Estranging the Familiar: “East” and

“West” in Satrapi’s Persepolis1

Nima Naghibi
Andrew O’Malley
Ryerson University

P: T S  A C () is Marjane Satrapi’s

highly acclaimed coming-of-age story set in revolutionary Iran. It is part of
a new wave of autobiographical writing by diasporic Iranian women, which
includes such authors as Tara Bahrampour (To See and See Again: A Life in
Iran and America, ), Gelareh Assayesh (Saffron Sky: A Life Between
Iran and America, ), Firoozeh Dumas (Funny in Farsi: A Memoir
of Growing Up Iranian in America, ), Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita
in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, ), Roya Hakakian (Journey from the
Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran, ), and Azadeh
Moaveni (Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and
American in Iran, ), not to mention Satrapi’s own sequel Persepolis
: e Story of a Return (), and Embroideries (). ese women
are using the autobiographical form, one virtually unheard of for Iranian
women authors until recently, to help them come to terms with the 
Iranian Revolution and their new lives in the diaspora. As a means of map-
ping out the complexities and contingencies of identity, autobiography has
been accorded a privileged status in postcolonial and diasporic contexts,
and these texts can be viewed as part of this recent trend.² However, the
use of the autobiographical genre has traditionally been discouraged in

ESC .– (June/September ): –

Naghibi, O'Malley.indd 223 2/21/2007, 8:40 AM


N N is
Assistant Professor
of English at Ryerson
University in Toronto.
Her research interests
include Iranian
feminism, Iranian
cinema and culture, and
Western representations
of the Middle East. Her
monograph, Rethinking
Global Sisterhood:
Western Feminism and
Iran, is forthcoming with
University of Minnesota
Press.
A O’M
is an Associate
Professor in the English
Department at Ryerson
University. He is the
author of e Making
of the Modern Child:
Children’s Literature
and Childhood in the
Late Eighteenth Century,
published by Routledge
in . Currently, he
is working on a project
investigating the uses
and popular adaptations
of Robinson Crusoe from
the eighteenth century to
the present.
Naghibi, O'Malley.indd 224
Iran, particularly for women. As Farzaneh Milani and Afsaneh Najmabadi
have observed, autobiographical stories have been perceived as a form of
metaphorical unveiling as indecorous as physical unveiling.³
Nonetheless, diasporic Iranian women writers have recently been using
the genre to challenge the stereotype of the self-effacing, modest Iranian
woman and to write themselves back into the history of the nation. Where
Persepolis differs from these other Iranian diasporic autobiographies is
in its use of a child narrator and of another Western form, the comic
book. is unique combination produces a text that regularly juxtaposes
the familiar with the alien. At the moment that the text promises the
comfort of stable meaning, it effects a slippage that subverts expectations
and undermines its promises. ese slippages take on a potent political
charge in the context of a long-standing and fraught history of Middle
Eastern (particularly Iranian) and Western (particularly American) rela-
tions. Satrapi’s text offers a significant intervention in this highly polar-
ized era of East/West relations. Her text plays the increasingly mobilized
stereotypes of the Islamic Republic as oppressive and backward against
the Western conviction over its own progressive liberalism in ways that
contest both of these scripts.
e  English edition of Persepolis (translated from the French)
has attracted a degree of attention that does not compare to the reception
of other recent books by diasporic Iranian women, with the exception of
Azar Nafisi’s bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran. Reading Lolita
is, in many ways, the antithesis of Persepolis. While Persepolis defies easy
categorization, Lolita places itself squarely within a conservative, canoni-
cal Western literary critical tradition. While Persepolis forces the West-
ern reader to work hard to understand the complexities of contemporary
Iranian political and social dynamics, Lolita serves up the usual fare of
the oppression of Iranian women under a fundamentalist state for the
uncritical consumption of Western readers. While Persepolis challenges
 We appreciate the comments we received from the anonymous reviewers of
this article; their input has helped us greatly with our revisions. anks also to
Candida Rifkind for reading this paper and giving us her valuable insights.
 See, for example, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (eds.), De-Colonizing the
Subject: e Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis:  of
Minnesota , ) and Women, Autobiography, eory (Madison:  of Wis-
consin , ).
 See, for example, Farzaneh Milani’s ground-breaking Veils and Words: e
Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (Syracuse: Syracuse , ),
and Women’s Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran, ed. Afsaneh Najmabadi
(Cambridge: Harvard , ).
 | Naghibi/O’Malley
2/21/2007, 8:40 AM
 Western preconceptions of Iran and Iranian women, Lolita merely rein-
forces them. e following passage is characteristic of Nafisi’s style of
representation. In it, she imagines one of her female students making the
trip home from their clandestine literature class in the author’s house.
e young woman, Sanaz, veils herself and her demeanour changes from
spirited to downtrodden:
You might notice that her gait and her gestures have changed.
It is in her best interest not to be seen, not to be heard or
noticed. She doesn’t walk upright, but bends her head towards
the ground and doesn’t look at passersby…. You might well
ask, What is Sanaz thinking as she walks the streets of Tehran?
How much does this experience affect her? … Does she feel
humiliated by the new laws, by the fact that after the revolu-
tion, the age of marriage was lowered from eighteen to nine,
that stoning became once more the punishment for adultery
and prostitution? (–)
Here, and throughout the book, Nafisi panders to the dominant Western
image of veiled Iranian women as oppressed and abject. e book also
offers a self-congratulatory appeal to Western readers. e “free” intel-
lectual space and sense of liberation that Nafisi’s class affords her students
come from their study of the “great works” of Western literature. Nafisi’s
“literariness” is highly conservative and canonical, appealing to conven-
tional notions of what constitutes good literature and maintaining firm
divisions between “high brow” and “low brow.” e kind of New Criticism
she and her students practise is almost reactionary in its celebration of
the ennobling power of the Great Books tradition.
Satrapi’s Persepolis is, like Nafisi’s Lolita, an extremely well-received
book, but one that challenges, among other things, the distinction between
the literary and the popular and the boundaries between high brow and
low brow. Persepolis can be found in most bookstores in most North
American cities under any one of the following categories: autobiography;
children’s or young adult’s literature; graphic novel; middle east history;
women’s studies. Part of the appeal of this book may be that there is cur-
rently in the West a greater interest in hearing from a member of the axis
of evil, especially in an autobiographical form that promises to disclose the
intimate secrets of an exotic other. However, this does not account for the
lesser degree of interest in other autobiographies by Iranian women (again,
with the notable exception of Reading Lolita). e appeal of Persepolis
may also have to do with the novelty of Satrapi’s use of the conventions
and format of the popular comic book or graphic novel (remarks on the

