Hi readers!

This week I’m the class blogger and I just finished reading everyone’s blogs and they were all amazing! Good job you guys! haha!

So anyway, this week, almost everyone from my class posted about Persepolis and connects it to Hillary Chute’s article titled The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. I am not surprised because that is what our class has been discussing this whole week and it was a great discussion, I myself enjoyed it so much.

Like what Kennedy said in his blog, its amazing how Satrapi was able to manipulate her readers by using techniques to somehow send hidden messages to the readers and the more we read her book the more we know what message she is really trying to send us. I also agree that each pictures have somehow different meanings and emotions behind it.

A lot of people (Kennedy, Kate, Grace, Peter, and Magda) focused on a picture from page 52 where Satrapi drew a picture of a man being cut up to pieces. Like what Peter and Kate said, it is obvious that it is a picture or an imagination from a child’s point of view. A child would imagine something violent in an unrealistic way where the man’s body parts in the picture was chopped equally, tidily, no blood and there are hollows, just like in cartoons whereas in the real world, its far from what she has drawn. Magda also agrees that its is not what the real torture looks like, she added that the picture above are more accurate of what the torture was like.

Another thing people in my class (Martin, Sandra, and Joseph) are drawn to is the black and white technique Satrapi has used. Like what Sandra said, most of us probably think at first that Satrapi used only black and white for her book just to set the mood and have no important reasons behind it. After reading Chute’s article we all changed our mind. The reason why she used black and white backgrounds turned out to be very important. Like what Joseph and most of us agreed that the reason why she used black and white backgrounds is to depicts how violent it was in that era. Martin added that black and white is a lot more powerful to recall traumatic experience and for readers to understand trauma more than to use color backgrounds. Martin ends his argument by quoting from our fellow classmate, Isiah that black and white is more straight forward and honest.

Reading people’s ideas and perspectives of the book and the article is very interesting and I really enjoyed it, as much as I enjoyed writing this blog post this week! Before I’m out, I have a small question for you guys to discuss, If you were the author of your own story/memoir, what special techniques or style you guys would use so that people would be drawn deeper to your story/memoir?

-Inneke Soeyanto