Title: Persepolis Author: Marjane Satrapi Creation Date: 2000 Location: Paris, France Collection: Banned, Burned & Dangerous Books
Brief
Marjane Satrapi published Persepolis in two volumes in French — Persepolis 1 in 2000, Persepolis 2 in 2001 — through L'Association, the Parisian publisher of auteur comics, with two further volumes following in 2002 and 2003. She was living in Paris, where she had arrived in the mid-1990s after a period in Vienna, having left Iran first at fourteen, returned for university, and then left permanently as the Islamic Republic's restrictions became incompatible with her life. The work is drawn in black ink, spare and high-contrast, with no grey: a visual register that matches the absolutism of the political world it depicts.
The memoir covers Marji's childhood in Tehran from around 1979 — she is ten when the Revolution triumphs — through the Iran–Iraq War, the curtailment of freedoms, the deaths of family members in the violence of the regime and the war, her departure for Vienna at fourteen, four years of displacement, adolescent crisis, return to Iran, university years, marriage, divorce and final departure in the early 1990s. Named for the ancient Persian capital, Persepolis situates the story inside the long history of Iranian civilisation — her educated, Marxist, cosmopolitan family is always arguing about Iran in terms of what it was and what it could be.
The work was adapted into an animated film by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud in 2007, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes. Persepolis occupies an unusual place in world literature: it made the graphic memoir a vehicle for political testimony about a living state, and it brought Iranian women's experience — the Revolution seen from a Tehran girl's eye level — to a European and American readership that had almost no other access to it.
The Banning
Persepolis has been banned, challenged or restricted on three continents for mutually incompatible reasons. In Iran, the work has never been formally published; it exists only through pirated copies and contraband editions smuggled across borders. The 2007 animated film intensified official hostility: the Iranian government protested its screening at Cannes, and diplomats described it as French "Islamophobia." The Republic's objection is existential — the memoir treats the regime as an imposition on a civilisation older and richer than the theocracy that claims to speak for it.
In Lebanon, the film was banned around 2008 under pressure from Hezbollah, which viewed any unflattering depiction of the Iranian Revolution as an attack on its own ideological foundations. In Tunisia, a 2011 broadcast of the film on Nessma TV provoked Salafist protests and attacks on the station; the director was convicted of "disturbing public order" for a scene in which God is depicted as a kindly old man.
In the United States, on 14 March 2013, Chicago Public Schools — the third-largest school district in the country — ordered Persepolis removed from all classrooms and initially from all school libraries, citing "graphic language and images that are not appropriate for general use," specifically scenes depicting torture rendered in Satrapi's spare black-and-white style. After organised protests from students, teachers and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the order was partially reversed — the book was restored to libraries but removed from seventh-grade classrooms. The American Library Association ranked Persepolis second among the most challenged books of 2014.
The Fallout
The Chicago controversy demonstrated that Persepolis had become one of the most effective pedagogical texts in the American school system — a graphic memoir doing more effectively than any textbook what textbooks attempt: placing the reader inside the experience of political repression. The removal order was partially reversed not because the administration changed its mind but because the community pushed back: students organised protests, teachers circulated the book informally, and emails obtained under freedom-of-information requests revealed the decision had bypassed formal challenge procedures entirely.
In Iran, the book's unavailability has given it the prestige prohibition always confers. Young Iranians read it in English or French, or in pirated Persian translations distributed through underground networks. Satrapi has not returned to Iran and has been explicit that she cannot — the memoir makes her persona non grata in her own country.
The cumulative banning history is paradoxical: a memoir written to explain Iran to a European audience has been banned in Iran for explaining Iran too well, banned in Lebanon for offending Iran's proxies, prosecuted in Tunisia for depicting God as a gentle old man, and restricted in Chicago for depicting torture in spare black ink. Each ban confirms a different aspect of the book's power and reach. It is simultaneously too critical of Islam for theocratic governments, too frank about violence for American school administrators, and too effective as political education for anyone who would prefer that students not think about what revolution actually costs the people who live through it.
Why It Was Feared
The specific danger of Persepolis is its ordinariness. Satrapi does not write about the Islamic Revolution as a geopolitical event. She writes about her uncle Anoosh, who survived the Shah's prisons and was shot by the new Republic. She writes about the plastic key to paradise given to boys too poor for university, sent to clear minefields by walking through them. She writes about the afternoon she was stopped on the street and told her coat was too short, and the lie she improvised on the spot — that she was running because she had heard Michael Jackson on the radio — to avoid arrest.
