42 pages • 1 hour read
Marjane Satrapi, Transl. Anjali SinghPersepolis 2: The Story of a Return
Nonfiction | Graphic Memoir | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Veil”
After Markus and Marjane break up, she spends more than two months homeless in Austria in winter. She blows through her savings and is soon digging in trashcans for food, smoking butts she finds on the ground, and sleeping on a park bench. She gets sick and passes out, waking up in a hospital. After some rehabilitation, she recalls that Zozo owes her mother money. She goes to her house and is shocked to learn that her uncle has been in Vienna looking for her, and her parents are desperate to hear from her. She has been gone for three months and gave no word to anyone. She talks to her parents and asks to come home to Iran on the condition that no one will ever ask her where she has been the last three months. They agree.
However, this will not be a proud homecoming. In the hotel awaiting her flight, she smokes against the doctor’s orders, preferring “to put [herself] in serious danger rather than confront [her] shame. [Her] shame at not having become someone, the shame of not having made [her] parents proud after all the sacrifices they had made for [her]” (90). She puts on a veil and admits that her time in Europe was a failure and that she needs to go home.
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Return”
Marjane returns to Iran and, after hearing about the past four years of war and death, determines never to talk to her parents about her time in Austria. Her problems are too trivial compared to what they have suffered in Iran. In Tehran she immediately feels the repressive culture of her homeland. She is unrecognizable to her father, having been away from him for four years. She left at 14 and is now an 18-year-old woman. At home she is scared to speak with her parents and flees to her room where she is repulsed by her one-time love of punk. She cleans up, removing her old passions and making the room hers again. She is the new version of Marjane, the one who knows Europe, knows sex, knows music and philosophy.
She explores Tehran on foot, only to be shocked by the signs, slogans, and murals, mostly bearing the names of martyrs. When her father returns from work, he tells her about the final push before the ceasefire in the Iran-Iraq war and his view that the West funded both sides in order to wipe out Israel’s enemies.
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Joke”
Marjane believes that she is a failure, having returned from Austria without accolades or successes. When extended family visit, she quickly grows tired of guests. She is only interested in her grandmother and a few friends. However, when her friends come, she is disappointed to find them dressed in Western clothing, hair, and makeup and talking of clubbing and parties. She does not yet understand that these are acts of resistance and defiance on their part and is judgmental of them. At the same time, she has not taken care of her appearance and has the look of a nun.
She learns that a friend was drafted and sent to the war and is now living with a disability. She visits him and is uncomfortable. Soon he tells a joke about the horror of the war that gets them both laughing. Marjane says, “[w]e can only feel sorry for ourselves when our misfortunes are still supportable. Once this limit is crossed, the only way to bear the unbearable is to laugh at it” (112). This character appears in only a few panels and is never seen or mentioned again.
Chapters 9-11 Analysis
Satrapi catalyzes the conflict of the novel when Marjane reaches rock bottom in Europe, living for over two months on the street before waking up in a hospital, having nearly died. This graphic memoir follows a typical three act structure. Before the third act, a fictional character typically must experience the crushing culmination of all of their challenges. This moment in hospital is the climax of the confrontation of act two, after which the novel must build toward resolution. Through these, Marjane is able to see her way out: home.
Marjane’s attempts to assimilate are foiled. Attempts to find herself, though successful at times, are not strong enough to sustain her through turmoil. Satrapi draws attention to a significant irony: Marjane exists in a culture where she can be anyone, express anything, and yet she chooses to express nothing, to instead exist in a lackluster relationship while suffering in a dull job and participating half-heartedly in political debates. This destabilizes the sense of freedom as a Western ideology in conflict with Iran, since Marjane does not find personal freedom in Austria.
This point leads into Marjane’s experiences with Self-Expression and Art Censorship in Iran. Satrapi juxtaposes self-expression with a repressive regime when Marjane interacts with women with Western hair and makeup–each motifs that draw attention to self-expression. In contrast, she introduces the motif of the veil, which the novel associates with repression. Marjane puts this veil on before going back to Iran, and her shock at the women who show their hair freely suggests that Marjane does not yet achieved her Bildung (her “forming”) and does not yet understand herself.
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