The Shaping of Marji's identity

Through Satrapi's graphic novel, we see that family was a major influence for her. She continues to relate back to the political turmoil of Iran throughout the work. Whether it is through the war literally being on her doorstep or through the guilt she feels for not being there after she has moved to Austria, Marji is constantly thinking of home. She has strong political opinions due to her parents and their openness about the events happening during the Iranian Revolution. This is where the story starts for Marji. Her parents give her the political platform that becomes the foundation for the rest of the novel and to an extent, her life. 

*Disclaimer: All pictures on this page are from Satrapi's Persepolis. Page numbers will be marked.

Her father would take pictures of the unrest (very risky) and both of her parents would participate in the protests. From them, it is easy to see where Marji attained her will to resist that is prevalent throughout various situations in the novel. 

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Besides all this, here is how Marji presents herself on the very first page and very first panel of the novel: 

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Marji begins with her ten-year-old self a year after the end of the revolution (it ended in 1979). With the more radical powers in office, she was forced to wear a head scarf when she was outside of her home. The unpleasant look on her face combined with crossed arms tells us that she was not pleased with this development indicating that she did not identify with what the more traditional Islamic leaders now in office. We of course already know this because of the political attitudes of her parents. However, her family as a whole was against the new powers. 

Her grandmother and uncle help shape her identity as well. Marji has close familial ties to the last royal family of Iran through her mother's side. I mean come on, she was born to be in the web of politics. Her maternal grandmother was the wife of the prime minister (who was one of the princes of Iran before the revolution) under the new Shah that had taken over after the revolution. But the Shah wiped out everything they had and left them in poverty. 

On her father's side, Marji was influenced by her uncle Anoosh. He had been imprisoned because he was thought to be a Russian spy. Marji was proud to have an uncle who, she thought, had done something of significance. There is also the brief mention of her great-uncle as well who attempted to make a democratic state out of one of the Iranian provinces. She was very proud of all these fighters in her family. They helped shape her into the fighter that she evolves into. 

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Her family was not the only ones to influence her at a young age. Family friends also had their say. Their names were Siamak and Mohsen. Both were in prison and brutally tortured. After they are released, they get together with Marji's family and discuss what happened to them in front of ten-year-old Marji. Of course she was probably too young to hear it but it became a great identity shaper for her.

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The most horrific moment is when they begin discussing how their friend Ahmadi was killed through various rounds of torture. We can see her innocence being taken away through these images. 

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Yet there are even more defining loss-of-innocence moments for Marji. The first is when her uncle Anoosh is taken to jail and eventually killed.

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The second instance follows closely after Anoosh's murder. It is her first experience with being bombed and as the panel says, it is the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War. 

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Once the war started gaining more moment, demonstrations against the people attempting to invoke more traditional Islamic values began. Marji and her family went to one that turned violent. 

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After this and a quick trip to Italy and Spain, they find out that Iraq has invaded.

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The fighting continues and a brief rift is created between Marji and her mother after she skips school one day to hang out with some older girls. 

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Her mother was very upset by this and basically grounded her. In my own opinion, I feel this created some confusion for Marji because at the heart of the matter, she was rebelling against the fundamentalist school that she was attending. Part of the curriculum was religion and the school praised the doings of the people fighting for a more Islamic state (also called martyrs). The parents were even called in to reprimand them for not having their daughters wear their head scarfs in a modest enough way. So I feel that Marji thought her parents may praise her or her actions excused at the least. But instead she was reprimanded herself. 

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From here on, we see the gradual formation of Marji's identity as she experiences life in a war-torn Iran and eventually an independent existence in Austria. But I want to begin with her parents having to sneak back some posters and clothing from their trip to Turkey that would be considered, and eventually are chastised, by the Islamic fundamentalists. She receives posters of pop culture figures of her period and some on-trend clothing. 

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She is beginning to come into an identity. She calls it punk which was a popular persona to take on in the 80s. You can see the first threads of identity outside of politics beginning to take place. However, when she wears the garb outside of her house - while still in a head scarf, mind you - she is confronted and almost taken to the headquarters of the fundamentalist Guardians of the Revolution.

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After this run in with the oppressive authority, Marji rebels further against them. She wears jewelry to class one day and is harassed by her teacher. This further cements the rebellious component of her identity.

