Hey readers!

After reading Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis I have gained a new perspective on the way in which life was like for a child growing up in the Islamic revolution and the Iran Iraq war.  I have actually gone back and read Persepolis for a second time to see if I would pick up on any key ideas that I did not the first time.  I found myself focusing a lot more on the images and what meaning they convey.  There were a couple of images that stood out to me as important, but I chose one in particular that I thought was a key idea to the book.  The image I chose is a good representation of the violence that was shown to be very much part of Iranian culture.

This is page 52 of Persepolis.

The specific image on this page that I want to explore is at the very bottom of the page.  It is the image of a cut up body with a black background.  The first thing that I recognized about this image is that the body is cut up so neatly and proportionately.  You may think that this does not seem like a very accurate representation of  the torture that people suffered.  Though it is a very accurate representation of what Marji imagined torture to be.  This photo is drawn through the naive eyes of Marji, and what her young mind imagined this torture would look like.  I think that the picture suggests that as the torture becomes worse and worse, Marji’s ability to describe it becomes less, and less.  As you can see the images above the bottom picture are what I would think to be more accurate description of what the torture was like.  The brutality of being scorched with a hot iron made me cringe, but when I looked at the cut up body I thought it looked a lot more tidy and clean.  Perhaps even though the image is being drawn from a child’s perspective the reader can still understand what she is trying to convey.  I felt that the black background added a lot of depth to the image.  It added a sort of thickness that you with a little bit of feeling for the horror and violence people endured.  Maybe the fact that the body is cut up do clean and proportionate has do do with Satrapi trying to show how normal violence and death in was becoming in Iran.

I chose to touch just on one particular image, but there are many more similar to this in Persepolis.  The way Satrapi uses the black backgrounds in some of her images may mean that those are the ones to stop on and think a little bit more about.  I love the way the images in her graphic narrative are so descriptive that some of them you could go on for ages reflecting and responding upon!  Satrapi also uses many more techniques for her illustrations that I have not touched upon.  I encourage you to ask questions and not just flip through the pages, but to think deeper about why Satrapi represents her images in such a way.

Thanks for reading!

Until next time,

Magda

I have often wondered that if I was to write a story about my life in chronological order, if I would get distracted by a significant memory or an event and want to expand on it.  This is what happened to Marjane Satrapi, but for her that significant event happened during her whole childhood.  Marjane Satrapi is the author of many award winning books, but the one book in particular that I want to focus on is Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood.  The graphic narrative follows the life of young Satrapi who refers to herself as Marji and her family in Iran during the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and the Iran Iraq war.

 This is a photo of Marjane Satrapi in real life and also a drawing of herself in Persepolis.  It is interesting to see that the two pictures look a lot alike, and when reading the book you know that you are being given an accurate Representation of how Margi actually looked through the drawings.

After reading Persepolis I thought it would be valuable to find out more about why Marjane Satrapi chose to write Persepolis, and what she wanted her readers to get out of it.  The 1979 Iranian Revolution, and the Iran Iraq War brought a lot of bad stigma to Iran, but Satrapi wanted to let people that Iran was not a terrible place to live in, and she was proud to call Iran her country.  Satrapi argued for along time that all of the visual representations in the news, and newspapers did not represent her experience growing up in Iran at all.  She found it hard to tell her friends about living in Iran because all they new about Iran was all the bad stuff they had heard.  Satrapi was determined to get people to open up their minds and not just believe what they hear.  When I found myself at the end of the book I had a whole different outlook on Iran, Satrapi’s Character Marji had a privileged childhood with a loving family, she was a normal kid who loved pop culture, books and hanging out with friends.  It opened my eyes up about Iran not being such an evil place full of oppression.  I can now see why Satrapi feels very rewarded when people from all different countries read her Persepolis because they gain a new perspective.  In 2008 Pantheon Graphic Novels staff asked Majane Satrapi various questions about why she chose to write Persepolis, one of the questions she was asked was: “What did you want to say through writing Persepolis?”  I found her answer to be very powerful because it summed up why she wanted people to read her story, and what she wanted them to get out of it.  She said “If people are given the chance to experience life in more than one country, they will hate a little less.  It’s not a miracle potion, but little by little you can solve problems in the basement of a country, not on the surface.  That is why I want people in other countries to read Persepolis, to see that I grew up just like other children.”

I have included the link to those interview questions asked by the Pantheon staff below.  This was a particularly good source because I was able to understand more on a personal level what drove Satrapi to write Persepolis.  Some of the questions asked also covered more about the novel itself, and why she chose to write a graphic narrative instead of a narrative.  I highly recommend that you check out the link if you need any clarity on what I have written about, or if you are interested in learning some more about Marjane Satrapi herself.

Thanks for reading!

Until next time,

Magda.

http://engres.ied.edu.hk/lang_arts/onlineRead/graphicNovel/PersepolisLesson_RandomHouse.pdf