Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and its

relation to Time and Space

Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, being a memoir about her childhood inherently tied to a culturally
evolving Iran, provides a deep understanding of the Area of Expression of Time and Space.
There are a multitude of interpretations of the text, which differ based primarily on the time
period and area of the reader. Persepolis would be entirely disparate if it was a memoir of a
person living in a country that is not Iran, or even Iran itself in a different period.
Of foremost importance is historical and cultural context. In this view, there is both an
introduction, and constant references to historical events to provide to the reader an overview of
the historical basis for the development of events that occur within the comic. The chapters “The
Bicycle” and “The Water Cell” are almost entirely devoted to historical context. Cultural context
is gained through passing references, but for the most part it is implied that the reader should
know context already. Due to the cultural revolution in Iran at the time, the reader understands
these changes as Marjane describes going through these changes and adapting to them. This
understanding of context is paramount, as Marjane’s analysis of her environment is driven by it.
In fact, without cultural context, some scenes seem, if possible, even more obscene. For
example, in “The Trip,” page 74, Marjane’s mother tells her and her father that “two
fundamentalist b*stards” insulted her, and said that she should be “pushed up against a wall and
f*cked.” This casual threat of rape is, while disgusting, understood through the context of the
cultural events in Iran at the time. This stands in direct contrast with Marjane’s culture at home,
which is why she experiences the effects of these cultural changes in a much larger magnitude.
A large amount of readers living in the modern times (in countries with ample access to
the internet and historical information) would interpret a theme of melancholic irony in the text.
There are messages of hope for the future stated by many characters in the text. For example,
Anoosh says in page 62, “the proletariat will rule! It’s inevitable!!!” This has of course not come
to fruition in Iran, as things have only gotten worse for the “proletariat” and the religious leaders
have not gone “back to their mosques” but rather hold a stronger, iron grip over governance in
the Islamic Republic. As Marjane grew up in a household full of Communists and
revolutionaries, we frequently see dialogues praising the ideas of Lenin (such as by Anoosh and
Marjane’s grandfather). After the 1990s, one can understand the failure of Leninism, and so
these messages of hope for the future and firm belief in an ideology that is fated to fail create a
sense of melancholy.
This directly relates to time and space in that the ideas of the modern era and the events
that occurred in the near past affect our interpretation of the text. A person reading the comic in
the 1980s would not have felt the same emotion, and a person unaware of history (due to the area
they live in or simply due to a natural lack of curiosity) would not have either. An individual
reading the novel in Iran in the recent times may consider Marjane’s problems with the Cultural
Revolution a non-issue, if they believed that the outcomes of a cultural revolution to be
beneficial for the country.
Persepolis as a text provides cultural knowledge to a large extent, particularly due to
Satrapi’s notion of her childhood being in large part affected by her culture and the changes it
went through. Texts in general offer cultural insight to a certain extent, but as a memoir
Persepolis simply provides more of it. If Marjane, for example, had grown up in the 2000s in the
United States, she would have talked about different aspects of her life changing, particularly
economic, due to the Great Recession, which means that readers would have gained a large
amount of economic context in contrast to the social context in Persepolis.
The meaning of Persepolis also differs as time passes. While to someone in the 1980s it
might have been a memoir about changing events going on around them, in the 2010s it is a
study of the changing culture of a country in the past. This leads to some form of emotional
detachment, and so in my opinion the understanding of the text based purely upon the content in
the text increases as time passes, but due to historical context being biased and altered as time
goes on, an understanding of the text in relation to context reduces. A group of humans reading
Persepolis a few hundred years in the future would gain a larger understanding of the text
because they have no inherent stereotypes about Iran and its history, but at the same time these
stereotypes could provide more understanding about the text in context of the 1980s.
In conclusion, the interpretations and meaning of Persepolis differ based primarily on
time and space of the reader, and the content of the comic would have been drastically different
if the time and space of the author was changed.