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 distinction between these terms follow below). But what is to us most
interesting about Persepolis is that in content and form this is a text that
is difficult to contain. Its categorization under so many different headings
allows it not only to operate in a number of registers but to interrogate
the assumptions that commonly underpin the distinctions readers make
between genres and categories.
In essence, the defiance of efforts to contain a text within a single
framework of meaning is, according to John Fiske, one of the foremost
qualities of the popular text; as he remarks, the popular or “producerly”
text “is, in a very real sense, beyond its own control” (). Like other
popular texts, including those in the comic book medium, Persepolis
invites a reading that “accommodate[s] … the dominant ideology" ().
Given the reviews it has received, most of which comment on the uni-
versality of the protagonist Marji’s experiences and the similarities that
make “her” and “us” human, this dominant reading can be understood
as liberal and humanist. It is important to note that this liberal human-
ist model encourages a recognition that can be formulated as: “they are
like us” rather than “we are like them”; as Gayatri Spivak has famously
argued, the project of imperialism has historically been to transform the
radically other into the domesticated other in a way that consolidates the
(Western) self (). In other words, the radical difference of the other is
defused by its absorption into the normative centre, the West. Despite the
fact that Satrapi writes about a culture that historically, and recently quite
intensively, has circulated as radically other in the West, most of the rave
reviews of Persepolis stress the familiarity and universality, in other words,
the normative or normalizing “Western-ness” of her text.
On the one hand, the multiple classifications of this text in bookstores
speak to its “universality” in that it can be so many different things to
so many different readers. On the other hand, the problems booksellers,
reviewers, and indeed readers have with categorizing this book—with
finding the right shelf for it, as it were—suggests the greater difficulty
posed by the place of comic books and graphic novels in the literary field
of cultural production. In Pierre Bourdieu’s model, a genre, or an example
of a genre, “receives its distinctive value from its negative relationship
with the coexistent position-takings to which it is objectively related and
which determine it by delimiting it” (). While in North America the
comic book medium or form has traditionally occupied a weak position
in the field, its prestige has increased somewhat in recent years, especially
since Art Spiegelman’s Maus won the Pulitzer Prize.

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 In France, where Persepolis was written and first published, the bandes
dessinées have enjoyed a greater degree of literary status and have been less
exclusively associated with juvenile literature than in North America, but
they still do not possess the same degree of cultural capital as such forms
as poetry or the literary novel.⁴ e critical acclaim Maus and a handful
of other graphic novels have enjoyed, however, has come largely through
their “negative relationship” with other examples of the form, in particular
the serial, highly formulaic, superhero-centred comic book, which is still
its dominant manifestation. Much of the praise Maus has received has
dwelt on the fact that it escapes or exceeds the limitations of the comic
book medium; in other words, its value has been calculated based on its
perceived superiority to and difference from virtually all other examples of
the form.⁵ In the Times Literary Supplement, Bryan Cheyette concludes his
review of Maus by remarking that “the comic-book, in Spiegelman’s hands,
has finally come of age” (). e comic book has traditionally been seen
as an immature and thus incomplete form, just as childhood is generally
perceived as an incomplete state. Indeed, the term “graphic novel,” coined
by Will Eisner to describe his own book A Contract With God (), is
used to create distance and construct difference between more “serious”
adult texts and the simple juvenile narratives and styles generally associ-
ated with comic books.⁶
e acclaim and prestige accorded to Satrapi’s Persepolis comes out of a
shift in the field similar to and precipitated by the success of Spiegelman’s
 We recognize that the history of comics and their reception is substantially
different in France than it is in North America and do not wish to disregard
these differences. Our argument, however, is more concerned with the recep-
tion of Satrapi’s work in North America. Further, while the BDs may be better
respected in France than in North America, the difference seems to be more
one of degree than of kind.
 Ethan Mordden, writing in e New Yorker, contends that before Maus comic
books had been a static and uninteresting form for fifty years and that what
separates Spiegelman’s book from other comics is its use of the more elite liter-
ary techniques of “irony and ambivalence” (). Michiko Kakutani of the New
York Times suggests that the form itself has had to expand to include Maus: “Mr.
Spiegelman has stretched the boundaries of the comic book form” (C). In the
New York Times Book Review, Lawrence L. Langer goes so far as to proclaim
that Maus has to be considered as something outside of its own medium: “Art
Spiegelman doesn’t draw comics…. ‘Maus: A Survivor’s Tale II, And Here My
Troubles Begin’ is a serious form of pictorial literature” ().
 As Amy Kiste Nyberg remarks, the impact of adult-oriented graphic novels
has not been all that significant on how the form generally circulates: “Despite
the creation of the graphic novel and the critical acclaim for Maus … there
remains in the minds of the American public the perception that comics are
for children” ().

