Monthly Archives: October 2013

It is often believed that our memory is an unreliable source of knowledge: we hear that they should not be trusted, as they only captures brief and unpredictable details of our experiences, if not the broadest gist of these experiences. In recent years, findings in the disciplinary field of psychology have revealed that memories are constructive and deconstructive. In a TED talk by the memory psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, she likens them to “a Wikipedia page”, stating “you can go in there and change it (but so can other people)”. English essayist George Orwell also alludes to the changing nature of memory in his essay Such, such were the joys: “in general, one’s memories of any period must necessarily weaken as one moves away from it. One is constantly learning new facts, and old ones have to drop out to make way for them.” Within their respective fields, these scholars emphasize the dynamism of memories, stating that their constant influence by other knowledge pathways means that they in a perpetual process of change.

This week’s discussion on the graphic novel Persepolis has, in particular, urged me to question the production of individual and cultural memory through life narratives. How is that these subjective products of memory come to be deemed legitimate historic records? Yes, they are significant in the fact that they record history and people’s personal experiences stemming from historic events, but shouldn’t their constant change make us question whether they should be used as evidence? A highly celebrated personal memoir, Persepolis has gained worldwide recognition for its exploration of the act of bearing witness to the atrocities of the Iran revolution and its aftermath. In its careful weaving of the Iranian historical events with her individual experiences, the graphic novel embodies the act of reminiscing. However, given the faulty and biased nature of our memory, can we truly say that Persepolis presents an accurate representation of the Iranian history?

As a graphic novel, Persepolis is narrated in the past tense and divided into three distinct chapters, each encapsulating key experiences throughout young Marji’s early lifetime through the use of flashbacks. As the memoir is narrated in selective chronological order, the reader is taken through time shifts, with the author Satrapi controlling the segments available to the reader. This segmented, disjointed structure that mimicks Satrapi’s own thought process as she embarks upon a recollection the events in her early youth. Yet, it means that we, as readers, only receive a series of episodic breakdowns of Satrapi’s life under the unstable and dangerous political arena in Iran. Writer George Orwell would not deem this selective nature of memory necessarily a bad thing, particularly as he contends in his aforementioned essay that “it is possible that one’s memories [can] grow sharper after a long lapse of time, because one is looking at the past with fresh eyes and can isolate and, as it were, notice facts which previously existed undifferentiated among a mass of others”. In other words, while the content of our collective memories may have diminished over time and may have become more contaminated and distorted with time, often this isolation from past memories allows writers to identify those that are most significant in exposing past realities. Thus, the distance from memories can give people a new perspective, a more mature and insightful way of looking at their past and extrapolating their experiences to wider applications.

Therefore, I think that the fact that Persepolis is based upon Satrapi’s memories does not actually undermine its validity, if anything it allows her to bring out the most relevant experiences to portraying the trauma she experienced in her youth in Iran.

What do you think?

Image links:

• http://iranian.com/Books/2002/November/Satrapi/Images/1.gif
• https://blogs.stockton.edu/postcolonialstudies/files/2011/03/the-veil.gif
• http://unleashthefanboy.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/persepolis-1.jpg

Over the past few weeks, our focus on life narratives in class has prompted me to re-consider their “autobiographical agency”(1) in shaping the global perception of cultures. In her book “Autobiographies in Transit: Soft Weapons”, and in particular in the chapter “Introduction Word Made Flesh: Whitlock argues that, as commodities exchanged through highly complex global networks, life narratives can influence our perception of the values, traditions and forms of thinking intrinsic to a culture or to a multitude of cultures. As a result, life narratives can contribute to reinforcing or defying cultural stereotypes, and consequently to fortifying or weakening cultural barriers. However, for me, it was difficult to grasp that a sole life narrative could have so much power, which has prompted me to question: How specifically do they achieve this? What literary features are involved in the molding and presentation of a culture and in the construction of cultural barriers?

Having read the blog Baghdad Burning, written by a 24-year-old female Iraqi woman in the midst of the American war invasion in Iraq with the pseudonym “Riverbend”, I became increasingly curious as to what these specific literary features were: how is it that they present cultures, and by consequence often reinforce cultural divisions?

Therefore, I sought to investigate the ways in which literary devices in Riverbend’s blog reinforce and challenge cultural divisions, by focusing in particular on her last blog entry. In the entry, written on the 9^th of April, 2013, Riverbend reflects on the fall of Baghdad exactly ten years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as well as the events that have occurred since then and her feelings towards them. She comes to the realization she has become the voice of her nation and believes that it is her duty as a citizen to talk about what has happened in Iraq, assumingly to a Western audience. Inherent to the entry is a focus on the knowledge that Iraqis have gathered in last decade and the changes they wish to see in the future.

A particularly salient feature of this entry was the recurring repetition of collective pronoun “we”. In her emphasis on this collective gradual process of learning, Riverbend presents the Iraqi people as a strong united entity, demonstrating the tight communal bonds between the Iraqi people and. There is a determination and a willpower that also propels the passage onwards as each sentence picks up its momentum with a persistent: “we are learning”. However, the use of the pronoun “we” also excludes any foreigners, drawing a barrier between the East and the West in its creation of an exclusive group restricted only to the Iraqi. Although not as prominent in this entry, through the use of anecdotes relating to the struggles that face the Iraqis every day, Riverbend also shows the resilience of the Iraqi people, as they are able to persevere despite living in highly adverse political and social terrains. For example in the entry on the 31^st of April of 2005, despite the electricity shortages and water shortages that they face and are becoming more pronounced with the passing days, they continue to move forward, driven by their need to survive.

Personally, looking specifically at these literary features of blogs such as Baghdad Burning can provide us with so much insight into what people from differing cultures are like. From first hand accounts of what their experiences are like, we can extract small details and deconstruct them to see what they perceive are the predominant qualities of their society and other global societies, and most importantly, how these cultures differ.

Links:

Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in transit. University of Chicago Press. USA. 2007.

Google Books preview: http://books.google.ca/books?id=4C09Yao332gC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false