Hello, and welcome back! This weeks post will focus on a literary review that our ASTU class has been analyzing for the past few classes: American literary scholar, Hillary Chute‘s “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” The class split into three groups, and each group had to analyze one of the three sections in Chutes literary review of Persepolis. As a quick recap, Persepolis is a graphic memoir (comic book style) about Marjane Satrapi, and her childhood experience growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution.

Bringing it back to Chute, the section “Style and Trauma: The Child” of Chute’s literary review is the section we (my group) have been analyzing for the past few days. A classmate of mine beautifully summarizes this particular section through a quote by Scott McCloud – “amplification through simplification.” There exists many quotes that acknowledges the power of simplicity – “the simplest answer is most often correct,” “The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity,” and many more. However, what really caught my attention in Chute’s review is how she interprets and connects Satrapi’s drawing and narrative style with trauma – through the perspective of a child.

Satrapi’s drawing style utilizes the absence of colour (black and white) and synthesizes it with a very flat, lack of depth, 2D perspective (this corresponds to the lack of shading in her drawings). Chute’s analysis when Satrapi portrays violence, death, and the dismembering of human parts, suggests that through the imagination and perspective of a child, it is very difficult to truly portray trauma. When Satrapi illustrates how Marji (the protagonist and childhood version of Satrapi) imagines a cut-up human being, she illustrates the human as something that resembles lego. The body parts (arms, head, legs, torso) look hollow on the inside just like lego pieces.

This is really interesting because through Satrapi’s simplistic drawing style, she emphasizes the importance of understanding concepts through a child’s perspective, and gives insights on how children might experience and cope with traumatic experiences. But at the same time, Chute analyzes that Satrapi also emphasizes the importance of how difficult it really is to imagine true trauma, no matter the age. I strongly agree with this analysis because, as a young adult, it is very difficult for me to recreate the feeling of a true traumatic experience (nails on chalkboards…sorry). And if I really tried to recreate it, it wouldn’t do justice to the trauma, because I believe that trauma lacks depth without the first-hand experiential element.