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After this incident, she is placed in another school with some difficulty but again she stands up against her teacher and is rewarded with a call to her parents. Her father thinks his daughter telling off a teacher is funny but her mother is more worried. Soon after, they make the decision to send her to Austria which begins her biggest change in identity. 

When she arrives in Austria, she is supposed to live with a friend of her mother's friend, Zozo, and her family. But she is upset that Zozo's daughter, as well as the rest of Zozo's family, are so out of touch with the more serious happenings of the world. You can see that much of her identity is placed on being active and alert about the serious problems facing her people.

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Zozo soon makes her live in a boarding house. Here Marji begins her true journey of independence and thus, change. Before she leaves Zozo's house, Zozo cuts her hair. So she begins her journey of independence looking like a new girl and most definitely not like the girl she was in Iran.

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Soon after, she is attending school and finds a diverse friend group. They become major factors in her transformation with their various outlooks and ideologies.

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She quickly finds out that she is not as educated as her friends on the topics they like to discuss. She begins reading and stepping completely out of the box compared to what she would have been able to read and learn about in the new Islamic Iran.

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She eventually goes to live with her friend, Julie, and is introduced to makeup and parties. We see another shift in her identity as she is introduced to a more Westernized society. She had gone to parties in Iran before but nothing to the extent of the party in Austria. Her horrified gaze and body language say it all.

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Not long after, Marji begins growing into an adult. Her mental transformation had already begun as previously stated but now her physical transformation was on its way.

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However, she now feels she is ugly but honestly, who doesn't when they hit the worst part of puberty? So she goes a step further and transforms her whole look. I argue that this specific transformation - which is quite a big one - is the most significant due to her making the decision to alter how the world perceives her. She wanted a certain message to come across and that is what she achieved. 

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She no longer is that girl from Iran. She is someone entirely different and even manages to hide where she is from.

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Yet she soon feels guilty of this and after hearing people gossip about her attempting to hide her nationality, she stands up to them and redeems herself.

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Her mother comes to visit her and doesn't even recognize her at first due to her growth. Her physical identity has changed. At this point, she has grown her hair back out and isn't living with Julie anymore. 

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After this, her next great adventure and identity alteration is a boyfriend. He is older and more mature which draws her in. He asks her to go to an anarchist party and she is thrilled. That political part of herself so deeply rooted in her identity comes alive again, if only for a moment. You can see her excitement.

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But the party doesn't end up being all she hoped it would. She had thought she would lose her virginity that night to her boyfriend but it doesn't happen and she blames it on herself. Although she has moved on from puberty, she still feels she is ugly and unworthy because of it. She has embedded this thought into her identity.

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But it turns out that he thinks he is gay. So Marji moves on with her life and finds herself split between the new anarchist friends she made at the party, her schoolwork, and her private home life where she is now living in communal. As she states in the panel below, this sort of lifestyle included drugs. She is now far from what she was when she came to Vienna and even far from what she was when her mother had visited her. Soon, all of this takes affect.

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She even becomes a drug dealer and is dealing at school. Not long after, she is warned to stop.

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The next in line for traumatic experiences is her first serious heartbreak. She had started dating another guy a while after her first boyfriend. When she missed her train to her birthday weekend in a different town, she decided to surprise him with breakfast. Turns out, he was cheating on her. But to make it all worse on herself, she leaves her communal house to go who knows where. She ends up spending her first night of many on the streets.

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Soon, she falls ill and is taken to the hospital. After she is released, she remembers that her mother told her Zozo owes her some money. She goes to collect and finds that her family had been desperately attempting to reach her. They were extremely worried. This final traumatic experience forces her to return to Iran but not before she expresses the disappointment in what she has turned into as seen in the panel below. Her identity has not evolved in a way she feels she can be proud of. But it becomes apparent that she is now basing her worth on if she has made something of herself or if she has made her parents proud. This is a dramatic change in identity compared to when she was placing her worth on her appearance.

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Marji dons the head scarf she had not worn for four years. 

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Her return to Iran means her return to a focus on politics and consequently, her identity beginning to again revolve around politics. 

Once she is back, she again is troubled by the continuing political turmoil. But it is all shocking because she had been in a Western country for so long with no martyrs and extremists. I think if she had stayed, the changes that shocked her so much would have been gradual and unremarkable. But since she is taking it all in at once, astonishing overwhelms her. Plus, everything that she sees makes her experiences in Austria feel less significant.