This is the method the censors cannot tolerate: the reduction of ideology to daily life, the insistence that political systems are experienced not as abstractions but as a series of specific humiliations, accommodations and small acts of resistance performed by people who want to stay alive. The black-and-white drawing style reinforces this reduction. There is no grey in the panels — the absolutism of the visual register matches the absolutism of the system — and within this stark frame Satrapi draws people who are funny, contradictory, afraid, brave, petty and generous, people who cannot be reduced to the political categories they are forced to inhabit.
The title itself is an act of defiance. Persepolis — the great ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid empire, burned by Alexander and still standing in ruins outside Shiraz — claims a lineage for Iran that the Islamic Republic cannot match. The Republic claims descent from the Prophet. Satrapi's family claims descent from Cyrus, from a civilisation that predates Islam by three thousand years. The book says: this is also what Iran is, and you do not own the whole of it. The regime that banned the book understood, correctly, that this claim — made in the simplest possible visual language, accessible to a child — was more dangerous than any political manifesto.
The Reading
Marji is nine or ten, living in a flat in Tehran in 1979, and the Revolution is happening outside the windows. Her parents are modern, leftist, educated; her great-uncle Anoosh has survived years in the Shah's prisons and will survive, briefly, the early weeks of the Revolution before being arrested again, this time by the new Islamic Republic, and shot. He is one of the first dead. He is not the last.
She draws herself at this age as a small figure with a dark fringe and wide eyes, wearing a white headscarf that she did not ask for and does not understand why she must wear. The headscarf is the Revolution's first intrusion into her body — the state arriving at the level of hair and skin, making itself felt before it can be understood. She is told to be serious, to understand, and she does understand — more than the adults around her expect — and she asks questions they do not know how to answer. Why does God speak only to the Ayatollah? Why can she not see the film Caligula? Why did the Shah leave and how is the new leader different from the Shah? The questions are drawn in panels where the child's face is half the size of the adult faces surrounding her, and the size differential is itself a statement — the child looks up at the Revolution the way children look up at everything, from below, trying to make sense of a world designed by and for people who are taller.
The adults in Satrapi's family are people who wanted the Revolution — who marched against the Shah — and who watch in horror as what replaces him is worse in the specific ways that matter to them. Her parents are secular. Her father drinks whisky that he brews at home. Her mother smokes. Her uncle was a communist. The Revolution that arrives is not their revolution, and they spend years in the gap between the Iran they wanted and the Iran that has come to pass.
The memoir's early chapters establish this gap through domestic scenes that are simultaneously ordinary and political. Marji plays at being a revolutionary in the family garden, using a frying pan as a shield and a broom as a rifle. She invents a religion of her own in which she will be the last prophet. She argues with God in her bedroom, a God who looks like an old man with a white beard and who appears less and less frequently as the chapters progress, crowded out by the Revolution's god, who is less conversational and more demanding. The drawings are spare: black figures on white ground, faces reduced to essential lines, the eyes always doing the most work. Satrapi's style is not simplification but compression — every panel contains exactly what it needs and nothing more.
The Iran–Iraq War begins in September 1980 and changes the geometry of daily life entirely. Iraq bombs Tehran. The air-raid sirens become part of the city's soundscape, as regular as the call to prayer. Satrapi draws the bombs as black shapes falling through white sky, and the explosions as jagged black starbursts that crack the panels open. The boys who are sixteen and too poor to go to university are given plastic keys — the key to paradise — and sent to clear minefields by walking through them. Satrapi draws the keys as small, cheap, identical objects, factory-stamped and gold-painted, held in the hands of boys whose faces she has given individual features — specific noses, specific eyes, specific expressions of belief or fear. The keys are mass-produced. The boys are not. She knows boys who go. She knows their mothers. She draws the mothers.
The city is bombed repeatedly. There is a period when their apartment building takes a direct hit and the windows blow in and her parents and the neighbours all sleep together in the ground-floor flat because the ground floor is safer. She draws this: the mothers and fathers and children on mattresses, packed in, talking through the dark, trying to be normal in a space where normality has been compressed to the dimensions of a single room. The dark is rendered as solid black ink filling the panels, the figures white against it, reversed, as if the darkness is the substance and the people are the absence.
