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Prose Studies
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A Graphic Self
Roco G. Davis

Available online: 20 Aug 2006

To cite this article: Roco G. Davis (2005): A Graphic Self, Prose Studies, 27:3, 264-279

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 Roco G. Davis

A GRAPHIC SELF
Comics as autobiography in Marjane
Satrapis Persepolis
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This essay traces a crucial transition in the enactment of the autobiographical text and
addresses its creative appropriation by Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian immigrant living in
France, in Persepolis. I will examine her use of comics a thematically and
representationally complex form that deploys the strategic juxtaposition of sequential text
and image as the medium for her memoir that enacts her process of self-identification and
negotiation of cultural and/or national affiliation. Here, the juxtaposition of image and
words constitutive of graphic narratives yields a new artistic, literary, and creative
experience a revised aesthetic. Combining theories on the childhood memoir and comics, I
argue that we must approach contemporary graphic autobiographies as increasingly
sophisticated forms of inscribing the past and read Satrapis text as a site for the negotiation
and management of the memory of childhood perceptions and positioning, family, history,
politics, religion, and art.

Keywords comics; autobiography; Marjane Satrapi; Persepolis; childhood

memoirs

A sustained analysis of the forms of life writing being enacted in this century obliges us to
reconsider the notion of the autobiographical act itself. Specifically, when we analyze
increasingly complex questions about self-formation and the process of signification and
the expansion of the boundaries of traditional autobiography by negotiating narrative
techniques, the consequences in the context of transcultural self-representation become
complicated.1 In this essay, I trace a crucial transition in the enactment of the
autobiographical text and address its increasingly creative and subversive appropriation
by a transcultural writer, Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian immigrant living in France, whose
recent autobiography, Persepolis, was published to critical acclaim.2 I will examine her
artistic project, particularly her use of comics a thematically and representationally
complex form that deploys the strategic juxtaposition of sequential text and image as
the medium for her memoir that enacts her process of self-identification and negotiation
of cultural and/or national affiliation.3
As contemporary transcultural autobiographies negotiate renewed forms of
experiences, these texts become experimental and revisionary narratives, which
challenge textual authority and prescriptive paradigms. I want to argue that a significant
challenge to the prescriptive paradigms of autobiographical writing comes through
genre. In the case of Satrapi, the juxtaposition of image and words constitutive of

Prose Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 December 2005, pp. 264-279

ISSN 0144-0357 print/ISSN 1743-9426 online q 2005 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/014403500223834
 COMICS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN MARJANE SATRAPIS PERSEPOLIS 265

graphic narratives yields a new artistic, literary, and creative experience a revised
aesthetic. Indeed, to engage these narratives effectively, we must move beyond an
analytical model of merely reading the surface of texts for potential meanings and
attend to the cultural and generic codes addressed by the authors to unravel what the
texts execute within the contexts of larger questions of cultural and political
mobilization. Genre definition and choice directs the act of writing as well as readers
reception of the ideological issues and concerns embedded in the narrative. This
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affirmation implies that a reconstruction of the memoir is necessarily inflected by the

relationship between creative writing and immigrant or ethnic configurations of
subjectivity and national affiliation. Writers sensitive to how differences in cultural
contexts and paradigms create specific responses revise established genres to destabilize
ideology and conventional strategies of meaning in order to enact distinct sociocultural
situations. Readers who encounter these revisionary texts are thus obliged to
reexamine their expectations and critical perspectives.
As they gesture towards new perceptions of cultural contexts and choices,
transcultural autobiographies challenge the generic scripts prescribed by
Euro-American autobiography. The transaction between formal and cultural
modes produces texts that consistently challenge inherited ideas of autobiographical
structure and content. Importantly, the nuanced approaches of these narratives clearly
serve a significant didactic purpose. The increasingly dialogic nature of life writing
reflects a multi-voiced cultural situation that allows the subject to control and exploit
the tensions between personal and communal discourse within the text, and signify on
a discursive level. Issues of ethnic representation therefore become central to the
autobiographical strategies employed by these writers and the manner in which each
text performs individual processes of self-awareness. The engagement with the act of
narrative evolves into a strategy that blends subjectivity and history, in an attempt to
stress individual sensibility, challenge contextual authority, or claim agency.
From our renewed appreciation of the constructedness and performative potential
of life writing where saying something is also doing something we need to consider,
albeit briefly, the authors choice of this particular autobiographical form. Satrapis
memoir of her childhood in Iran explains in particular ways the present self, and
reasserts how the past can only be known and understood through narrative in her
case, a multilayered form of narrating. In a sense, reading her text involves asking
pressing questions about the act of construction (or reconstruction) of the self-in-
narrative. Her strategy serves as a highly effective vehicle for two fundamental
concerns of transcultural self-inscription: the performance of selfhood and how
meaning itself evolves. Importantly, transcultural autobiographers, particularly of
experiences of childhood set outside Europe or the United States, may also be engaged
in a didactic project the reader accompanies the writer as her self-as-child learns
about heritage culture and experiences historical events, fashioning a seemingly artless
insider perspective that is, nonetheless, complexly layered.4
These revisionary models of transnational and transcultural position and affiliation
have transformed reductivist ideas of the idea of otherness, and the process of othering.
I suggest that Satrapis comic autobiography can exemplify that new intermittent time and
interstitial space in literary studies that Bhabha refers to (1994: 312). Many writers engage
in increasingly complex ways of understanding and articulating migrant and ethnic identity
by choosing a transnational position, one that is neither purely assimilationist nor
 266 PROSE STUDIES

