Throughout the novel Persepolis so far, we see Marji being portrayed as someone behaving a lot older than her actual age. In the start of the novel, she is just six years old. By that time she has already been able to comprehend and understand the misfortunes of the world and want to work toward fixing those by becoming a prophet. Also, without being raised in a super religious household, she already has a very strong father/friend relationship to god as we can see with how god is drawn in the book panels and their interactions. For just being six years old, you would need a lot more intellect than the average six year old, and be able to hold such big and well thought out aspirations at that age.
In the next few chapters, we are introduced to Marji’s views on the oppression her and her family has been facing. We know she does her research on the subject, and refers to a lot of big authors that most elementary students have never heard of like Leon Trotsky and Marx. We even find out her favorite book is the comic book version “Dialectic Materialism”. Even when she is talking to her uncle in later chapters and he finds out that she has read this book and knows about topics like these, he is also very surprised at first and impressed.
Her knowledge of these topics and her various readings are what inspired Marji’s well thought out anti authoritarian attitude, which is very rare for any 10 year old to hold. Even while holding these values, her mother tells her it is important to forgive those whose parents were former supporters of the Shaw, and Marji follows by trying really hard to forgive. At any age, that is milestone in intellectual growth, which Marji is able to do at ten.Despite this, we do actually some instances were Marji does act her age, for example when her parents are talking, or her dad is talking to her uncle, she doesn’t quite always understand what they are saying. So she might laugh just because they are laughing or just say what has just been said on the TV thinking it is true. However, this is normal for any child, and overall I would say Marji still acts a lot older for her age. This may because her older self when going back and writing all these events may be just portrayer herself as older, or she actually did act older because the revolution forced her to grow up at a much faster pace.
Yeah, I agree. In general I think Marji is pretty mature (although with the jumping chronology of the narrative, sometimes its hard to figure out how old she is at a given time). I think this is an important thing to keep in mind, because I know I constantly find myself going "wow, that was really immature" or "that's a very simplistic way to view a complex issue" and I have to remind myself that Marji is 6-10 years old, and certainly much more aware of the world than I was at her age, even if her emotional maturity is still at her actual age.
ReplyDeleteAlong with Caroline, I totally agree with you. This reminds me of a scene in Naruto... I won't get into that because I doubt you read the manga lmao
ReplyDeleteBut yea... I'm gonna be honest I didn't even know what dialectic materialism really was... I bet her voracious thirst to read more books (something I DONT have) is probably why she knows so much. Nevertheless, emotional maturity comes with time, so we see her act in not-so-smart fashions such as wanting to nail Ramin after she heard her dad killed many communists. When her mother told her otherwise, she quickly changed her attitude and made up with him.
That being said, her sense of justice has remained steadfast -- everything she wanted to do was to benefit the people around her -- she has always thought about the injustices of the world and tries to fix it in various ways (such as becoming a prophet or communist, and even her wanted to be a scientist to some degree).