LESSON 2 · 🔒 PREMIUM

The Veiled City

Place as narration — how a memoir can refuse the system’s story

50 minutes RL.9-10.1, RL.9-10.2, RL.9-10.3, RL.9-10.6, RI.9-10.6, W.9-10.1

Learning Objectives

Analyze how Satrapi’s choice of form (black-and-white graphic memoir, narrated in first person by a child) is itself a refusal of the regime’s narrative
Identify and evaluate the cultural details Satrapi uses to render Tehran from the inside — veil, school, prayer, public execution
Connect Satrapi’s purpose (2000, in deliberate conversation with the State’s telling of the revolution) to the unit’s central question about who gets to narrate a place

Students read a teen narrator’s account of discovering Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis alongside a paraphrase of two of its panels — the moment the veil becomes mandatory and the moment a public execution by the new regime reshapes the narrator’s understanding of “revolution.” Together the texts examine how Satrapi’s choice to narrate in black-and-white panels from inside the revolution declares something the unit’s essential question is asking: that narration itself can refuse, or re-shape, the system’s story about a place.

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The Veiled City

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