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 work and that of other celebrated figures in the field, such as Chris Ware
and Joe Sacco. e variety of headings, other than “comic books,” under
which booksellers find themselves shelving the book can be understood
as a product of the struggle of comic books in the field. To classify the
text as a work of autobiography, middle-east history, or women’s studies
is to distance it from the comic book and to align it with genres or forms
that have greater capital in the literary field. is more prestigious clas-
sification also affects how readers interpret the text: “e meaning of a
work (artistic, literary, philosophical, etc.) changes automatically with each
change in the field within which it is situated for the spectator or reader”
(Bourdieu ). In a sense, the “elevation” of a text like Persepolis to a posi-
tion superior to popular literature helps confirm its dominant reading as a
liberal, humanist testament to the nobility, equality, and universality of the
human condition; it is now understood to be doing what the literary novel
is commonly lauded for doing. Azar Nafisi’s more conventionally literary
text Reading Lolita has garnered similar praise for demonstrating the
universal sameness of people in the East and the West. In fact, we would
argue it has been so widely celebrated precisely because it encourages
the dominant reading preferred by a liberal ideology when it encounters
a foreign “other” culture.
is kind of dominant reading of Persepolis is, however, challenged
by the kinds of slippages the text generates, slippages that come about in
part at least by virtue of its comic book form and its illustrations, which
are in a style Scott McCloud calls “cartooning.” According to McCloud,
there are two important effects of cartooning: the first enables a focus on
specific details; the second is “the universality of cartoon imagery. e
more cartoony a face is, for instance, the more people it could be said to
describe” (). Cartooning, he argues, is a way of seeing, not just a way of
drawing, so the simplification of characters and images toward a purpose
can be an effective tool: “[W]hen you look at a photo or realistic drawing
of a face—you see it as the face of another but when you enter the world
of the cartoon—you see yourself" ().
Persepolis is indeed very “cartoony.” Despite accusations by some
critics of a lack of sophistication as a graphic artist, Satrapi’s style is
deliberate and has definite effects. It is part of her effort to make familiar,
to universalize, but at the same time to other. e “cartooniness” of her
drawings encourages the reader to see herself in Marji, to see the self in
the other, to erase all differences in a gesture of “cultural understanding.”
But before that identification can comfortably take place, the potential for

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 understanding is displaced by a moment of radical otherness that cannot
be erased or contained.
e cover of Persepolis shows a small image of “Marji,” the protagonist
to whom the reader has not yet been introduced (fig.). is image is, at
first, separate and distinct from the narrative. A small girl in a headscarf is
depicted on the front cover, confronting the reader from the outset with an
image of the veiled, radical other. At the same time, this image is familiar
because it is of a perceived universal figure: the child. is universal image

Figure .

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 of childhood is, however, framed by stylized Persian art, which once again
evokes difference. Attached to this framed image of a veiled girl is a smaller
frame containing an upside-down tulip. Tulips, which have a universal
association with springtime, are popular flowers in Iran where they grow
in abundance. is universal signifier of new life, however, shifts in the
context of the revolution and the Iran-Iraq war when tulips became potent
symbols of martyrdom. Satrapi makes clear this connection in Persepolis
: e Story of a Return when she submits an art project for her college
qualification exam in Iran. Her drawing is a reworking of Michelangelo’s
“La Pietà,” in which Mary is replaced by a veiled Iranian mother grieving as
she holds the body of her martyred son who displaces Jesus in the original
(fig. ). e figures are surrounded by tulips, and Satrapi adds a footnote
saying “It’s said that red tulips grow from the blood of martyrs” (). is

Figure .

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 is a remarkable example of the shifting significations in Satrapi’s texts:
the assumptions of recognition and familiarity experienced by a Western
reader are constantly undermined by the interjection of culturally specific
and unfamiliar references.
Indeed, what gives Satrapi’s work radical potential is its refusal to be
wholly appropriated into a Western frame of reference; her texts offer
recognizable signifiers for a Western reader and then immediately effect
a slippage so that their meaning cannot be seamlessly appropriated into
a Western framework. In Persepolis, the story moves between three levels
of identification: it is Marji’s specific story, the story of all Iranians who
lived through the revolution, and, at the same time, a universal story of
childhood experience. As an illustration on the cover, Marji is separate,
marginalized, veiled, and radically other; at the same time, she is a univer-
sal cartoonish figure of a child to whom presumably everyone can relate.
us, the cover immediately achieves an effect that is repeated throughout
the book, as the reader’s moments of identification are destabilized by
disidentification. In Persepolis, there is a constant fluctuation between the
familiar and the alien. is dual process of othering and making familiar
occurs throughout the text. Marji is on the cover, as an image outside the
narrative, outside the sequential events of the story. But the illustration
also offers us a way inside the narrative.
e first panel is an identical reproduction of the image on the cover—
drawing us into the specific context of Marji’s life. is is the context of a
radical otherness, symbolized by the veil. is image works as a counter-
point to her self-portrait on the back flap of the dust jacket (fig. ). Here,
she is depicted as very hip, dressed in black clothes, wearing chunky boots,
and with a cigarette in hand. Visually, there are a few elements that connect
the images on the cover and the back flap. In both illustrations, Marji is
surrounded by black or she is wearing black, she has her arms crossed in
the same way, and the front of her hair has similar highlights.
How, then, do we reconcile these two images of Eastern Marji and
Western Marji? Indeed, this is a question that frames the entire narrative,
just as the illustrations on the cover and the dust jacket frame the physical
text. We have a veiled figure of radical otherness positioned alongside a
familiar image of Western underground hip. is dialectical relationship
of East and West, radical otherness and recognizable familiarity is played
out in the chapter on “e Veil” (–).
e contrapuntal relationship between East and West shapes the nar-
rative throughout the text. e first chapter on the veil introduces us to
a split image of Marji; one half of her is veiled against a background of

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 Persian artwork (signifying Eastern tradition), and the other half of her is
unveiled against a background of the instruments of science and technol-
ogy (signifying Western modernity). Indeed, this split is reflected at the
level of form: using Western autobiography and comic books to depict

Figure .

