The Power of Persepolis | School Library Journal
The Power of Persepolis
by Sara Amini
Jul 14, <a href="https://comicvibe.com/new-anime-on-netflix-in-august-2026/” title=”New Anime on Netflix in August 2026″>2026
| Filed in News & Features
Iranian-American author Sara Amini remembers the impact of Marjane Satrapi’s work
I was first introduced to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolisin in my 20s, at a time when I was searching for a deeper connection to my Iranian heritage. Prior to that, I had only visited Iran once, in 2006, when I was 18 and fresh out of high school. And when your father is the only member of his large family who immigrated to the United States, those precious days on precious soil are not spent taking in art and 
architecture but visiting cousins and second cousins and someone who is your uncle (but not really, he’s just a family friend whom you must respect as though he were a blood relative). Everyone wanted to know about Ali, the one who left Iran during the revolution, married a Colombian woman, and was raising three American-born children.
I, too, wanted to know about Ali. My father, permissive and open-minded and philosophical, was (and still is) a closed book when it came to being a young person living in Iran before and during its revolution. Not to say that he doesn’t find himself in the past often—I know about his early childhood years, down to the smell of the fruit trees in his village that lined the main dirt road. Or his years spent as a teenager going to Tehran cinemas, where he would order a mortadella sandwich and Coca-Cola during the film’s intermission. But from about the time he was 20 in 1978, to 1984 when he met my mother in Houston, there is a gap in my father’s history which I know almost nothing about.
Like many, I turn to art to gain a more meaningful connection to the world, and, for someone who is of mixed-race heritage, as a means to grasp at fragments of my identity that often feel out of reach. Something about the Iranian revolution has always eluded me. Perhaps because it is cited so often by activists and scholars to help others understand it from an intellectual perspective, yet my father’s suppression of the topic never allowed me to understand it from an emotionalperspective. With Persepolis,I found my way in.
What Satrapi—who died June 4 at age 56—created felt both personal yet familiar to me. I immediately recognized my father’s defiant spirit and incessant questioning of authority that has gotten him in trouble (though he’d never see it as “trouble”). I grasped that to love your country as deeply as Iranians do, you must be both proud and critical of it. I discovered humor as a way to cope with pain. And I understood at once why I’ve always found my dad to be so funny, or perhaps more soberingly, wherehis funny was coming from.
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Sara Amini
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This was also my first time reading a graphic novel (or as Satrapi preferred, comic). I was floored that someone could tell a memoir in this medium. Persepolismanages to highlight a time in history that is irrevocably devastating to its people, while simultaneously capturing the universality of a coming-of-age story. While I did not know what it was like to grow up against the backdrop of war and an oppressive regime, I could relate to a precocious and independent young girl, because I was one myself. As the eldest, I often felt torn between childhood and adulthood. I randomly spoke to God. I had crushes and heartbreaks. And I too believed I didn’t fit neatly into one conventional box.
Though writing a graphic novel was never on my radar, a growing desire to share my own coming of age, as the mixed-race, first-born daughter to immigrant parents, was. I revisited Persepolisin my 30s, just as my wonderful collaborator, Shadia Amin, who is Colombian of Lebanese-Palestinian descent, came aboard to help me tell Mixed Feelingsvisually. Initial,y I’d written a collection of essays to bond with other biracial misfits searching for belonging, but Shadia’s connection to my experience elevated the text, and now I cannot see my story depicted any other way. Her illustrations captured the period, heightened the humor, and made nuanced, intimate moments really shine. And something about seeingmy real family and friends on the page took me back to my youth and set about a self-healing I didn’t know I needed.
That’s the beauty of memoirs. They are specific to one’s experience, yet we can all recognize parts of ourselves in someone else’s story. And little by little, those recognitions allow us to liberate ourselves from the confines placed on us—whether cultural, societal, or self-imposed. Marjane Satrapi, like all Iranian women I know and love, was not a woman confined. Her spirit is reflected in the continued fight for liberation in the face of obedience, persecution, and death—a testament that the bravery of Iranian women, then and now, knows no bounds.
Persepolisis one of the most influential works of our time
“It completely transformed me,” Shadia says. “At a time when I was trapped in the depths of denying my identity, riddled with shame, her story taught me to stand proud of who I am. Marjane inspired me and countless others to embrace our heritage, to choose kindness, and to stay fiercely true to our values. She gave us a mirror to see our own worth.”
I am equally as grateful for her impact. She helped to bridge some of the gaps in my dad’s life and showed me that graphic novels can be a profoundly effective way to tell your own story. Her legacy, one of courage, conviction, and punk rock, will endure, and we are so lucky for that
Sara Amini is an actress and the author ofMixed Feelings
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