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Marji meets with her old friends again but they have undergone drastic changes and she can no longer relate to them. They haven't grown as much as she has nor have they experienced as much. But those experiences, despite what she thinks, are significant and shape her identity. Nevertheless, she attempts to rekindle the friendship.

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She feels that they have really changed for the better; they've opened their minds and are of a more Western persuasion than Iranian. However, that proves to not be the case when she goes on a ski trip with them and discusses her sexual exploits. She proves to them that her identity is no longer tied to traditional Iranian ideas. But they are still products of the stricter Iranian society that had developed since Marji left and they react according to values of the culture. 

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All the changes she experiences so quickly between Austria and Iran cause her to mentally breakdown. She attempts suicide but nothing works. But after such a big change and an attempt on her life, Marji experiences another major identity change. She grows into a woman. She becomes involved with positive influences in her life: she becomes an aerobics instructor, finds a new boyfriend, and heads to college.

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Marji soon finds out she had been admitted into college after she, along with her new boyfriend, Reza, had passed the national entrance exam. Here we see another confirmation that her identity is based on what she is capable of doing and making herself, and her parents, proud.

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It seems as though Marji is on a path towards achieving a more solid, less constantly-altering identity. Yet she proves to her family that she is severely out of touch with what they stand for by accusing an innocent man of saying indecent things to her just so she wouldn't get in trouble with the extremists. 

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Her grandmother does not think it was cute or funny in the slightest. She harshly criticizes her and accuses Marji of forgetting who she was and where she came from.

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Marji greatly respected her grandmother so she took to heart everything she yelled at her for. Here we see another turning point in Marji's identity. She had always found family important but she had lost touch with what her family found important. She connects back with her roots while also maturing.

We see this growth through the following panels. She is now a student and of course has to wear the head scarf and keep herself covered. 

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But Marji explains that things were slowly progressing. Little by little, women were allowed to show a more. 

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In a school meeting targeted at having the girls cover themselves better and not wear makeup, Marji speaks up and points out the double standard the men of the school's administration, and really every fundamentalist man, is attempting to enforce. She is once again back at her roots, resisting the oppressive powers and standing up for what she believes is right. This specific scene reminds me of a younger Marji standing up to her school teachers. 

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Marji takes another stand against the regime when they try to stop her from running because, as they say, it will make men look at the movement of her behind. It seems that the Marji we knew before she went to Austria is back.

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But she is still holding onto some of the more Western traits she gained in Austria. In the panel below, you can see that she is asking her classmates what the big deal is about having sex with her boyfriend. Of course they think it is absurd but after her more open-minded experience in Austria, she sees that there is nothing wrong with it. She also believes that she alone owns her body so she can give it to anyone she wants. Thanks to her parents and her stint in Austria, she hinges her identity on herself and her ability to do whatever she pleases. Her parents have given her the grit to fight for herself. Austria showed her that there is much more beyond a veil and husband.

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This next panel is Marji in her final stage of the novel. It is the beginning of the chapter entitled "The Wedding". She is married to Reza but quickly finds out it is not for her as the second panel shows. So long she had been resisting the social pressures of Iranian society but finally she gave in. She feels as though she is not being true to herself as her identity had hinged on her independence for so long.

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Marji and Reza do try to stick it out but it eventually comes to an end. Though before it does, Marji had fallen into a depression which her father, some friends, and a doctor helped her crawl out of. She again relies on education to help her. If I had to describe the foundation of her identity in two words it would be: education and independence.

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Now that she is divorced and graduated from college, Marji feels likes Iran no longer has anything for her if she wishes to continue growing. So the novel ends with her leaving again, but this time it is her choice and she is choosing this path because of the values inherent to her identity. We see in the following panels that she pays respects to her uncle and spent valuable time with her parents. But now her identity is more based on herself than on her parents. She doesn't feel like she must stay in order to continue to be herself but rather that she must go so that she can continue to be herself. 

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If you were to look at just the pictures of Marji without taking into consideration the words of those panels, you would see her physical change throughout the novel. However, each picture tells the story of how she evolves into who she is by the end. She must find herself in the midst of a revolution. Of course she does but it includes an emphasis on political involvement and independence due to the events of the revolution. But her time in Austria also gives her a better worldview which shapes her as well. In the end, it is all Marji's experiences that shape her identity.

Questions: How does Marji's culture shape her identity?

How does the Austrian/Western cultures shape her identity? 


Works Cited:
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York, Pantheon Books, 2003.