Hello bloggers!
My turn as the class blogger has come around and I must say, the blogs I read this week were great!
I’m sure it is of no surprise to you that this week many people chose to write about Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. A reoccurring theme this week was the discussion of style in which Satrapi used in her graphic narrative.
In Paolina’s blog, she writes how she is beginning to see “Persepolis and comics in a whole new light” and personally, I agree with her. I am no longer seeing comics as something just for children and I am growing an appreciation for the simplicity behind them. In fact, “graphic novels add a new dimension to the reading experience.” While Paolina writes how her view on comics has changed, Gabriel writes about how Satrapi reveals the normalization of violence. Satrapi not only shows us how normal violence is in her life at the time, but in society today. Similarly to Gabriel, Kate addresses how through the minimalist style of the drawings, it shows “trauma more effectively and horrifically than simply describing it with words or a more realistic image.” Due to the fact that it is from a child’s perspective, the drawings cannot always be realistic. A child cannot always comprehend how horrific some things really are and because of this, it allows the reader’s imagination to wander.
Unlike many others this week, Baris focuses more on the similarities of growing up in Iran (when Satrapi did) and present day Turkey. Even through Satrapi’s minimalist style in Persepolis it is difficult to imagine what hardships she experienced, but for me, it is even more difficult to imagine someone in our very own class has experienced something similar. Persepolis has helped me in realizing that although the things Satrapi has experienced may be extraordinary, she herself, is still and ordinary person and that until the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war she was just living her normal life like many of us.
Being able to read everyone’s thoughts and opinions of the book as well as their own experiences and connections was something I really enjoyed. I look forward to reading all of your future blogs, but before I go, I do have a few questions. What if Persepolis had been in colour? Would it have changed anything? Or what if Satrapi had decided not to have made it a graphic narrative at all? Would the underlining message be as intensified as it is?
Until next time,
Elizabeth
Elizabeth asks some interesting questions to consider. Specifically, I am looking to the question of the results to Satrapi’s “Persepolis” being in a non-graphic narrative form. I assume this to mean being in a written narrative, completely made out of words without any pictures.
In my honest opinion, I believe that the message would not be as intense as it currently is. We have learned though Hillary Chute’s essay (“The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis”) that Satrapi’s style brings attention to the normalization of violence by depicting it so abstractly, and thus jarring a reader’s sense of reality and making them see violence as something that is truly horrific.
I believe that this would be extremely hard to achieve with only words, as words would end up describing these scenes realistically, and we would still view it as ‘normal’.
-Sandra Maglanque
I want to expand on Paolina’s (http://blogs.ubc.ca/pmbuck/) change in perspective on the nature of the comic book. While growing up, comic books were often seen as a means of communicating humour through direct images with minimal text. It is fascinating how Satrapi, among others, has contributed to transforming the genre of the comic into one of the graphic narrative, where humour is lacking but story and history are abundant. Paolina discusses the “new dimension of the reading experience” brought about by the graphic narrative, one that inspires great thought through the simplicity of a black-and-white image. The graphic narrative allows for a significant amount of interpretation to be performed by the reader, thus allowing for a more personal experience between reader and author. I look forward to reading more graphic narratives in the future and I am glad to have been exposed to this genre formally unknown to me.
-Erin Livinghouse