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 a very Iranian experience. is negotiation between Western forms and
Eastern content reproduces again the tension the narrative establishes
between the unfamiliar and the familiar.
While Persepolis provides a perspective on events unfamiliar to the
Western reader, the comic book form it assumes is itself automatically
familiar. Satrapi is clearly well versed in the history of her medium, and her
text can be seen as part of the tradition of autobiographical and politically
engaged underground “comix,”⁷ which emerged as an important part of
the North American counterculture of the s and which evolved into
“alternative comix” in the s. Her use of the autobiographical mode
and choice of black-and-white illustration, as well as her subject—the
impact of one of the formative world events of the twentieth century on an
individual—have drawn comparisons by readers of the English language
edition between her work and Spiegelman’s Maus.⁸
In some ways, Spiegelman’s masterpiece is the apotheosis of an evolu-
tion in the American underground comix scene, a scene he helped shape
from its inception. Most comic book historians trace the underground
movement to Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix ().⁹ Roger Sabin remarks
how the work of such early underground comix pioneers as Crumb and
Gilbert Shelton was political primarily in that it mocked and exploited
establishment taboos about sex and drug use. e “first wave” of counter-
culture comix was followed quickly by what Sabin describes as “a period

 As Roger Sabin remarks, the term “comix” was coined by their counterculture
producers “in contra-distinction to their straight counterpart and to denote
their ‘x-rated’ content.” e term usually also implies work in the medium “pro-
duced outside the commercial mainstream” (). Linda Hutcheon mentions
that Spiegelman’s use of the term “co-mix” emphasizes the mixing of graphic
and written elements ( fn.).
 Again, by situating Satrapi’s work in the tradition of North American under-
ground comix, we do not mean to disconnect it from its French influences.
Reviewers, for example, have rightly pointed out the stylistic similarities be-
tween Persepolis and the work of French comic artist David B. (Beauchard);
indeed, Satrapi’s book was first released by the publishing house David B. helped
found, L’Association, and his name is included in her “anks” on the back
page. Stylistically, Persepolis bears a strong resemblance to B.’s autobiographi-
cal L’Ascension du Haut Mal (Volume  translated into English as Epileptic,
Fantagraphic Books, ).
 See, for example, Mark Estren’s A History of Underground Comics (San Fran-
cisco: Straight Arrow, ). Crumb’s influence certainly extended to France
and helped shape alternative comic books there as well.

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 in which the subject-matter began to diversify and include more specific
areas of political struggle” ().¹⁰
Persepolis may not be as overtly agenda-driven as some of the under-
ground titles from the s. However, by engaging with the necessarily
politically charged terrain of the events and impact of the Islamic Revolu-
tion and by placing the triply-marginalized figure of a young Iranian girl at
the centre of these events, it shares the aspirations of comix in this period,
of acting as a forum for voices that have usually been silenced.
In “Hothead Paisan: Clearing a Space for a Lesbian Feminist Folk-
lore,” Dana Heller offers an intriguing explanation for the status of the
comic book as a medium of choice for disenfranchised voices to contest
structures of dominance. e serialized comic Hothead Paisan: Homi-
cidal Lesbian Terrorist, Heller argues, is an example of the effective use
of “‘trivialization’ as a strategy of feminist folklore” (). She borrows the
term “trivialization” from Joan N. Radner and Susan S. Lanser, who define
it as “the employment of a form—a mode, a genre, etc.—that is consid-
ered by the dominant culture to be unimportant, innocuous, or irrelevant"
(cited ). Heller argues that this strategy allows comics to “camouflage”
potentially subversive messages or ideas by conveying them in a medium
generally considered unthreatening (). In Persepolis, Satrapi uses a simi-
lar strategy: by adopting a naïve, childlike drawing style, by using a child
as the autobiographical subject, and by working in a medium associated
primarily with either low-brow or juvenile readers and narratives, she
effectively “camouflages” the complex politics of identity and nation Marji’s
story raises in the guise of simplicity and universal accessibility.
Persepolis explores the political possibilities of the popular not only
through its use of the comic book form but through the events and expe-
riences its narrative depicts, and it is here, at the level of content, that
both the limitations of the popular and its liberatory/subversive power
are most clearly revealed. e popular culture Marji consumes as a child
in revolutionary Iran is exported American mass culture. Popular cul-
ture may, as such critics as John Fiske assert, offer empowerment to its
consumers by allowing them to shape it to their individual needs. Fiske’s
model can (though it need not) lend itself to a celebration of the unify-
ing power of popular culture, and, indeed, this is how many readers of
Persepolis interpret the Kim Wilde and Michael Jackson vignettes. e

  saw the first feminist comic, It Ain’t Me Babe, and in  Wimmins Comix
debuted. ese titles were soon followed by Gay Comix (Sabin ).

