Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return is the sequel to Marjane Satrapi’s bestselling graphic memoir, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, which was published in four volumes between 2000 and 2003. The early memoir documents Marjane’s childhood in Iran during the transition to fundamentalist Islamic control and concludes in her departure at age 14 in 1984. Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return was released in 2004 and documents the author’s teenage years in Austria and her eventual return to Iran. The sequel deals heavily with the lingering trauma of childhood in repressive Iran, her exploration of freedom of expression and sexuality in Europe, and her eventual return to her family, roots, and culture in Iran. Originally written in French, the graphic memoirs were intended for a Western audience. The sequel garnered acclaim for its improved art, honesty, and the continuation of the bildungsroman that began with book one. The series was made into an animated movie in 2007.

This guide is based on the 2007 Pantheon e-book edition of The Complete Persepolis.

Content Warning: The source material discusses drug addiction, suicide, and war.

Summary

The story follows but one character: Marjane. The autobiographical memoir opens with Marjane already in an Austrian boarding school waiting to meet her roommate. She is 14 years old, sent to Europe by progressive parents during the Iran-Iraq war and the transition to fundamentalist Islamic control of the country in 1984.

Her first months in Austria are rife with transition. She has no support, no family, and she is in a new culture going through difficult teenage adaptations. Her parents intended for her to live with family friends, but after less than two weeks she is deposited at a Catholic boarding school. At school she attempts to assimilate by reading about her punk rebel friends’ preferred philosophies. When she is expelled for insulting a nun, Marjane moves in with Julie, a friend from school who lives with her mother. During this time, Marjane learns of the open sexuality of her new environment. She believes that these experiences have truly showed her the sexual revolution and is both hesitant and curious to learn more.

Marjane has a growth spurt and attempts to assimilate further by mimicking the punk appearance of her counterculture friends. She begins to take drugs. She has failed to identify who she is as a young woman and continues to look outward for acceptance. Still, she struggles to find comfort in her identity. At a party someone asks if she is Iranian, and she lies. Later, she overhears teenagers talking about her and yells, “I am Iranian and proud of it!” (43). She learns that, in Europe, she will always be seen as the Iranian woman from a repressive culture suffering and languishing in war. She cannot unshackle herself from this identity and instead leans into it.

After this, there is a break of unspecified time. When the narrative picks back up, she has left Julie’s apartment and finds herself living in a temporary home with eight gay men. She has grown out her hair, grown much taller, and has returned to the clothing she wore when she arrived in Austria. Marjane is calm, organized, and calculating now, and yet she also increases her drug use and begins to explore her own sexuality with mixed success. She trials several boyfriends before taking Markus, a literary blond, as her first true male companion.

They spend two years together, much of which is not documented in the memoir. Time leaps and stalls during this period while she begins to deal drugs, barely graduates school, and applies for advanced studies that she does not attend. She finds a job and tries to get involved in local politics. She no longer feels connected with Markus, and has lost touch with friends. Her political activism is confined to cafes and cigarette-laden discussions that provide little more than entertainment.

The downward spiral culminates when, on her 18th birthday, Marjane catches Markus in bed with a blonde woman. Enraged, she ends up on the streets, eating out of dumpsters and getting ill from the Austrian winter. After several months of deep depression and introspection, Marjane awakens in a hospital, nearly dead. She passed out in a public park, and the kindness of a stranger was her only reason for surviving. When she recovers, she returns to the home her parents originally sent her to and finds that her uncle, parents, and Iranian family have all been searching for her. She asks to come home to Iran.

In Iran, she struggles to shed the depression that lingers from her breakup with Markus. She sees her time in Europe as a failure and feels guilty because life in Iran while she was away was brutally difficult. Some of her friends are dead, others have disabilities from injuries. Homes are gone, and the streets have been renamed for the martyrs. Hundreds of thousands died while she was away in Austria. Her trials in Europe now feel trivial.

Her attempts to connect with friends and family are fruitless. Still depressed, Marjane attempts to die by suicide. When she does not die, she turns to exercise and preening and soon becomes a beautiful aerobics instructor. She has not found her harbor but has found a way to pass the time. Marjane struggles to be accepted by her peers. In Iran she is seen as the westerner—a woman influenced and perhaps corrupted by a foreign culture.

At a party, Marjane meets Reza, a handsome former soldier who is now a painter. They hit it off and keep their relationship quiet so as not to arouse suspicion from the Guardians of the Revolution, a militarized group that monitors citizen morality. Marjane is very much in love with Reza. Together, they study for the university entrance exam and pass. They climb to the head of their class.

At university, Marjane studies graphic art. She is vocal about her dislike of the required female dress and is asked by the school to design something that adheres to the Koran while also allowing female students to move freely. She is accepted by some students but rebuked for her sexual promiscuity by the more conservative crowd. This pleases her, and she soon finds herself with many like-minded acquaintances.

She spends her days sketching models covered in lumpy clothing. At night, the artists gather behind closed doors and sketch one another. They drink, dance, and party well into the mornings but each day attend classes as law-abiding students. At times, the Guardians raid their parties and arrest them. The parents pay a fee, which Marjane calls a bribe, and the students are released. They repeat this several times. At one party, a male student runs from the Guardians and falls off a rooftop trying to escape. He dies, but the other students continue to throw parties. Marjane is neither moved by the student’s death nor by the fines her parents pay to sustain her counterculture lifestyle.

One day, Marjane is worried that the Guardians of the Revolution are coming for her because she is wearing lipstick in public while waiting to meet Reza. To divert attention, she accuses a stranger of speaking indecently to her. The stranger is arrested and Marjane and Reza laugh about this. At the time, Marjane is angry that she gets in trouble for wearing bright socks or showing hair or wrist or wearing makeup. When she tells her grandmother what she did in a fit of laughter, the grandmother sharply rebukes her and shames her for tarnishing their family’s strong moral legacy.

Because they are tired of hiding their relationship, Reza and Marjane marry. Marjane’s father convinces Reza to write the option for divorce into their contract, and they have a lavish ceremony with over 400 guests. After the wedding, Marjane immediately regrets the decision. They sleep in separate rooms and their relationship slowly withers. Marjane no longer makes an effort to amuse or appease him, and he appears disinterested in her friends, politics, or art. She spends all of her time at her parents’ house watching TV once her parents get a satellite dish that allows for Western programming. In the background, the Kuwait-Iraq war begins, a war that Marjane and her father blame on the west.

Eventually, Marjane tires of her dull marriage and a life in which she is one person by night and another by day. She tells her parents that she will divorce. Happy that their daughter will become a liberated woman again, they send her back to Europe with a promise never to return to Iran. The final lines of the graphic memoir concern the grandmother’s death while Marjane is in exile.

The artistic style of the illustrations is simple and bold, drawn in black and white using clean lines and swirling, curved shapes.