Persepolis II

I found Marjane Satrapi’s identity shifts in Persepolis II incredibly interesting. We begin the memoir with her arrival in Austria and placed directly into a Catholic Boarding School after spending just ten days with her mother’s best friend, Zozo. This is the first encounter in II that deals with an uncertain personal identity of Marji—we see her converse with Shirin, a girl of her age, who has interest in make-up and earmuffs, while Marji struggles with her recent exposure to the war at home. The lower panels on this page (2) and their illustrations signify and foreshadow, to me, the split Marji may feel in her identity throughout the rest of the memoir: the background is cut directly in half with white on the top, black on the bottom; Marji’s facial expression shifts from pleasant to distraught fairly quickly, allowing us to see this flip-flop outside of the background and onto the characters. I found it so fascinating in comparison to Persepolis I: although there were the beginnings of a lack or confusing personal identity for Marji, it wasn’t as apparent in the illustrations or text, and the beginning of this memoir automatically shows a shift in her understanding of herself.

Marji continues to search for her place in Austria through her ability to shift her identity to something that seems to fit in. Almost the entire “Pasta” section shows her physical transformations through the different friend groups that she encounters. This made me question what mental or emotional transformations she chose to undergo in order to solve this identity crisis—she’s constantly informing and educating herself to better understand the world, and I wouldn’t say she completely placed her culture on the backburner in order to fit in, but it does seem like she lost herself for a while during her years at school. It isn’t until she outwardly proclaims herself proud that we as readers see a claiming of a solid identity in a country that isn’t her own (42-43).

Alas, we see Marji’s identity shift again when she returns to Iran. She feels unsettled with the changes of her home city, perhaps without the recognition that she, too, had shifted and changed in the time that she had been away. She feels alone and somewhat secluded around all the people that she used to know, both family and friends, and clearly their shifts of perspective vastly varied. She claims that she feels as if she is “constantly wearing a mask” (117), is seen as a Western woman by her female Iranian friends (115), and that she’s “A Westerner in Iran, and an Iranian in the West” (118).  These reflections lead to an attempted and failed suicide, preceded by another transformation into a sophisticated woman (119). This, to me, seems like so many identity shifts that it’s confusing whether or not she really does have a solid grasp on who she is or who she thinks she is. I cant even imagine the back and forth between two different spheres of existence and how that can be reactive to how you present yourself and your identity, particularly at the young age Marji began these transformative shifts in both her physical and mental worlds. By the end of the memoir it seems that she knows who and what she is, and perhaps without the extreme situations and constant identity shifting she wouldn’t feel as comfortable in herself and her mixed identity.