Suffering and Trauma Theme Analysis

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.