Persepolis:The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
by Marjane Satrapi

“…Don’t forget who you are and where you come from.”

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Pg. 152

Summary: Author Marjane Satrapi tells the story of growing up in Tehran, Iran during the country’s political upheaval and their War with Iraq. In Persepolis, Satrapi uses both words and pictures to share her experiences, creating a strikingly clear, sharp memoir of a confusing period in Iranian history.

Themes: Iranian Culture/History, Politics, Beliefs/Freedoms, Government/Individual, War, Activism, Family, Relationships, Growing-up, Loss/Violence

Grade Level: 10^th grade and up

Possible Student Reaction: I believe most students will pick up and read Persepolis because they will be attracted to the graphic novel format of the book.  I think most students, like many adults only think of graphic novels in terms of escapism. They will be surprised at the political and historical significance they discover between the pages of Persepolis and will be intrigued enough to ask questions about what they have read.

Analysis: There are many different layers of storytelling in Persepolis: the political, cultural, personal, and the visual. It is hard to decide which part of Satrapi’s story to talk about first. I think if you are a history teacher you begin with the history and the politics of the region that she presents in her story. But as an English teacher do you choose to talk about Satrapi’s personal storytelling or the fact she told her story as a graphic novel?  I don’t think it is possible to talk about one without the other. The strength in this story is the combination of the two.  Words without the artwork or vice verse and you lose the clear straight forward telling of Satrapi’s tangled and conflicted childhood in Iran.

  

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Discussion questions for thinking of the book as a graphic text, with a focus on word and image as devices for storytelling:

1. Why do you think Satrapi chose to tell her story in words and images?  What does the combination make possible that words or images alone would not?

2. How would you describe the style of Satrapi’s drawings?  How does this style contribute to the story that she tells?
3. Satrapi’s drawings are in stark black and white, but how black and white is the world that her drawings depict?  To what extent does Satrapi manage to convey complex experience in such simple, even childlike, drawings?

4. How does Satrapi use drawings specifically to develop characters, to portray the differences and/or connections between the inner and outer worlds of characters, or to make thematic connections?  For example, what are some of the implications of the echoes between the two drawings on page 102 of the text?

5. What particular incidents in the story do you think are conveyed more effectively in pictures than they could have been in words alone?

6. When Marjane’s Uncle Anoosh is surprised that she knows about dialectical materialism, she tells him that she “read the comic book version” (59). What are we to make of this joke about the medium that Satrapi has chosen for her book?

7. What do you consider the main strengths of using images to tell this story?  What are the main limitations of doing so?

8. What traditional novels that you’ve read do you think might be better in this graphic format?  Why?   

These discussion questions and more can be found at:

www.lsu.edu/srp/Discussion%20Guide%20for%20Persepolis.doc 

If you would like to read more about Marjane Satrapi, she continues her story in, Pesepolis 2: The Story of a Return.