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 empowerment and unity promised by the shared consumption of, in this
case, popular music is, however, complicated when the popular culture
product comes from the centre—the American mainstream—and oper-
ates in the postcolonial margins.¹¹
In the “Kim Wilde” episode (–), fourteen-year old "Marji," wear-
ing Nike shoes and a jean jacket with a Michael Jackson button, buys con-
traband Kim Wilde and Camel tapes on the black market. She is stopped
by the morals police who threaten to imprison her for her unacceptably
Western appearance. She tries to talk her way out of an arrest by argu-
ing that her button depicts Muslim leader Malcolm X, and not Michael
Jackson, and that her sneakers are not a fashion statement: she is wearing
them because she plays basketball. Finally, she bursts into tears and claims
that her stepmother will burn her with a clothes iron if she is arrested.
e last panel shows her in her room dancing and singing along to Kim
Wilde’s “We’re the Kids in America,” as she tries to calm her nerves after
her near-brush with jail. e choice of song is an ironic one, of course,
because the encounter she has just had demonstrates that she is certainly
not a kid in America.
e “Kim Wilde” chapter is often mentioned in reviews of the book,
although most critics tend to read it as an example of the universality of
young people’s desires. In other words, if one looks beyond the veil, one
sees that Marji is like any other teenager in the West. Christopher eokas
of USA Today writes:
Illuminating the similarities between the Western and Islamic
worlds is what Satrapi does best. In both worlds, kids grow
up and rebel against their parents and society. ey try to
shape their own identities. e only difference between a girl
growing up in the USA and a girl growing up in Iran is that in

 For the purposes of our paper, we would like to clarify that we are using the
term “postcolonial” as part of a broader postcolonial cultural critique that
includes countries like Iran that were never officially colonized by European
powers. Although Iran was never a formal European colony, the country was
indirectly controlled by Britain and Russia for much of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, until these powers were displaced by American hegemony
in the region. David Scott has argued that, “As a political-theoretical project …
postcoloniality has been concerned with the decolonisation of representation;
the decolonisation of the West’s theory of the non-West” (). It is to this end,
the decolonisation of Western representations of Iran, a country subject to
indirect economic, political, and social colonization, that we include it in the
category of the postcolonial.

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 Iran, rebellious behaviour we take for granted could lead to
jail time—if not worse. (–)
e liberal humanist reading this chapter invites minimizes difference by
transforming the radical other into a domesticated other. is other can
be understood because she is essentially “just like us,” in her youthful re-

Figure .

belliousness and love of pop music, even if the (mere surface) particulars
of political and social circumstances are different.
e cross-cultural similarity implied by the shared consumption of
American pop music is supported, then subverted, by a variety of visual
elements in the text. e image accompanying the “Kim Wilde” chapter
title shows a profile of a sweep of blonde hair and eyebrow and a (presum-
ably blue) eye with a star as its pupil (fig. ). e image is in “negative,”
that is white on a black background. e image of Kim Wilde’s eye visually
connects this chapter with the opening chapter title, “e Veil.” A visual
parallel appears in “positive”—black on a white background—in the im-
age accompanying the title, "e Veil" (fig. ).¹² e similar composition of
the two images suggests a commonality between the veiled Eastern
woman and the secular Western woman. At the same time, difference is
reinforced by the black/white reversal. Similarly, when Marji pins up the
poster of Kim Wilde her parents have smuggled for her from Turkey, we
get another parallel-contrast effect. Marji, in imitation of Wilde, assumes
the same posture as the pop hero in her poster (fig. ). Again, this link, or
moment of “sameness” (of the sort reviewers of the book have found so

Figure .
 e same sort of effect is produced between the “Kim Wilde” chapter heading
and the panel directly below it, where we see Marji’s parallel profile, also in
“positive.”

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 Figure .

moment of “sameness” (of the sort reviewers have found so compelling)

is also marked by difference, not only because Marji’s hair is dark while
Wilde’s is blonde, and her top is white while Wilde’s is dark, but because
her imitation of Wilde’s posture is in mirror image. In other words, by
mirroring Wilde, she shows how she is the same but different, a mirror
image being identical yet opposite.
ese two chapters are thus linked visually, lending themselves to a
dialectical reading. A comparison of these images creates a similar effect
to that achieved by comparing the self-portraits on the cover and back
flap. e “Kim Wilde” chapter, like the artist’s self-rendering as hip and
Western, lends itself to a reading of the text that foregrounds Western
aesthetics and tastes as universal. e chapter “e Veil,” like the picture of
the veiled child on the cover, subverts this reading by stressing difference
and cultural specificity. In other words, these two chapters and images
epitomize the overall effect of this comic book: the comfort of sameness
is always disrupted by the discomfort of otherness.
Such a reading as Christopher eokas’s of the “Kim Wilde” vignette
might understand Marji’s “resistance” through Western codes of youth
rebellion; indeed, it is her emulation of Western fashion and the embrace
of Western popular music that land her in trouble. At the same time, her

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 familiarity with Western cultural figures provides her with a way out of
her predicament (the image on her button depicts Malcom X and not
Michael Jackson, she protests). In this reading, the West always provides
the way out, the way to freedom. Ironically, Marji’s tame, by Western
standards, teenage rebellion is transformed, for Western readers, into a
profound statement of resistance and individualism in the menacing face
of a totalitarian, fundamentalist Islamic theocracy. is reading reinforces
the widely cherished view of the revolutionary power of popular culture
(particularly of rock music). However, one could just as easily argue that
the uncritical consumption of Western popular culture by Iranian youth
actually diffuses their revolutionary potential; to paraphrase Adorno and
Horkheimer’s famous argument, the culture industry provides a distrac-
tion from the real work required to challenge the political order.¹³
Satrapi herself remarks on this in Persepolis : e Story of a Return.
Returning to Iran at the age of eighteen after four years in Vienna, Marji
notes that resistance to state authority no longer happens at the macropo-
litical level, but at the microlevel, through the wearing of make-up and the
disclosing of a few locks of hair from beneath the veil (). Western media
tends to latch on to these visible signs of dissent (innocuous and scattered
as they are) as signs that Iran is “opening up” to the West. Images of young
semi-veiled and made-up Iranian women are more visually appealing signs
of resistance—not least because of their embrace of Western models of
being in the world—than the images of angry anti-imperalist revolution-
aries in the s.¹⁴
e dubious nature of American popular culture’s ascension to the
position of unifying global culture and its circulation as a form of politi-

