This is our third week of blog posts in our ASTU class. The past few weeks we have looked into scholar Farhat Shahzad’s essay The Role of Interpretative communities in Remembering and Learning which explored collective memory and forgetting, we read the graphic narrative Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi the account of a young girl growing up in Iran during the Iranian Revolution, and this current week The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, a scholarly essay by Hillary Chutes investigating the importance of Persepolis as a graphic narrative and the different styles Satrapi utilizes in her work.
When examining Chute’s essay in class, different groups were assigned sections of her essay and the section my group looked at was Style Trauma: The Child. Within our section, Chute calls attention to Satrapi’s depiction of a child’s disconnect with violence and how her translation through simplicity of images demonstrates the gap of knowledge a child experiences, calling attention the “horror of history”(Chutes 98). Chute finds that it is more successful for Satrapi to present violence in more abstract images instead of realistic ones in order to present the real process of trauma. The key theme of anti- realism or non-realism represented by the architectural and “highly stylized” childlike drawings with impersonalized faces makes chaos structured and faceless.
What I found most interesting about this section was Satrapi’s display of the normalcy of violence for youths. Within Persepolis, Marji is a witness to unspeakable tragedies, increasingly common placed and copes with this display of violence by either blocking out the realism of the images, such as the dismemberment of tortured men, or accepting the violence as the new normal. As an American growing up in California, this idea of violence becoming more common placed had become more prevalent in the media, especially in the case of gun control and its affect on various school and public shootings. In my politics discussion group this week we spoke about the availability of guns and if access to guns gives people more freedom. This subject is loosely related to school shootings in that the loose nature of gun control and regulations has caused mishandling of guns and the common occurrence of guns reaching individuals who have killed many defenseless people.
I am not saying that school shootings are anywhere as nearly traumatic as Marji’s experience in Iran but the connecting factor is the distress and pain caused and then the responses that come after. Hearing about school shootings such as Columbine, in my community have created a hyper awareness of violence. One example would be when my high school received a anonymous tip of a shooter targeting the school which created an immediate lock down of the campus and evacuation. The tip was a hoax but since there had been similar cases of attempted bombings in my area, they took extra precaution, almost anticipating it as a normal occurrence like an earthquake drill. It is unfortunate that such exposure to violence causes it to become ordinary but Satrapi even states herself “…while Persepolis may show trauma as (unfortunately) ordinary, it rejects the idea that it is (or should ever be) normal…”
