Despite the differences in social class, Satrapi befriends her maid, Mehri, and helps her write love letters to the boy next door in exchange for a day at the protests. These family stories fascinate Satrapi and she becomes obsessed with asking questions about the heroes of her family.ĭesperately wishing to better understand what is going on in her country and what her parents are demonstrating for, Satrapi immerses herself in books. When she hears that her grandfather was held in a “water cell” for hours a day, she soaks in the bathtub for as long as she can to better understand his plight. The shah appointed her grandfather as prime minister, but eventually imprisoned and tortured him.
Satrapi’s parents are educated and progressive, and they tell her that her grandfather was once an Iranian prince. When Satrapi overhears that 400 civilians are killed in a movie theater, she pleads with her parents to let her join the protests, but they tell her it is too dangerous. She becomes fascinated by socialist revolutionary icons like Che Guevara and Karl Marx and wishes to join her parents, who go to daily demonstrations. Satrapi reveals she believed herself to be a prophet at the age of six, but she no longer believed this once the revolution began.
She and her family are disoriented by the rapid changes and rise in Islamic extremism in Iran and are struggling to adjust. Her coed bilingual school closed and reopened because it was initially seen as a symbol of capitalism. The story opens in Tehran in 1980, a year after the revolution, as Satrapi and her female peers are forced to wear a veil. Iran as a nation and cultural entity persists despite centuries of outside influence and invasion this sets up Satrapi's book as a means to help preserve Iranian culture as she knows it in spite of the oppressive fundamentalist regime. Satrapi begins her story with an Introduction including brief historical context about Iran and the events leading up to the revolution. Persepolis is both an autobiography as well as a bildungsroman or coming-of-age tale.
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