 Compare Max Horkheimer and eodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment,

trans. John Cumming (London: Allen Lane, ).
 Ironically, Satrapi’s Embroideries () implicates itself in this same impulse
to repackage women’s resistance as women’s sexual promiscuity. Embroideries
offers the reader a voyeuristic glimpse into “girltalk” Iranian-style. e title of
the book is a coy reference to the genital surgery sexually active women undergo
to “pass” as virgins in a culture that values sexual innocence in young brides.
e irony is, of course, that all the women (across generations) in the book have
defied the stereotype of the meek and virginal Iranian girl. ese women, then,
who speak so boldly about their sexual experiences and desires and subsequent
surgeries, are meant to be read as “liberated” and “enlightened” in a way that
is discordant with the general Western perception of women living under the
Islamic Republic. Although the text challenges the stereotype of the obedient
and oppressed Iranian female subject in mainstream Western discourse, it also
risks affirming the claim of emancipation through sexual liberation popular in
certain Western feminist models.

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 cal resistance is further highlighted by Satrapi’s juxtaposition of images
of a Western-style party and the sacrifices made by Iranian soldiers killed
during the war with Iraq. Satrapi again employs a technique of parallel
composition to underscore difference by constructing visual similarities.
On one page, there are only two panels; the top panel, which is roughly
twice the size of the one below it, depicts flying bodies of martyred child-

Figure .

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 soldiers with their keys to paradise around their necks (fig. ). e smaller,
second panel portrays Marji and her friends dancing at a party. e broken
bodies of the child soldiers are mirrored by the exuberant postures of the
party-goers; the keys on their necklaces are mirrored by Marji’s “punk”
chain necklace; the holes in their shrapnel-ridden bodies are mirrored by
the holes in Marji’s sweater, knitted for her by her mother in imitation of
the then trendy punk style. e effect of the comparison of scenes—neces-
sitated by their arrangement on the page—is a profound indictment; far
from being a political gesture, Marji and her friends’ consumption of punk
subculture becomes a shallow indulgence of privilege.
As we observe above, Persepolis brings East and West together, often in
ways that underscore the tensions and contradictions such unions inevita-
bly entail. It does this not only at the level of content but also at the level
of form, as Satrapi draws on a long history of underground comix. While
the confessional/autobiographical mode Satrapi employs has been rare
in the Iranian literary tradition, it is so common to counterculture comic
books that Marcie Frank calls it a “cliché in Underground comix” ().
Frank observes that more recent feminist and queer deployments of the
autobiographical comic have destabilized the notion of the cohesive, uni-
fied self that autobiography has tended to imply. Frank offers “life writing”
as an alternative to the glorification of the bourgeois subject traditionally
encouraged by the autobiographical genre. She believes this term more
accurately describes such underground comix as Julie Doucet’s Dirty
Plotte, which, she argues, demonstrate the unstable and performative
nature of identity and which “work through their refusal to speak on
anyone’s behalf ” ().¹⁵
A common feature of autobiographical underground comix is an
emphasis on the inadequacy or ineffectualness of their subjects. Visually,
this effect can be achieved through the author/illustrator’s self-portrayal
as a small and insignificant figure.¹⁶ At one level, such self-representations
can be seen as a challenge to the heroic figures of conventional comics, as
well as to the triumphant celebration of the individual common to autobio-

 Of course, the humanistic notion of the cohesive, universal self has been chal-
lenged elsewhere in autobiography through poststructuralist fracturing of
identity and through feminist and postcolonial collectivist constructions of
identity.
 See, for example, Chester Brown’s self-portrayal at the end of Yummy Fur 
(January ), and on the cover and in the epilogue of Yummy Fur  (April
), as well as Robert Crumb’s frequent self-portrayal as a small, cowering,
and often pathetic figure.

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 graphical narratives. Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, which depicts the
mundane life of a working-class, self-described loser, provides an example
of the “counterculture” autobiography that deflates triumphant individu-
alism. Of course, it must be said that such self-deflating autobiography
still, ultimately, reinscribes the centrality of the individual by devoting so
much, however unflattering, attention to the experiences and opinions of
the autobiographical subject. Nevertheless, Satrapi’s use of this mode of
autobiography—the autobiographical genre that downplays or questions
the autobiographical subject—is another strategy of negotiating Eastern
and Western models. Satrapi adapts the underground tradition of the
inconsequential autobiographical subject with her use of a child narra-
tor; this also allows her to circumvent the traditional Iranian bias against
women’s autobiographies.¹⁷
While the autobiographical genre has perennially been rare in Iran, it
is fast becoming a most sought after form for Western readers. In an era
when “reality” programming preoccupies television and documentary
films achieve blockbuster status, the autobiographical story, particularly
one that promises to “unveil” the mysteries of the life of a woman from
the East, has gained significant cultural capital. Because of the West’s
perpetual desire to look beyond or beneath the veil in order to glimpse
into the life of the exotic or sinister East, what Graham Huggan has called
the “ethnic autobiography” has become extremely marketable. Ethnic
autobiographies, argues Huggan, are appealing to a Western audience
as they “signal the possibility of indirect access to ‘exotic’ cultures whose
differences are acknowledged and celebrated even as they are rendered
amenable to a mainstream reading public” (). us, the “amenable”
exoticism of this story, the story of a little girl’s experience growing up in
a part of the world so vilified in the West these days might account for the
enormous interest in this book.
In large part, the perception of comics as, to use Nyberg’s term, a
“subliterature” (), has as much to do with their status as low, disposable
culture as with their perennial association with juvenile readers. Once

