Prophet?

- What is unique about the individual story within national story/landscape? Is this memoir political?

Stories of revolution, war, and the political ideologies behind them have always interested me. However, political jargon often impedes my understanding, which is why I gravitate toward images and personal stories. I have been to Auschwitz, seen a Nazi rally in Budapest, and watched soldiers march through Tiananmen Square. Traveling through these places I absorbed stories that cut through the jargon and slaughtered the ideologies oppressors swore by. As a graphic memoir, “Persepolis” offered a new translation of war. She didn’t skimp on the facts but she told us the story of how those facts factored into her life and that this how the Islamic Revolution came to life for me.

The image of the angry mob with raised fists and mouths ajar on the first page of “Persepolis” established this as a political book. In the frame next to the mob the enemy in black anchors the frame, a woman in an encompassing veil with an angry eyebrow. Only two pages later we see another mob of angry women but they are depicted in black verse white (5).

Regardless of weather or not Marji really wanted to be a prophet when she grew up, I found that bringing up religion in the beginning of the book was clever. Since most wars have some religious influence and Marji is not merely becoming a part of a religion here, rather she thinks she is the root of one (a prophet), she establishes herself as a unique and insightful narrator. She chats with God (8-9), wants “to be justice, love, and the wrath of God all in one,” but lies to her parents, proving she is both insightful but fallible and human.

Satrapi drops some serious political history, ideologies, comparisons (God and Marx, pg. 13), and current events on our asses in “The Bicycle” (10). The second frame in this chapter is a depiction of Marji dressed as Che Guevara and her friends pretending to be Fidel and Trotsky. When I was her age I was dressing up like Pippi Longstocking and going on imaginary adventures in my bathtub, not sporting fake machine guns and chanting “Down with the king!” The imaginary game that takes place in these three frames communicates so much about the narrator’s political beliefs (she is a revolutionary) and about the gestalt of her childhood (the opposite of mine). Next we see her preaching under a tree, “The revolution is like a bicycle. When the wheels don’t turn, it falls” (10). These are wise words from our young prophet. Then, in one large frame (not even a page) we see the history of “2500 years of tyranny and submission” (11).

A lot of information was packed into “Persepolis 1” which would explain why the type is so small. I believe this is some of the smallest text we’ve seen so far. Although the letters are all capital if they were applied to font measurements they are probably only ten point.

I found myself holding the book only inches from my nose, reading this tiny type, and then examining the pictures closely. I admit, in some of the other novels we’ve read I usually skimmed over the image and text at the same time because they often repeated each other. I could not get away with that in “Persepolis 1.” First of all, often the image referenced the text but added information to it. Secondly, I found myself studying the images because they were so foreign. Common scenes at a grocery store (87) or in a classroom (86) took me a few minutes to process. I was looking at the shelves for familiar products, checking out the license plate on the car, and looking to see if their desks were the same ones I had as a child. “Circle K Cycle” referenced foreign cultures too, but there were few images to get lost in, not like the onslaught of frames in “Persepolis.”

“Persepolis 1” has left me with a few new political ideologies to chew on and I feel a little more enlightened after reading it. And although Satrapi’s business card may say novelist, I’d say she is also kind of a modern day prophet after all.

~Margaret Seelie~