Monthly Archives: October 2015

It has been a while since my ASTU course touched on literary scholar Hillary Chute’s essay on the graphic narrative Persepolis,  but nonetheless I have decided to go back to it. In her paper, Chute is especially interested in the memory of trauma within the story of Persepolis. For instance, Chute explained how the black and white visual Satrapi uses for her story is a deliberate plan to emphasize the “horror of history” through “a pointed degree of abstraction” (98). Since I was also intrigued by the topic of trauma, I explored other ways of representing traumatic messages. Today, I’d like to introduce a particular way of doing so, that I found interesting.

The advancements in trauma studies in recent decades, has led to the heightened understanding of traumatic experiences being overwhelming and incomprehensible. This created the need to interpret the situation in a different way from the past. Literary scholar Laurie Vickroy, in her book Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction, argues that “trauma narratives” – A form of fictional story-telling that helps readers in understanding traumatic experiences – is the answer to that need of an alternate interpretation, as it has assembled “an important place among diverse artistic, scholarly, and testimonial representations” (1). She argues that the style clarifies “our relationship to memory and forgetting within the complex interweavings of social and psychological relationships”.

Trauma narrativists try to reach out to their audiences (readers) in various ways. One-way of doing so is to make the story personal to the audience by presenting a character in a state of having simultaneous conflicting reactions and beliefs (2). Briefly going back to the story of Persepolis, this method can be seen when Marji, the main protagonist, struggles with the understanding of her own religious beliefs, because of a traumatic experience of her uncle getting killed (71). Another possible method is what I call, “fill in the blank”. Authors draw readers in by deliberately, or unintentionally, not giving the full story in the book. Because the author does not give the whole picture to the reader, the readers are forced into imagining the picture themselves; consequently getting more involved with the story. Again, this can be found in part of Persepolis, for example when Marji saw her friend dead after getting hit by a missile (142). Satrapi does not give any descriptions on what it was like; sometimes, silence speaks more then words. This could also be connected with one of the topics we are tackling in class right now, “trauma and forgetting”.

The idea of using fiction for this particular topic did not seem adequate to me at first, but after giving more thought to it, I came to the conclusion that it is better for traumatic stories to have fictional parts in it to some extent. I say this because once trauma stories become completely non-fictional, not only does it become a very sensitive read for the audience, but also the writers will have to recollect every single detail of their traumatic experiences, which could be extremely taxing to them mentally. For both writers and readers, the inclusion of a bit of fiction could prove to be beneficial.

Works cited:

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (2004)

Laurie Vickroy, Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (2002)

For the past couple of weeks in our ASTU class, we had been continuing our discussion on the graphic memoir “Persepolis”. The class material has moved on from the book, but there is one more aspect of the book that I want discuss in this week’s blog.

The storyline of Persepolis conveys messages from various themes: history, feminism, family, war and peace… and also religion. In the book, religion is swirling around Marji’s world. The Islamic revolution – the main focus of the book – was triggered from religion. Religion remains relevant throughout the story, so it is natural to think that Marji becomes deeply influenced by it.

As expected, at the beginning of the story, Margi is deeply religious. As she proclaims: “I was born with religion” (Persepolis, page 6, frame 2). She has big discussions with God every night, and he has high aspirations of her becoming a prophet. She would embrace God’s nomination, and tell her grandmother how, once she becomes prophet, she would solve everything that she deems problematic, from inequality in society, to fixing her grandmother’s knees.

However, God’s presence starts to fade in time. In the year of the revolution, Marji decides she needs to start an action, so she “put [her] prophetic destiny aside for a while” (10, frame 2). At this point, she has already left her aspirations of becoming a prophet. Despite all of this, God comes to see her from time to time. She still had space for God in her heart. One night, Marji overhears her parents talking about a theatre being burnt down (16, frame 1). She tells God, who is present, that she wants to join her parents to go demonstrate. In the next frame, God leaves the room without telling her; and he would not come back for the night.

From that moment, God’s appearance in the book becomes scarce. He appears in one frame in page 25, where he asks Marji “What are you doing?” (25, frame 8), a question of which she does not reply to, and another appearance in the last frame of page 53, where he is embracing Marji who is lost in the understanding of what “justice” is. This insinuates that, though God’s presence was not as big as it used to be for Marji, he still was somebody she could rely upon from time to time.

