Persepolis was a great city of the ancient world � a vital center of the Achaemenid Empire between 550 and 330 B.C. � and its Persian ruins can be seePersepolis was a great city of the ancient world � a vital center of the Achaemenid Empire between 550 and 330 B.C. � and its Persian ruins can be seen today in contemporary Iran. And when Marjane Satrapi titled her 2000 graphic novel Persepolis, she seems to have been giving a nod to the greatness of her country’s past, even as she denounces the cruelties and horrors of its more recent present.
Satrapi, born in 1969, was 10 years old when the Iranian Revolution took place, and therefore she conveys the events set forth in Persepolis with a perspective similar to that of Harper Lee's narrator, Scout, in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960): an adult’s experience-based look back at a child’s movement from a state of naïveté to a state of awareness. No doubt it is with this emphasis in mind that Persepolis is subtitled The Story of a Childhood.
The early part of Persepolis sets forth the cruelty of pre-revolutionary Iran, where the Shah Reza Pahlavi maintained his control of absolute power through his feared SAVAK secret police. Young Marjane learns that her beloved grandfather was a prisoner of the shah’s regime � “Prison had destroyed his health. He had rheumatism. All his life he was in pain� (p. 25) � and it against that historical background that broad-based opposition to the regime begins.
Someone reading Persepolis for the first time may be surprised to learn that the revolutionary opposition to the Shah’s regime included not only Islamists but also well-educated socialists like Marjane’s parents � who eventually find, to their sorrow, that the Islamists have long harboured a detailed plan for seizing full power, locking out the socialists, quashing any moves toward democracy, and implementing a regime every bit as cruel and oppressive as that of the Shah.
The graphic-novel format of Persepolis is central to the book’s success; the relatively simple, thick lines of many of the illustrations give them a childlike quality, and reinforce the idea that these dramatic moments from Iranian history are being presented from a child’s perspective. When, for instance, the family receives a post-revolutionary visit from two friends, a husband and wife who have just been released from prison, the evening is given over to a recollection of the various tortures that the two ex-prisoners suffered and witnessed while in prison.
The tortures, because they are presented from the young Marjane’s perspective, and because they are depicted through childlike drawings, somehow take on a particular horror � more, perhaps, than if they were presented in “realistic� full color. Satrapi, looking back on how she learned of these atrocities, wryly remarks that “My parents were so shocked…that they forgot to spare me this experience� (p. 51).
The stark black-and-white illustrations emphasize the oppression involved in the Islamist government’s adoption of a policy compelling all Iranian women to wear the chador. As Satrapi chronicles, "morals police" roamed the streets of post-revolutionary Tehran, threatening with physical or sexual violence any woman who dared not to wear the veil. Once the work of the "morals police" is done, the women whose individuality once showed through in their clothing and hairstyle now are all made to look exactly alike � their blank, pale, carefully expressionless faces framed in a sea of black. Satrapi even archly points out how the “modern woman� of post-revolutionary Iran would “show [her] opposition to the regime by letting a few hairs show� (p. 75) under her chador.
The horrors of the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 take center stage in the second half of the book � and we see devoutly religious Muslim characters start to question their faith, under a government that has ruthlessly exploited the Islamic religion for political purposes. A friend of Marjane’s mother, Mrs. Nasrine, describes how her 14-year-old son is being recruited as a soldier, offered a “key to paradise� to wear around his neck into battle, with promises “that in paradise, there will be plenty of food, women, and houses made of gold and diamonds� (p. 100). Mrs. Nasrine, anguished, says, “All my life, I’ve been faithful to the religion. If it’s come to this…well, I can’t believe in anything anymore…� (p. 99)
And a couple of pages later � because the graphic-novel format allows the artist to manipulate specifics like panel size for dramatic effect � Satrapi gives us a large panel that shows ten child soldiers, in silhouette, keys around their necks, being blown sky-high by an explosion. The caption sums up with laconic eloquence the cruel cynicism with which the Iranian revolutionary regime consigned children to a violent death: “The key to paradise was for poor people. Thousands of young kids, promised a better life, exploded on the minefields with keys around their necks. Mrs. Nasrine’s son managed to avoid that fate, but lots of other kids from his neighborhood didn’t� (p. 102).
