Satrapi’s Persepolis contests the complacency of Nafisi’s memoir

Evidence

Another celebrated recent instance of the Iranian women’s memoir is Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis (London: Vintage, 2008). It tells the story of the author’s childhood and teenage years, much of it spent under the consolidating power of the Islamic Republic. Like Nafisi, Satrapi can be identified with a bourgeois secular nationalism, but this time with a strong leftist edge. Persepolis covers the same span of time as Reading Lolita in Tehran, but Satrapi’s response to events is more open and interrogative than Nafisi’s and includes a healthy dose of skepticism about the West’s sudden interest and meddling in the region. The egoism and independence of spirit of the young protagonist, viewed with the benefit of adult hindsight, means that the text has none of the complacent certainty that underpins Nafisi’s work. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 724

Categorization

• SEED: A contrast case to Hamid/Naqvi: what formal traits distinguish interrogative self-doubt from complacent certainty in ‘Islamophobia-era’ texts — persepolis’ protagonist egoism-as-hindsight vs. Nafisi’s narrated certainty.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 724