Hello everyone in ASTU,

This week  we were continue discuss about Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis in our class. Instead of reading the comic, we began to read Hillary Chute’s essay who is the literature scholar in the Harvard Society of Fellows. In her essay she starts from the important role that women authors play in the realm of graphic narrative and she argue that they often being ignored by media and public because stereotype of men are usually predominate in comic production.Chute also alter my perspective of the contents of comic which is from Japanese animation to graphic narrative she describes as “hybridity and autobiography, theorizing trauma in the connection to the visual, textuality that takes the body seriously.”(Clute 93).

In Persepolis, the representing of trauma is one of the main theme that Satrapi wants readers to seek at. “Trauma  is an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape or natural disaster.” (1) Indeed, there are many portraits of violence, mass death, execution scenes emerge in the story. It reveals that Satrapi is not shy to presenting trauma although through the voice of a little girl. Chute mentions about the ordinary of trauma twice in separate paragraphs. She quotes a interview about Satrapi which express there are so many incidents are relate to violence in nowadays. Rise from individual to government, people are more appealing to “solve”conflict through forces. The consequence is clear now that the act of violent is an vital factors that result in personal trauma. In another hand, as kidnapping, gun shots, car bombs those incidents frequently emerge on news and media, crowds becoming less sensitivity and see as ordinary.

I remember in the elementary school, I sometimes heard about student beat up by secondary school’s bully. In that case peers were generally thought the guy who being beat up was in his bad day and he should’t provoke the student who have relations to gang. Same as the frequent shootings in the States and many of us no longer think as a big due to us, as long as is not happened surround us.

However, Chute and Satrapi both argue the idea of normalize of violence is totally abnormal and in fact I think is a “sickness” exist in our cognition. Individual after attack by others might suffer in physically for temporary, but lead to longer suffer in mentally. Wounds on skin or inside body might be cure by treatments but the negative emotion responses might last in one’s mind for longer. It comes back to the vital theme of Persepolis, trauma，which is one of the significant part of Satrapi experienced in her childhood. She implies if we never forget tragically events，（such as 9/11 which led to a national trauma in America）we are able to prevent violence happened again because we gain awareness of it. We also need to take actions when thread is coming towards ourselves in order to make everybody who living in the community feel more secure.

Work Cited:

• Hillary Chute. “The Texture Of Retracing In Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly: 92-110. Print.
• (1)”Trauma.” Psychology Topic. American Psychological Association, 2015. Web. 16 Oct. 2015.