What happens in Chapter 17 of Persepolis?
In "Kim Wilde," Marji's Uncle Taher has a heart attack, and the family's frantic efforts to obtain a visa for him to get medical care abroad reveal the harsh indifference of the Islamic Republic's bureaucracy. While Taher suffers, Marji's father tries everything he can but faces endless obstacles. At the same time, Marji's mother decides to smuggle in prohibited Western items—cassette tapes and a denim jacket—from her trip to Turkey, which Marji covets like any teen yearning for pop culture. The chapter shifts between two contrasting tones: the life-or-death seriousness of Taher's situation and Marji's ecstatic anticipation over a Kim Wilde poster and Iron Maiden tapes. When Taher finally gets a passport, it comes too late—he passes away before he can travel. The chapter ends with Marji donning her new denim jacket and headscarf at the airport, thrilled with her contraband, even as her family has just buried her uncle. This jarring tonal clash is intentional and heart-wrenching.
Analysis
Satrapi creates one of the memoir's most striking tonal contrasts in "Kim Wilde," using the chapter's dual plotlines not for cheap irony but to explore the emotional complexities of adolescence within a police state. The simple yearning for Western pop culture—Kim Wilde's face on a poster, the sound of a cassette tape—comes through with genuine sincerity, refusing to mock Marji's wishes even as it coexists with her uncle's death. This refusal is central to the chapter's craft: neither storyline undermines the other. Instead, they reveal how surviving under authoritarianism means holding both grief and joy together.
Satrapi's visual style sharpens this argument. The black-and-white panels illustrating Taher's decline are stark and suffocating—bureaucratic offices depicted as bland rectangles, officials as indistinct, interchangeable figures. In contrast, the panels of Marji dancing to Kim Wilde radiate with energy and self-aware absurdity. This contrast is deliberate and meaningful.
The chapter also furthers the memoir's ongoing theme of borders—whether physical, political, or cultural. The visa Taher cannot secure and the denim jacket Marji's mother smuggles in both represent acts of crossing, one denied and deadly, the other successful yet trivial. Satrapi draws the reader into the same uncomfortable laughter that Marji feels: we want the jacket too. The final image—Marji in contraband denim at the airport, both grieving and exhilarated—captures the memoir's message that resistance and loss are not opposites but enduring, exhausting companions.
Key quotes from Chapter 17
“I was wearing my denim jacket and my headscarf. I was the punk of the family.”
Marji describes herself at the airport, newly outfitted in smuggled Western clothes, the day her family is also mourning her uncle Taher.
“To die in your own country, among your own people, is the least one can ask for.”
Taher's wife speaks bitterly after his death, underscoring the cruelty of a regime that denied him even the chance to seek treatment abroad.
“We found ourselves in the black market, which was, in fact, a normal street where the sellers were just more… mobile.”
Satrapi's dry aside as she describes the family navigating Tehran's underground economy for Western goods, lacing tragedy with deadpan wit.