oppositional. Writing the self the way Satrapi does privileging the transcultural
experience through a genre that has not completely achieved mainstream acceptance
illuminates the more challenging strategy of normative self-fashioning and self-
representation. As such, the performance of the Iranian child who will become the
transcultural adult complicates issues in the discourse of nationalism and affiliation. In this
context, William Boelhowers approach to ethnic autobiography stresses historical
contexts as well as the socially-constructed dimensions of the cultural discourses adopted
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by immigrants, specifically the macrotext of immigrant autobiography which revolves

around the contrapositioning of different worlds. Boelhower explains that the process of
transculturality becomes a metaphor for the contemporary, postmodern, condition and he
argues that the more ones local ethnic encyclopedia is disestablished, the more its
semiotic nowhere becomes a cultural everywhere, with the ethnic subject now forced into
a floating practice of genealogical ordering and interrogation (1991: 137). When the
spaces represented in the text are located outside Europe or the United States, the
implications for national and cultural allegiances become more complex.

Comics as autobiography: possibilities and challenges

Will Eisner, in his germinal work, Graphic Storytelling and Visual, posits that the last
decades of the twentieth century have obliged us to rework the definition of literacy.
The proliferation of the use of images as a communicant, he argues,

was propelled by the growth of a technology that required less in text-reading

skills. From road signs to mechanical use instructions, imagery aided words, and at
times even supplanted them. Indeed, visual literacy has entered the panoply of
skills required for communication in this century. Comics are at the center of this
phenomenon (Eisner, 1996: 3).

Similarly, William Nericcio notes that the study of comics operates a significant link
between textual and visual studies and that the time seems right for the critical
community to confront the innovative space of graphic narrative: to understand it as
both epitome of and reaction against an age obsessed with moving pictures (1995:
106). But the renewed position of graphic narratives in cultural production did not
evolve from merely technological innovations, and requires that we, as critical readers,
consider the multilayered strategies marshaled in this creative endeavor. Graphic
artists/writers are increasingly conscious of the possibilities of the form itself the
way the interaction between word and image reconfigures manners of meaning as a
medium of communicating complex ideas and positions. Though comics are still often
considered a popular (read inferior) form, Matthew McAllister, Edward Sewell, and
Ian Gordon argue that the nature of comic art deploys significant ideological meaning,
in the manner in which it combines words and pictures allowing for much flexibility in
the manipulation of meaning, which has important implications for both
representation and interpretation of ideological images and meaning (2001: 3).

On the one hand, the communicative elements in comic art encourage the form to
occasionally create a closed ideological text, imposing on the reader preferred
 COMICS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN MARJANE SATRAPIS PERSEPOLIS 267

meanings. The limited space in which the artist/writer has to work, for example,
may entice the creator to use stereotypes to convey information quickly. Similarly,
the use of storytelling devices such as captions and thought balloons can make the
themes and values in a comic especially explicit. On the other hand, techniques
such as the use of comics to visually change the point of view in a comic strip or
book and the semantic space created by the sometimes ambiguous relationship
between the word and the picturemake comics a potentially polysemic text,
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encouraging multiple interpretations, even ones completely oppositional to any

specific artistic intent (McAllister, Sewell and Gordon, 2001: 3 4).

