Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Growing Up and Growing Old
Identity, Culture, and Self-Expression
Gender and Oppression
Suffering and Trauma
Summary
Analysis
After 10 days, Marjane’s entire extended family shows up to visit her. Marjane is terrified that everyone knows how badly she failed in Vienna. Everyone is kind, but Marjane soon grows tired of being the center of attention. When the visits taper off, Marjane’s grandmother finally visits. She’s the one person Marjane really wants to talk to. Then, Marjane’s friends arrive. Marjane isn’t as worried about seeing her them, since she figures they’re the same age and they’ll be able to connect. But her friends are all very made-up and want to get married as soon as possible. They also want to hear about Vienna’s nightclubs, which Marjane didn’t enjoy. Marjane realizes later that getting made up and wanting to go to nightclubs was her friends’ way of resisting. She still feels very alone.
Seeing all her family members is unsettling for Marjane and makes her anxious. In part, this is because she is so self-conscious about what happened to her in Vienna, and she seems to believe that her failures must be obvious to everyone who looks at her. And seeing how much her friends have changed impresses upon Marjane that she might not even have a home in Iran anymore.
Themes
About a week later, Marjane moans to Mom that all her friends are unbearable. Mom points out that no one is asking young Iranian women to be intelligent these days. She suggests Marjane cut her friends some slack. When Marjane’s grandmother says that there must be someone Marjane wants to see, Marjane realizes there is. She wants to see Kia, whom she played with in the streets. Mom has never liked Kia and starts to protest. After Marjane assures Mom that they won’t get into trouble now that they’re adults, Mom shares what happened to Kia. He was arrested for trying to evade his military service and sent to the front. Now, he’s “almost dead”—he’s disabled. Marjane is nervous but not dissuaded. She tracks down his phone number and schedules a visit.
Since she spent the last four years in Iran, Mom attempts to contextualize Marjane’s friends’ behavior. Because the regime curtailed women’s rights, Mom implies that there’s nothing for young women to do but make themselves attractive to men, dream of marriage, and idealize Europe. Learning that Kia is now disabled also forces Marjane to acknowledge that everything has changed.
Themes
On the way to Kia’s apartment, Marjane worries about what she’ll find. One of Kia’s neighbors seems thrilled that someone is visiting Kia, and his reaction calms Marjane down enough to ring the doorbell. Kia answers the door from his wheelchair and lets Marjane in. It’s awkward at first and Marjane tries to only look at her friend’s eyes. She only notices that Kia only has the use of one arm when he goes to fetch sodas from the kitchen. After Marjane helps Kia get his soda open, Kia explains that he hopes to go to the U.S. to be fitted for prostheses.
Seeing Kia in a wheelchair makes the consequences of the war real for Marjane in a way they weren’t before. Before seeing Kia, she could pretend that the war didn’t affect any of the people she loves in such a devastating way. This makes Marjane feel even more like people had it worse in Iran than she did in Vienna. But that also doesn’t give Marjane room to acknowledge that she nonetheless had painful, dehumanizing, and traumatizing experiences in Vienna.
Themes
When another awkward silence falls, Kia tells Marjane a joke: A grenade lands on the head of a young soldier at the front, blasting him into pieces. The medics gather up the young man’s body parts and rush him to Tehran, where the doctors stitch him together. Then, when he’s healed, the young man’s family finds him a wife. On their wedding night, the bride is aghast: the doctors reattached the man’s penis to his hip. Despite the man’s insistence that his penis still works, the bride demands a divorce. The man is so fed up that he points to his armpit and tells his wife to kiss his butt.
Kia’s joke makes the point that in the face of pain and suffering, sometimes the only thing people can do to feel better is laugh. It’s especially meaningful that Kia—a disabled veteran—is the one telling this joke. This shows Marjane that even people who are suffering deeply can try to make the best of their situation—a lesson Marjane might find useful in dealing with her own trauma.
Themes
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Kia laughs so hard that he falls out of his wheelchair. He and Marjane spend the rest of the afternoon laughing. Marjane visits Kia several more times before Kia leaves for the U.S. After this day, Marjane learns that people can only wallow in their miseries for so long before they have to laugh.
Reconnecting with Kia and having so much fun shows Marjane that things at home might not have changed as much as she thinks. That Kia is still around and is just as funny as he used to be suggests that Marjane might still have a home in Tehran after all.
Themes