Then came Marji’s encounter with uncle Anoosh. She idolized her uncle, because he had gone through many hardships, including escaping to the USSR, and being thrown in jail for nine years. His presence, which was bigger than God to her, took out the existence of God in her life. God no longer appeared in any of the frames until Anoosh gets executed, and Marji, being in a miserable state, kicks God out of her life. She goes on in the book, saying “And so I was lost, without any bearings… What could be worse than that?” (71, frame 1).

So why did Marji eliminate God from her life, if he was the only one lest that she could rely on? It seemed odd to me at first. Then, I realized why she could not have had God with her anymore: because religion was what brought this tragedy to her life, and the thought of God was directly related to religion. Ironically, it seems, God was eliminated by religion.

At first, Marji’s faith was spontaneous. Religion was not oppressive, and her parents were not sources of religious ideas, as they were “very modern and avand-garde” (6, frame 1). Then, the revolution happened, and a different, oppressive religion was pushed into her life, directly affecting her surroundings, forcing her to abandon her religiousness and God. However, I believe what young Marji did not understand at the time, and what the grown-up Marjane Satrapi, as an author did realize, is that those two religions – one coming from her own mind, and one from an outer source – are completely different things. In the latter half of the book, she despises religion, as it oppresses her and her family, but the author perhaps did not want the reader to comprehend Marji’s thoughts on religion as one sided, but instead, conflicted and agonizing. She did not intend to scrutinize religion as a whole, but instead, the oppressive natured religion that was pushed into her life at a young age, by showing that she, too, was very religious at one point in her life.

Works cited: “Persepolis – The Story of a Childhood”

In my ASTU class, we have been discussing the graphic memoir “Persepolis” written by Marjane Satrapi. I really, really enjoyed reading this book. I am going to use today’s post to explain what exactly I liked about Satrapi’s work, and what I obtained from those positive thoughts towards the work.

The graphic memoir fascinated me in two aspects. First, I want to point out the genius in Satrapi’s style of art. The pictures are all black and white, which, in my opinion, gives the book an authentic yet serious feel to it. Many scenes in the book demonstrate why exactly this book was written in a comic book style. For example, the big, single frame in page 71 of the book shows Marji, the main protagonist, floating in space with nothing around her, with the caption on top, “And so I was lost, without any bearings… What could be worse than that?” and on the bottom written, “It was the beginning of the war.” These words and the picture fit together so well; I am certain that there was no better way in this particular scene in understanding and feeling the emotions of the main protagonist, than imagery. I would like to talk about the connection between imagery and memory on a different date, since it is another fascinating topic worth looking into.

Another intriguing part of the book was how it made me look at history in a different way. Since the story is being told from a young girl’s perspective, the story has a highly subjective narrative to it; and yet, the book is highly informative. I learned a lot about the history of Iran, specifically about the “Islamic revolution” and the “Iran/Iraq war”. But the book does not feel like a history textbook, or any form of history document. This is because it is a memoir, the personal memory of Marjane Satrapi. What we learn in history class is a collective memory of the nation or state. In classrooms, I was always taught the so-called objective views of history, and never subjective views. However, looking back, I can no longer say that those lectures were objective. Why? Because after reading Persepolis, I started to think about objectivism and subjectivism, and came to the conclusion that objective views, when discussing history, is not very realistic. History, in my opinion, is a compilation of personal memories, such as Satrapi’s. The compilation gets generalized at the national or community level, and it becomes the “official” memory, or the history we learn in history class. What that means, is that those subjective memories, once they are compiled and generalized, suddenly become “objective”. I do not see the logic in that. I believe every historical document has subjectivity, or biases, and I do not consider that as a bad thing. What I do not appreciate, though, is that some claim to be objective when they are not. Satrapi does not pretend to be objective; everything in the book seems to have come straight from her heart. And that is something that impressed me and made me like the book even more.

I do have some criticisms for the book; but in total honesty, I do not have the time to write all of that. So for this week, this is all I am going to write about. Thank you so much for reading!

Ken Sakamoto