The possibility of multiple, even palimpsestic, meanings constitutive of the graphic text has
been harnessed in increasingly sophisticated ways by contemporary graphic artists who
want to limn political, social, and personal agendas, or challenge the dominant tropes of
writing.5 For instance, Joseph Witek asserts that comics are currently one of the most
dynamic cultural forms in the United States and while some cartoonists do aspire to social
and commercial respectability, others turn to comics as a readymade tool for critiquing and
subverting the values of mainstream America (1992: 7172). Because ideological
positions are consistently deployed in these texts, it is necessary to interrogate the
intersections between the possibilities offered by the form and effectiveness of this strategy,
as part of an attentive reading of the layers of meaning offered by comics.
Since the 1960s, comics for older readers have developed into a variety of genres and
styles, and autobiographical comics in particular are a distinctive and rewarding domain for
exploration from a critical, cultural and gender perspective.6 In this study, I read comics as
a sophisticated and developed medium, a set of cultural signifying practices in which the
intersections of culture, history, ethnicity, and gender can be effectively negotiated by
cartoonists and their adult readers. Moreover, the potential of the graphic narrative as a
highly dynamic text, as opposed to the more static single-image narrative painting or plain
text, determines the dialectic between text and image, providing creators with a wider
range of artistic and imaginative possibilities. Thus Satrapi writes within a tradition of
comics that is becoming increasingly multilayered in Europe and the United States.
Creators of autobiographical comics use a uniquely palimsestic graphic medium (both
visual and textual) to narrate and construct a life story. Paul John Eakins idea that the
tension between the experiential reality of subjectivity on the one hand and the available
cultural forms for its expression on the other always structures any engagement in
autobiography encourages us to critically negotiate Satrapis generic choice (1992: 88).
For writers who want to creatively limn their experiences, the specificities of the comic
book format, Will Eisner argues, which presents a montage of both word and image,
obliges the reader to

exercise both visual and verbal interpretive skills. The regiments of art
(e.g. perspective, symmetry, brush stroke) and the regiments of literature
(e.g. grammar, plot, syntax) become superimposed upon each other. The reading
of the comic book is an act of both aesthetic perception and intellectual pursuit
(2003: 8).

Autobiographical comics have existed for almost as long as comic art has. Susanna
Egan explains that Art Spiegelmans Maus produced an (auto)biography so powerful
 268 PROSE STUDIES

that the role of comics in autobiography must now be assured (1999: 16). Spiegelman
successfully deployed comics to portray the horror of the Holocaust to draw the
indescribable, so to speak.7 Hugo Frey and Benjamin Noy, in their introduction to a
special issue of Rethinking History on the use of the graphic novel in historical
representation, note that this text, more than any other, transformed the status of
comics as a legitimate vehicle for the telling of history.8 It has also become a staple in
womens comics, with important comic artists such as Jessica Abel, Erika Lopez, Julie
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Doucet, and Lynda Barry expanding the possibilities of the form. Barry, in particular,
considers issues of self-representation in the introduction to her One Hundred Demons,
where she introduces the concept of autobifictionalography to describe her project,
interrogating the limits between truth and necessary invention or elaboration: Is it
autobiography if parts of it are not true? Is it fiction if parts of it are? (2002: 7).9 These
graphic artists have demonstrated the flexibility of the comics to literally represent
memory, dreams, possibilities, and engage the idiosyncrasies of the present. Terri
Sutton considers womens autobiographical comics as the most adventurous of the
genre, noting how their art is enacted most significantly in the private sphere (1993:
111). Interestingly, Trina Robbins explains that:

big chunks of womens comix tend to be about the artists dysfunctional family,
miserable childhood, fat thighs, and boyfriend problems. Although [Aline]
Kominsky seems to have invented the form, the autobiographical comic actually
harkens back to the confessional style of mainstream romance comics (1999: 91).10

Robbinss perspective links womens graphic autobiography with earlier forms, even as
she notes that these contemporary women significantly transcend the limits of those
earlier texts artistically, thematically, representationally.
Contemporary graphic autobiography dialogues with other narrative conventions,
as well as furthers the possibilities of graphic expression. Satrapis use of comics as
autobiography illustrates Egans assertion that [e]very occasion for mixing genres
demonstrates how distinctive sign systems can intersect and merge to signify meanings
at which neither one could arrive alone (Egan, 1999: 21). This form limns the
interactions between drawing and language, and its ostensible simplification is actually
a complex strategy for the representation of events and perspectives that may be
difficult to communicate only through words. Scott McCloud explains this strategy
when he describes

cartooning as a form of amplification through simplification. When we abstract an image

through cartooning, we are not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific
details. By stripping down an image to its essential meaning, an artist can amplify that
meaning in a way that realistic art cant (McCloud, 1994: 30, emphasis in original).

