and the Viennese consider her an outsider. The Austrians regard Iranians as barbarous, insane, and have little knowledge or interest in this ancient and cultured society. She is constantly discriminated against in Vienna. Because she is from the Middle East, she has few friends and has to move around a lot. She is called a “dirty foreigner” and the general assumption is that she is uncultured and uneducated, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Thus, she masks her Iranian background to gain an identity in the Western world, claiming to be French. No matter what, during her time in Europe, Satrapi is unable to integrate her former identity with her new European one.

What’s even more difficult is when Satrapi goes back to Iran she undergoes a second exile that is stranger and rougher than the first. She returns home, ready to reintegrate herself into the world, only to discover that she is unable to adapt to her home country’s increasingly politicized environment. The war's wreckage has turned Tehran's streets into graveyards. She shuts herself in her room, fearful of being hurt. She enrolls in an Iranian university after being encouraged by her parents, but the restrictions on what was taught in the classroom make it difficult for her to accept. On her way to visit her grandmother, she is reprimanded by her for wearing cosmetics. Her mother wants her to have a free and unrestricted life, but the Tehran that Satrapi returns to is a far cry from the one she left behind. She feels as alienated as she did in Vienna.

You can't go home again

In the aftermath of her two exiles, Satrapi ends up in an identity crisis, feeling like she is neither an Iranian nor a European, belonging to neither of the two societies. The fact that Satrapi initially must absorb and integrate into Western culture, and later do the same when she returns to a much-changed Tehran reflects the way Iran has had to integrate with its past pan-Arab civilization with a liberal, pro-Western ideology, and later with the Islamic Revolution. Religious zeal, terrorism, and political unrest are intermingled with the film's simple black-and-white pallet. The Islamic revolution in Iran has been a rough road, and Satrapi felt it in highly personal ways.

Persepolis may initially seem like a memoir chronicling Satrapi’s life, but it is far more than that. Over the course of the film, Satrapi’s experience mirrors and becomes a representation of Iran‘s tormented recent past. And it all comes from the story of a young girl growing up.

©Yao Wei and the CCA Arts Review