Persepolis, written by Marjane Satrapi, is a memoir depicting the life of a young girl growing up during the Islamic Revolution in Iran during the late 1970’s. Before the Islamic Revolution the country of Iran was run by a westernized ruler called the Shah. After the Shah is overthrown the country’s new government places new religious rules making if obligatory for women, and sometimes men, to wear specific clothing in public. A key theme I picked up on in the book is the theme of rights, specifically women's rights.
Marjane Satrapi writes the women and their roles in her book as strong willed and very active in politics. In the book there are two main groups of women. Those who were strongly for the revolution and those who were strongly against
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She starts to realize that her role as a woman is based on what her government decides. She soon starts to do little acts of defiance. She wears Nike shoes when she is not supposed to, she wears jeans and a michael Jackson pin, she shows her hair through her veil, and she defies the teachers to the point of where she is expelled. Marjane says “ I learned that you should always be louder than your aggressor” (pg. 143). She has a lot of trouble fitting in to the expectations of her school, mainly because she has suffered so much from the rule of the Islamic Revolution. She views her teachers and principle as a symbol of the regime, and she acts out against it. Even though Marji was a troublemaker and could have listened better in school, because she had the opportunity to go to school, she shows us as readers that it's important to stand up for your rights, both male and female rights. She showed us that just because someone is telling you can’t do something because they don’t like what you stand for, doesn’t mean you have to conform to their ideas. In the word’s of Marji’s grandmother “always keep your dignity and be true to yourself”