Interestingly, this approach to understanding graphic art is structurally related to one of

the constitutive elements of the memoir of childhood, where specific details acquire
heightened meaning. The process of memory often involves the symbolic interrogation
of particular artifacts, sensory detail like the taste of specific food or the smell of a
childhood home, brief conversations or episodes that resound emotionally in the
authors memory. Because these texts are written in adulthood, the significance of
 COMICS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN MARJANE SATRAPIS PERSEPOLIS 269

these shards of memory, to use Salman Rushdies term, is heightened as they might
be the only remnants left of that lost past and lost time. In memoirs like Satrapis, the
specific event or detail gives meaning to the whole, as with the comic, where the
simplest drawing might acquire the most universal meaning.
Another structural connection between the writing of childhood and graphic art
lies in the manner in which both forms negotiate specific ways of perceiving. The issue
of perspective is fundamental to how we read both autobiographies and graphic
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narratives, as the forms themselves require the reader to position him- or herself
strategically in order to comprehend the performance which has been enacted. In
relation to comics, McCloud explains that

Cartooning isnt just a way of drawing, its a way of seeing. The ability of cartoons to
focus our attention on an idea is, I think, an important part of their special power,
both in comics and in drawing generally (1994: 31, emphasis in the original).

Childhood memoirs similarly focus our attention on specific ideas and forms of
understanding the world, the writers individual itinerary of selfhood. Noting
constitutive intersections in these modes of inscription, we must approach
contemporary graphic autobiographies as increasingly sophisticated forms of inscribing
the past. Further, metaliterary elements serve as signifying strategies and these comics
engage, in particularly effective ways, the writers perception of themsleves and their
process of education. Indeed, graphic narratives are highly effective kunstlerroman (novels
on the education of an artist) because the subjects of the autobiographical comics are,
most often, graphic artists themselves. The reader is privileged to participate in the
performance of both memory and art, and the complex interaction between them.

Persepolis: the graphic memoir

In the context of transcultural writing that negotiates the historical and cultural
upheaval in Iran in the latter part of the twentieth century, Marjane Satrapi harnesses
the expressive possibilities of the comics form to enact the dramatic changes she
experienced as a child beginning with the Islamic revolution and ending with her solo
journey to Austria. I propose to read Satrapis transcultural graphic autobiography as a
literary and cultural site for the negotiation and management of the memory of
childhood perceptions and positioning, family, history, politics, religion, and social
transformation. The narrator-protagonists emerging subjectivity in Persepolis is based
upon a series of shifting affiliations and growing awareness of the complexity of
religious, ideological, gender, class, and even literary issues. Her choice of medium is
deliberate, though it appears to challenge conventional prescriptive ways of inscribing
experience. As she explains in an essay titled On Writing Persepolis:

People always ask me, Why dont you write a book? But thats what Persepolis is.
To me, a book is pages related to something that has a cover. Graphic novels are
not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a
way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw it seems a
shame to choose one. I think its better to do both.11
 270 PROSE STUDIES

Further, in an interview, she explains:

[Comics] is my way of expressing myself, and I think the pictures, they say always
more than the words can say. Also, in pictures, they help me to have the distance
without becoming cynical, and be able to describe a part of the story with
humorwhich I couldnt do otherwise.12
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Because of the nature of her childhood experiences and the vivid quality of her
memories, Satrapi believes that this form is particularly apt for this engagement: it is
also the medium through which she habitually expresses herself, and is thus a form that
comes naturally to her and whose complex possibilities she has mastered. More
importantly, by doing both, Satrapis powerful autobiographical aesthetic
interrogates the crucial intersections between public, private, and, I would add,
secret, histories her perception of herself, and those dreams and feelings impossible
to articulate verbally. Thus she harnesses linguistic and visual elements to effectively
represent not only the events of her childhood, but her place in those events, as well as
her own process of self-awareness.
A constitutive aspect of the renewed process of seeing involves the issue of the
gaps in the narration of comics. Comics require the reader to fill in the gaps between
the panels, to imaginatively link what is represented in one panel with that drawn in
the next one. Graphic narratives contain more gaps than a traditional autobiography
even those written in as separate stories and we must therefore read the design
and intention behind the textual destabilizations and the cultural implications of such
fragmentation. The structure of Satrapis text is typical of most comic books short
titled narrative pieces that form a larger whole. Her chapters have simple titles: The
Veil, The Bicycle, The Water Cell, Persepolis, The Letter, The Party, The
Cigarette, Kim Wilde, among others. This ordering emphasizes breaks, beginnings
and new beginnings, episodic structuring of lives and selves, inviting the reader to fill
in the gaps, to find whole meaning from the fragments retained in memory and on
the page. The organization of the discrete narratives becomes the authors attempt to
control a series of fundamental memories, to define their meaning and their
significance with regard to her own formation. Nonetheless, in spite of the
fragmentary characteristic of the narrative strategy, the text exists as a coherent
whole, irrevocably linked by the protagonist/narrator and by a series of motifs,
issues, and strategies. Yet, as Boelhower points out, through a strategy of
reconstruction, autobiographical interpretation defamiliarizes actual self and place by
converting them into figurae, or tropes, which defer to an alternative cultural
scenario (1991: 134). Thus autobiographical comics cannot therefore be read solely
as a personal account, the cultural connotations of the stories and the narrative
choices signifying on the level of national drama and attesting to the complex
interweaving of the strategies of meaning. Significantly, Sutton has noted that
criticism ignores one of the more potent roles of autobiographical writing:
witnessing (1993: 111) which is clearly part of Satrapis complex project. Also, the
comics emphasis on recurring themes as well as its traditional resistance to closure
and remote works suggests a wider universe of significance for the writer and her
stories. The diasporic nature of Satrapis personal and national chronicle, which
 COMICS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN MARJANE SATRAPIS PERSEPOLIS 271

