Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

“As for Houshang, Zozo’s husband, he was a CEO in Iran, but in Austria, he was nothing.”

After arriving in Austria, Marjane finds her mother’s friend Zozo in constant battle with her deflated spouse. Marjane rationalizes the anger and resentment by summing up the experience that many Iranians faced when they fled Iran for exile in Europe. This conveys a loss of identity in exile and the inability to reclaim one’s status abroad.

“I understood later that her reserve came from the fact that she considered the others to be spoiled children. But I was different. I had known war.”

Lonely in her new boarding school, Marjane is finally befriended by Julie. She attributes this friendship to Julie’s respect for her maturity, which she in turn contributes to living in a war zone. Marjane is a round character: She believes that the war in Iran (and the shift to fundamentalism) has stunted her development. At the same time, she reveals her belief that war ages and matures those who experience it, and she capitalizes on this to make friends with the older counterculture kids at school.

“This cretin Momo wasn’t altogether wrong. I needed to fit in, and for that I needed to educate myself.”

Marjane spends her Christmas holiday reading after being embarrassed by Momo for her lack of knowledge about political philosopher Mikhail Bakunin. This action speaks to An Identity in Conflict Between Two Worlds. In Iran, she was known as a rebel, a thinker, politically savvy, and well informed. In Austria, this identity isn’t available to her, and she works to adapt to the new environment. The double negative of “wasn’t altogether wrong” highlights Marjane’s struggles with coming to terms with this.

“In every religion, you find the same extremists.”

Although she has fled cultural war in Iran during the transition to Islamic fundamentalism, Marjane sees the roots of religious extremism in the Catholic nuns who run the boarding school in Austria. Thematically, much of the Persepolis series is about Authority’s Use of Religion to Control Populations. For Marjane, any religion can be manipulated in order to control the population. She sees the manipulation of the regime as similar to the manipulation of the nuns in the boarding school.

“And then, I was turned off by all these public displays of affection. What do you expect, I came from a traditionalist country.”

At her first party in Europe, an unsupervised group of teens takes drugs, lies around stoned, and makes out. Compared to the parties in Persepolis 1, where family danced and ate, this is a decidedly different experience for Marjane, who admits to feeling deflated. Again, she is stuck between worlds: an identity that is neither whole in Iran, where she feels repressed, or whole in Europe, where she feels left behind.

“That night I really understood the meaning of ‘The Sexual Revolution.’ It was my first big step towards assimilating into Western culture.”

Although Marjane spent much of her early time in Austria reading in order to better assimilate and understand the West, it is not until she experiences the party in Chapter 4 that she understands. Marjane Satrapi’s use of quotation marks around the official term, “The Sexual Revolution,” suggests that Marjane has only previously encountered this concept in a theoretical sense in books. The narrator is making a statement about what it means to know versus understand. Marjane knew about the sexual revolution, but she did not understand it until she lived it in close proximity.

“The harder I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my culture, betraying my parents and my origins, that I was playing a game by somebody else’s rules.”

In the first half of Persepolis 2 Marjane is looking for acceptance and belonging and confusing that with the search for identity. Everything she has done to fit in has been done in service of assimilation and acceptance. Here, the flaws in her search methodology are realized. Her decision to attempt to become comfortable in herself defines her character arc and determines the trajectory of her future in Europe.

“I finally understood what my grandmother meant. If I wasn’t comfortable with myself, I would never be comfortable.”

This epiphany initiates Marjane’s emotional character arc. The first part of the graphic novel depicts Marjane’s search for acceptance and belonging. At this pivotal moment of realization, Marjane’s search takes on a new form. She will no longer try to fit in but will instead attempt to define herself based on her own set of experience-informed beliefs.

“This chaste love affair frustrated me more than it satisfied me. I wanted to love and be loved for real.”

The new Marjane is comfortable enough with herself that she admits what she wants and goes after it. She wants true love and will look for it elsewhere. Satrapi uses a polyptoton with the word love, mobilizing the adjective (“love affair”), active verb (“to love”), and passive verb (“be loved”), to suggest Marjane’s growing understanding of the various meanings and manifestations of the word. This is a significant moment for a character who has spent much of her life seeking the approval of others.

“Each time that I asked my mother to pray for me my wish was granted.”

Marjane’s dream as a child in Iran was to become a prophet. During the course of the war and revolution, she drifted away from God, and has since been involved with anarchists and socialist. This sudden reemergence of God hints at a subtle return to her childhood roots and the development of the narrator, who is untethering herself from her commitment to her countercultural, anti-religious sentiments.

“It’s the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves.”