Her grandmother is the memoir's moral centre — a woman of enormous physical presence and absolute standards who smells of jasmine because she puts jasmine flowers in her brassiere every morning. The grandmother's advice is consistent throughout: be true to yourself, know who you are, never compromise on integrity. It is advice given in a country where integrity is increasingly expensive, where a woman who refuses to wear the veil correctly can be arrested and a man who drinks can be flogged, and the grandmother gives it anyway, because the grandmother has decided that certain things are not negotiable.
There is a scene — one of the memoir's most devastating — in which the Satrapis' neighbour is killed in a bombing. Marji comes home from school to find the building next door destroyed. She sees a familiar bracelet in the rubble. The bracelet belongs to her friend Neda. She draws the bracelet — a turquoise bracelet on a severed arm — in a single panel, without commentary, without additional text. The image does everything that needs to be done. The bracelet is recognisable. The arm is not attached to a body. The friend is dead. Satrapi learned early that the simplest images carry the heaviest weight, and she never forgot it.
Marji's parents send her to Vienna at fourteen because Tehran has become incompatible with the daughter they have raised. She will be freer there. She will get a proper education. She will not be arrested for wearing her coat too short. She will — they do not say this but they mean it — be able to become a person. The departure scene at the airport is one of the memoir's emotional centres: her mother faints and her father carries her mother away and Marji, behind the departure gate, watches them go and understands that she is now, at fourteen, alone.
Vienna is its own kind of exile. She is fourteen and does not speak German and does not have money and does not know how to navigate European social hierarchies. She falls in with a group of young people who are loosely leftist and variously troubled; she has relationships that fail; she lives in a series of accommodations including a period sleeping on the street after she loses her flat and becomes ill. She draws the Vienna chapters with the same black-and-white sparseness as the Tehran chapters, but the violence in Vienna is smaller-scale and private — the violence of not belonging, of being stateless in a city full of people who are somewhere they have always been.
She does not manage to explain Iran to her Viennese friends in a way they can hold. When they say "Iran" they mean the Ayatollah, the hostage crisis, the bearded men burning flags on television — an Iran of images, curated by Western media, bearing no resemblance to the country she carries inside her. When she says "Iran" she means her grandmother, who is the most important person in her life and who smells of jasmine, and her mother's cooking, and the sound of her father arguing about politics at dinner, and the quality of the light on the Alborz mountains in the afternoon. The gap between these two Irans is the distance she lives in for four years, and the distance is not only geographical but epistemic — it is the distance between knowing a country from inside and knowing it from headlines, and no amount of conversation can close it. She tries on European identities — punk, anarchist, philosophy student — and none of them fit, because she is not European, and the Iranians she meets in Vienna are not her Iranians, and she is fourteen and then fifteen and then sixteen and then seventeen, growing up at a velocity that exile accelerates, doing it without the family that would have held her shape.
By the time she leaves Vienna she has had a breakdown serious enough to hospitalise her. She has been sleeping on the street. She has nearly died of bronchitis. She has discovered that exile is not freedom but a different kind of unfreedom — the freedom to be no one, to belong nowhere, to carry a country inside her that the people around her know only as a headline. She has survived, but barely, and the barely is important — Satrapi does not present her survival as heroic. She presents it as something that almost did not happen, something contingent and lucky and insufficient. She goes home.
Tehran at the end of the 1980s, when she returns, is not the Tehran she left. The war has ended. Hundreds of thousands are dead. The surviving generation of young people has found ways to be young under the restrictions — parties behind closed doors, music on cassettes smuggled across borders, the slow negotiation of the borders between what is permitted and what can be done without being caught. She goes to art school, where she draws from live models while the models wear full Islamic covering and the students are expected to render the body without seeing it. She marries a man she loves insufficiently, discovers that the marriage was an attempt to become someone she is not, divorces.
