How Does Marjane Satrapi Use Language In Persepolis

Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi is a short two-part graphic novel in which the author depicts her life in Iran as a child. Persepolis is considered an autobiography that is written in black and white drawings that represent a type of art and writing style in her culture. This autobiography includes religion, history, identity, freedom, sexism, racism, and self-understanding. Persepolis as a graphic novel does a great job of showing emotion to the reader through the facial expressions of the characters and also makes it easy to follow the story and morals that each character follows. These ideas, language, and a few graphic scenes have cause this book to end up on the list of frequently challenged books year after year and lead to many arguments …show more content…
This book brings too much to the lives of those who read it and taking it off the shelf would keep people from experiencing what this author went through as a child. Persepolis represents the idea that one can live through the fears that they are forced to live and specially a young Muslim girl living in Iran. Persepolis for the audience it was written for, western civilization, was challenged for language in younger grade levels. While this is an understandable challenge people have come to the conclusion I believe that 8th graders get a fair amount of language from peers and themselves on a daily basis and if not the news, music, television, and public give them a fair amount of language. As for the torture depicted I believe the same is true in that it is an understandable opinion, however many 8th graders watch the walking dead or have seen the same amount or an extended amount of graphic scenes in their own history textbooks. Personally in my research it was enlightening to read about how many wanted to ban this book with their only argument being that the culture depicted is full of terrorist and is insensitive to American children. To me these claims based on Islamophobia are extremely offensive to me as an American to think that people in my community are so ignorant to what is going on in another culture, someone writes a graphic novel depicting her personal story and even after that people still just have this broad idea that all Muslims want to preform acts of terrorism and hate Americans. This claim that the book is not appropriate for college level students because its “garbage” and “offensive” in a classroom setting leaves me vexed as to why people just take everything they hear as truth and refuse to open their mind (Jaffe, Meryl). Reading some of those types of challenges made me even more on the side of not banning the