Growing up, there are few greater joys than finding your name in unexpected places. I would always look in gift-shops and classes for mine, but being named “Marjan”, I very rarely had the satisfaction of finding what I was looking for (let alone anyone who could actually pronounce my name). But years later, I stumbled upon Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical comic, and later film adaptation, Persepolis.
I was in disbelief that something so distinctly Iranian existed in popular media, let alone that it had been dubbed in so many languages and had even been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. I begged my parents to let me watch it, but was told that I was too young. And so, I filed my desperation away and resorted to watching clips on YouTube in the interim, forgetting the small spoilers as the years passed and eventually forgetting my desire to watch the film altogether.
That is, until this year.
Persepolis retells Satrapi’s life-story as a young girl growing up in revolutionary Iran and follows her throughout the Iran-Iraq war and her subsequent immigration to Austria. When I first heard about this premise, I immediately recognized it. Not because of the previous spoilers, but because I recognized it as my mother’s story too. Didn’t Maman grow up during the revolution? Wasn’t Maman in Iran during the war? Wasn’t she still there after? Is this what made her immigrate to Canada? I had heard these stories before I went to bed, from my grandmother over tea, at social gatherings in passing, and I would always inquire about my mother’s life before my sister and I. Through Persepolis, Satrapi manages to create a stunning representation of these stories and bring them to life.
The film opens in an airport and in color; a surprise considering the film’s reputation for its iconic and noteworthy black-and-white animation style. However, we’re soon transported back to Marjane’s (Chiara Mastroianni) childhood, which fully embraces this style and begins to take us through the events that would soon paint her life and work.
Though I had grown up around these stories, watching them come to life was not easy. For much of the film, I stared back at the screen in disbelief, tears welling in my eyes. It’s not that Persepolis distinctly tries to be heart-breaking — it just is. Though much of the film is shown to us in what feels like separate vignettes, they are sewn together by Marjane to depict the stories that come together to form the tapestries of many Iranian people’s lives. Part of this immense melancholy is also emphasized through this animation style.
Persepolis’ black-and-white style plays a much bigger role in Marjane’s story than is immediately apparent. There are the black-and-white ideas of many of the experiences in her life: supporters of the Shah vs. the Revolutionaries, Iranians vs. Westerners, Marjane’s home vs. her identity. They are constantly pulled apart and thrown back together again, and much of her struggle comes from having to choose between and endure these ideologies and experiences as her home and way of life changes indefinitely. Then, there are her memories in and of themselves. Though they’re played back to us in black-and-white, only emphasizing their inherent melancholy, they’re also filled to the brim with surreal elements — moments in which Marjane is flying, floating, and dancing through her life surrounded by pure magic. When she falls in love for the first time, she floats along streets. When she needs guidance, her role-models speak to her through heavenly dreams, silhouettes, and shadows.
And then, suddenly, we’re back to color. Despite never having seen the color of Tehran’s sky, or of the murals, shops, or patches of nature — Marjane’s colorful present almost seems bleaker than her past. In fact, this is one of the last things we see before the incredibly bitter-sweet ending of the film, and it is this sort of lingering melancholy in the lives of Iranian people that I immediately recognized and appreciated.
Beyond a yearning for a way of life that seems like nothing more than a dream, there is a toll that lived Iranian history leaves with you. I never lived a life like Marjane’s or my mother’s, but bits and pieces of their experiences have seeped into the way I’ve been raised. There was a tangible dissonance between the stories I would grow up hearing and the Iran I would see on TV or would visit. In the film, Marjane’s mom (Catherine Deneuve) recounts that when walking the streets of Tehran, it feels “like you’re walking through a graveyard” and I felt these ghosts every time I would visit my grandparents, my hijab tight and the air thick with smog amongst the greying buildings around me. This is where Maman grew up? I would think, not realizing that it was, down to parties held in secret, the traffic, the guards in the streets, and the ghosts of an incredibly rich culture at every turn.
And yet, Maman’s stories were still colorful, much like Marjane’s monochromatic memories. Despite the hardship, air-raids, bombings, brutality, and betrayal — there was never a moment that these stories weren’t soaked in co-existing memories of laughter and delight, even in the direst of situations. The past is not tainted, nor is the present; they live together in joy and sorrow, from monochrome to color. Marjane’s family smiles and bids her farewell at the airport, only to collapse once she has her back turned. Marjane dances at a club, only to be deafened by the increasing weight of isolation at the same time. My mother watched bombs fall from the sky while telling stories and eating sandwiches in bunkers underneath the stairs. She told me these stories amidst classmates laughing at me for speaking in Farsi over the phone, or for leaving class early to go to pick my grandparents up from the airport.
When I finished the film, it felt like I had been looking in a mirror the whole time, and one that wasn’t calling me a terrorist or freak in return. For the first time in my life, a piece of media had not only normalized what it means to be Iranian, but also what it means to be a member of the Iranian diaspora. Someone still living in their suffering homeland, an immigrant, a child of immigrants; all of our lived experiences shone through the film in a way that brought tears to my eyes. Though each lived experience for every Iranian family is different, it is the way Persepolis shines a light on our culture, traditions, and quirks I didn’t even know were universal that made it one of the most validating pieces of media I had ever consumed.
My mother didn’t want to watch Persepolis at first, and I suspect it’s the same reason she kept me from watching it when I was younger. “Iranians didn’t like it, it was very controversial,” she’d say, “they said it spread lies.” But soon after, when I had convinced her to watch it alongside me, she was able to relate to every vignette the film produced. From Marjane’s childhood to her adolescence, to streets named in the film, and the behaviors of rude guards, nosy family members, and supportive friends — my mother shared the stories that I’d heard my whole life with me once again, but now, with new company.
My mother longs for Iran every day. She mourns her previous life, and the life her mother had, and so on — even if she never experienced it first-hand, she mourns it. I mourn it too. She still talks to relatives every day to share this longing, finding that they can relate as they assimilate to life in other corners of the world, far from her and each other, all of them trying their best to cope with a homesickness that cannot be rectified.
But finding community is a pinnacle of the Iranian diasporic experience. It’s what brings me closer to other children of Iranian immigrants and makes me cherish every moment I have with my family, because I don’t know when it’ll be the last. Persepolis fosters this sense of community. It makes you feel less alone, but also brings to life the source of a deep-rooted melancholy that I’ve known to be constant and unchanging my entire life. Sometimes it’s hard to acknowledge, to draw attention to the roots of an ever-growing trauma, but as Marjane’s father (Simon Abkarian), much like my own, tells her, “It’s important you know the history of [y]our family. That should never be forgotten. Even if you don’t understand everything and even if it’s painful…”
And it is painful. To experience, remember, and to witness — even in the form of a film. But Persepolis knows this, and it knows this because Marjane Satrapi has lived it, much like the Iranian community who would come to watch it. Much like me and my mother. It is a unifying, beautiful, and deeply harrowing depiction of reality but that is what makes it so important and necessary.
I will always be thankful for finding my name sake so many years ago and for the gift it has now left me with. Though melancholy will always be part of my experience, this melancholy has also helped produce an incredibly important piece of media for any member of a marginalized community, especially when prejudice is so violently prevalent around us. I now cherish the stories I’ve been told my whole life, and am honoured to be part of the same tapestry that holds stories like Persepolis.
