Simplicity, Trauma, and the Act of Remembering – By: Taylor Khatkar
Hello readers!
As I mentioned in my previous class blog, we are continuing to discuss Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, in our ASTU 100A class this week. However, we have moved away from attempting to comprehend the basic story of the graphic narrative and have begun to analyze an academic article by English scholar Hillary Chute, called “The Texture of Retracing In Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis”. It focusses on the importance of the genre of comics, more specifically, the graphic narrative, and the unique characteristics that make a graphic narrative such an effective framework through which to describe serious stories and topics, like the personal events that occur during the Iranian Revolution and the Iran and Iraq war as experienced by Satrapi. The way that Satrapi utilizes simplicity to illustrate trauma and violence, as argued by Chute, is extremely effective.
This point struck me so deeply, that it brought me back to my childhood, in the form of a novel that I read in grade seven called The Breadwinner, by Deborah Ellis. This story is told from the perspective of Parvana, a young girl growing up in Taliban-controlled Kabul, Afghanistan. When her father, a history teacher, is arrested for being educated in a foreign country, Parvana is forced to cut off her hair and pretend to be a boy, selling goods, as well as reading and writing letters for the illiterate people of her country, at a crowded marketplace in order to support her family. Parvana sees the world through the eyes of an eleven year old girl, fearing acts of violence as a child should and losing her more or less “innocent” attitude towards traumatic events over her time acting as boy.
Although the language in this novel is slightly more sophisticated than that of the average eleven year old, the effect of Parvana’s words are similar to the effect of Satrapi’s dialogue in Persepolis: both use simplistic wording and phrasing to get the author’s perspective across. However, the way in which I remember the traumatic and violent events in these two works differs. On one hand, Ellis’ novel only utilizing words to describe experiences, and Parvana’s feelings toward them, gave my imagination full authority to create images of the story and access as much detail as I could comprehend. On the contrary, Satrapi’s use of pictures gave me a starting point as to how I should interpret her explanations. Nonetheless, the simplicity of her images made my mind hungry for more depth and details, causing my imagination to see past Satrapi’s childhood innocence while reading this graphic narrative. When I think back on these two pieces, I remember the pictures created by my imagination with regards to The Breadwinner, but this is not the case with Persepolis. Instead of seeing my own interpretations of Satrapi’s work, I remember the simple images that she drew.
This point is illustrated by Chute when she claims that “certain modes of representation depict historical trauma more effectively, and more horrifically, than does realism”. In Satrapi’s case, the use of cartoon images, with varying detail, was far more effective than just the language itself. Some images are, as Chute describes, “excess of our frames of reference”. In class, I mentioned that sometimes, events are so horrible, that we cannot imagine them to exist in a realistic and accurate manner; we “cannot go there”. I found that, just like one of the entirely black frames in Persepolis, showing how Marji could not comprehend the death of her friend, my imagination blackened during parts of The Breadwinner, as my twelve-year-old mind was unwilling to picture certain atrocities that were described. This goes to show the effectiveness of both the simplicity of writing and images, especially through the use of a graphic narrative, as well as the unintentional impact these vessels have on the act of remembering.
These points, as well as the discussions we had in class, have led me to consider three questions regarding memory: 1) to what degree does the act of remembering trauma affect our interpretations of the past and all issues relating to it?, 2) will we ever be able to fill in the images that we have blocked out in black?, and 3) is the act of blocking an image out the same as forgetting? Although these are questions to be answered at another time, I leave you with some insight that Satrapi provides at the end of her introduction to Persepolis, “one can forgive, but one should never forget”.
Until next time readers!