The Little Persian Girl and Other SHort Stories

It definitely has its moving parts and I did cry some. Naipaul, Anne Tyler, and other writers, Nahid Rachlin has spent her career writing novels about hidden Iran-the combustible political passions underlying everyday life and the family dramas of ordinary Iranians. With her long-awaited memoir, Persian Girls, she turns her sharp novelist's With her long-awaited memoir, Persian Girls , she turns her sharp novelist's eye on her own remarkable life. When Rachlin was an infant, her mother gave her to Maryam, Rachlin's barren and widowed aunt. For the next nine years, the little girl lived a blissful Iranian childhood.

Then one day, Rachlin's father kidnapped his daughter from her schoolyard, and from the only mother she'd ever known, and returned her to her birth family-strangers to the young girl. In a story of ambition, oppression, hope, heartache, and sisterhood, Persian Girls traces Rachlin's coming of age in Iran under the late Shah-and her domineering father-her tangled family life, and her relationship with her older sister, and unexpected soul mate, Pari.

Both girls refused to accept traditional roles prescribed for them under Muslim cultural laws. They devoured forbidden books. They had secret romances. Her story details the impact of war and religious extremism on Iranians, especially women. Belonging to an upper-class family, Marji has access to various reading materials and is exposed to Western political thought at a very young age. By discovering the ideas of numerous philosophers, Marji reflects on her class privilege and also uncovers her family's political background.

This inspires her to participate in popular demonstrations against the Shah's regime where people are asking for his exile as a way to safeguard their rights. Unfortunately, after the Shah's departure, Marji notices the rise of religious extremism in her society and is unhappy about it. However, her uncle's visit deepens her interest in politics when he tells her stories of being imprisoned as a communist revolutionary making her value ideas of equality and resistance.

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After an abrupt family vacation to Europe, Marji returns to Iran where the government has declared war against Iraq. As Tehran comes under attack she finds safety in her basement, the bomb shelter. Amidst the chaos of an ongoing war her family secretly revolts against the new regime by having parties and consuming alcohol, which is now prohibited in the country.

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Two years of war force Marji to explore her rebellious side by skipping classes, obsessing over boys, and visiting the black market that has grown around the shortages caused by war and repression. As the war intensifies, Marji rushes home one day to find a long-range ballistic missile has hit her street. She is traumatized at the sight of her friend's dead body and expresses her anger against the Iranian political system. Her family begins to worry about her safety and decide to send her off to Austria for further study.

The novel ends with her departure to Europe. The second part of the series takes place in Vienna where Marji starts her new life at a boarding house. Since she cannot speak German upon arrival, Marji finds it hard to communicate but eventually overcomes it and makes friends. She assimilates into the culture by celebrating Christmas and going to mass. Away from home, Marji's Irani identity deepens and she is expelled from the school after an altercation with a nun who accuses her of being ignorant. No longer in school Marji starts living with her friend Julie and her mother.

Here, she experiences more culture shock when Julie talks about her sexual endeavors given that such topics are a taboo in Iran.

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Soon enough, she undergoes a physical and ideological transformation by abusing drugs and changing her appearance while continuing to move homes. Marji finally settles on a room with Frau Dr. Heller, but their relationship is unstable. Issues also arise in her relationships and she again finds comfort in drugs.

Finally as the fights worsen, Marji leaves Dr. Heller's house after an accusation of stealing a brooch forcing her to become homeless for over two months. As her condition worsens, Marji reaches out to her parents who arrange for her to move back and thus after living in Vienna for 4 years, she returns to Tehran. At the airport, she recognizes how different Iran is from Austria. Donning her veil once more to go out, she takes in the foot murals of martyrs, rebel slogans, and the streets renamed after the dead. At home, her father tells her the horrors of the war and they talk deep into the night.

After hearing what her parents had gone through while she was away in Vienna, she resolves never to tell them of her time there.

Persian Girls

However, her trauma from Austria makes her fall into depression forcing her to attempt suicide twice. When she survives, she takes it as a sign to live and starts her process of recovery by looking after her health and taking up a job. Following her return to Iran Marji meets Reza, also a painter, and they soon begin to date. In Reza proposes marriage to Marji, and after some contemplation, she accepts. Her mother, Taji, warns her that she has gotten married too young and she soon realizes that she feels trapped in the role of a permanent wife.

Later on in Marji confides in her friend, Farnaz, that she no longer loves Reza and wants a divorce. Farnaz advises her to stay together because divorced women are socially scorned, but her grandmother urges her to get a divorce. After much contemplation, Marji decides to separate with a reluctant Reza. She goes to her parents and tells them about her and Reza's divorce and they comment on how proud they are of her and suggest that she should leave Iran permanently and live a better life back in Europe.

Background

In late before her departure for Europe, Marji visits the countryside outside of Tehran, the Caspian Sea , the grave of her grandfather, and the prison building where her uncle Anoosh is buried. In the autumn, Marji along with her parents and grandmother go to Mehrabad Airport for their final goodbye as she heads off to live in Paris. Persepolis is a non-fictional graphic autobiography, or a graphic novel based on Satrapi's life.

Later, writers such as Aaron McGruder and Ho Che Anderson used graphic novels to discuss themes such as Sudanese orphans and civil rights movements. This genre has become an appropriate forum for examining critical matters by using illustrations to discuss foreign topics, such as those discussed in Persepolis. Persepolis uses visual literacy through its comics to enhance the message of the text. Visual literacy stems from the belief that pictures can be "read.

Satrapi uses the context of the Iranian Revolution to criticize the hypocrisy of state-enforced social pressures that seek to enact violence. The veil is a popular symbol of Middle Eastern culture and Satrapi uses it to challenge ethnocentric perceptions about Middle Eastern culture and feminism. The portrayal of the veil in Persepolis has also been used to combat the Western perception that the veil is solely a symbol of oppression. Due to the nature of artistic choices made in Persepolis by virtue of it being an illustrated memoir, readers have faced difficulty in placing it into a genre.

The term "novel" most commonly refers to books that are fiction. Thus, there is some controversy surrounding how to classify the genre of Persepolis , being that it is non-fiction.

Ancient Iran

Nima Naghibi and Andrew O'Malley, professors of English at Ryerson University illustrate this by stating how bookstores have had issues with shelving Persepolis under a single label. An article from a journal on multicultural education written about teaching Persepolis in a middle school classroom acknowledges Satrapi's decision to use this genre of literature as a way for "students to disrupt the one-dimensional image of Iran and Iranian women. The original French series was published by L'Association in four volumes, one volume per year, from to When the series gained critical acclaim, it was translated into many different languages.

In , Pantheon Books published parts 1 and 2 in a single volume English translation with new cover art under the title Persepolis which was translated by Blake Ferris and Mattias Ripa, Satrapi's husband; parts 3 and 4 also with new cover art followed in as Persepolis 2 , translated by Anjali Singh. In October , Pantheon repackaged the two English language volumes in a single volume with film tie-in cover art under the title The Complete Persepolis.

Upon its release, the graphic novel received high praise, but was also met with criticism and calls for censorship. Friere and Macedo argue that teaching Persepolis in a Middle School classroom has proved to be beneficial in the development of students' literacy and critical thinking skills, which are necessary to help them interpret the world around them.