Here, Marjane is criticizing her boyfriend for not attending a protest with her in Austria. She knows all too well what happens when apathy allows extremism to survive. Satrapi uses this accusatory tone as a characterization tool for Marjane who is emphatic about her beliefs when criticizing others; the language here mirrors the accusatory tones of “traitor” at the beginning of the memoir.

“‘Night brings good council,’ my grandmother always told me.”

Marjane is depressed to find herself single and alone in Austria after so many years in exile. During her first night homeless, she turns inward, realizing her shortcomings, her mistakes, and her loneliness. These interjections from her grandmother are catalysts throughout the plot that prompt Marjane’s epiphanies.

“I spent my first night on the street. There were plenty of others.”

While the first sentence of this passage delivers the information bluntly, the second sentence is passive and lacking in detail. This indicates Marjane’s desire to forget and pass over these difficult times, distilling the painful experience in the word “plenty.”

“For ten years they’ve been made to believe that the martyrs are living in a five-star hotel in paradise.”

Recently returned to Tehran, Marjane is shocked to see the banners, street signs, and murals depicting martyrs. When she sees mothers happy to have their children martyred in the war, she questions the logic of this. Though at times religious, Marjane is ultimately deeply critical of both Catholicism and Islam, both of which she describes as manipulative ideologies. This passage highlights Authority’s Use of Religion to Control Populations in a sardonically humorous way, since she mocks Islamic beliefs about paradise by comparing it to a “five-star hotel.” In Chapter 11, Marjane and her friend joke that “the only way to bear the unbearable is to laugh at it” (112).

“Next to my father’s distressing report, my Viennese misadventures seemed like little anecdotes of no importance.”

Marjane resolves never to talk of her troubles in Austria with her parents, displaying survivor’s guilt upon her return to Iran. Likewise, her search for identity in Europe seems trivial compared to the loss of life at home. The central theme of the novel is downgraded for a brief moment while Marjane adapts to her new surroundings. Satrapi uses the literary language of “misadventures” and “anecdotes” to juxtapose these smaller tales with a more official “report.”

“When something is forbidden, it takes on a disproportionate importance.”

Marjane understands that her friends, who dress in Western attire and crave clubs and parties, are rebelling in their own way. It isn’t until months later that she begins to emulate their subtle form of protests.

“I am ashamed of having done nothing with my life. Happily, no one knows the details, for good reason. I don’t tell them anything. I feel like I’m constantly wearing a mask.”

Realizing that she is depressed, Marjane admits these lines to her therapist. Her statement that “no one knows the details” is designed to draw in the reader through irony, since the Marjane has divulged the details to the reader. This establishes a mode of intimacy between protagonist and reader since the details already outlined in the text are a secret to others.

“I was a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the west. I had no identity. I didn’t even know anymore why I was living.”

Depressed and isolated, Marjane reaches true rock bottom in Tehran and determines to end her life. This line establishes Marjane’s keen sense of An Identity in Conflict Between Two Worlds. Satrapi discusses this using a palindromic structure—“westerner,” “Iran,” “Iranian,” “west”—to suggest that each identity cancels out the other in Marjane’s mind.

“He sought in me a lost lightheartedness. I sought in him a war which I had escaped. In short, we complemented each other.”

In hindsight, Marjane is able to clearly reveal her failed marriage, writing bluntly of their relationship in the memoir with the benefit of knowledge of the ending. As always, she is brutally honest in hindsight but as events unfold remains unreliable as a narrator.

“To allow oneself to behave indecently is to trample on the blood of those who gave their lives for our freedom.”

Although the leaders of the university espouse propriety and chastity, the students live a rich and sexually expressive life behind closed doors. With this revelation, Marjane mocks Authority’s Use of Religion to Control Populations.

“When we’re afraid we lose all sense of analysis and reflection. Our fear paralyzes us. Besides, fear has always been the driving force behind all dictators’ repression.”

Justifying her life of compliance and submission, Marjane admits that it is fear that keeps everyone in line in Iran. Losing her “sense of analysis and reflection” underscores her characterization as selfish and thoughtless about others.

“The more time passed, the more I became conscious of the contrast between the official representation of my country and the real life of the people, the one that went on behind the walls.”

Marjane finds acquaintances and companions among some of the intellectuals, students, and counterculture. Still, the more she exists in two worlds inside Iran, the more she is torn apart by the contrast. Her point about “official representation” has a double meaning, both critiquing the way Iran represents itself and the way the West represents Iran.

“The regime had absolute power, and most people in search of a cloud of happiness, had forgotten their political conscious.”

Like Marjane, those who wish to survive the regime make sacrifices in terms of freedom, expression, and belief in order to survive. Satrapi uses a wispy image of a “cloud of happiness” to suggest the emptiness of that which people pursue when they cannot express their beliefs.