Girls will be veiled girls

The story opens with Marjane being caught smack in the middle of the "glorious" Islamic Revolution on 1979. We see that all the boys and girls are separated and all bilingual/liberal teachings were outlawed. In the drawings we see all the girls wearing the burkah and their homogeneity represents their loss of liberty and personal identity. They were no longer Marji or Mina or Golnaz they were just women. That was the only identity that mattered now.
To me the stigma of wearing the veil or burkah runs both ways. On the one end there are people like Marji who are forced to wear the burkah in a screwed up religious attempt at modesty and subjected to utter anguish by their subjugators. But on the other hand there are those that whole-heartedly and with great enthusiasm take up the burkah but who are subjected to ridicule and sometimes much worse for exercising that choice. I think the key word here is choice. Marji's power to choose has been taken away. And i think she is saying that you cannot force traits like modesty on human beings -that is something that has to be learned by example and taught from an early age.
Marjane wants to be a prophet as well. This seems very contradictory to the progressive image that we seem to get of her from an early age. In a way Marji reminds me of William Blake. Like Blake she is deeply religious but in a very unique Blake-ish way. Like Blake she can cut through the hypocrisy and double standard of the religious institutions and see their hunger for power and wealth. Like Blake she prefers a more direct and personal connection to the higher beings. Just like Blake uses irony and satire in his works to bring into view the spurious nature of the whole system so too does Marjane.Their similarity does not end there. Blake used a very original form of expression where he blended visual art and poetry to give the maximum amount of information possible. To read Blake without the background is losing half the essence. So too in the case of Presepolis. The images are cartoonish but they are in commensuration with the satirical nature of the novel and the age of the narrator.