Sometimes, there are books that I’m convinced I’ve read, only to open them and find the experience of reading them so transformative that I wonder if I was mistaken; if I’d never actually read them at all.
I’m currently staying in a friend’s apartment, which boasts a very well-stocked bookshelf, and as I was attempting to outlast my jet lag, I grabbed Persepolis from the shelf. A graphic novel I was positive I’d read (and enjoyed) before, it seemed the perfect way to stay awake but not risk overtaxing my overtired brain.
But a few pages in, I had to stop. I wasn’t absorbing nearly enough. It made me wonder if I’d actually read it before, or merely seen the film adaptation one summer working at the Cannes Film Festival (also highly recommended – both the festival and the film).
I picked Persepolis up the next day and devoured it in one sitting, and even now, I don’t know if this was my first or second read, if the influx of new emotions I felt reading it this time should be chalked up to the novel nature of the book or to the fact that since my last reading, I have changed.
Persepolis is a coming-of-age story that strikes that perfect balance between illustrating the reality of the foreign and appealing to the universal. Protagonist Marji is a young, opinionated girl growing up in a time when Iranian cultural politics are quickly changing. The daughter of independent and activist parents, a pre-adolescent Marji has frank discussions with God and loves her grandmother and the boy next door. Over the course of her early childhood and adolescence, Marji experiences the enforcement of the enforced hijab for women and girls; the deaths of family members and friends.
With that oh-so-universal youthful ignorance vis à vis one’s own mortality, Marji seeks out contraband music, posters, and punk fashion; this is the part of Marji that grabbed me, the part that I recalled of her most, when I picked up the book and read the first pages.
Through her chosen medium, author Marjane Satrapi succeeds in telling a story of growing up under an oppressive government with the humor and gentle touch that help the story appeal to the reader’s own memories of what is likely a very different rebellion. I’m (mostly) past the age of rebelling, but I remember what struggling to forge my own identity felt like, as an adolescent. And while Marji’s story is vastly different to my own, those emotions come racing back reading the pages of this graphic novel, a window, at once, into a world I know nothing about and one I once knew intimately.