 is does not apply to her sequel, Persepolis , in which Marji comes of age. As
an adolescent in Vienna and a young woman in Iran, Marji discloses much of
her private life, including her sexual experiences. is is particularly shocking in
an Iranian cultural context; Satrapi ventures into territory that is still off limits
to the growing field of diasporic Iranian women’s autobiographies, texts which
tend to skirt the issue of sexuality. In Embroideries, the discussion of sexuality
is much more explicit as a group of women including the three generation of
Satrapi women (Marji, her mother, and grandmother) engage in a rather graphic
exchange about their and other women’s sexual experiences.

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 again Persepolis’s embrace of the things relegated to the marginalized
world of childhood creates political resonances, especially within a postco-
lonial context. e discursive connection between children and members
of the lower classes has a lengthy European history itself. Chapbooks, for
example, a mainstay of plebeian reading in much of Europe from the
seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, were long considered a natural
choice for child readers. e tastes of the child and of the plebe were
both understood to lean toward simple, improbable, illustrated adventure
tales. e lower orders have historically been discursively constructed
as a species of larger child, lacking restraint, education, sophistication,
and a grasp of nuance or complexity.¹⁸ Both categories have also been
understood to need the supervision and assistance of their betters/elders.
A similar discursive infantilization has historically been a regular feature
of colonial discourse; the colonized (and/or oriental) subject is one in
need of instruction and moral guidance, a subject usually incapable of
adequately restraining appetites and actions, and one who, along with his
or her culture, has not developed to full maturity.
By centring her text on herself as a child during the Iranian revolu-
tion and by telling her story in the comic book medium, Satrapi forces
the reader to consider the nature of these discursive formations. e fact
that her story is told in the simple language one might expect of a book
for children does not reduce or simplify the events she is describing but,
rather, complicates them. e bold-lined, black-and-white, and almost
rudimentary artwork similarly belies the ambiguities and grey areas the
text explores. If anything, the assumptions of innocence, naïveté, and
universality that this combination of a child protagonist and a childlike
illustrative style seem to produce are belied by the kinds of slippages in
potential meaning they generate. Persepolis invites notions of shared expe-
rience through its cartoony drawings and its use of the universal figure of
the child, but at the same time it undermines this universalism.
A common observation reviewers make of the text is that because the
story is told through the eyes of a child it is easy to identify with the nar-
rator, Marji, and her experiences. Built into this claim is the assumption
that childhood as a category of being and experience is somehow universal.
Children, the assumption implies, are the same everywhere. is is an
ideological given in the liberal humanist view, as it validates the notion

 John Brand, to provide just one of many possible examples of this discursive
association, in the late eighteenth century described the poor as men “who ‘are
but children of a larger growth’” (I:ix).

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 that “we are all the same under the skin”; as children we are all start out
the same, but the problems and conflicts of adulthood (artificially) dif-
ferentiate what was originally and universally alike.¹⁹
A related remark that appears frequently in reviews is that the illustra-
tions are naïve and simple—evoking a child’s perspective. Journalist Chris
Kutschera writes:
What gives “Persepolis” credibility is the convincing way spe-
cific events are interpreted through the eyes of a  year old
girl…. Her drawings are simple but stylized and effective; they
carry a message everybody understands and usually evoke a
smile of pleasure. is is what gives her work its unique flavour,
while they can be didactic and political, still, both the text and
the drawings provide the reader with a wry pleasure. ()

According to Andrew Arnold of Time Online, “e artwork in Persepolis

has a simplicity that resonates with having a child as its main character”
(). In other words, because childhood is uncomplicated by the nuances
and divisions of adult experience, it speaks in a single voice that can be
easily grasped by all. Further, the text’s perceived simplicity gives it an
appearance of transparency that translates into unequivocalness; its simple
meaning is obvious and, therefore, fixed. However, as Fiske remarks of the
popular text in general, Persepolis exposes “the vulnerabilities, limitations,
and weaknesses of its preferred meanings” (Fiske ), and thus opens up
the possibilities of readings that contradict the dominant ascribed mean-
ing. Indeed, Persepolis subverts at every turn the very assumptions of
universality and simplicity reviewers have widely ascribed to it and which
the book itself encourages.
Marji’s rebellious spirit is much celebrated by reviewers; they often
remark on how she—like all children—rebels against adult authority.
However, hers is more than just the youthful rebellion supposedly uni-
versal to all children; in the specific context of revolutionary Iran, the play
and children’s culture depicted in the text take on qualities of political
subversion. is potential appears at the very beginning of the text, when
Marji describes the discontent she and her fellow students feel over having

 As Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer observe in e Pleasures of Children’s

Literature (rd ed), contemporary Western children’s literature tends to enshrine
the notion that “e World Is A Homogeneous Place,” even while celebrating
diversity on its surface (). “Mainstream” children’s books generally tend to
suggest that “[o]nce people acknowledge the superficial differences, they can
see past them into the shared humanity” ().

