In Persepolis 2, people become silhouettes at moments of sublimation to nationalism and of increased tension with nationalist discourses.  Landscape around these inked silhouettes falls away, and the inked silhouettes replace the landscape, invoking and troubling the discourse around land/nation and human-as-text/human-as-nationalist-subject.  People seem to become “mere” transition panels, marching readers’ eyes from panel to panel.  Meanwhile, the soldier in Kia’s joke transforms from a person with a charming smile into an ink silhouette receiving judgment for his corporeal form, which is his most visible testament to his participation in a struggle, the signifier of both his rejection by his nation and his inscription as a hero within nationalism.

Depicted with very little detail and much thicker blocks of ink than Marjane and her friends, the Guardians have the power to instigate inked and white space that almost removes setting and reduces people to silhouettes.  As soon as a Guardian addresses another, unseen Guardian, “Let’s load up these whores!!” Marjane and her friends become ink silhouettes against a white, lineless background (Satrapi 156).  A firm step and a protruding machine gun prod from the left-hand side of the panel, directing the women to trod across the panel (pursued by readers’ gaze from left to right and into a holding cell in the next panel).  Only their feet mark where the otherwise un-delineated ground might be; they move through white space.  At the moments when, according to nationalism, there should be the most grounding, the most literal land and the most land as reproduced in discourse, the backdrop disappears and the ground falls out from under characters’ feet.  Similarly, a couple without a marriage certificate and claiming to be cousins becomes ink silhouettes when Guardians command the two, “Come on, get in the car!” (Satrapi 134).  Once again, guns lead people (and readers’ eyes) across the panel from left to right, this time into a room with a representative of the Commissariat of the Guardians of the Revolution, while Marjane and her friends end up in a holding cell after a party (Satrapi 134, 156).  Detainment coincides with the transformation of people into silhouettes, which entails de-individualization on a continuum from arrest for general infringement of nationalist codes of conduct to cloistered torture and death designed to render both someone’s individual rebellion and individual pride in nation anonymous, so that someone posthumously becomes incorporated into the air, soil, and unmarked graves of a nation, so that someone’s participation must not be singular and must not depart from a collective narrative (even one of coercion).

In these panels, people are transitions between moments in a story; they move readers’ eyes from one panel to the next.  Silhouettes are anonymous stand-ins for any arrest, although readers surely recall their individual remarks or smiles or their collective inside jokes prior to arrest.  They show the process of de-individualization; they become not participants in a story but the story itself.  There is no backdrop in these panels because they are the scenery, the font, the inscription, the land.  It can be empowering to assert membership in a nation, but when it is at the gunpoint of coercion, becoming one with one’s nation can be a transition panel of de-individualized silhouettes in-between life and death, between grappling with (anti-imperialist, nationalist, revolutionary, counterrevolutionary, etc.) discourse and being subsumed into the discourse that has power behind it.

Later, inked space and a reduction of landscape occur amidst the interplay between nationalist rhetoric and wartime experience, between the heroic and de-individualizing aspects of sublimating the self to a nationalist struggle or becoming inseparable from that nationalist struggle, and narratives of martyrdom.  As Kia tells Marjane the joke about the soldier who is reconstructed after being blown apart, the soldier shifts from a person with distinct eyebrow, hair, smile, and mustache lines to an ink silhouette outlined by white space or lines formed through the lack of ink (Satrapi 110-111).  As a silhouette, he shows emotion through the angle of his head and the movement of his mouth, as his bride rejects him and he enacts emotional dejection.  Throughout the joke, the soldier’s wife retains distinct eyebrow, hair, and mouth lines (which of course shift slightly in ink thickness and in position to represent facial expressions); her eyes and mouth reflect her new husband as an object of abject horror, anger, and resentment (Satrapi 111).  Positioned as if readers are right behind him, gazing over his shoulder at his wife, the soldier seems to be closer to us than is his wife.  We see both his dejection and her rejection; we have to face her reaction because of his large or up-close placement towards the left-hand of the panels (Satrapi 111).  In other words, we see him become less and less a person and more and more an image of bodily Otherness.  More specifically, we see her reaction, her self-distancing from him, her resolute rejection of him as being like her.  That winning smile of his doesn’t matter anymore because he is “just” someone injured, fragmented, and reconstructed via a war and its aftermath.  He is the aftermath that she doesn’t want to confront, and he reflects the emotional aftermath of loved ones that soldiers may fear.

Perhaps he “is” de-individualized, but perhaps he reflects a fear of de-individualization into silhouette/ink block form in the eyes of others.  His corporeal body is literally fragmented in fighting for his nation, and although he is reconstructed (bodily and through externally imposed narrative) as a hero, he becomes a permanent signifier of that past fragmentation, of a separation between body and nationalist narrative at the moment of joining that nationalist narrative on its terms.  On the other hand, his body is the refusal of that narrative to produce cohesion; his body always signifies that explosion, and his survival attests to the price of becoming one with a nationalist narrative.  He is rejected as non-normative in body under the precise circumstances that make him bodily ideal as someone who has risked complete sacrifice to the cause.  His body becomes a text, like the silhouettes in the other panels that become transition texts, or rather a subtext of nationalism’s text.  Instead of reifying that text, he problematizes it, as do the silhouettes whose words had land and whose feet now walk across white space.