The blog post deadline for my Art Studies class is coming up real soon. It is uncanny how soon the next deadline is! There is only so much information us undergraduates can come up with in under a week, or worse, less!

The book I’m reading right now with my fellow Art Studies classmates is the critically acclaimed and slightly controversial graphic bildungsroman, simply titled “Persepolis” with the subtitle, “The Story of a Childhood” to warn potential readers about its deceiving content. While it is “a story of a childhood,” Persepolis deals with issues that children tackle when they are finally allowed to legally have intercourse, such as radical fundamentalism (the extreme form of both radicalism and fundamentalism with a bit of misguided conservatism), rape and other forms of violence, and living in fear (though children should be familiar with the concept of living in fear by the time they reacah puberty). The issues conveyed by Satrapi, the author, are very negative at times (with a glimmer of hope here and there, but still manages to be bleak), as evident when the main protagonist’s mother, was violated by extremists and threatened “that women like me should be pushed up against a wall and fucked and then thrown in the garbage.” (Satrapi, 74) There are gory and disturbing images in the comic coupled with the author’s use of black and white colors to highlight the bleak and the brooding atmosphere of Iran as the author remembered it when she grew up there. From the mature issues, the disturbing images, and the social commentary voiced by the author, it is pretty obvious that Persepolis isn’t for the prepubescents looking for a quick fix for their comic book addiction. It is also pretty obvious that Persepolis isn’t your conventional comic book story. Since I am done elaborating that Persepolis is not your average 15-page-of-superheroes-or-teen-romance comic book, I will address what Persepolis did not mean to me.

One of the things mentioned in class was how Persepolis was supposed to be an accurate representation of history. Personally, I never did see Persepolis as an “autobiography” that recounts history as it happened. There is a reason why Satrapi chose the graphic novel (or comic book genre, if you insist) instead of the conventional book form when writing autobiographies. Granted, the reason is just an assumption made by yours truly, but I’m sure it would make sense once my point gets through. Since the book is in graphic novel form, Satrapi would be in complete control over the visuals and the imagery conveyed. While some may argue words are like X-ray, you read and you’re pierced, etc, etc, Satrapi can establish how she wants the characters to be seen: to make the innocent-looking Shah at the time to be seen as a ruthless, silly, tyrant; to make the Westerners stereotypical and silly-looking without having to mention their stereotypical features; and to portray Karl Marx to visually resemble our Father in heaven. After all, Persepolis is Satrapi’s memoir of how her childhood turned out to be; Satrapi can portray all the people in her life how she wants to remember them. I see the book as part of the memoir genre and cannot be accounted for its representation of history due to the nature of memories and how everyone remembers everything differently.

The argument that how we remember things are explained through our interpretive communities fits in well in why Persepolis shouldn’t be seen as an accurate representation of history. Satrapi, the author, came from a middle-class family living in Iran before and during both the Iranian (or Islamic) Revolution and the Iraq-Iran War in the 1980s. One might argue that she has seen terrible and awful things during her time in Iran, thus her memory of the Shah and the Ayatollah would be skewed compared to people who weren’t in Iran at that time and to people who were with both the Shah and the Ayatollah. This makes her recount and recollection of the past highly subjective, befitting of the term memoir instead of autobiographical, since she is remembering them from a subjective and personal point-of-view, instead of an objective, matter-of-fact presentation of her past. Besides, if Persepolis were presented in an objective way, Persepolis would be a novel and would be subtitled simply, “Life of a 10 year-old in Iran During the Iranian Revolution”.

And that is what Persepolis didn’t mean to me; it wasn’t a history lesson or the next “Diary of Anne Frank” or the next Holocaust survivor autobiography. It was a story with simple-drawn characters that we can put our shoes in. A story with an unreliable narrator that relies on her memories and experience. A story of a childhood told by someone who lived nowhere near Persepolis and used the title Persepolis because it meant “City of Persians” which is what she is, a Persian.

I apologize for the wall of text!