foregrounds the need to return and rediscover a home physically, imaginatively,

representationally is effectively subsumed into the genre. Moreover, this narrative
strategy demonstrates how the transcultural subject is not exposed to one ideology,
but to a plurality of discourses. This multiple positioning radically determines her
textual negotiation of subjectivity.
Eisner has explained how, in comics,
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body posture and gesture occupy a position of primacy over text. The manner in
which these images are employed modifies and defines the intended meaning of the
words. They can by their relevance to the readers own experience evoke a nuance
of emotion and give auditory inflection to the voice of the speaker (2003: 103).

Satrapis artwork is minimal and stark, with curved figures rarely involving much
detail, yet simultaneously humorous and painful in its depiction of escalating violence
and madness. Andrew Arnold notes that the arts simplicity solid, high-contrast
black shapes [which take on] a wood-cut look13 reflects and resonates with the
perspective of its child protagonist, as it negotiates the complex nuances of the story.
Satrapi uses black and white to effectively illustrate clothes and backgrounds in shifting
ways that create dramatic contrasts. Her flexible geometric style eloquently conveys
both childhood innocence and indescribable pain. Fernanda Eberstadt describes this
style as bold and vivid (2003: 8). Satrapi, she explains, draws

in a faux-naif pastiche of East and West [and] deploys all the paranoid Expressionism
latent in the comic strips juxtapositions of scale the child dwarfed by looming
parents, would-be rescuers dwarfed by giant policemen guarding the locked doors
to a movie theater thats been set on firebut when Satrapi depicts a schoolyard
brawl, its straight from Persian miniature (Eberstadt, 2003: 8).

In one of the most dramatic moments, Marji walks by a neighbors home which has just
been bombed. The drawing of the rubble is highly sophisticated, worked in shadows and
intersecting lines. The last three panels on that page illustrate her reaction to suddenly
seeing and identifying a bracelet on her friends arm under the rubble: her horrified
expression, her covering her face with her hands, then a panel in black above the words No
scream in the world could have relieved my suffering and my anger (Satrapi, 2003: 142).
Satrapi uses the conventions of Western perception of Iranian culture to criticize it
from her transcultural position. Persepolis combines political history and memoir,
portraying a countrys twentieth-century upheavals through the story of one family. As
Frey and Noy argue, we need to transcend the perspective that reads graphic novels
merely as a new set of historical sources and read them as a site where history itself,
or the representations of history, are put into play: interrogated, challenged, and even
undermined (2002: 258). Graphic representation confers a multilayered
performativity to Satrapis text: we simultaneously read and see the story, words and
images coalesce to produce an inextricable narrative gestalt (Witek, 1992: 74). The
juxtaposition of visual and verbal constructs a nuanced text that obliges readers to
rethink previous concepts about Iran, about childhoods, about memory, and strategies
of self-representation. It also gives the author fuller control of her subject herself
as her life writing act involves actual, though stylized, self-portraiture. Satrapis
 272 PROSE STUDIES

