This past week in our ASTU class, we finished reading the book Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. When I first learned we were going to be reading Persepolis, I really didn’t have any opinion on it whatsoever. While I never actually knew what the book was about, I recognized the cover from my mother’s bookshelf, and assumed it was just another dull and uninteresting foreign novel she had read. Not to my surprise, I was completely wrong. I found myself captivated by this intriguing story, not being able to put the book down once I started reading it. 

Persepolis tells the story of a young girl named Marji, growing up during the Iranian revolution. The book illustrates the hardships and changes Marji and her family had to endure, along with many others living in Iran. At first glance, if you were to quickly flip through the pages of Persepolis, it could be easily seen as a simple comic book; however, this is not the case. Satrapi’s drawing style gives the reader a different perspective to the story a normal book would not be able to portray. 

For example, Satrapi uses many visual techniques in her comics to show the concept of time throughout the book. On page 132 when Marji is buying illegal music tapes, Satrapi draws Marji and the street vendor appearing to have two faces in the panels, which seems to produce a feeling of motion over time.

Satrapi also uses changes in Marji’s appearances to give the reader a sense of time progression. As the story develops, Marji is given different hair lengths and clothing styles to show her physical changes as she grows up. In the beginning of the book, Marji has short hair and wears the typical clothing of a young girl. 

 (pg 7)

However, towards the end of the book, Marji has long hair and forms her own sense of style, differentiating herself from the proper/traditional way most other Iranian girls dress.

 (pg 131)

The use of the illustrations to show the progression of time is one of the many visual techniques Satrapi utilizes in Persepolis. By doing so, she creates a complex piece of literature with messages that would not be depicted the same if it was simply just a comic book or a regular novel. 

In Farhat Shahzad’s article,The Role of Interpretive Communities in Remembering and Learning, she writes about the use of technologies of memory in interpretive communities. She states that “human beings interpret, relate, select, record, share, and tell their memories with the help of a variety of technologies of memory such as media, textbooks, documents, the internet, museums, monuments, and landscapes.”

Though I never thought of social media in a scholarly way such as a “technology of memory,” I think Facebook is a great example of it. With the rapid rise of the internet, the ways in which people connect and communicate with one another has significantly changed and is continuously changing all the time. Facebook itself is a community, and there are thousands of different communities within it.

While I was looking through the page of a recently joined group, I noticed some connections with what Shahzad shared in her article, and saw Facebook in somewhat of a different way. The specific page I was looking at was called “Friends of Dan Mindich.” This page was created in memory of a teacher from my previous school who had tragically died during a rough water swim earlier this month. There were several posts about Dan from fellow colleagues and students in Hawaii, as well as people from his hometown in New York, close friends in Africa, and college classmates, all spread throughout the continental US. The posts included pictures of Dan from classes, weddings, vacations, and reunions, as well as some anecdotes on his silly outgoing personality or the ways in which he changed the lives of those around him. 

Although the circumstances of the page was very sad and unfortunate, I think it’s a pretty awesome thing that came out of this tragedy. It’s a place where all these different people from around the world can come together in this sort of online “community” and share stories, pictures, lessons, etc, of Dan that can be available for everyone no matter where they are. 

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