A Sense of Doubt blog post #2965 - The Personal versus The Political in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis Series
One of the things I love about Medium is that anyone can be a published writer on the platform. Seeing a student publish their essay from a college course. I get excited when I see someone write about something I am interested in and want to follow them. Last I looked, this author only has this one publication.
I have taught Persepolis several times in class, and now, due to a ban of it in a Pennsylvania school, it's part of my upcoming talk on censorship, hence adding it to that category.
Thanks for tuning in.
https://medium.com/@sidika.sehgal/the-personal-versus-the-political-in-marjane-satrapis-persepolis-series-4ff4de73630a
Sidika Sehgal
The Personal versus The Political in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis Series
The graphic novel is an interesting genre for the modern reader in many ways. The marriage of the visual form and the literary form, or the “twinning of words with images”, as Kathyrn Strong Hansen puts it, is the primary appeal of the form. The ever reducing attention of the modern reader is captured by the riveting visuals — “Graphic novels cater to young people’s growing affinity for the visual rather than written media.” The form doesn’t privilege text over image or image over text and it is the symbiotic relationship of the visual and the literary which is responsible for the success of the genre.
Graphic novels are no longer a boyhood past time, and are often tools of pedagogy. Many graphic novels approach serious issues such as immigration (American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang), the holocaust (Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman), caste discrimination (Bhimayana, Navayana Publications). Almost always, there is a deeper interest that author-illustrator of graphic novels have. For Marjane Satrapi, the concern with Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and The Story of a Return was:
this old and great civilization has been discussed mostly in connection with fundamental ism, fanaticism, and terrorism. As an Iranian who has lived more than half of my life in Iran, I know that this image is far from the truth. That is why writing Persepolis was so important to me. I believe than an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists.
A noticeable trend in graphic novels is the use of the literary device of memoir or autobiography. While there are no statistics to prove the point, examples should suffice. Joe Sacco’s Palestine is based on his experiences in the Gaza strip in December 1991 to January 1992; Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco describes his experiences as a Japanese migrant in the changing landscape of 20th century San Francisco; Joe Kubert’s Fax From Sarajevo: A Story of Survival is the true story of his correspondence with his friend Ervin Rustemagic during the two and a half years of bombing and destruction of his home city. These then become non fiction graphic narratives.
Writing social histories from one’s personal point of view, as one witnessed or experienced it, can be problematic. As readers, how much can we trust the narrative to give us the truth knowing the subjectivity of the narrative and the narrator/author/protagonist who gives us the story? Autobiographical pieces of work are a representation of memory and testimony — how much can we rely on memory? And finally, how much do we rely on it? This paper examines these questions using Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis as case study.
Persepolis opens in 1980, a year after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The author was ten years old at the time. The book spans fourteen years of her life during which Marji goes to Austria for four years, comes back to Iran, attends University, gets married. At the end, in 1994, Marji leaves Iran for good. The graphic novel then becomes a teen interest novel of sorts, a coming of age novel where we’re taken into Marji’s life — her understanding of the revolution, her experience of losing loved ones to the revolution, some have moved away from Iran, some have been killed, her failed relationships and her experience of being an immigrant in Vienna. No detail of her life has been left out. Satrapi has been bold in revealing information she’s uncomfortable about, about issues that are subjects of taboo in Iran where she comes from. She talks about her drug abuse and her attempted suicide. Satrapi then effectively bares her soul to the reader and this candour draws the reader in. A reliable narrator has been found in Satrapi when she refuses to gloss over the ugly experiences in her life.
Demonstrating that she has not solely divulged information that she as a writer “feels comfortable talking about”, as many memoirs do, but rather has provided an invaluable insight into her sense of self…In affording us glimpses at her highs and lows she has created a close proximity to us, making us feel like a confidant or friend of hers.
Some critics argue that Persepolis is a simplistic exploration of Satrapi’s own confused identity. One must question then her motivation to pen Persepolis. Is it socio politically motivated or personally motivated? Satrapi makes her intent clear in the introduction to the book. It appears that she’s motivated by the need to uphold a sense of pride that comes with nationality. And although this is a personal motivation, it would be wrong to dismiss Persepolis as just a personal account.
