Marjane Satrapi begins her “Introduction” to Persepolis with some moments in Iran’s history, as well as these words:

I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists.  I also don’t want those Iranians who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom, who died in the war against Iraq, who suffered under various repressive regimes, or who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland to be forgotten.

Her final introductory words are, “One should forgive but never forget.”  Among other things, this memoir is a eulogy to the dead and a documentation of the living.  As Anoosh encourages Marjane to learn and remember her family history and national history, the memoir announces its own writing, perhaps one moment of its inception in the “Moscow” sequence (Satrapi 54-61).  Having lived in exile, been imprisoned, and eventually having been killed, Anoosh speaks out of more than one grave, all his own.  When he lives in the USSR, contact with family probably resides on a spectrum from unwise to impossible, with the death always clinging atop the measuring dial.  Returning from this exile, he returns from a grave, from a conceptual (and very real) space bounded by the threat of death and separating him from his family and from a homeland in which he was very politically active.  Sitting with Marjane, he is on the precipice of death, telling her critical details about national/family history, and he is very much alive.  This preserves Anoosh, if only within this text, from historical anonymity and from complete depersonalization as one of “those Iranians who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom.”  In other words, he’s not a place-holding device to designate liminal space between the living and the dead, although he may occupy that space, along with many other people.  We see him speak, and we see him as a newsprint photo and as damning headline, as someone who becomes to those who don’t know him a “Russian Spy Executed,” a stock image of fear, the intrusion of enemy influence, the threat of Soviet invasion, the threat of betrayal by one’s own (Satrapi 70).  This is the always incomplete reconciliation of the story and the story, of the public and the private stories, of the private stories excised from the public, of the public stories exiled from the public, of the indivisibility of those realms of narrative.

Something is always “forgotten.”  For the three men that Marjane knows who have suffered imprisonment and torture, there are numerous panels of anonymous dead: in the movie theater (Satrapi 15), in the post-Black Friday massacres (Satrapi 40), and “[t]housands of young kids, promised a better life, [explode] on the minefields” (Satrapi 102).  Panels of the living abound, as well: people scream, “Down with the king!” and “[throw] stones at the army” (Satrapi 18), “the country [has] the biggest celebration of its history” when the Shah leaves power (Satrapi 42), women protest the imposition of veils (Satrapi 76), students “mourn the war dead” (Satrapi 95), and kids are “recruit[ed]…for the front,” (Satrapi 101).  The word choice emphasizes that Satrapi can’t possibly know all the names of people protesting, killed, killing, or celebrating (“massacres,” “[t]housands of young kids,” “the country,” etc.), and the images often use similar eye, eyebrow, and hair lines along with synced arm and mouth motions (fists in the air and mouths shouting).  However, Marjane and her family are present in several of these panels, including the veil protest and the in-school mourning for the “war dead,” among others.  This presence of “known” people amongst what could initially appear to be stylistically homogenized images (people throwing stones in unison, people dying as if in a fabric design) renders it impossible to collapse the living and dead into one cookie cutter coping mechanism image or into idealized images of unified revolution.  Marjane cannot always know her friends’ sentiments, but she can express her own and attempt to present dialogue that grapples with reasons/ways to live and die during a period in her childhood and in Iran’s history.

The mourning students do not resemble uniform copies of one image, although they could initially appear to because of their staggering/placement almost atop one another (giving the appearance of anonymously layered, living bodies) and their shared motion of breast-beating (Satrapi 95).  Their eyes all have different expressions, although they all strive to evince the appropriate gestures through eyes and hands, and Marjane is among them.  She may not know who lives, dies, is imprisoned, goes into exile, has a relatively uneventful life, and all the various ways that national histories determine personal histories and vice versa, but she can place herself among the living, to show that at this moment of mourning the “war dead,” she is among the living honoring the dead, not anonymous and not in a liminal space.  Simultaneously, she is in a liminal space, participating in a ritualized awareness that death is always a possibility, that anonymity is always a possibility (as one of the “war dead” or as someone whose history is suffers attempted erasure through disappearance).  This mourning is complicated, enforced (but not necessarily "only" enforced), public, and very intimate.

When people celebrate the overthrow of the Shah, everyone has different hairstyles, eyebrow lines, and fabric patterns on their clothes (Satrapi 42).  However, they all have fabric patterns on their clothes, and many people make a “Victory” hand gesture.  Staggered atop one another as in the panel of students mourning the “war dead,” people are differently sized to show their proportions in relation to one another, with the “closest” and therefore largest people near the bottom left and right hand corners of the panel.  We have to face Persepolis’ joy and probably that of her parents in the panel, even if we can’t identify the other people celebrating.  This is not a stock photo of regime change and human happiness, but it’s a stock photo of regime change and human happiness; many of the people in this panel are simultaneously remembered and forgotten in this very panel, anonymous but drawn, celebrating together but evoking as many conversations/conflicts as Persepolis attributes to family and friends.  Panels that invoke and subvert patterning, anonymity, and homogenization like this one write anonymity into itself; they show historical erasure and cannot necessarily show what is erased in the form of particular people’s lives outside of those of Persepolis, her friends, and her family, a celebration of the living and the dead without conflating the two and while exposing the slippage between the two.  These panels are suggest who can be mourned and who is mourned incompletely, whose stories can be invoked rather than “fully” written, a gesture towards what disappearance entails.