For the past couple of weeks, our class has read and started to analyze Marjane Satrapi’s moving graphic narrative, Persepolis. The story is narrated by Marji, a feisty 10-year-old girl growing up in the midst of the Islamic Revolution and Iran-Iraq War. Her narrative captivated my attention immediately, and I began to wonder why this was.
Since I was in elementary school, I have always been fascinated with narratives of historical events. This early fascination began with book series like Dear Canada: a collection of fictional diaries narrated by young girls and set in historically significant – and often traumatic – settings, such as the Halifax Explosion of 1917, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, the Ukrainian Canadian Internment of 1914, the residential schools of 1966 and many more. As a kid, I was never taken aback by the juxtaposition of the trauma of these events and a child’s point of view. However, after delving into Satrapi’s Persepolis, it now strikes me as a more potent contrast and wrought with purpose.
Generally, authors of books are rarely children themselves – so why do some choose to speak from a child’s perspective, especially when they are narrating solemn or upsetting events? One explanation is the issue of accessibility. Complicated situations may be simplified through the eyes of a child, as their interpretations are often influenced by a lack of information or differential understanding of nuanced circumstances. This simplification has a way of inviting a larger audience, including those who may find a detailed account from a history textbook uninteresting or confusing. I encountered a lot of information about historical events through Dear Canada at a younger age than some of my peers, drawn in by the voices of young girls like me describing horrifying, yet captivating traumatic settings. In Persepolis, Marji’s perspective as a child simplifies certain aspects of the Islamic Revolution, likely extending its accessibility to the Western audience it is directed toward, as we discussed in class.
A child’s point of view may also work to humanize traumatic events that are overwhelming and hard to grasp emotionally. A general historical description of, say, World War 1 may list the number of casualties in a given battle – the Battle of the Somme resulted in one million, for example. From this information, it is difficult to comprehend statistics of this magnitude at face value to identify with the sheer devastation of this event. However, a child’s perspective – of losing a father or brother in this battle, of the grief it brought on the family, of the change that resulted from this death – provides a personal narrative that works to ground trauma and information that can otherwise be incomprehensible.
Whatever the purpose, historical narratives through the eyes of a child have proved to be a profound, even jarring, means of interacting with traumatic events.

http://www.scholastic.ca/dearcanada/books/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Somme
https://www.amazon.ca/Persepolis-Story-Childhood-Marjane-Satrapi/dp/037571457X