Week Two: Culturally Relevant Book Club

1.) What do we know and understand about the main character’s sociocultural background/ identities?

• Before our groups discussion I noticed how politically active her parents were, which probably influenced Marjane to want to participate in the revolutions. During our discussion in class we discussed the fact that Marjane's grandfather used to be royalty.

2.) How does your own sociocultural background and identities and literacy or schooling experiences compare/contrast to the main character?

• Having grown up in the United States, I was never directly exposed to any sort of political revolutions. I was only 3 years old when 9/11 happened so I do not remember the day or any events that immediately followed. My schooling was also very different to Marjane's schooling. I went to a public school where speaking about any religion was discouraged. Our books did censor some parts of U.S. history, though we never had to physically rip out pages of our books when there were major changes in our country.

3.) How do you reflect upon your positionality in relation to the characters in the novel?

• There are many ways in which I can relate to Marjane, but she has definitely been through some experiences that I could never comprehend. Like Marjane, I identify as a woman, and because of this I have faced situations where my thoughts and opinions have been undermined. However, as I mentioned in the previous question, I have not personally faced war and violence. I have taken part in peaceful protests and I have read about wars and violent crimes, but I have luckily never had to deal with it to the extent that Marjane has.

During our class discussion, we found an article about a school in Denver that is embracing a new way of teaching that aims to help students who have experienced trauma. We discussed how students who, like Marjane, have experienced trauma at a young age could benefit from this model of teaching. We also discovered a short sequel to Persepolis that was created by a few fans of the graphic novel. This sequel is called Persepolis 2.0 and it can be found here! It was published in 2009 and uses images from Persepolis with updated text that speaks about the 2009 uprisings in Iran.