The art school chapters contain some of the memoir's most pointed social observation. The absurdity of drawing a body you cannot see is the kind of thing Satrapi renders without commentary — she draws the scene, the model in her chador, the students with their pencils, and the gap between the exercise and its purpose is visible in the panel without a single word of editorialising. The memoir's method throughout is to show rather than argue, to present the daily reality of the Islamic Republic through scenes that are simultaneously funny and devastating, and to let the reader draw conclusions that Satrapi has arranged for them to draw. She draws a party raided by the Guardians of the Revolution — the guests pouring alcohol down the drain, hiding cassette tapes, the frantic scramble to appear innocent — and she draws it as comedy, because it was comedy, lived comedy, the kind of absurd improvisation that people under totalitarian systems develop as a survival skill.
She draws a couple caught holding hands on the street and interrogated by the morality police, and the interrogation is at once terrifying and ridiculous, because the regime's interest in what people do with their hands is both a genuine threat and an absurdity that no amount of reverence can disguise. The book's great formal achievement is its ability to hold terror and comedy in the same panel without either cancelling the other out — to be funny about the Revolution without minimising it, to be devastated by it without losing the capacity to laugh. This is not a trick of tone. It is the actual texture of life under the Islamic Republic as Satrapi experienced it — the daily oscillation between fear and farce, the way ordinary people navigate extraordinary restrictions by being simultaneously obedient and subversive, the double consciousness that authoritarian systems produce in the people who must live within them.
The return is also a reckoning with depression. Satrapi draws a period of complete withdrawal — lying in bed for months, the panels emptying of detail, the black ink taking over until the page is almost entirely dark with only a small white figure curled in the centre. She recovers slowly, through therapy, through art school, through the decision to draw again. The recovery is not triumphant; it is incremental, fragile, a daily choice to get out of bed and face a country that has changed around her and a self that has changed inside her.
She eventually leaves again for France, this time permanently. The leave-taking is the last image of the memoir: the taxi to the airport, her mother collapsing again, and then the line of departure, and then Paris. The grandmother has died by then. The jasmine is gone. What remains is the memoir itself — drawn in an apartment in Paris by a woman who left her country twice and found the second leaving permanent, who carries Iran inside her the way her grandmother carried jasmine: as something that defines her smell, her shape, her way of moving through the world, even when the source is no longer there.
What makes Persepolis work as both memoir and political text is Satrapi's refusal of abstraction. She does not write about the Islamic Revolution. She writes about her uncle Anoosh and the moment her mother has to tell her he has been executed. She does not write about the cultural restrictions of the theocratic state. She writes about the afternoon she is stopped on the street and told her coat is too short and she lies to the officer and says she was running because she had heard Michael Jackson on the radio. She draws herself lying — the quick improvisation, the survival reflex — because this is what life under the regime actually looks like at the level of a body moving through streets.
The stark black-and-white drawing style is a formal argument. There is no grey in this world, not because Satrapi lacks nuance — the memoir is full of nuance, full of characters who contain contradictions — but because the political world the Revolution created was genuinely stark. You were veiled or you were arrested. You were with the Republic or you were suspect. The visual absolutism of the drawings matches the absolutism of the system, and within it Satrapi draws people who are messy and funny and contradictory and afraid and brave, people who cannot be reduced to the black and white they live inside.
The book's title — Persepolis, the great ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid empire, burned by Alexander the Great in 330 BCE and still standing in ruins outside Shiraz — is a claim about Iran that the Islamic Republic cannot make and cannot answer. The Republic claims a lineage from the Prophet, a history that begins with the arrival of Islam. Satrapi's family claims a lineage from Cyrus, from Darius, from the Persian kings who wrote the first human rights declaration on a clay cylinder, from a civilisation that predates Islam by three thousand years and that produced poetry and astronomy and architecture while the Arabian peninsula was still a desert of warring tribes. The title is nationalist without being religious, historical without being exclusionary, a quiet insistence that Iran is older and larger than any single ideology that claims to define it. It says: this is also what Iran is. You do not own the whole of it. You never did.
This post is part of Books They Tried to Destroy, a series on the Banned, Burned & Dangerous canon — works that frightened states and survived them.
Two reliable English editions of one of the most-banned graphic memoirs of the century:
The single-volume Pantheon edition, collecting all four French volumes in one book — the most widely taught text and the one Chicago Public Schools tried to remove in 2013.
The Pantheon paperback of the first volume — Satrapi's childhood under the Revolution and the early years of the war, in the original two-volume division for readers who want to start there.