The graphic narrative written by Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis, is based on the author’s personal experiences growing up under the Islamic regime in Iran after the Revolution took place in 1979. The Revolution was responsible for taking Reza Shah out of power and implementing the rule of the clergy, led by Ruhollah Khomeini. Through the perspective of a child, Satrapi approaches themes including the war, governmental oppression, gender roles, social inequality, identity and remembering by making use of the non-verbal language represented in her iconic black and white style of drawing, as well as verbal language including dialogues, speech bubbles, and narrations. Satrapi’s intent in publishing Persepolis, which was banned from her country, is to change people’s perspective of Iranians who have increasingly being attributed a bad reputation due to the rise of extremist groups. According to Marjane, “one should forgive but one should never forget”. This motto serves as Satrapi’s foundation as she tells the audience her individual story and to a certain extent the story of her people. The tittle Persepolis alludes to this motto since it was the capital of the Persian Empire, hence a reference to Iranian history being placed in a modern context.
When talking about memorializing trauma, it is important to first define trauma. Generally, trauma is understood as a form of injury or the result of a deeply distressing experience. Even though I agree with these definitions of trauma, I believe it is crucial to take into account the broad effect that it can have, not being limited to the person who had a first-hand experience of it but also to a whole group of people, and in some cases a whole nation. For example, in Persepolis, we are introduced to the fact that Marji’s grandfather was a political prisoner because he was a communist under the Shah’s rule. The title given to the chapter is “Water Cell”, which refers to one of the forms of punishment he would face, being locked in a cell filled with water for hours. Since little Marji’s mother, Taji had been conditioned to seeing her father being taken away from her and on the 3rd panel she has an emotional breakdown, stating that “all his life he was in pain”. The use of graphic weight, the contrast between black and white, in this panel makes Taji’s tears stand out, providing the audience with an idea of what the burden of carrying this trauma must feel like. In these panels, we notice that Marji’s grandfather faced physical pain, as when Taji would visit him at prison he would try his best to play with her but his suffering was visible. Additionally, the emotional distress of being away from his family contributed to his suffering. The trauma resulting from the experiences that Marji’s grandfather lived in prison were transferred to Taji as it affected her childhood and memory of her father, and are now being transferred to Marji, who is visibly shocked and tries to put herself in her grandfather’s position by staying a long time in a bathtub filled with water. Marji’s attitude reflects her innocence as a child. In the second role of panels, we can neatly see Marji’s reaction which contrasts with her mother’s reaction. While her mother is crying as she feels the pain of trauma and remembering, Marji is unsettled as it is her first time hearing about trauma in her family and getting a sense of its lasting consequences.
Likewise, it is interesting to reflect upon the private and public spheres of trauma which are evident in the chapter “The Heroes”. We are presented to two political prisoners who Marji’s parents knew, Siamak and Mohsen, and they tell Marji’s family about their experiences being tortured in prison. These experiences although personal to them can be generalized to other political prisoners and despite the different time periods, Siamak, Mohsen, and Marji’s grandfather, as well as their families, have to deal with the trauma resulting from the oppression and torture they had faced.
Based on our class discussion looking at Chute and DeKoven essay, “Introduction: Graphic Narrative”, there is a “risk of representation” associated with the genre of graphic narrative chosen by Satrapi and with the concepts of private and public deriving from her story. One of the risks that Satrapi runs is making use of humor in order to deepen the audience’s understanding of the social reality under the Islamic regime since the use of humor is a characteristic of the comic genre and it is usually superficial, not connected to heavy themes such as war. Satrapi once said in an interview while receiving a prize from Stanford University’s department of Iranian Studies that “laughter is the highest degree of understanding the other because it is based on abstraction”. When looking at trauma it is easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, but due to Satrapi’s choice of approaching the theme of humanity through the use of humor, she shifts the discourse of trauma emphasizing its universality. In the chapter “The Sheep”, for example, Satrapi’s representation of the Siamak and his family escaping Iran by hiding among the sheep breaks with the prior panels of what was happening with the families of political prisoners, which included Siamak’s sister being choked. The “laughter” does not come from escaping with the sheep being unreasonable, contrastingly, it comes from the realization of how deprived of humanity was the Iranian society, to the point that people who followed different ideologies were killed and forced to escape by hiding among flocks of animals. Satrapi’s iconic (non-realistic) drawings provide lightness to the graphic narrative, serving as a juxtaposition to the seriousness of reality and thus adding on the humor. Above all, the drawings maintain a certain loyalty to Marji’s perspective coming from a child, as although she grows into an adult the iconic drawings remain the same. A similar use of humor can be seen when Marji and her friends laughed at the formalities performed in respect to the martyrs in the chapter titled “The Key”. Humor prevents trauma from taking over the narrative, it balances the heaviness of reality with the lightness of the drawings and Marji’s perspective. In order to deal with trauma, parties were used as tools to make the governmental repression psychologically bearable and so trauma was not limited to Marji’s family, but was an issue dealt and still being dealt with by a whole society.
Another interesting connection would be between the way trauma is portrayed in Persepolis and in Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell, which was also discussed in class. In the film, Polley interviews her family members and friends in an attempt to gather as much information as she can about her mother, who had died from cancer when she was young. However, the trauma present in the film is not only in her attempt to reconstruct her mother but also in the personal quest to figure out who is her biological father. Just as in Persepolis, the boundaries of public and private become blurred. Still, the people being interviewed by Polley laugh at certain situations in order to cope with the retelling of their stories. When we laugh with them, the connection developed goes beyond empathy. Even though we might not necessarily laugh at Satrapi’s graphic narrative, as in physically laugh, but unconsciously there is something funny about it, something about how fragile and resistant people are which connects to the laughter in Polley’s documentary.
Finally, the limitations of memorializing trauma can be seen in the fact that both Satrapi and Polley needed something visual, a graphic narrative and a film, to come close to the reality of it. The use of laughter and humor balances the pain that remembering brings and makes sure that despite trauma persisting, it does not take over from the greatness that it is to live, to experience and build your own history.