narrative opens with a self-portrait, at the age of ten, wearing what is probably the
single most recognizable symbol of the Islamic Revolution in Iran: the veil. Yet, Satrapi
is consistent in privileging her child perspective she does not mention the veil
(though it is the most striking element in her self-portrait) until the third panel, and the
first page concludes with a wide-frame drawing, reminiscent of Persian miniatures, of a
group of little girls negotiating the imposition of the veil.
The opening page effectively sets the stage for the narrative: it introduces the
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protagonist, Marji a tough, smart Iranian girl, who constantly asks questions and
refuses to be anything but the protagonist in everything going on around her and
signals the moment in which she begins to realize that her world is changing. Though
Satrapis story is inextricably entwined with that of her country her great-
grandfather was Irans last emperor, who was overthrown by the father of the Shah
ousted in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and her parents participated actively in the
Shahs overthrow her narrative is fundamentally that of a child growing up. She
successfully weaves the paradigms of childrens culture family, school, idols with
the ethnic and national concerns that surround her and gradually impinge upon their
private lives, and her secret one. In this context, the choice of the title Persepolis is
significant; it is the title of the fourth story of the book, in which she recounts the
history of successive regimes in Iran, as well as her familys connection to the former
ruling class. By giving her memoir Irans historical name, she posits the text as a
doubled narrative of memory that of a country and a childhood lost, as well as the
intricate connection between the two. For Satrapi, the changes in the country are the
changes in her family and her life there is no difference among the three.14
Satrapi intelligently juxtaposes her own experiences with the larger political scene,
consistently privileging the personal over the political, but always limning the
connection between the two. As such, her childhood games includes playing at being
Che Guevara and learning about methods of torture; her friends parents and her own
uncle are executed; and a boy she has a crush on leaves for the United States to escape
the oppressive regime. Her early representation of herself stresses the happy
contradictions that often exist in a childs perception of the world, as well as the more
insidious conflicts between her home life her parents are Marxists who encourage
their childs intellectual development and public life that includes the pain that a
repressive government causes. There is also an opposition between the brutality of the
regime and the descriptions of the war and the warm and loving home life she
experiences: her parents are affectionate and supportive, her grandmother is a source
of solace and comfort, her depictions of her conversations with God are among the
more poignant scenes in the text. As a young child, she declares that she wants to be a
prophet, while informing the reader that her favorite book was a comics version of Karl
Marxs Dialectic Materialism. Her syncretic religious-political sentiment, which mirrors
the countrys religious-secular dichotomy it was funny to see how much Marx and
God looked like each other. Though Marxs hair was a bit curlier (Satrapi, 2003: 13)
is creatively depicted, illustrating the manner in which a child perceives, and
allowing the reader to see what she imagines. Her secret relationship with God also
attests to her personality, and to the kind of insecurities typical of childhood.
Two self-portraits that Satrapi draws graphically dramatize her liminal position:
the child literally finds herself caught between the religious and the secular worlds,
between tradition and technology. The first portrait is of her at the age of ten, after the
 COMICS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN MARJANE SATRAPIS PERSEPOLIS 273

imposition of the veil, at a point where she is struggling to understand what it means,
and why she has to wear it (see Figure 1).
The portrait she draws of herself at the age of 14 continues to privilege her
liminality, but this time in a more eclectic formulation. Her sense of transculturality is
graphically represented by the manner in which she literally wears the symbols of the
position she has chosen for herself. At this point, Marji is no longer a child caught
between two world-views: she has carved a place for herself (see Figure 2).
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The denim jacket and Michael Jackson button identify her as a typical 1980s
teenager, a willing victim to the demands of fashion. The headscarf, with a few
carefully orchestrated escaping strands of hair is her partial concession to
fundamentalist imposition. The use of verbal and graphic images signals the tensions
inherent to transcultural self-identification, and illustrates the vexed discourses of
imposed forms and chosen manners of self-representation.
From the very beginning, Marjis story is one of contradictions, of a child finding
herself between cultural, political, religious, linguistic and social demands and
impositions. To understand this text, we must understand the manner in which
the narrator-protagonist negotiates the crucial binaries of palimpsestic history, and
how the author re-presents those often impossible contradictions. The narrative
focuses on the childs evolving perspective of lifes complications: she learns about
hypocrisy when her Marxist father breaks up their maids love affair with their
neighbors son, because he says that in this country you stay within your own social
class (37); she ironizes Islamic fervor, recounting the story of the widow of a man who
dies of cancer who shouts along with the masses that he has died a martyr (32); she
experiences the execution of her favorite uncle, which leads to her loss of faith (70);
and she notes on diverse occasions the socially accepted double standard of the religious
government. Marjis life develops in a context of increasing political turmoil
and violence, yet she necessarily sustains the processes of childhood and adolescence.

FIGURE 1 (p. 6)
 274 PROSE STUDIES
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FIGURE 2 (p. 131)

In the story The Cigarette, she intersperses her account of typical adolescent
rebellion cutting school to flirt with boys and being punished by her mother, who,
Marji claims used the same tactics as the torturers (113) with information about the
Iran-Iraq war: Naturally, the regime became more repressive. In the name of that war,
they exterminated the enemy within. Those who opposed the regime were
systematically arrested and executed together (117). She ends the story with an
effective merging of both transactions:

As for me, I sealed my act of rebellion against my mothers dictatorship by

smoking the cigarette Id stolen from my uncle two weeks earlier. [. . .] It was
awful. But this was not the moment to give in. With this first cigarette, I kissed
childhood goodbye (117).

