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The Graphic Memoir Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Decent Essays

It did not take me very long to get through the graphic memoir, Persepolis not only because it is a sort of comic book, but because I could not put it down. I chose to read the interview between Robert Root and Marjane Satrapi instead of the TED talk because I love the raw dialogue between the two. Through this interview, Satrapi’s strong independence and blunt words ring through loud and clear just as her character in Persepolis. I find her honesty very refreshing, “I have always said, even verbally, orally, that I was nasty. I am very much a fan of imperfection, actually. This idea of perfection-I think really, it’s the beginning of the fascism, this idea of perfection”. The woman being interview is very much the young girl that hit her principal then said, oopsy, “I didn’t mean it!”

I can honestly say, that this graphic memoir opened my eyes to the female perspective in Iran during the time of the Shah to the revolution and beyond. Before reading Persepolis, I had a single worldview of the Middle East. I thought that women would be treated the same way in most countries-as unequal to a man as it can get. I pictured women unable to have respectable jobs and never being able to show much more skin than their hands and face. When Satrapi says, “The basic culture is not that the woman is nothing—Iran is not Saudi Arabia—the women, they are educated, they are cultivated, they work. You have women that are judges, they are doctors, they are journalists, they work.

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