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 to wear the veil. e last panel of the first page shows girls undermining
the veiling ordinance by using their headscarves as a skipping rope, as a
harness, as a monster mask, and in other ways that are contrary to their
meant purpose of guarding female modesty (). For Western readers, the
veil is one of the most loaded signifiers of Islam’s oppression of women,
but the fact that Marji and her friends do not read it in this way, and even
disregard it so casually, empties this signifier of its dominant meaning. A
similar subversion of state-deployed discourse occurs when Marji and
her friends mock the official veneration owed to the “martyrs” of the Iraqi
war (–). In both instances, the child, rather than being the passive
subject interpellated through the  of the school, becomes a figure of
resistance through ridicule.
e reader soon learns that Marji has the kind of absurdly exagger-
ated sense of her own importance commonly associated with childhood
self-centredness. She sees herself as the last prophet, and Satrapi draws
her child self with a radiant sun for a head and with worshippers kneel-
ing before her (). At one level, this childish fantasy reinforces universal
assumptions about the quaintly naïve understanding the young child has
of her place in the universe. Marji imagines herself joining the ranks of
the prophets; their reactions to a female prophet, and later that of Marji’s
teacher to her divine aspirations, reveal the provocative quality of this
fantasy for a female child in Iran ().
Satrapi appears to be toying with the Western, Romantic notion of the
“divine child” here; she also toys with the idealized figure of the innocent
child untouched by the tainted adult world. It is worth noting that Marji’s
desire to be a prophet is born out of a desire to redress the social inequities
she sees around her: “I wanted to be a prophet … because our maid did
not eat with us. Because my father had a Cadillac” (). A six year old is
usually not supposed to have an awareness of these sorts of political reali-
ties, because the dominant ideology of childhood as a state of innocence
renders it an apolitical category.
e child narrator also allows for certain unique insights and con-
nections between the events of the Iranian revolution. When Marji and
her family’s maid Mehri (who, by virtue of her illiteracy, her naïveté, and
of course her class, is configured as “child-like” as well) attend the “Black
Friday” demonstrations, the bloodiest to that point in the revolution, it
is a kind of game for them. Marji’s mother slaps them both when they
return because they have disobeyed her orders to stay at home. e vio-
lence to which Marji’s angry mother subjects them echoes the violence of
the state against the protestors, and this creates a double meaning in the

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 narrator’s remarks in the final panel: “[I]n fact it was really our own who
had attacked us” (). e parallel the text invites between the state’s and
the parent’s exercise of authority is reinforced again in the chapter, “e
Cigarette,” in which Marji reaches adolescence. Marji’s mother confronts
her about her truancy and tries to compel a confession from her, causing
Marji to observe “my mother used the same tactics as the torturers” ().
If her mother acts in the same capacity as the state here, Marji takes on the
role of protester, raising her fist and declaiming her mother’s autocracy:
“Dictator! You are the guardian of the revolution of this house!” (). e
child’s experience and knowledge of the outside world are often confined
to and mediated by the domestic sphere. While on the one hand this
limits the child’s perspective on the national stage, on the other hand it
demonstrates poignantly how political events and state violence disrupt
and reshape family dynamics.
Persepolis is a disruptive text on many levels. It delivers, for example,
comfortable liberal notions of our common humanity in its representa-
tion of the universal desire for personal freedom. At the same time, it
demonstrates liberalism’s need for an abject or menacing other that is
excluded from the common humanity by allowing the reader to reconfirm
stereotypes of, for example, subjugated, veiled Muslim women and of post-
revolutionary Iran as a threatening and alien place. However, Persepolis
upsets the easy categories and distinctions that it appears to endorse:
between the secular West and the threateningly religious East; between
the oppressed and liberated woman (i.e., veiled and unveiled); between
domestic and political/public. Persepolis also demonstrates that there is no
such thing as a pure Iranian identity by illustrating that the revolutionary
claim for a return to a pure Islamic past is just as problematic as the call
for a return to a pure Persian, in other words, secular, tradition. is is an
idea Mohammad Reza Shah touted with much pomp and circumstance
in his  celebration of twenty-five hundred years of Persian history, an
event Satrapi mocks in her text (). Furthermore, Persepolis subverts tra-
ditional Iranian representations of the ideal (modest and demure) Iranian
woman by positing itself as a forceful and interventionary response to the
current anti-Iranian and anti-Muslim sentiment in the West. Satrapi’s
work thus disrupts the categories of good and evil which have emerged
in recent Western political discourse about the East, particularly Islamic
countries.
As a comic book, Persepolis manages to challenge the reader’s expec-
tations of the medium. With its stark and simple style and child-focused
narrative, it promises easy understanding, yet this is a text that forces the

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 reader to work for meaning. e comic book as a form requires a com-
mitment from the reader to unpack its “co-mixed” words and images. In
the case of Satrapi’s Persepolis, readers are invited to work twice as hard
as they decode the co-mixing of Eastern and Western cultural experiences
as well. is work, in large part, takes place in the space between panels,
known in the comic book trade as the “gutter.” e gutters are empty
spaces in the text that can either be filled with easy answers provided
by the dominant ideology or they can function as sites of aporia. In the
gutters between the panels of Persepolis, the reader has to interact with
and interpret historical, political, and cultural silences; this is the space in
which new meanings that deflate the overdetermined categories of East
and West have the potential to be generated.

Works Cited
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Brand, John. Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain
Chiefly Illustrating the Origin of our Vulgar and Provincial Customs,
Ceremonies, and Superstitions.  vols. Ed. Sir Henry Ellis. –. New
York:  Press, .
Bourdieu, Pierre. e Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art andLit-
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Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman,
.
Frank, Marcie. “‘How Did I Get So Anal?’: Queer Self-Authorization at the
Margins.” Queer Diasporas. Eds. Cindy Patton and Benigno Sánchez-
Eppler. Durham: Duke , .
Heller, Dana A. “Hothead Paisan: Clearing a Space for a Lesbian Feminist
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Huggan, Graham. e Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London:
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