As we, students in the Global Citizens stream of the Coordinated Arts Program at UBC, walked through the doors of Dr. Luger’s ASTU (Arts Studies) classroom, we were asked to think of our first memory of UBC. Some students were told to simply write down a narrative of their first experience of UBC and others were told to write their first experience as if it was going to be published in a collective history of UBC. This was the moment we, as a class, came across the theme of “history vs. memory”. This theme later led to another concept, the “technology of memory”. How can we use genre to convey our narrative and how can we make meaning from the choice of genre used?

After reading Persepolis, Dr. Luger explained that we should think of this particular genre as a graphic narrative and how we could see this as a “technology of memory”. The frames composing page 142, are a clear example of how this narrative is used as “technology of memory”. Marji is faced with death (first hand) for the first time, she sees the bracelet of her dead neighbor (in the rubble of their bombed house) attached to… She can’t finish her sentence. In the next couple frames, she goes from covering her mouth in horror, to covering her eyes with her hands. The final frame of the page is completely black. This is Satrapi using this particular genre, the graphic narrative, as a “technology of memory”. The reader sees her perspective of the event, as she covers her eyes, we too as the readers, see what she is seeing, blackness. Satrapi uses the graphic narrative genre to control what the reader sees, leaving everything else out. This is essentially the technology of remembering certain events and forgetting others. The graphic narrative is the technology by which Satrapi is able to convey her memories from.

Like Persepolis, this blog is a “technology of memory”. This blog is a place to compose my thoughts and my analysis; generally, to share my memories on the internet to a public audience, not objective or unbiased, but from my personal perspective. Neither Persepolis nor this blog represent official histories, but that doesn’t make either one of them false. Each genre (Satrapi’s graphic narrative and my blog) is making use of use of the situation in order to choose a form which best fit the message and ideas they wish to convey, and discourse they wish to create.

Using the “technology of memory” of the graphic narrative, speaking from the voice of 10-year-old Marji, she is able to make meaning from her memories by disrupting the historical and political discourse about Iran portrayed by the media shortly after 9/11. George Bush was one such person leading the discourse. When he referred to the “axis of evil”, he grouped Iran, as well as many other countries, into generalizations or abstractions of what a few extremists did.

I realized that Persepolis interrupts this metanarrative of Iran. As Satrapi explains in the introduction of Persepolis, Iran is now seen in connection with, “Fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism”. Yet, Satrapi’s character Marji is just a young girl, not an extremist. This is how Persepoli,s as a “technology of memory”(of Marji’s memory) helps to disrupt the negative and generalized discourse of Iran just as any “technology of memory” has the power to do.