For the next week or so our topic in my ASTU class is Persepolis.  Never heard of it?  I hadn’t either.  Persepolis is “Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution” (as stated on the inside cover).  As I looked at this graphic memoir before I began reading it, 2 things were going through my head. One, being that I’ve never read a graphic memoir before and two, that I know nothing about the Islamic Revolution.

Much to my surprise, I was immediately taken in by Persepolis.  Not only was I learning small bits and pieces about the revolution but I was also intrigued by the detail in the drawings.  Before I even realized, I was three quarters of the way through this memoir.  I found the graphic memoir a really interesting genre that I have never had the pleasure of reading until now.  The relationship between the dialog and the illustrations captured my complete attention and kept it right through till the end, which doesn’t happen often.

When I had finished the memoir I could not help but to just stare at the last piece of information Satrapi leaves us with.  She has drawn this image of herself turning around to look at her parents one last time before she leaves for Australia, and she sees her dad carrying her mother out of the airport.  I could not help but feel a connection to the way she felt.  Even though the circumstances were extremely different I understood the pain of saying goodbye to your parents in an airport.  I had experienced this only a couple of weeks ago when I said good bye to my parents to get on a plane to come to UBC.

Now I know that some may say that by reading her memoir I have only learned her side of what happened during the revolution. In class we talked about memory and a couple questions that surrounded this topic were “who owns history and memories?” and “who has the right to tell it?”  I want to jump to a paper I was reading for my history class, which was Oscar Moore’s personal account of living with aids.  A specific line in this paper caught my eye, it read “…in 1976 (well 1977 really, but it’s my history, I’ll lie if I want to)”(Moore,38).  When I read this I was immediately drawn to the thought that because this was Moore’s account of what happened in his life, he had the right to tell it in the way he wanted it portrayed.  This idea has left me wondering what memories of Satrapi’s story she specifically remembers and what parts may have be altered over her lifetime, as many memories do.

A suggestion was brought up in class that her story may have been a very different story from the one that could be told from someone who was from a lower social class.  If this had been the case, how different would the story have been?  All the information that is depicted in her memoir has left me with many questions that I hope to find answers.

Till Next Time!

Farhat Shahzad’s research paper “The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning” opened my eyes to the idea that even if people have been taught something the same manner, they may interpret it completely different.  I had never really considered that where you grew up, what culture you grew up around, all those little things, had such an impact on the perspective that you would take.  In her paper, Shahzad states that “a human agent gives meanings to facts in the light of how these communities represent them, the words they use, the stories they tell, the images they produce, the emotions they associate with them, and they way they classify and conceptualize them” (pg.306).  Only after having read this did it occur to me that the reason I have the same, for example, political views, as my parents do it is because I grew up with their influence.  It was in the TV shows we watched and the world issues that we talked about, that their opinion slowly became mine.  This is not because it was forced upon me but simply that this was the voice I had listened to all my life, the voice that guided me, the voice that taught me and therefore I had never seen a reason to look elsewhere.  That is until now.  Shahzad’s paper has encouraged me to reconsider many of the opinions I previously thought to have been my own.   I now understand that it has not just been my parents but also my friends, teachers, and the country in which I grew up in, among many other “interpretative communities” that have shaped my perspective of different topics.  I experienced this first hand when I was talking to my new roommate, who happened to be from the United States.  The topic of history had somehow come up and immediately she disagrees with the Canadian version of history.  Since she had grown up in America, the communities that had shaped her remembering and learning were very different from ours.  Her understanding of history, the way that she remembers it, would have been the understanding in more than one of her communities.  Shahzad writes that “students learn not only in a school system, but also within a highly diverse network of communities” (pg.310).  This conversation I had with my roommate, only further proved Shahzad’s idea of how interpretative communities frame the way we remember and learn.

Welcome to my ASTU blog! A little bit of info about me! I’m a 19 year old female Arts student hoping to major in Speech Sciences.  I am from a small town in north of Toronto, Ontario.  I’ve lived on a horse farm for 95%  of my life, and have shown  horses competitively for the last 12 years.

If you’re wondering what my ASTU blog is, I will tell you! ASTU is the short form used for Arts Studies.  My class has been given the assignment to create a blog as part of our course!  This blog will cover topics related to my CAP (Coordinated Arts Program) courses, which includes Arts Studies along with Political Science and Sociology.  These courses are based on a global citizen’s perspective.

I can’t wait to get started!