Persepolis

100 Comics Number 10

The first time I read Persepolis was in 2003, and my understanding of the Iranian revolution was surface level at best. I remember it happening (I was in high school), I remember the hostage crisis, I recall Khomeini and Banisadr and that the revolutionaries were Islamic fanatics. With this minimal knowledge of the events that form the setting of Persepolis, I was impressed by it even if I knew that what I knew was rudimentary. Now twenty two years later, I know a little more about Iran and its history, and I am living in a country that has just been taken over by wannabe Nazi fanatics, and Persepolis feels like an essential book for the moment we find ourselves in.

Persepolis was written and drawn by Marjane Satrapi, a French-Iranian cartoonist. She was born in 1969 in Tehran into a well-off left-wing family. Her great grandfather on her mother’s side was a shah (“shah” is the Persian word for “king”) in the Qajar dynasty, the last ruling family before the Pahlavis, who ruled modern Iran until the Iranian revolution. And her grandfather, the son of that Qajar shah, was a prime minister under Reza Shah, the first ruler of the Pahlavis. He was educated and was radicalized by Communist intellectuals. He ended up a political prisoner of Reza Shah.

Satrapi’s art is quite simple, and she uses that simplicity to let us experience her understanding of her grandfather’s radicalization as a child would. She hints at historical facts—that Reza Shah was an uneducated man, a soldier who had worked his way up from private, and he came into power right after the Russian revolution. Communism was in the air, so much so that even an Iranian prince could turn communist. In other words, Marjane Satrapi is the descendant of communist royalty.