Contextual Understanding (DP IB English A: Language and Literature: HL): Revision Note

Context involves facts and details about the author’s life and the socio-political, historical and cultural realities of a given time and place. Understanding context allows us to explore how culture and identity influence an author’s choices and how audiences in different times and places may interpret a text differently. Knowing contextual details can also provide insight into the themes and purposes of texts and allow you to make informed and convincing analytical claims.

Authorial context

The Area of Exploration (AoE) Readers, Writers, Texts asks you to reflect on how meaning is constructed and interpreted. Knowing details of Satrapi’s life helps readers infer reasons for her artistic choices and understand how her personal experience shapes the text.

• Marjane Satrapi was born in Rasht, Iran, in 1969, and grew up in Tehran:

  • She was raised in a secular, left-wing, middle-class family with strong political convictions

  • Her grandfather was a Qajar prince: Satrapi depicts her father explaining that “the emperor that was overthrown was grandpa’s father”, situating the family’s history at the transition from Qajar to Pahlavi rule

  • Her parents were politically active; her father was an engineer and her mother a designer

• Satrapi attended a French non-religious school in Tehran before the Revolution:

  • Persepolis records that in 1979 “we were in a French non-religious school”, and that the order to close all bilingual schools in 1980 was one of the Revolution’s immediate cultural impacts

  • This European-facing education is reflected in Marji’s awareness of Western culture, revolutionary icons and political theory 

• She left Iran in 1983 at the age of 14, sent by her parents to study in Vienna:

  • This period, largely absent from the first volume of Persepolis, is covered in Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (2004)

  • Her parents’ decision to send her away reflects their fear that the Islamic Republic’s atmosphere of repression would harm her

• Satrapi eventually settled in Paris and studied illustration at the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg:

  • She became part of L’Association, a French comics collective whose members include David B., whose autobiographical graphic novel Epileptic influenced her choice of form

  • Writing in French, for a primarily Western audience, shaped her choices about what to explain, contextualise and represent visually

• Satrapi has spoken in interviews about her motivations for writing Persepolis:

  • She wished to counter the single, monolithic image of Iran and Iranians prevalent in the Western press after the 1979 Revolution

Social and historical context

The social and historical context is the events, changes and values of the time and place in which a text was produced. Persepolis was first published in France in 2000 and covers events in Iran from 1979 to 1983. Some key details of that time and place are explored below.

Iran before the Revolution

• Iran was ruled by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi from 1941 until 1979:

  • The Shah pursued a programme of rapid, Western-aligned modernisation known as the “White Revolution” (1963), which included land reform and the enfranchisement of women

  • The Shah’s government was authoritarian; the secret police, SAVAK, imprisoned, tortured and killed political opponents

  • Both secular leftists and Islamist groups opposed the Shah’s rule, and Satrapi shows Marji’s family situated within this secular, socialist opposition

• Satrapi represents Iran’s pre-revolutionary culture in the early chapters of Persepolis:

  • The family’s lifestyle reflects a cosmopolitan, educated Tehran; wine, Western music and political debate are part of the household

  • Uncle Anoosh represents the Communist and socialist tradition of opposition to the Shah, and is shown as a heroic figure by the young Marji

The 1979 Islamic Revolution

• In 1979, the Shah was overthrown in a popular revolution led by diverse political factions, including secularists, Marxists and Islamists:

  • Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had been in exile in Iraq and France, returned to Iran and established the Islamic Republic

  • The new theocratic state imposed strict religious law: alcohol was banned, music was restricted, and women were required to wear the veil in public

• Persepolis opens in 1980 with the newly imposed veil requirement for girls:

  • The opening chapter, “The Veil”, shows ten-year-old Marji and her classmates confused and resistant at being told they must now wear the hijab at school

  • The veil functions throughout the text as a symbol of the Revolution’s attempt to control women’s bodies and identities

The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988)

• In September 1980, Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, invaded Iran, beginning an eight-year conflict:

  • The war caused enormous civilian casualties and material destruction.

