For the past 2 weeks In ASTU, we have been exposing ourselves to the genre of ‘the graphic narrative’, a graphic novel that is non-fiction (since novel means fiction), so we have started to read and analyzing the graphic narrative ‘Persepolis’ by Marjane Satrapi. The book Persepolis is about a 10 year old Marjane’s experience growing up in Iran during the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, so in other words, this book is a graphic memoir.

I was familiar with the book as I have previously read this book before in my grade 11 year in high-school. It was on a bookshelf labelled ‘banned books’ alongside some other books. I asked my librarian what that meant, and she informed me that it means that the books on that bookcase were banned from other schools or libraries because some parents or people have deemed those books to be ‘unfit in a  library’ because of their ‘inappropriate’ or ‘controversial’ content and have ‘challenged’ them. ‘Challenging’ a book meant that anyone could make a claim against a book, and as long as they could argue their point and back it up with evidence, they could get that book successfully removed from a school or public library. Since that book wasn’t banned at my school, I was intrigued and decided to read it. It being a graphic novel (since I hadn’t known about the graphic narrative at the time) enticed me even more as graphic novels were my favourite genre right behind fantasy. Reading it back then, I never read deeply into the book, as I was reading it for it’s story and well illustrated characters. I never paid very much attention towards the deeper meaning of the book, but after reading it, I could definitely see why that the book could be considered ‘inappropriate’, such as bombing of civilians, death,   and the use of excessive violence.

Now that we are close reading this book in ASTU, reading it thought a second time with a much more analytical eye, I have noticed the details and symbolisms that escaped the mind my grade 11 counterpart, such as the big topics like faith, family, freedom and war. I start to see that the book that the book is less about what living in Iran in the 1980’s was like, but more as a the traumas and hardships of a young Iranian girl living in a dangerous environment. Satrapi makes great use of the graphic narrative, rather than a regular memoir to illustrate her experience living in Iran because she gives us an representation of it rather than explaining it. By using the graphic narrative, this gives her the power to control what we focus on, and allows her to use subtle details to enhance her points.