Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis (2007), is the first diasporic autobiographical work by an Iranian female author that has adopted the Western form of graphic novel. Satrapi tells the story of growing up amidst and moving away from a revolution and a war in Iran and later moving to Europe into exile, only to face a crisis larger than the one she faced at home: one of identity. Autobiographies can assert or help establish one’s identity, which can become fragmented or severely altered when one settles in a country with different cultural norms than their own culture.
In graphic autobiographies images and words accompany each other, and thus the portrayal of the self can be traced in the drawings as well as the writings. In this paper I will be studying Satrapi’s style to explorer her portrayal of a fragmented self. Focusing on the visual, I will be discussing how Satrapi’s drawings of her “self” affected the expression of the self. Scholars have called cartooning a new way of “seeing.” Such choices made for the “way of seeing” and “being seen” on the part of the creator obviously affects identity formation. In case of Persepolis, we see Satrapi creating multiple fragments of a self (a self-constructed fiction of identity) through her visualizations. For this purpose her cartooning style, literal and visual framing and mirroring as subject formation, and the role of creative memory will be discussed.