  • Satrapi depicts the war’s impact on Tehran by describing bomb shelters, food shortages, the deaths of neighbours and friends

  • The chapter “The Sheep” shows the death of Marji’s neighbours, the Baba-Levys; Satrapi represents Neda Baba-Levy’s death through the image of her turquoise bracelet in the rubble rather than depicting the body directly

• The war intensified the Islamic Republic’s grip on Iranian society:

  • Patriotism and religious sacrifice were instrumentalised to silence internal dissent

  • Many of the regime’s political opponents, including secular leftists and Marxists, were arrested and executed during this period

  • Marji’s beloved Uncle Anoosh is imprisoned and executed, an event that marks a profound loss of innocence in the text

Political repression and the Islamic Republic

• The Islamic Republic systematically suppressed political opposition:

  • Former political prisoners like Uncle Anoosh, who had been jailed under the Shah, were re-imprisoned or killed under the new regime

  • This shows Satrapi’s political point in that authoritarian repression was not unique to the Shah but continued, in new religious form, under Khomeini

• Daily life under the Islamic Republic is shown to involve constant surveillance and the policing of dress, behaviour and speech:

  • Women could be stopped by the Guardians of the Revolution (“Guardians of the Revolution”) for showing hair under their veil or wearing Western clothing

  • Satrapi depicts parties raided by morality police, underground alcohol sales and the maintenance of private, secular lives behind closed doors

Literary context

The Area of Exploration (AoE) Intertextuality asks us to think about how texts adhere to or deviate from conventions of their form. Persepolis is both an autobiographical narrative and a graphic novel: a form that carries specific conventions and carries its own history.

The graphic novel form

Autobiography and the bildungsroman

• Persepolis belongs to the tradition of the bildungsroman, the coming-of-age narrative:

  • The text charts Marji’s development from childhood (aged 10) to adolescence (aged 14), showing her formation of identity under political pressure

  • Like other canonical bildungsroman, the text traces the protagonist’s disillusionment and growth as she encounters the adult world’s compromises and contradictions

• As an autobiographical text, Persepolis raises questions about memory, perspective and narrative reliability:

  • Satrapi reconstructs events from childhood memory, filtered through an adult authorial consciousness

  • The text’s combination of first-person narration with visual representation means readers must interpret both image and word to construct meaning

Context of reception

In the Area of Exploration Time and Space, questions revolve around how audiences “then and now” or “there and here” may read texts differently. Paper 2 questions may ask you to compare texts that make you think about this, and in the IO, you might compare how two different texts in different contexts explore the same Global Issue; therefore, it is useful to understand how Persepolis was received at the time of publication and how it continues to be received and challenged.

Initial publication and Western reception

• Persepolis was first published in French by L’Association in Paris in 2000 and was an immediate critical success:

  • It was translated into English by Mattias Ripa and Blake Ferris and published by Jonathan Cape in 2003

  • Western readers and critics praised it as a humanising account of Iran under the Islamic Republic, offering a personal perspective largely absent from mainstream news media

  • The text won multiple awards, including the Angoulême Coup de Coeur award in 2001

• A film adaptation, directed by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, was released in 2007:

  • It won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007

  • The film was banned in Lebanon and Iran

Reception in Iran

• Persepolis is banned in Iran:

  • The Iranian government objected to its portrayal of the 1979 Revolution as repressive and its depiction of the Islamic Republic’s violence against political opponents

  • Iranian officials also criticised the book’s portrayal of a secular, Westernised middle class as representative of Iranian experience

Censorship and the text in schools

• In the United States, Persepolis has been one of the most frequently challenged books in school curricula:

  • In 2013, the Chicago Public Schools briefly removed it from seventh-grade classrooms citing “graphic illustrations” before reversing the decision following teacher and student protests

  • Challenges have focused on its visual depictions of torture and its political content

Exploring critics

Below are notable critical perspectives on Persepolis:

Gillian Whitlock: Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (2007) 

• Gillian Whitlock, a scholar of life writing, situates Persepolis within a tradition of Middle Eastern women’s life-writing that has been consumed by Western audiences as testimony:

  • She describes this phenomenon as “autobiography in transit” meaning that texts that travel from their contexts of production to Western audiences and are read through the lens of those audiences’ existing knowledge and assumptions

  • Whitlock argues that readers should be alert to how their own cultural position shapes their reading of a text like Persepolis

Hillary Chute: Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010)

• Hillary Chute places Persepolis within a tradition of women’s autobiographical comics:

  • She argues that the graphic novel form is particularly suited to autobiographical narrative because it makes visible the construction of memory and identity through the interplay of image and text

  • Chute suggests that Satrapi’s simple visual style is a deliberate formal choice rather than a limitation, allowing readers to project themselves into the story

Sources:

Satrapi (M.),  Persepolis, Jonathan Cape, London, 2003 (translated by M. Ripa and B. Ferris).

Whitlock (G.), Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Chute (H.), Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, Columbia University Press, 2010.