HOLA! Readers, welcome back.
In these last days I finished reading the first part of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. In this graphic memoir Satrapi uses the character of Marji to represent herself from ages six to fourteen and recounts the story of what she lived during the Islamic Revolution in her home country of Iran. Reading Persepolis made me see how little I knew about Iran. I had a completely different idea of what life in Iran looked like. I learned several cultural and social aspects that made me value her country and the story she tells more than I could have expected. I feel like I can even relate some of the events she narrates to what has been going on in my country, Mexico.
I really enjoyed reading Satrapi’s work and I think it was the particular graphic aspect of the book that made me understand the story in a more personal way. I felt more connected to the story and to the character she uses because of the comic strips in her book. I like how she intends to use this genre to give the story a more informal and personal touch but without making it fictitious. I found the contrast between the harsh story and the graphic representation very important so that I could better understand what she was telling.
After I had read the book I thought of how this story was being a “technology of memory” (Wertsch, 2002) for me and how everything I thought about Iran was being replaced by the new content I had learned from reading Persepolis. This was interesting to me and it made me think about the way that we learn or the way that we create memories from what we read . Something I had earlier discussed in my ASTU class when I read “The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning” by Farhat Shahzad. Because the graphic style of Persepolis was important to my understanding of the book I wondered.. How different would Persepolis’ impact be if it were written in a formal way with no graphics? How important is the format when you want to make a significant impact on your audience?
Those questions made me think of something that happened to me a couple of months ago, when I read about recent political situations on newspapers and how my understanding of what was happening was different when I found supporting materials that gave me another perspective. I recall this time in recent internal elections in Mexico when I read some stories about politicians. After a while I found some political cartoons that, just like in Persepolis, helped me have a better understanding of the situation and how the person who makes them thinks of that certain subject. The cartoons in Satrapi’s book and the political cartoons I saw on newspapers had a specific point of view and I think they are an important piece of evidence that show how some people feel and what they think. It would be very interesting to see what a similar book would look like told from the point of view of Marji’s school principal.
My experience with this genre for the first time, when reading Persepolis, was surprising. It was very entertaining and the format in which Marjane Satrapi chose to tell her story really made a difference to me. It was also interesting to see how she could take advantage of the graphics to show more in detail what she had in mind and what she thought. The contrast between the dramatic story and the humor that she uses in the book makes it a unique and intriguing story.
~Gabriel
P.D. Sorry if the paragraphs move. I’ve spent 40 minutes trying to fix this but..
Wertsch, J.V. (2002). Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge University Press.