Late in Persepolis, the reader learns that Marjane has a potential way out � a chance to leave Iran for Austria. Because she once went to summer camp in France, her parents posit that she will be prepared for life in the West � and they sense that this may be young Marjane’s last chance to get out from under the oppression of the Islamist regime. On the night before her departure from Tehran, young Marjane cuddles with her grandmother in bed; and the framing of the image � with grandmother and grand-daughter cuddled together in emotional warmth, against a backdrop of absolute blackness � reinforces how this is a brief moment of comfort in the face of an uncertain future. The grandmother’s advice to Marjane is eloquent and moving:
In life, you’ll meet a lot of jerks. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it’s because they’re stupid. That will help keep you from reacting to their cruelty. Because there is nothing worse than cruelty and vengeance…Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself. (p. 152)
On a note of mingled hope, sorrow, and apprehension, Marjane Satrapi leaves Iran for the last time.
In a 2002 afterword to Persepolis, Satrapi writes that since the 1979 revolution, “this old and great civilization has been discussed mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. As an Iranian who has lived more than half my life in Iran, I know that this image is far from the truth. That is why writing Persepolis was so important to me. I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists.�
Composed in a spirit of mingled love and grief, Persepolis provides a powerful look back at a crucial time in history, and tells the story of a brave little girl who sought a way to fight back against a regime that sought to deny her personhood � and found her way of fighting back, through artistic expression....more
Reading forbidden books in post-revolutionary Iran might seem counterintuitive, or even dangerous; reading a novel like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (195Reading forbidden books in post-revolutionary Iran might seem counterintuitive, or even dangerous; reading a novel like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), with its notoriously difficult and controversial subject matter, might seem almost suicidal. Yet Azar Nafisi, an Iranian-born and American-trained professor of modern literature, led a group of her students, young Iranian women, in quietly defying Iran’s Islamist regime by reading Lolita and other forbidden or challenged books, as she chronicled in her 2003 book Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Nafisi, who came from a socially prominent and politically active Tehran family, spent much of her early life in Great Britain, Switzerland, and the United States of America, where she finished her doctoral work in English at the University of Oklahoma. Her return to Iran in 1979 coincided with the Iranian Revolution that deposed the Shah Reza Pahlavi, who had terrorized Iran for decades with his feared SAVAK secret police. Ordinary Iranians of the time might not have anticipated that the Islamists who took power in the country would impose a regime just as cruel and just as dictatorial as that of the shah. The only difference was that, rather than trying for a modernist approach to restoring the classical glories of the Persian Empire, as the shah had done, the Islamists would apply their tyranny on the basis of a twisted fundamentalist interpretation of the Muslim faith.
The early passages of Reading Lolita in Tehran show how the Islamist regime, once it has taken power, became ever more oppressive, particularly in terms of the restrictions it imposed against women � and ever more willing to use violence in order to enforce its laws and rules. The University of Tehran, where Nafisi was teaching at the time, was no “ivory tower� shielded from the regime’s cruelties. The atmosphere of revolutionary fervor only intensified after militants� seizure of the U.S. Embassy in November of 1979 � a time at which Nafisi happened to be teaching F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. Nafisi recalls that “I was taking some risks in teaching such a book at such a time, when certain books had been banned as morally harmful� (108) � and indeed, she came to find that class discussions became more and more likely to be interrupted by Islamist students who found a book, or the way a book was being taught, “counter-revolutionary� or “un-Islamic.�
Against that backdrop, Nafisi organized a quietly revolutionary movement of her own. She organized a secret class, held in her home, where a group of women students with particularly strong interest in modern literature would gather and read books that the regime had banned or might ban. The students � Azin, Mahshid, Manna, Mitra, Nassrin, Sanaz, Yassi � differ in many things: their cultural background, their socioeconomic status, their attitudes toward the Islamic Republic and the Muslim faith. What they share is a love of literature and a need to share their ideas about literature in an atmosphere that is free of fear.
The book is divided into four sections � “Lolita,� “Gatsby,� “James,� and “Austen� � and in each section, Nafisi and her students draw intriguing parallels between the literature that they are reading and the reality of their lives in revolutionary Iran.
In the “Lolita� section, Nafisi recalls the cruel and perverse attempts by the novel’s narrator, Humbert Humbert, to possess a 12-year-old girl with whom he is obsessed, and links those features of the novel with the Iranian regime’s attempts to achieve total control over the lives of ordinary citizens, particularly women. We learn that one of Nafisi’s students, Sanaz, had gone to the Caspian Sea with some girlfriends for a beach holiday; the girls were arrested by “morality squads� of the Revolutionary Guards, and were held incommunicado, subjected to virginity tests, made to sign false confessions, and sentenced to 25 lashes each � even though they had not violated any of the laws of the regime: no alcoholic beverages, no forbidden tapes or CD’s. From the regime’s perspective, it had to be found that these arrested women had done something; Revolutionary Guards and morality police could not be embarrassed by being found to have unjustly arrested a group of women.
