At age 14, Marjane’s parents send her to Vienna to attend school. This is, in part, to protect her from the Iran-Iraq war raging in their home country, as well as the religious extremism of the Islamic Revolution. She leaves, in other words, to escape trauma. However, what Marjane experiences in Vienna isn’t as idyllic as her parents might have hoped. Bigotry and sexism plague her everywhere she goes, and she ends up becoming homeless in the winter and almost dying from bronchitis. But upon returning to Iran in the aftermath of her hospitalization, Marjane vows not to tell her parents anything about what she experienced in Vienna. In her mind, she both squandered an opportunity and didn’t suffer nearly as badly as anyone who spent those four years in Iran. Through her memoir, however, Marjane makes it clear that the personal traumas she experiences in Vienna and in Tehran are no less meaningful than the large-scale traumas of war that individuals who stayed put in Iran experienced. In both cases, it’s unhelpful and even unhealthy to try to compare one’s trauma to that of others.
The trauma that Marjane experiences in Vienna is especially meaningful for her because she has to suffer all of it more or less alone. Because of this, Marjane is forced to come of age much more quickly than she might have otherwise. In Vienna, Marjane experiences small-scale indignities like mistreatment at school, racism from landlords (and even a boyfriend’s mother), and her period of homelessness. None of these things would be easy for anyone—being bullied, discriminated against, and displaced are universally traumatic experiences. However, Marjane recognizes that at the same time as she’s grappling with racist landlords and careless boyfriends, her friends and family at home are dealing with a war. As a result, she makes a concerted effort to distance herself from any news of the war or the political situation in Iran. This is, in part, an attempt to protect herself from more trauma—but this falls apart as soon as Marjane returns home to Tehran.
Marjane is ashamed when she returns to Tehran and learns more about what happened there in the last four years—she believes that her experiences in Vienna are trivial compared to the atrocities that took place in Iran. But her attempt to protect others by refusing to talk about her own experiences is both unproductive and unhealthy. Marjane vows to never talk about what she terms her “Viennese misadventures” that seem “like little anecdotes of no importance” to anyone in Iran. In Marjane’s opinion, being called a “dirty foreigner” who’s dating her boyfriend to obtain an Austrian passport pales in comparison to the experiences of more than a million people who were injured or killed as a result of the conflict in Iran. Marjane’s silence, however, doesn’t achieve what she hoped it would. She has to face friends who want to hear about a glittery European city, not how difficult Marjane’s time there was. Marjane’s self-imposed silence about the hard times she faced in Austria leads her to become depressed and attempt suicide twice. She ultimately fails to kill herself and, deciding her failures must be a sign that she should live, changes her outlook—but the fact that she gets to this point at all speaks to the dangerous, unfruitful nature of trying to compare one’s own traumatic experiences to those of others.
Marjane also makes the case that curiosity about others’ trauma is a natural part of being human—but that in far too many cases, people (including her) pursue the trauma of others in ways that are unhealthy or offensive. Marjane deals with this during her first year in Vienna, when she befriends a boy named Momo who’s “obsessed with death.” To him, Marjane is cool and worthy of his attention because she’s seen war and death firsthand—but from Marjane’s perspective, Momo is insensitive and offensive. He refuses to see that Marjane is more than her brushes with violence. But even though Marjane finds Momo irritating and rude, this doesn’t stop her from doing much the same thing that he did years later, when she meets Reza (the man she eventually marries). A veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, Reza offers Marjane a connection to a conflict that she mostly got to ignore and allows her to feel like she’s part of the larger cultural experience of the war. But this comes at the expense of ignoring who Reza really is, and what each of them actually wants out of their marriage. Ultimately, they divorce because Marjane finally accepts that although Reza can connect her to the war, their marriage can’t make her happy in any other way—it’s impossible to build a healthy, strong marriage solely on Marjane’s interest in Reza as a veteran. Through this, Marjane seems to propose that while a person’s suffering may be an important part of their identity, it’s narrow-minded and disrespectful to see someone only in terms of their past trauma. Trauma doesn’t define a person, Marjane suggests; what’s important is how a person handles those experiences, and how they treat others with traumas very different from their own.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Suffering and Trauma ThemeTracker
Suffering and Trauma Quotes in Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
She introduced me to Momo. He was two years older.
“This is Marjane. She’s Iranian. She’s known war.”
“War?”
“Delighted!”
“You’ve already seen lots of dead people?”
“Um... a few.”
“Cool!”
In every religion, you find the same extremists.
“Whatever! Existence is not absurd. There are people who believe in it and who give their lives for values like liberty.”
“What rubbish! Even that, it’s a distraction from boredom.”
“So my uncle died to distract himself?”
For Momo, death was the only domain where my knowledge exceeded his. On this subject, I always had the last word.
The harder I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my culture, betraying my parents and my origins, that I was playing a game by somebody else’s rules. Each telephone call from my parents reminded me of my cowardice and my betrayal. I was at once happy to hear their voices and ashamed to talk to them.
[...]
If only they knew...if they knew that their daughter was made up like a punk, that she smoked joints to make a good impression, that she had seen men in their underwear while they were being bombed every day, they wouldn’t call me their dream child.
In the letter, he was overjoyed by the thought that I had a peaceful life in Vienna. I had the impression that he didn’t realize what I was enduring.
I’d already heard this threatening word yelled at me in the metro. It was an old man who said “dirty foreigner, get out!” I had heard it another time on the street. But I tried to make light of it. I thought that it was just the reaction of a nasty old man.
But this, this was different. It was neither an old man destroyed by the war, nor a young idiot. It was my boyfriend’s mother who attacked me. She was saying that I was taking advantage of Markus and his situation to obtain an Austrian passport, that I was a witch.
What do you want me to say, sir? That I’m the vegetable that I refused to become?
That I’m so disappointed in myself that I can no longer look at myself in the mirror? That I hate myself?
I had known a revolution that had made me lose part of my family.
I had survived a war that had distanced me from my country and my parents...
...And it’s a banal story of love that almost carried me away.
Despite the doctor’s orders, I bought myself several cartons of cigarettes.
[...]
I think that I preferred to put myself in serious danger rather than confront my shame. My shame at not having become someone, the shame of not having made my parents proud after all the sacrifices they had made for me. The shame of having become a mediocre nihilist.
Many had changed names. They were now called Martyr what’s-his-name Avenue or Martyr something-or-other Street.
It was very unsettling.
I felt as though I were walking through a cemetery.
...Surrounded by the victims of a war I had fled.
It was unbearable. I hurried home.
Next to my father’s distressing report, my Viennese misadventures seemed like little anecdotes of no importance. So I decided that I would never tell them anything about my Austrian life. They had suffered enough as it was.
Certainly, they’d had to endure the war, but they had each other and close by. They had never known the confusion of being a third-worlder, they had always had a home! At the same time, how could they have pitied me? I was so shut off. I kept repeating to myself that I mustn’t crack up.
But as soon as the effect of the pills wore off, I once again became conscious. My calamity could be summarized in one sentence: I was nothing. I was a Westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity. I didn’t even know anymore why I was living.
He sought in me a lost lightheartedness. And I sought in him a war which I had escaped. In short, we complemented each other.
The regime had understood that one person leaving herself while asking herself: Are my trousers long enough? Is my veil in place? Can my makeup be seen? Are they going to whip me?
No longer asks herself: Where is my freedom of thought? Where is my freedom of speech? My life, is it livable? What’s going on in the political prisons?
