While reading Persepolis, I learned a lot more about Iran than I already knew. I knew that people considered Iran an unsafe country and that might have ‘terrorists’, but considering I lived there, I was curious as to what the book would say when the author said that she wanted to show the other side of Iran’s story.
In the book, I learned about how difficult and scarring the war was from the perspective of people in Iran, especially for children like Marjane and her friends, and how the war affected people in negative ways.
In one part of the book, I see Marji talking about how she smokes a cigarette to signify the end of her childhood and the beginning of her adulthood, which looks bleak at that point.
This part of the book makes me wonder about how war can affect people, and how people can make rash decisions during war. This part of the story shows how much Marji wants to be a grown up, and how much she wants to be treated like a mature adult. Later, she ends up acting quite headstrong to her parents and her teachers, to the point where she goes a bit too far when she gets angry, and ends up being expelled. I feel like I see a lot of this in the earlier stages of the book when Marji is small, and she really wants to understand everything, which makes her read a lot about very many different things. At some point in the book, Marji even says that she read more than she had ever read in her childhood, mostly because of her need to understand everything.
In another part of the book, you get to see the ‘guardians of the revolution’, and how scary they can be.
In this part of the book, I can imagine how scared I would be, because if a person got caught by the guardians of the revolution, and they thought you were doing something wrong, they could take you to their committee where you could be whipped, and your parents wouldn’t know, but would end up thinking that their child was kidnapped or ran away. In my opinion, the possibility of getting caught by those people is a scary thought.
Later on, Marji’s neighborhood is bombed, and she sees her friend’s severed hand with her bracelet still on it.
In this part of the book, she is only 14, and it makes me wonder how she handled it, because most people would be scarred for a very long time. She, on the other hand, is recounting the experience by telling the story, and I end up wondering how she is feeling.
In all these 3 parts of the book, something bad or scary happens to Marji, her family, or her friends, and Marji has to be able to try and forget it, and uses some tactic to try and move on from it to try and cope with adults threatening to whip her for wearing basketball shoes and a Michael Jackson pin, to try and cope with seeing her friends severed, bloodied hand.
This book has shown me the horrors of war and revolutions, but kind of filtered behind the cartoon-ish feel of a graphic novel.
To increase that feel, for my creative part, I’ve made some memes that are related to Marji and what is happening to her.
The Ikeable One 