In the past week, we started reading Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical narrative Persepolis, which talks about the author’s childhood in Iran, the Islamic Revolution and the fall of the Shah. The graphic narrative is filled with hundreds of drawings and all of them are black and white.

Satrapi once said: “I was never planning to make a comic, but then I was in an art studio in Paris and discovered what comics were, and actually the fact was that this was really the medium that fit me the best because I love to write and I love to draw and so it really was the best for me. From the second, I made the first page I knew this is what I should be doing.”
I was really interested in why she chose to publish her graphic narrative in black and white and here are some of the reasons I came up with:

Firstly, black and white portrays the stark contrast between the east and the west and between Iran and the western world. Marji was always caught between the two worlds and in the graphic narrative, this is often portrayed in the way that Marji chose to dress – either in the burqa with the veil or in western clothes. Secondly, black could represent power and authority. In the graphic narrative, black tends to portray darkness, sadness, depression, dominance and difficult times that Marji and her family went through. White, on the other hand, represents peace, happiness, freedom and religion.
Lastly, Persepolis is written in the eyes of a young girl that knows either good or bad. The two colours are used efficiently to represent this judgement, where white represents the good and black represents the bad.

In Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi effectively conveys her visual ideas through the use of two colours. The simplistic approach shows, that to her there are two extreme sides.

http://asiasociety.org/marjane-satrapi-i-will-always-be-iranian

Over the last few weeks, we have thoroughly discussed genres in my ASTU class. I have been familiar with genres probably since the end of elementary school and was quite surprised when we started talking about it in my university English class. I asked myself: “Do university students really have to talk about different kinds of genres?” The topic of genres seemed so obvious that you never really talked about it, let alone think about it. In my IB English class, genres were a norm that you never really questioned.

After reading the scholarly essay ‘Youth, trauma and memorialisation: The selfie as witnessing’ by Kate Douglas, I came to the realization that there is so much more to genres. I never thought that we encounter so many different genres in so many different settings on daily basis. In fact, reading Douglas’s essay on taking selfies at trauma sites and sharing them on social media provoked one personal experience that I’d like to share.

In August 2016, I visited the United Nations Headquarters in New York and participated in a model united nations conference. On the last day, we visited the 9/11 memorial. It was a surreal experience that I struggle to put into words. Walking around the two square pools, I felt so small and unimportant and I was baffled how a city like New York was all of sudden so silent. For a few moments, the sirens, snarled up traffic, heavy construction sites and large crowds disappeared and my focus laid on the memorial. There were hundreds of people around the two pools and almost everyone had their phone out and pointed towards the memorial. Everyone was snapping pictures and I wonder if taking selfies was a way of dealing with the sensitive situation. It seems that people don’t mind posing in front of a memorial where more than 2500 innocent people lost their lives. As Douglas outlined in her essay, selfies are becoming a social norm of witnessing situations. Nevertheless, I feel that certain monuments have to be respected and that people should refrain from taking pictures and instead pay respect to the people that lost their lives.

I learned that there is a lot more to genres than I originally thought and I now know why the topic was discussed in my university English class. Genres are not just categories of books, but prevail a deeper meaning if understood in the correct way.