Harroop brought out an interesting question worth keeping in mind while reading through Persepolis: "Where does our identities come from?" She thought that they derive from our heritage, our peers and some from the media. I definitely agree with this, because Satrapi spends most of her time in Vienna struggling to find out who she is. When the question is applied on her, Satrapi's "identity" has an Iranian ancestry and European friends and abundance of books; but her source of information of current events are weak because News was censored in Iran and she didn't want to hear the news of her mother country when she was abroad.
While pondering about this question, I was naturally led to the motif of her being an outsider. Then it became a sort of a chain reaction--questions following questions. If indeed our identities have roots, then do people with the same background have the same identitiy? That being the case, in a world of 6 billion people, can a true "outsider" exist?
I found these questions very complex. There are other factors to consider, like genetics and environment, and also statistics. My knee-jerk reaction to this question was to say yes to both of these questions, though they are not completely true. I think as long as we are humans that share many similar characteristics (physical and mental), our identities can be identical to an extent. The variation might depend on individual's experience; I do nto believe anyoneone can do the same thing and feel exactly the same about it; riding a rollercoaster, for example. Some people like it, some are scared of it. If the hypothesis, "our backgrounds make up our identities" was true, and people knew about it, then we would have had tons of einsteins and live in a super-developed world.
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