Persepolis 2

There's a lot to talk about in Persepolis 2. I'm interested in tracking Marjane's affiliation with religion, which she never really discusses in Persepolis 2, even though it's a source of frustration and confusion in the first book. On page 129, Marjane prays to God to help her pass her test. On the very next page, Marjane claims after having passed that the man who interviewed her is a "truly" religious man. Marjane doesn't outright explain what she means by truly, and she doesn't elaborate on what it might mean to not be "truly" religious either. In the punk sense, I guess she could mean that this man is not a poser- he's the real deal. He appreciates Marjane's honesty concerning the veil and even remarks that she is the only applicant who told the truth about how she felt. Marjane brings up the notion of being "truly" religious once more in Persepolis 2. Even though Marjane renounces God in the first book, she acknowledges that there are good people still out there even in the face of disillusionment and the allure of forbidden things that results from the enforcing of traditionalist ideals. Marjane must necessarily draw this distinction between "truly" and "fake" based on her experiences in Vienna where she encounters to her astonishment and disappointment fake anarchists. Playing tag in the woods and listening to Janis Joplin is not punk, much like anyone who claims to be religious is not necessarily good or aligned with God. To be "truly" religious in Marjane's eyes, one must defy the law (which interestingly happens to be a requirement of anarchism,) because the law is oppressive, and doesn't allow individuals to be true to themselves, much less have a relationship with God. Marjane even mentions that the person she is forced to be in public is so profoundly different from the person she is in private that the contrast produces of feeling that can only be described as "schizophrenic". Moreover, painting the city of Tehran with murals of martyrs and forcing students to study religion doesn't mask the truth that the regime and the war are wholly ungodly (no pun intended.)

I would like to expand on this trend of parallelism in the Persepolis series, but also suggest that perhaps this model no longer applies in the second book where nothing is as plain and simple as it would be from the perspective of a child. Various people suggested last week in class and in their blogs that Marjane's personal rebellion can be tracked according to the revolution occurring in Iran. As Marjane matures, however, her rebelliousness translates into self-destructiveness and ultimately results in a loss of identity, rather than a formation of identity through rebellion. On a personal level, Marjane turns first to fashion and music, then to sex, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, aerobics, and finally marriage to try to reconcile her fragmentation of identity as a result of leaving her country at an early and age and then returning a few years later to the facts of what transpired after she left Iran. Rebelling through superficial things like makeup, the veil, etc., no longer seems that crucial to Marjane now that such superficialities are used to consistently deflect from serious questions concerning freedom, quality of life, war, etc.

I think it could be educational to just meditate on the last few words of the novel: "Freedom had a price..." (page 187). It certainly does. When else is this the case? Why does Marjane choose to end the book with this?