ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how Satrapi employs the bande desinee comic format in conjunction with the form of the autobiographical “coming-of-age” narrative to disrupt the safety and universality of its representations. Satrapi challenges the position that sees childhood as an apolitical category and a romanticised state of innocence to explore the subjectivity of the child persona by framing the personally identifiable elements with the politically dissonant. Satrapi subverts westernised models of framing the child, the autobiographical subject, the Iranian and the Muslim woman as alterities to be appropriated into a western subject position. Instead, she plays on familiar stereotypes only to feed in slippages in a non-seamless assimilation of images. Through the avatars Marji/Marjane she does not pressure her viewers to “know” or comprehend these experiences fully, yet Persepolis invites notions of shared experience and leaves them open for exploration, questioning and discussions, and the imploration to not forget.
