Persepolis
Drawings
The
drawings are important to understanding what things were like in Iran at the
time that the book talks about and for understanding how Marji saw things. She was just 10 years old at the time when
her country had a revolution. The
country had just gotten rid of a leader that the people thought was bad. Then, there were new leaders. Many things were changing about how people
lived their lives. There were many new
rules, and people were being put in jail, beaten and killed. Since Marji was only 10 years old, she did
not understand a lot of what was happening, or why. The drawings help tell the story. The drawings help the reader better
understand the story of what is happening in the country, not just what a 10
year old girl can tell of the story.
When I
first started to read the book, in the part called “The Veil”, I noticed that
all of the girls looked the same. They
had the same kind of black veil covering their hair. The drawings do not look like real people,
but I could see that all of the girls looked unhappy. The words did not say that the girls were
unhappy, but the drawing did. None of
the drawings look like real people, but you can tell when people are happy or
unhappy, or if something mean has happened.
There are drawings of people being beaten, some being burned, and a man
whose body has been cut into pieces. The
words and the drawings both tell parts of the story.
One drawing that stands out as important to me is the
drawing on page 42, “The day he left, the country had the biggest celebration
of its entire history”. The drawing is
full of happy people. Everyone is happy
because the old leader is gone. People
are dressed in all kinds of clothes. Men,
women, boys and girls are all together.
It looks like they are thinking that everything will be great now. The people are celebrating their freedom, but
from what the new leaders do, we know that the new leaders are not good. With the new leaders, people are less
free. They have to live under all kinds
of new rules. People are all dressed
alike in black clothes. Women and girls
had to cover their hair, and boys and girls were kept apart. The colleges were closed for a while because
the new leaders did not like what they were teaching. The new leaders were beating and killing
people too. In that drawing, people were
celebrating their freedom. But, they
were less free now. Marji and her mother
both found out that they were less free in the drawing one on page 76, “…when
suddenly things got nasty”. Marji and her
mother had gone to a meeting to fight against the strict religious rules. Marji wanted to go and her mother thought that
it would be good if Marji learned to help defend the rights of women. They did not have scarves covering their
heads. They ran into a crowd of angry
religious men who were going to beat them because they were not wearing scarves,
and they ran away. Living under the new
rules seemed worse than having the bad leader from before.
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