The juxtaposition between word and image in graphic narratives allows Satrapi
to inscribe her passage to maturation on two levels: as she writes Marjis process of
increasing awareness, the drawing style also evolves. The later drawings are more
sophisticated, the black and white shading more nuanced and expressive. There is a
representational coherence to the text that limns the reality of drawing as a
language as expressive as words. The cultural influences of pre-revolutionary Iran
are also evidenced in Satrapis graphic text. She explains that before 1979 she
attended a bilingual French school and that her family was very cosmopolitan and
liberal, leading us to understand the nature of her drawings: God, for example, is
represented as an old white man, in the traditional Western style. Later, as an
adolescent, she identifies with American popular culture she hums were the
kids in America, whoa! as she buys black market cassettes of Kim Wilde and
Camel, and screams along with the cassette to unwind after a confrontation with
the law (132, 134). Class issues are also negotiated on several occasions. The
 COMICS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN MARJANE SATRAPIS PERSEPOLIS 275

representational strategy of word/image juxtaposition privileges inconsistencies

between private (upper-class) and public (lower-class) lives. Marjis family struggles
to survive the situation, maintaining a semblance of normalcy in the face of
escalating violence. Her parents smuggle a Kim Wilde poster into Iran for her, she
wears 1983 Nikes, denim jackets, and a Michael Jackson button (though, when
questioned by the Guardians of the Revolution, she claims that it is Malcolm X the
leader of Black Muslims in America. Back then, she explains, Michael Jackson
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was still black [133]).

The story The Key most vividly depicts the different worlds upper- and
lower-class Iranians lived in during the war. As Marji reads about the casualties in
the newspaper, her mother asks her to style her hair. Mom, dont all these dead
mean anything to you? the girl asks. Of course they mean something to me! her
mother exclaims, But we are still living! Thats very Persian, the narrator
comments, the philosophy of resignation (94). Then their maid comes to tell them
that her son has been given a gold-painted plastic key: They told the boys that if
they went to war and were lucky enough to die, this key would get them into
heaven (99). Later, they learn that only poor boys were given keys, hypnotized
with songs and patriotic ideals, and used as mine fodder. Meanwhile, Marji attends
her first party (see Figure 3).
This shocking sequencing, which suggests simultaneity, foregrounds the childs
vacillating perceptions: though intellectually she acknowledges that violence
happens, her emotional life is that of an upper-class teenager and she locates
herself in a world where typical adolescent processes can still, and must be, lived.
This dramatic depiction of the contrast between the poorer teenagers lives and
her own through a one-page juxtaposition is one of the most effective pages of her
text.
Marjis parents begin to worry about their headstrong and independent
daughter and resolve to send her away to Austria, to avoid the risk of arrest. This is
the note on which the memoir ends, with a new beginning for the 14-year-old
separated from family and country. This ending posits a dramatic rupture: family,
and nation and childhood are left behind. The last story, The Dowry,
recounts her preparations for her journey, her fathers admonition: Dont forget
who you are and where you come from (152), and her grandmothers advice to
Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself (150). These thoughts clearly
remained in the girls mind, and may be read as metaliterary imperatives: the
construction of her graphic autobiography limns her process of remembering and of
finding a unique way of self-expression. Persepolis is the document that attests she
has attended her fathers and grandmothers parting words graphic proof of the
multidimensional memories she has retained in her mind, and reproduced on the
page. Because leaving Iran and her parents was a little like dying (153), the text
serves as Marjis way of surviving, by revisiting and reenacting those memories of
simultaneous violence and family togetherness, and her parents love that made
them understand that only by sending her away would she be safe. Eberstadt notes
how ambitious artist-writers all over the world have been discovering that the
cartoons on which they were raised make the perfect medium for exploring
consciousness, the ideal shortcutvia irony and gallows humorfrom introspec-
tion to the grand historical sweep (2003: 8). Through her successful graphic
 276 PROSE STUDIES

negotiation of her early life, Satrapi has found a way to tell her stories without
letting rage and bitterness take over:

I cannot take the idea of a man cut into pieces and just write it, she explained. It
would not be anything but cynical. Thats why I drew it. People are not ready to
read a book about all the misery of the third world, and I dont blame them
(Bahrampour, 2003: 1).
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FIGURE 3 (p. 102)

