Finding laughter in the absurdity

BLOG PROMPT          "The only way to bear the unbearable is to laugh at it." (page 112)


Reading Persepolis II was riveting, heartbreaking, and left me with so many questions at the end. The theme of "the return" was so prevalent within its pages, and Marjane's shame and experiences living abroad as an expatriate, as a foreigner who was racially discriminated against, was so personal and relatable, and I found those underlying themes of parallelism again--the fall of the personal and the fall of the nation, the lost of self and the disillusionment of 8-year war that nobody remembers how it started, and the reclamation of dignity of both selfhood and nationality. The book bled and mourned and laughed, and I was thrown in, yet again, Marjane's mastery in storytelling. I was constantly reminded of Salman Rushdie's essay, "Imaginary Homeland," where he writes:

'The past is a foreign country,' goes the famous opening sentence of L.P. Hartley's novel "The Go Between," 'they do things differently there.' But the [black-and-white] photograph tells me to invert this idea; it reminds me that it's my present that is foregin, and that the past is home, ableit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time. (9)

That's how I felt Marjane's return was. As an expatriate living in Vienna, she was thrust into a cold world without any roots and any status of value. She was alone, and it was her charge for her depression against her family and out family--that despite the fact they were living through a war, they had each other, and she was alone. She experienced a displaced life, had very little friends, and had an unhealthy relationship with a man she burdened her mental state on--and when that relationship ended in an affair, she broke. I loved her line and shame that, though she survived a war, saw her uncle and friends die in utter meaninglessness, it was a broken heart that destroyed her. I'm paraphrasing, of course, but it felt incredibly authentic and I sympathized with her: war is an absurdity in itself unless you are directly in the trenches or the battlefield or planning out the meaningless conflicts, and to live under such circumstances, people adjust and assimiliate, are broken down by learned helplessness, and life goes on, in its absurdity. A broken heart, especially your first one, is a war within, and the kinds of compromises one endures complicates the self, and in a bigger context, it's a lovely and guilt-ridden metaphor.

But like the laughter with her friend who had lost his leg and arm during the war, forms of resistance spread across the spectrum of human emotion. Marjane's ability to love, lose, and laugh during this regime shows me the humanness of everything, the emotional truth within the boundaries of war and regimes. Her bought with depression and drugs, her failed and yet young and restless marriage/relationship with Reza, her transformation from a girl to a woman, her epithets of her neighbors and friends that were so revealing and heartbreaking, her experiences at the art university in Tehran, her tests of integrity with her grandmother and parents, etc., were all ways to express the ability to transcend the unbearable.

I want to end on Rushdie's quotation on the "present that is foreign, and ... the past is home." When Marjane returned to Iran, the streets were renamed and filled with the blood of the martyrs, and her imagery that escaped to the surreal (page 97 and the skulls underneath the pavement) acutely described that notion. She returned to a place that was no longer the land she knew. The people, too, drastically changed, and yet underneath most of her female friends' modernity, there existed the pull to the fundamental (from her ski trip where one of her friends accosted her: "So what's the difference between you and a whore?" to the moment in her classroom where her pills fell from her bag). Marjane acutely described their disdain for her as moments of jealousy and ignorance. It was Marjane's experiences abroad that enabled her to talk honestly about these moments. But it was also Marjane's understanding of loss--what she had lost from growing up in Vienna (that connection to a fake modernity and the freedom to experience the West's liberalism) and the fight to reclaim who she was, an Iranian--that enabled her to speak upon these moments, deconstruct them, and array them in this narrative, visual fashion, revealing the humanity behind the fundamentalism. I want to end with Rushdie's comment that speaks to Marjane's isolation abroad and the universality she's able to achieve through it:

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to me self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him but the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being 'elsewhere.' This may enable him to speak properly and concretely on a subject of universal significance and appeal. (12)