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!