A Child's-Eye View of Revolution

It’s an old saying that hindsight is 20/20, but for the memories of childhood, hindsight can be positively transformative and seem downright wrong. Persepolis’ protagonist/author, Marjane, sees the Islamic Revolution not just through the eyes of a person who was in Iran at the time, but the eyes of a child who’s learning of extremely adult matters. 

This is very important to the story, and to giving the whole event its impact- without a person there to give us a view of the events, any historical event is reduced to an encyclopedia entry. And telling these events from the point of view of a child is especially jarring, and reveals the awful truth that in the scary parts of human history, children have experienced the same horrors as adults. In fact, it serves to show us a more vulnerable view of the world-at-large, one which cuts to the emotional quick of living through the revolution and the society that came afterwards. 

For the record, I’m aware that this wasn’t really a choice on the part of the author, but it does lend Persepolis a special weight. The Shah’s mass release of political prisoners is shown in the documentary “Fall of a Shah” as a political gesture, one of many in a much larger story, but to Marjane it was the time when people close to her were freed. Likewise, the Iranian secret police, Savak, are an unpleasant part of that society when viewed years afterward, but their torture and imprisonment of people gains impact when filtered through the imagination of a child.

Most striking, though, is what simply isn’t covered by the scope of the documentary. Communists are hardly mentioned in it, and yet almost the entire cast is made up of communists and socialists. What’s more, the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini is something that actively threatens them. When students take over the U.S. embassy, it’s not a footnote about what happened shortly after the Ayatollah took over, it’s the end of Marji’s ability to get a visa and escape to America- a closing instead of a new, interesting development.

These are significant changes in the larger tale of Iranian government, and meaningful on a scale of megadeaths, but for someone this small and human, they’re boiled down to moments of celebration and tragedy, joy and death. These are the footprints that big events leave on all of us, and they serve as the greater context for all our lives.