Nafisi sees the parallel between Lolita on the one hand, and the ordeal of Sanaz and her friends on the other, in the way that in both “an act of violence has been committed� � one that “goes beyond the bars, revealing the victim’s proximity and intimacy with [the] jailer� (p. 75). She suggests that “The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one’s individuality� (p. 77) � just as Nafisi and her students do with their forbidden-books class in Nafisi’s home.
The ”Gatsby� section, as mentioned above, does address the ironies of teaching a book that is widely considered to be the Great American Novel, at a time when “Death to America!� is the most popular slogan being shouted on the streets of revolutionary Tehran. Beyond that, however, Nafisi once again draws parallels between situations from an important novel and realities of life in the ayatollah’s Iran, noting with sadness
…how similar our own fate was becoming to Gatsby’s. He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream? (p.144).
In the case of The Great Gatsby, the constant disruptions of Nafisi’s class by a noisy minority of students who oppose her teaching of the novel lead Nafisi to the inspired expedient of putting the novel itself on trial, with students in the class as judge, prosecutor, defense attorney, and jury. These passages are a highlight of Reading Lolita in Tehran, and any reader who values the freedom to read and think for oneself is likely to appreciate the full-throated defense of Gatsby offered by some very bright and very brave students.
By the time of the book’s third section, “James,� it is September of 1980, and the Iran-Iraq War has broken out. History tells us that the war killed more than a million soldiers and more than 100,000 civilians on both sides, and resulted in nothing more than a stalemate that strengthened the position of dictators and tyrants in both countries. Nafisi gives us the grim tableaux of life during wartime � the fear of awaiting the next missile strike, the heartbreak of seeing child soldiers sent to walk through minefields with “keys to paradise� hung round their necks � and once again invokes literary parallels. In those times of war, with groups of revolutionaries roaming the streets on motorcycles to stamp out any activities that might seem anti-war � including any act of mourning for the war’s many dead � Nafisi and her students look at Henry James novels like Daisy Miller and Washington Square.
Nafisi suggests that in the seemingly quiet and decorous world of James’s novels, “There are different kinds of courage�. Nassrin points out that the character of Daisy Miller, in the novel that bears her name, tells another character “not to be afraid. She means not to be afraid of conventions and traditions � that is one kind of courage.� And Mahshid adds that the character of Catherine from Washington Square “is shy and retreating, not like Daisy, yet she stands up to all these characters, who are much more outgoing than her, and she faces up to them at a great cost. She has a different kind of courage from Daisy, but it is still courage� (p. 248). This section of the book emphasizes the quiet acts of courage through which Nafisi and her students resist the regime’s attempts to dominate not only their lives but also their very thinking.
And the “Austen� section � as it focuses on Jane Austen’s novels about women for whom securing a good marriage is a matter not just of finding love but also of securing some chance of social and economic survival in a world where women have virtually no other options for doing so � looks at questions of marriage in the lives of Nafisi’s students. Nafisi describes well what has made Austen’s protagonists heroes for women, and men, for more than 200 years now:
These women, genteel and beautiful, are the rebels who say no to the choices made by silly mothers, incompetent fathers (there are seldom any wise fathers in Austen’s novels), and the rigidly orthodox society. They risk ostracism and poverty to gain love and companionship, and to embrace that elusive goal at the heart of democracy: the right to choose. (p. 307)
The ”Austen� section of Reading Lolita in Tehran shows how the young women who constitute Nafisi’s “secret class� face a variety of marriage-related issues in their lives, in a manner not unlike what Elizabeth Bennet faces in Pride and Prejudice, or Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. Some of the women are being pressured to marry men they don’t love, or not to marry men they do love, for reasons relating to family name, or tradition, or economic prospects. For some of the women, marrying the man of their choice may involve leaving Iran, when they might want to stay; for others, a marriage might mean staying in Iran, even if they want to leave. Even Nafisi, as she considers the possibility of leaving revolutionary Iran and relocating to the West, finds that her marriage is affected, as she and her husband quarrel in ways they never have before. The choices are difficult, and the future is uncertain.
Reading Lolita in Tehran is more than A Memoir in Books (the book’s subtitle). It provides an inside perspective on revolutionary and post-revolutionary Iran, and it shows a very brave group of women fighting to maintain their dignity, their personhood, and their intellectual freedom in the face of a regime that seeks to take all those things away from half the population of a country of 85 million people....more
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