I’d like to start off this blog post by asking a relatively simple question. What allows us as humans to forget? In Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, A young girl’s life is recalled through a graphic novel. In Hillary Chute’s scholarly article titled: The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” She examines the graphic novel through closely looking at how the aesthetics of the illustrations compare in relation to the trauma being expressed through Satrapi’s words. From my perspective at least, Satrapi’s words appear much more graphic than the illustrations. Although this may seem totally counterintuitive, it can be justified in the sense that more often than not, what’s left to the reader’s imagination turns out to be significantly more vivid and potentially traumatizing than what the illustrator decides to display. Another example of this occurring in popular culture was in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1961 film “Psycho” in which a murder takes place but a very minimal amount of violence is depicted on screen. The intended effect of this visual minimalism can be summarized through the cliché “less is more”

Another interesting point that Chute raises is that because all of the illustrations are in black and white, a lot of the violence depicted in Satrapi’s work becomes abstract due to how colourfully destructive violence normally is in the media. Chute also argues that by making the violence appear abstract, it makes it slightly more obvious that the story is being told by an adult reflecting on their childhood as children typically have trouble rationalizing violence. This leads me to the question I asked at the beginning of this entry. What allows us as humans to forget? In Satrapi’s case I believe it’s not so much about forgetting as it is subliminally displaying how the normality of violence in her youth has had a deep and profound impact on who she is as a person today.