When I first saw the animated film adaptation Persepolis in theaters in 2007 (see trailer), I was thrilled to finally see a highly commercialized story depicting the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath, which many of my friends and family in Iran have been coming to terms with for many years. Although the film is a faithful adaptation of the graphic novel, the text allows readers to pause and reflect upon certain images, thereby allowing them to animate these images themselves.

In Persepolis, Satrapi describes her personal history as a middle class Iranian woman who experiences the effects of a post-revolutionary transnationalism as she migrates across Iranian and European borders and attempts to explore and test the boundaries of identity expression within the boundaries of the state. The graphic novel form allows her to tell this story in a unique way because she can illustrate the figuratively and artistically black-and-white dichotomies in Iran and Europe during the 1980s, juxtapose simultaneous elements of brutal honesty and playfulness within select images, and explain a complex political history in a series of snapshots with small amounts of text.

Satrapi hooks her readers with her first chapter, “The Veil,” which introduces an image that I believe many people imagine when they think of Iran: women in veils. As a viewer, I am struck by these initial images of frowning young girls with white faces emerging from black veils. Further, on page 6, Satrapi includes the image of herself as a young girl split in half: on the left side is a girl with short hair, a long-sleeve top, and the gears and tools of progress in the background, while the right side depicts her in a black veil with what appears to be traditional or even religious imagery in the background. One would not see such visually drastic polarizations of lightness and darkness, or modernity and traditionalism, in a photograph or film of women in Iran wearing the veil. Through the graphic novel form, however, she is able to weave these images in ways that tell her story of this split in identity without relying solely on words or stand-alone images to convey her thoughts. I must note that, while I think such images are powerful and productive for her narrative, they can also be limiting, as the viewer only sees the solid black against solid white and cannot imagine more colorful, diversified images of veiled women in post-revolutionary Iran, such as this image from Iranian New Wave filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s 1987 film Where Is the Friend’s Home?

Iranian schoolchildren in “Where is the Friend’s Home?” (1987)

Satrapi effectively utilizes these black-and-white scenes to convey her transnational reality later on in the graphic novel, when she spends time in Austria. For example, in the chapter “The Soup,” there is one strip of images that shows how her caretakers, Zozo and her husband, Houshang, saw their lives change drastically after moving from Iran to Vienna. In one image, Zozo is a smiling secretary in Iran, and in the next, she is a frowning hairdresser in Vienna; in another image, Houshang is a smiling CEO in Iran, and in the next, “he was nothing” in Austria (157). Thus, in just four pictures with two- or three-line captions, Satrapi is able to capture the hardships of the transnational Iranian migrant in a way that would be formed and communicated differently if conveyed through other media, such as a text-based novel or documentary film.

Through the graphic novel form, Satrapi also has the advantage of being able to convey multiple images simultaneously, with multiple moods. For example, she includes one scene where children and their mothers shop in a sparse grocery store during a time of growing food shortages in Iran. While the mothers are in one corner of the scene, lamenting about how the increase in the number of refugees in Tehran has affected this food shortage, the children are in another part of the image, laughing about a bean joke (92). In this way, Satrapi juxtaposes a brutal reality of the effects of transnational migration on the middle as well as lower classes in the aftermath of a major conflict in Iran, while also showing the playful childhood innocence that still lingers during this difficult time.

Finally, the graphic novel form allows Satrapi to take many liberties in her portrayal of the political history of Iran. Because she can only capture her situation through images and small amounts of text, she is able to summarize key events in ways that the reader can easily digest the history. For instance, in her chapter, “The Sheep,” she depicts the crux of revolutionary motivations and the liminal, transnational space of the transitional Iranian state in five images depicting a conversation between Marjane’s father and uncle. Her uncle says, “In a country where half the population is illiterate and you cannot unite the people around Marx, the only thing that can really unite them is a nationalism or a religious ethic,” and her father replies that the elections in favor of the Islamic Republic must have been faked, because 99.9% of the people supposedly voted for it and he personally doesn’t know a single person who wanted it (62). I don’t think it would be appropriate to go into further detail in this graphic novel, because she can only explain so much in this form and she is depicting the situation as it was presented to her as a child. However, it is important that the reader understands this and realizes that this is just a small synopsis and particular point of view of how the revolutionaries became in favor of establishing an Islamic Republic following the collapse of the monarchy. After all, she does not go into much detail at all about Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power and his ability to strategically unite revolutionary protesters across several key demographics to call for the overthrow of Shah Reza Pahlavi.

If Persepolis as a retelling of political history appeals to you, I would highly recommend reading the 9/11 Report in the graphic novel form. For me, this text allowed me to understand a national history I witnessed and was a part of in a way that I had not thought about before. You can read the first chapter here.