The Singular Power of Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi’s inimitable art encompassed revolution and war, education and ideology, repression and rebellion.

Teachable. The biggest compliment a college professor can give to a book or a movie is to say that it’s “teachable.” Over the years, somewhat to my dismay, this has become the main criterion I use to assess new texts, especially books. To be teachable, a book or a movie or whatever has to possess a certain set of qualities. It has to be something you can count on a roomful of students to make their way through without too much trouble; if it is difficult stylistically or theoretically, it has to be difficult in a way that there can be some pleasure or satisfaction in puzzling out; it has to have multiple angles of approach, multiple kinds of questions that can be asked of it; ideally, it’s something that could fit into a variety of different disciplinary or thematic frameworks; it has to speak on multiple different levels or in multiple different voices.

I have, as most professors do, a running shortlist of the most teachable texts. Both of Nella Larsen’s short novels are incredibly teachable. So is Rear Window. Fun Home, as well as every essay James Baldwin ever wrote. Of more recent vintage, Janicza Bravo’s Zola, George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, and Kristen Roupenian’s viral short story “Cat Person” are all shockingly teachable. But there’s one book and one movie that have been at the top of this list since the first time I taught them over a decade ago. They’re both called Persepolis.

The first thing to say about both Persepolis the 2003 graphic novel and Persepolis the 2007 film is that they are perfect. Marjane Satrapi, the French Iranian comics artist and filmmaker who died last week at the age of 56, published Persepolis in the original French in four installments annually from 2000 to 2003. The whole series was translated into English shortly after. It’s sold millions of copies worldwide, it’s been listed as one of the best 100 books of the twenty-first century by both The Guardian and The New York Times, and, like many other great books, the United States can barely handle it—it has been frequently banned or challenged in schools across the country.

The comic is an autobiographical........

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