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