 COMICS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN MARJANE SATRAPIS PERSEPOLIS 277

This successful juxtaposition of words and images offers us a revisionary manner of

narrating a past that negotiates the intersection of history, childhood and itineraries of
ethnic and national affiliation.
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Notes
1. I use the term transcultural as explained by Rosalia Baena in the introduction to this
book. I would like to thank Professor Baena for her careful and encouraging reading of
my essay and her insightful suggestions.
2. Reprints from this text are used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of
Random House, Inc. The English version of Persepolis contains the two volumes
originally published in French as Persepolis 1 and Persepolis 2, published in Paris by
LAssociation in 2000 and 2001, respectively. Satrapis Persepolis 3 was published in
French in 2003. The English edition, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return was published in
2004.
3. The term for the genre in question comics is itself subject to debate. The term
was first used as a plural form to describe graphic narratives published in newspapers.
Some critics have argued that comics sounds juvenile and its most colloquial
synonym, funnies, detract from the forms thematic and artistic complexity, and
should be replaced. Will Eisner proposes the use of the terms sequential art or
graphic sequential art in his crucial study Comics and Sequential Art (2003; first
published in 1985). Art Spiegelman introduced the term commix as a way of
suggesting the crucial co-mixing of words and pictures that distinguishes the comics
from other types of visual narratives (Spiegelman, 1988: 61). In some European
criticism, particularly the French, the expression bande dessinee (BD) is the preferred
term. In this study, I will use the word comics as Scott McCloud defines it, as
n. plural in form, used with a single verb. 1. Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in
deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic
response in the viewer (1994: 9). I will also refer to comics synonymously as
graphic narratives.
4. See Davis (2002) and Davis (2005) for more on representing childhood in ethnic
autobiographies.
5. For information on the ways women graphic artists have developed comics, see
Robbins (1999), among others.
6. Matthew Surridge argues that most Biographical and especially Autobiographical
comics are better described as an extension of the personal essay, perhaps by way of first-
person journalism. Basically, for whatever reasons, comics biography and comics
autobiography have evolved their own codes; they have their own sets of expectations.
Possibly most significant is the fact that biographical comics [. . .] tend to put artistry
before information. They are, in other words, a separate genre than [sic ] prose
biography, dealing with separate concerns, and probably should be treated as such. See
Matthew Surridge, Based on a True Story. The Comics Journal, http://www.tcj.com/
3_online/b_surridge_09229.html, accessed 4 September 2003.
7. See Linda Hutcheons excellent essay Literature Meets History: Counter-Discoursive
Comix (1999) for a thorough discussion of Spiegelmans Maus as autobiography and
history.
 278 PROSE STUDIES

8. The existence of this book testifies to the increasing critical interest in the validity of
comics in contemporary historiography, highlighting how, in the words of the editors,
the form has actually been the site for some sustained and sophisticated engagements
with the problem of representing historical events (Frey and Noy, 2002: 255).
9. See Melinda L. de Jesuss article (de Jesus, 2004) for a thoughtful discussion of Barrys
autobiographical strategy.
10. Robbins also points out that so many womens autobiographical comics are
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depressing, and so many are about dysfunctional families, that it becomes tempting to
believe that dysfunctional families breed women cartoonists (1999: 127).
11. Marjane Satrapi, On Writing Persepolis, http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/
graphic novels/satrapi2.html. Accessed 3 September 2003.
12. Rebekah Denn, A Moment with. . . author Marjane Satrapi. Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/books/123973_momentwith29.html, accessed 11
August 2003.
13. Andrew Arnold, TIME.comix on Marjane Satrapis Persepolis, http://www.time.
com/time/columnist/arnold/article/0,9565,452401,00.html, accessed 5 September
2003.
14. Analysis of Satrapis perspective on the situation in Iran is interesting, but beyond the
concerns of this study, which aims to focus primarily on issues of self-representation.

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Roco G. Davis has degrees from the Ateneo de Manila University of Navarra (Spain),
where she is Associate Professor of American and Postcolonial Literatures and Director
of the Institute of Liberal Arts. Her publications include Transcultural Reinventions: Asian
American and Asian Canadian Short Story Cycles (Toronto: TSAR, 2001), Sites of Ethnicity:
Europe and the Americas (Co-edited with William Boelhower and Carmen Birkle. Mainz:
Winter Verlag, 2004). She has recently edited a special issue of the journal MELUS on
Filipino American Literature (2004, Vol 29 No.1), and is working on a book on Asian North
American autobiographies of childhood.
Address: Modern Languages Department, University of Navarra, 31080 Pamplona, Spain.
[email: rgdavis@unav.es]