by Marjane Satrapi Pantheon Books, 2003
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi was first available in the US last year and is now out in paperback. It has been widely read and reviewed in France where it was originally published in two volumes in 2000 and 2001 Persepolis 2: The Story of A Return is due out at the end of August.
From the opening page of the graphic novel Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s drawings and narration are bold and direct. Her 10 year old self stares out of the first panel with a steady thoughtful gaze. Thus we come eye to eye with the serious little girl who will lead us through both a history of Iran and her own stark coming of age story. In that first look, she seems to regard us with caution and almost as if to say “You can know what I know. You can see what I’ve seen. Here I’ll show it to you.�
In graphic novels and comic books artists often break the boundaries of traditional novels, short stories and journalism. There is a freedom and flexibility to the play of words and images on the page. Satrapi uses the form to tell a personal tale that traces the history of modern Iran.
Satrapi was born in 1969. Her telling of the changes within Iran’s government, politics and society that took place during her childhood is matter-of-fact and forceful. The Islamic revolution which pushed out the British-installed Shah in 1979 was the beginning of the Islamic fundamentalist government which ultimately transformed a largely secular society into one dictated by laws repressing dissent and enforcing new societal norms, including requiring all women and girls to wear a veil. Satrapi writes, “We didn’t like to wear the veil, especially since we didn’t understand why we had to…. We found ourselves veiled and separated from our friends. And that was that….� As she learns slowly about the history of her own family, Satrapi learns of her country’s history too, and the events that led to the revolution.
Her telling of her family’s everyday struggles is touching and disarming: a grandmother’s aching knees, a mother’s rules and worries, an uncle come home from prison, life under the threat of Iraqi bombs and missiles during the Iran-Iraq war. The strength of the tale is her vision of these events from a child’s point of view. And yet she does not romanticize youth (or any particular experience for that matter). She shows herself as precocious but also at times immature and quick to judge.
Little Marji asks relentless questions and struggles to understand all that she sees and hears going on around her. Perception itself is a creative force and the curiosity that children have is demanding and imaginative. What at first glance is a simple childlike retelling, actually roots out and reveals complexity and contradictions.
Satrapi’s illustrations capture that struggle of vision vividly. They are fanciful and frightening and funny and able to evoke emotion with each skillfully inked page. The illustrated characters have a great depth, as Satrapi is able to convey pain, sorrow, anger and love. Her ability to show each of her parents and their relationship with both tenderness and clarity works to pull the book together on a larger level. We see her parents dealing with the loss of friends, of freedom and ultimately of Marji, herself, when they finally choose to send her to Vienna, Austria for school.
Satrapi’s intelligent wry humor has a startling way of waking the reader up to absurdities and horrors as well as the vastness of what is remarkable in humans. The story deals with martyrs and punk rock in almost the same breath. The author also uses this humor to address her education in Marxism and communism. In one wonderful section of the book, Marji reads her “Dialectical Materialism� comic book, compares Marx to God, and then has a conversation with God himself.
Her treatment of communism is as matter-of-fact as everything else. Her class analysis is apparent in her embarrassment at sitting in her father’s Cadillac and her relationship with the family’s maid. Communists in the book are friends and martyrs. After the departure of the Shah at the advent of the Revolution, communists and other political prisoners were released. Marji meets two of these men, friends of her parents, who are communists and revolutionaries. Within a short period of time, however, the new Islamist government began jailing and executing communists. One friend manages to flee into exile but the other is executed in his home. The young Marji also observes the diversity of the Iranian population in her encounters with black market salesmen, underground vintners and people of varying religions and ethnicities. Many of these characters from her childhood likely suffered brutally under the terror of the rule of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Persepolis, like Iran’s history, is a tale of tragic loss, ancient traditions, and modern hopes. Satrapi’s artistic vision creates an experience, which is enveloping rather than alienating. She certainly achieves her own goal as set forth in her introduction of showing an Iran that is much more than fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism. She writes, “I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists.� This sentiment certainly strikes home at a time when we as citizens of the United States are struggling with the ugly American brand of extremism. Worth reading again and again, Persepolis gives American readers a glimpse into Iranian history, teaches us about her own life journey and ultimately about ourselves.
|
Top level
Dynamic Magazine
