Persepolis

              Marji always had a close relationship with her family throughout the story, even when she was in Austria (excluding the time when she was alone on the street for a couple months). No matter how far gone she seemed to be, they always knew how to bring her back. For instance, when she came back from Austria and she was deeply depressed, they always stood by her side reminding her of who she was and why that was important. And all the while she was in Austria, when she was doing things that she knew wouldn’t impress her parents, the thought of them usually grounded her back to her roots. When she told the one man in Austria that she was French, not Iranian, the thought of what her grandmother would think of her saying that made her yell out how she was proud to be Iranian when the girls were making fun of her. She always had her family in her mind. When drinking and parties were outlawed in Iran, her parents continued to have them and to drink alcohol and play games. They said they needed this for their survival. So many things were taken away from them after the war began, they needed something to keep them alive and to keep them happy. Which is why it was worth the risk of getting caught having parties, because if they didn’t have them, they will have given in to just about all of the restrictions that had been put on them, that they wouldn’t hardly have their own identity anymore. Their family did what they needed to do to stay sane.

                  I didn’t understand what the title Persepolis had to do with the novel at first. And I’m still not exactly sure that what I think about the title is correct. I didn’t even know where the name “Persepolis” came from until I was reading the book in the middle school classroom here in Pullman that I am teaching in, one of the students came up to me and asked what I was reading. I showed him, I think the graphic novel part of it interested him, but when he saw the title he said “Oh, Persepolis, that’s like the Old Persian country”. And then I asked him what he meant, because the book took place in Iran and then in Austria. He then explained to me that Persepolis means city of Persians and that it was in part of where Iran is now. He knew a lot about this because his family came from Saudi Arabia so they learned more about there than I had ever learned about it. And then it made sense why in the novel, she said she spoke Persian, which I didn’t really know that was a language in Iran, realizing how little I knew about Iran in general. I thought about the idea of Old Persia. In the novel, Marji and her family are always talking about how restricted they are because of what is new, and how they wish things were as they were before. When their city was probably originally all alike, a city of Persians, now with new government and war bringing in new ideas and new restrictions. They only wanted to go back to how it was for them, with everything was comfortable and normal. I think that is at least part of why the novel is titled Persepolis.