Hello fellow students, I’m Sam and I’ll be summarizing this week’s blogs for ASTU 100. There is so much I want to write about in this post, because all of your blogs were so interesting and seemingly purposefully connected that there is a lot to sum up. I’ll try and capture all your ideas as best I can, for as I read through the separate blogs I kept thinking back to what I wrote about in my first post, how we as a community are developing or own interpretive community of learning. I think exploring this community through class blogging is important, but I’m sorry if I ramble on.

I sat down to start writing this after reading all of your blogs, and I put on some Miles Davis to concentrate while I was writing, and it made me think of the chapter we are reading in Sociology right now on culture. The graphic novel we are reading right now: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is very much based around this idea of culture, and how it connects to memory and the authors own personal narrative growing up in Iran during the revolution. Culture encompasses the ideas, values, practices, and material objects that allow a group of people, even an entire society to carry out their lives in relative order and harmony (Ritzer, Guppy 2014). Let’s take Iran and America (or the west) for instance. The two cultures associated with those countries are very different and as I will discuss later, Satrapi uses her personal narrative told through an abstract medium, to convey how her story sheds light on previous assumptions and shows us a greater truth to our cultural differences.

Another important part of a culture and country is memory. Nicola’s blog focuses on the culture of family inside Iran vs. that of the Western world and how it passes on memory. As we see in Persepolis, the idea of memory and lenses of memory are linked to Satrapi’s personal narrative, as well as the culture of Iran. Both Carolina and Kendall both discuss this idea. Carolina shows how age and memory are fused as one, and gives the example of the lenses that Satrapi uses to convey her story. She writes from her own point of view living in Iran as a child, but her story is narrated by a much older self. I ask myself, how does this affect her telling of what happened historically? Kendall’s blog focuses on this, and she believes that “memory is arguably the most authentic way to record history” and I agree. I also think Satrapi realizes this as well. History cannot cover every view point, but smears them all together to get the gist of the cultural, political and social aspects of what happens over time. Kaveel points out in his blog the fact that there really is no specific time-frame to Satrapi’s work and says that this is not necessarily a bad thing. While a personal narrative naturally comes with bias, or a certain “perspective”, it is this perspective that gives us a unique view of one specific thread that contributes to the rope that is history. Satrapi’s Personal Narrative cuts through the generalizations of culture and memory to open the reader’s eyes to the connection we have as human beings.

After reading Kaveel’s blog I was drawn to Satrapi’s narrative and the meaning that it holds. It is very descriptive as a comic, but why did she choose to write it as a graphic novel? In my grade 12 AP English class, we read a book called Fugitive Pieces which discusses the same themes (memory, written history, culture) as in Persepolis, but is about an orphaned Jewish child in the wake of the Nazi agenda. The book is extremely descriptive but is described through text. Why would Satrapi use an abstract form like a graphic novel to portray an extremely controversial, important and personal life narrative? Jennifer’s blog includes a video link at the end of her post to a trailer for the film version of Persepolis, which uses the same art style. That led me to watch a clip of “Making of Persepolis” where Satrapi talks about her use of graphic narrative in the telling of her story. In it, she answers our question by saying: “Drawings have an abstract quality, if we used real images…it would be an ethnic film, it becomes the problem of those people who live over there and are crazy about God. Drawings with their abstract quality emphasize the universal.” (3:08)

This conversation on the use of graphic narrative in respect to meaning, memory and popular culture opened a wide array of views from the class. In Rachel’s blog she points out that comic narrative affects the feel of the person reading it, and how it conveys even horrible topic in a personal way. With text, we relate our own ideas of what the sentences and concepts in a text mean or look like as images in our head, and base our understanding from our interpretation of the text. In a graphic narrative, the author gives you these images and you interpret the significance of the concepts and themes through the drawings. To give an example as to how this makes for an accessible, but also powerful medium we can look at what Kihan discusses. She points out that when an author uses a medium like popular art it widens the scope to a mass media level. But Kihan argues, in Satrapi’s case this does not lead to trivialization of the graphic narrative as say, a comic book would. Instead it “creates something powerful for everyone to experience.”

This begs the question: why in Satrapi’s case it is a powerful medium? How does this graphic narrative change the readers view on the subject? In both Jaqueline and Imaan’s blogs they answer these questions. Jaqueline compares Persepolis to Stephan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday in the way that both authors counter previous mainstream stereotypes about their experiences through their personal narratives. She illuminates the fact that Marji is powerless to create change as a child living in Iran at the time, but as an adult she uses her personal narrative of living through such an event to “give power to her once over looked voice”. In Imaan’s blog points out how a powerful narrative like this can change our views on a subject that have developed over time. She connects Satrapi’s narrative to that of a child who experienced the Residential School system. In Canada we are slowly changing our views on the assimilation of Aboriginals into western culture by the government, through these personal narratives of Aboriginals who experienced this and are sharing their stories. In Satrapi’s case, she uses her narrative to bring about a positive change in the way the west views Iran because of the Revolution. Her narrative and its universal presentation breaks down the generalizations of mass media and culture to bring people a first-hand story narrated though a personal lense. Through this presentation, she creates a meaningful change in the way people view the events she lived through. Satrapi breaks through barriers of culture, memory and history with her personal narrative to focus on the simple connection we have as humans living on this planet.

Apologies for making this so long, you guys had a lot to say!

Thanks again for reading, see you all next class

-Sam Tuck