“Autobiographies are not written in a vacuum.” This is true for this case where the novel opens with a panel of Marji’s portrait and in the third panel she moves to a scene from the revolution. With the fourth panel, Satrapi is back to talking about how the revolution affected her. The lines between the personal and the political, if any existed to begin with, are blurred in this account.
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| FIGURE 1 |
Marji is no ordinary child — when she realises that she doesn’t know enough she reads everything she can and she learns about the children of Palestine, about Fidel Castro, about the Vietnam War. Marji cannot possibly distance herself from the political because of the surroundings she’s born in. Her grandfather was the prince of Iran before he was overthrown in 1925, her parents demonstrate regularly against the current regime, their family friends have spent time in prison as political prisoners and Uncle Anoosh, one of the most influential people in Marji’s life loses his life to the revolution.
For the most part, the personal events in Marji’s life are influenced by the political revolution. It is the “the political confluence of the everyday and the historical” we see in Persepolis. Some of her friends leave Iran to go to America, her school’s shut for nearly a year because the regime has decided to revise books. Yet even when Marji seems to be acting completely separate from the revolution, it later ties in with the revolution. The chapter titled ‘Kim Wilde’ begins with Marji asking her parents to bring a denim jacket and posters from Turkey, where they’re going for vacation. Here, Marji is like any other teenager who wants to keep up with the latest trends in fashion and who’s obsessed with their favourite artist. To assume that Satrapi digresses here would be presumptuous because later in the chapter Marji is stopped by two women who are ‘guardians of the revolution’ and reprimand Marji for being improperly dressed. Satrapi doesn’t lose sight of the political environment, neither does she push it to the sidelines.
Having said that, the second volume in Persepolis, The Story of a Return is largely a personal account of Satrapi’s life in Vienna. Satrapi talks about her bout of depression, her drug abuse, her love interests. The political tension in Iran goes unmentioned. Satrapi concluded the two volume series in 1994 when she left Iran for good. She didn’t want to write a third volume based on second hand information. She feels a need to stay true to oneself and to one’s own experience. Perhaps this is why for the four years she stayed in Vienna, Satrapi doesn’t talk about the events in Iran.
Yet Iran lingers in the spaces. Marji talks about the burden of being Iranian in the western world (Figure 2). The story of an immigrant who’s left the country because of political turmoil is one of the many narratives of a revolution, and not one to be ignored.
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| FIGURE 2 |
It is the personal touches, the human elements that make Persepolis such a strong narrative. In the last chapter of the first volume titled ‘The Dowry’, when Marji is leaving Iran to go to Austria, she fills a jar of Iranian soil to take with her and she gives her most precious things to her friends so that they don’t forget her. (Figure 3)
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| FIGURE 3 |
If Persepolis is not a chronological account of events in Iran, it’s not meant to be. The graphic novel is meant to represent the pain of leaving home as was felt by the people. Satrapi has succeeded in her goal — we no longer associate Iran and Iranians with fanaticism, we’re shown through Marji’s example that this fanaticism was imposed on the people and that they suffered at the hands of the few in power.
“Satrapi is disabusing the idea that the world is made up of vastly differing lands, instead she beseeches us to realise that the same threats exist within every society and the observ er must learn to separate the identities of nations from governments and religions from the extremists they foster.”
Satrapi doesn’t give us a year by year history of the Iranian revolution, but she gives us so much more. Figure 4 shows the readers a side of the revolution no objective account can give.
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| FIGURE 4 |
In her personal account, she gives us moments of lightness when those who’ve suffered because of the revolution forget the gloom that hangs in the air and laugh about it. These moments serve as the much needed relief from what could have been a very morose story had they been absent. (Figure 5) “The human side of history had so much more meaning, and seemed to imprint a deeper and easier understanding in my mind than most accounts.” writes a reviewer on Amazon.
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| FIGURE 5 |
Hillary Chute writes: “In this sense, Persepolis — ostensibly a text about growing up and the private sphere — blurs the line between private and public speech.” In conclusion, the personal doesn’t distance the readers from the political. On the contrary, it is the personal which makes us invested in the narrative to read it till the very end. The personal and the political need not be seen as two exclusive strands in the narrative — they overlap and interact all the time. The narrative is a subjective one, coloured by Satrapi’s personal experiences and opinions. The subjectivity doesn’t take away from the chronicle; it adds to it and makes it all the more richer.
(From a research paper written for Popular Fiction)
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2304.01 - 10:10
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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