Originally published in four volumes. Volumes 1 and 2 translated from French by Blake Ferris and Mattias Ripa, and Volumes 3 and 4 translated by Anjali Singh.
The complete volume published by Pantheon, 2007, 341 pages. The four volumes in the original version published between 2000 and 2003. English versions: Vols. 1 and 2 published as one volume in 2003, and vols. 3 and 4 published as one volume in 2004.

“I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists. I also don’t want those Iranians who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom, who died in the war against Iraq, who suffered under various repressive regimes, or who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland to be forgotten.
“One can forgive but one should never forget.”
—From the Introduction

This graphic novel of a young girl’s coming of age in an Iran that was taken over by the mullahs is a classic. It is Marjane Satrapi’s own story, portrayed in striking black and white images.

Marji was 9 years old when the Shah was overthrown by Khomeini and his people. Her family were progressive, and she was exposed to works of political thought from a young age. Her uncle Anoosh was arrested for being a communist spy by the Shah’s regime, and later arrested and executed by the regime of the mullahs for his political beliefs.

The regime, which was welcomed by some for overthrowing the corrupt Shah, morphed into a dictatorship, laying down strict rules of behaviour and cracking down on people it did not approve of. Marji’s parents resisted the regime by having parties and drinking alcohol, both of which were forbidden. Marji, in her own way, also resisted the regime.

In September 1980, Iraq attacked Iran, which resulted in a war that was to last eight years. Young men were sent into battle, and many did not return. Marji is traumatized when a missile hits their street, killing their neighbours, including her friend. For her safety, her parents sent her off to study in Vienna.

Vienna is liberating but has its own challenges. Marji does not fit in—initially, language is a barrier, but it is more than that. The culture is completely different, and her landlady is anything but welcoming. She struggles and eventually returns to Iran, where the war has been raging.

Writing this book was important to Satrapi: she wanted to show what life was really like in Iran and dispel some of the myths surrounding it. She wanted to show the lives of ordinary people and how they coped.

Persepolis focuses on women and the effect that the regime had on them. Iranian women are not the meek, oppressed creatures that some would have you believe: they have their own ways of defying and resisting the country’s regime. Marji’s grandmother is one of the strongest characters in the book.

Marji plays the role of an observer—you get an account of the country through her own story. This is not just a depiction of Iran from the 1980s—Satrapi also goes back in time to the great civilization that Persia once was. This is an honest book: she does not gloss over anything, including her own behaviour.

This is a rich book. I reread it after Satrapi’s death at the age of 56 and found it just as absorbing as the first time. Her drawings are seemingly simple but extremely effective: stark black-and-white images (no greys). Although faces are drawn without a lot of detail, the emotion they are feeling is clear. She uses larger panels to depict larger events—a sort of pause in the narrative. The funeral march that the girls in school are made to attend has a full-page panel dedicated to it—a group of veiled schoolgirls with just their faces showing, but each one has a slightly different expression.

Satrapi brings it all to life. She set out to prove that “we Iranians were not an abstract concept but rather human beings for whom the words pride, dignity, patriotism and life mean exactly the same thing as they do to Americans.”[1]

And she has. This book is particularly relevant in the current climate, and should be essential reading.

(Note: the book was also made into a film.)

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[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/satrapi.blogs.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/defending-my-country/. I would recommend reading this article.