Dear folks,
My apologies for this late entry. Last week
was one long wrestle with fibromyalgia and thus set me back greatly on
all of my work, and I'm wrestling yet again.
Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis represents
a profound success in the transmission of a personal, familial, and
national narrative through the careful re-membering and re-rendering of
key moments in personal and collective life as they occur - inextricably
simultaneous, and linked.
We are introduced to Satrapi's "Iran" - home
and state - as she experienced it, through the eyes of a daughter of a
well to do Marxist family during and post-revolution. It
is specifically Satrapi's capacity to convey with the blunt honesty of a
child's wonder and confusion, the dueling contradictions of her life,
that allows us to come so painfully close to the heart of the world she
was stitching together beyond dogma and polemics. There are innumerable
precious intimate moments in the text that facilitate this - for example
Satrapi's conversations with God, where she wrestles with the ideals of
a world void of suffering, beside the very plain examples of pain and
violence that littered her life. Her desire to "be justice, love and the
wrath of god all in one," her search for God as the political dynamics
began to shift and enter more powerfully into her family and intrude
more deeply into her heart and imaginary world: "God where are you? That
night he didn't come." (17) And her subsequent abandonment of God (and
perhaps trust that a healed and just world could be possible) with the
execution of her uncle. We see her using all of her senses and resources
to comprehend the stories she was exposed to - ie. taking a long bath
to understand the torture her grandfather experienced in jail. She cues
in on something that is so common to us all We are offered witness to
the way in which state violence enters the psyche of a child in other
ways as well, For example the way in which she mobilizes her friends to
attack the son of someone whose father had murdered Marxists during the
revolution with nails; the way in the first page there is a child's play
rendition of "execution in the name of the revolution"; the way she
dresses up as Che and Fidel. "The revolution is like a bicycle. When the
wheels don't turn it falls" she theorizes.
Satrapi's uses the interior world of the child as a way to gesture
towards the transformation and chaos of the society in which she lived.
The scenes she offers at once lodge in the reader both the question and
then evidence of how a child retains their childhood in the face of war
and political oppression - and more broadly how we retain our humanity
in these conditions. She demonstrates to us that our humanity lives
precisely in the place of contradiction. Her Marxist parents bringing
home Nike's from Turkey. Their employment of Maids. The neighbour who
paraded her legs in miniskirts adopting full religious dress. She shows
us consistently through the text through luminous examples the defiance
of the human spirit to submit to - be that her uncle's constant
reassurance "everything will be ok" prior to his execution, to her
family's clandestine weekly parties as card nights.
The
narration happens strictly in past tense. It is often used in the text
as a tool to build the context in which the actions that take place in
the space of the panels occur. They are written from the keen position of
an attentive author who is adherent to the key theme she wants the text
to communicate, which in my opinion is, trauma and resilience in the
face of political oppression - the way these land in the individual
(psyche, heart and body), the space of the family (nuclear and
extended), and in the broader society as a whole.
I was particularly interested by her use of large full and half page panels. I think this strategy added to the authority of the child's perspective because it seemed to emphasize
the events in memory that were hardest to put together, or sat with most
power. The use of the surreal in these panels gestures towards the
child's way of utilizing the imaginary as a strategy for emotional
survival - the way in which we must find ways to contend with things that we sometimes cannot look at in their literal form. I think of the movie Pan's Labyrinth.
So much more to explore. Moved to no end by this text. Satrapi's father was right when in the text he said
that her bluntness would "help her later on."(119)
Light,
mia
Yes the contradictions in the narrative raise all of the interesting questions of this text. It keys the reader in to the author's intent while maintaining the perspective of a child, who couldn't possibly articulate such large ideas.
ReplyDeleteGlad you were able to pipe in. I appreciate the observations about containing the story inside her childhood. The story becomes one of discovering and also relieves the responsibility of accuracy of the historical facts (but of course, who's truth).
ReplyDeleteall good
e