Prophecy in Persepolis

Hey guys--

Sorry for the late response! Intense and exhausting weekend. But, here it goes...

Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis ignited an interesting religious undertone, which I would not really necessarily consider an abandonment of religion, but rather a reconfiguring of what religion meant to the narrator from the get-go. Page six, the fourth illustrated page in the text, immediately places us into the narrator’s religious thought process: “Deep down I was very religious…I was born with religion” (6), and we continue to experience her desire to become a prophet throughout the first portion of the text. Satrapi’s illustration of a God is reoccurring up until page 70, and although we do not see that depiction or her relationship with God past that point, it seems as if the prophetic side of the narrator occurs through her actions, which she describes as “rebellious.”

Satrapi says that the reasons she thought she “was the last prophet by age six” was because their maid did not eat with them, her father drove a Cadillac, and her grandmother’s knees hurt (6), which makes me think of not necessarily the “rules” of religion but rather the interpretations that the narrator took from her understanding of what it meant to be connected with God. The reader pretty regularly encounters a depiction of child Satrapi interacting with God on what seems to be an intimate level (pages 8, 9, 13, 14, 16, 25, 30, 53, 70), and we can see that once we get deeper into the story, His appearances become less frequent and ultimately disappear after she tells Him to go away. This, to me, speaks to somewhat of a friendship with God as opposed to the “you must do everything that I say” God that is mentioned through teachers at a later date in the story (the concept of heaven, hell, paradise for the little boy soldiers, which was confusing to Satrapi and her family pgs 98-102). Of course, this is after the renouncing of the God figure on page 70. But, I would say that the narrator continues to achieve her prophetic desire through tackling and considering the social constructs (which she concludes are the reasons behind her desire to turn Prophet).

The reader is encountered with the food problem not only by the maid’s place NOT at the dinner table, but also through the multiple grocery store scenes (87-88; 92-93). Each of these scenes depict the extreme lack of food in grocery stores and gas stations during the bombings—because Satrapi includes them, she places herself in a position similar to her childhood maid who was not allowed to eat at the table with her family—the wealthy individuals are brought to a similar stature as their previous help. These pages, too, show her family’s Cadillac out of working order. Her father cannot find gas to fuel the car, and the car acted as a status symbol, and therefore the family’s status decreased to the status of those who previously did not have expensive cars. Each family became the same in through the destruction caused by the war, and social class became less important, very similar to what I know of the Christian faith and the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament.

It is so interesting to me that through the destruction of her home, Satrapi’s prophetic rules become somewhat truths, but in a way that articulates itself as negative (due to the death of thousands, war, etc). Even more interesting is that the narrator says that the beginning of the war coincides with her “Shut up, get out of my life!!!!” proclamation to her God figure (70-71). I feel like there are a zillion million things to say about the act of prophecy and religion in this text (and really, everything about this text)… and am not totally sure how to articulate them at this moment. Such as the reoccurring statement “too much” (I can’t find the page numbers). And (!) the mention of Zarathustra (pg 7), which if one has read “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Friedrich Nietzsche, has its own underlying meanings around the notion of prophecy.