A tension that Marji struggles with throughout Persepolis is what is truly ‘Persian’ and what is ‘Iranian.’ It seems that Marji views things Persian as the true identity of the country, and things Iranian as a recent construct. It’s telling that she titles her book Persepolis, the capital city of the First Persian Empire, and the tone of her introduction gives us an idea of how she views Iran’s history. As I read this introduction (again), I was surprised to learn that ‘Iran’ is a name that actually originated around the 3rd century with the rulers of Iran, referring to the people of the empire, despite Marji generally treating the term as foreign. ‘Persia’ was actually used by the ancient Greeks beginning around 500 BCE, to refer to Cyrus the Great’s empire.
And yet Persia is the name that stuck, and that Marji associates with the “strong culture” of Iran, which goes beyond its modern association with “fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism.” We’ve seen before in Persepolis that for a time Marji’s view of political issues (especially the Iraq/Iran war) was largely framed in a big-picture historical context. In page 90, Marji presents her project, titled “The Arab Conquest and Our War” which argues that “...This war is the same as the one 1,400 years ago.”
Going out on a limb, I know that often in post-colonial countries there’s an effort to remake their image and leave behind everything colonial, to bring back the ‘old and true’ image of the country. But often in doing so, the country’s history is grossly oversimplified, aspects of it are glossed over altogether, and customs actually observed by the populace can be discredited because they ‘aren’t original.’ This process has been going on since the shah took power, largely to bring legitimacy to his rule. The lower left panel of page 32 makes the point clear: “All the country’s money went into ridiculous celebrations of the 2,500 years of dynasty and other frivolities… all of this to impress heads of state; the population couldn’t have cared less.”
This conversation is one of the first major lessons teaching Marji to look beyond what everyone tells her and to know what’s really going on. Given that Marji’s family is very educated and politically aware, it makes sense that they would help teach her to view history through a wider lense. Marji’s confusion over what the ‘real’ history of her country is intensifies and takes a new direction under the Islamic regime, starting with the ‘editing’ of schoolbooks on first two panels of page 48: “After all this joy, a major misfortune took place: the schools closed during this period, reopened, and… ‘Children, tear out all the photos of the shah from your books.’ ‘But she was the one who told us that the shah was chosen by god!’”
The search by many government for various countries “true” history continues, and I appreciated this look into how someone living there actually feels about it. Often one wonders how people of a country simply “accept” things their government tells them, and Persepolis shows us how the confusion affects everyone -- and how sometimes other things and life just get in the way. For the adults of the society, the government story isn’t accepted or believed so much as ignored, among everything else that needs to be worried about it.