Hi everyone!

For the past few weeks, my ASTU 100 class has been reading the graphic narrative Persepolis, written by Marjane Satrapi. It tells the life of Marji (Satrapi’s younger self), growing up in Iran during the time of the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. Told through the eyes of a child, this graphic narrative shows Marji’s personal struggles as it illustrates the political turmoil and violence within Iran during that time. While being in comic book style, the images within Persepolis are devoid of unnecessary details and are coloured with only black and white; unlike what you would expect for a comic book.

Despite Persepolis being filled to the brim with emotions (Marji’s anger towards the regime and anguish when her uncle Anoosh is executed) Satrapi chooses to omit colour, which conveys emotions from the book. Why does she do this? Is it because she feels that the emotions held within the book are impossible to convey with just words and colour?

With just black and white colouring the images and the simplistic art of the illustrations, Satrapi tells the story of her childhood through Marji’s perspective on her world that is wrought full of complex violence and turmoil. It is through the simple artwork that Satrapi juxtaposes Marji’s innocent and naïve outlook with the true horror and the normalcy of the violence that is surrounding her. This shows up when two of her family’s friends were released from prison and are telling Marji’s parents about what happened to another prisoner. They tell that he was tortured more than they were and ultimately, “was cut into pieces” (52). When Marji hears of this, she immediately imagines the body cleanly cut and hollow, while in truth a cut up body looks nothing that.

Marji’s imagination of what a cut up body looks like

The man cut up into pieces “cannot be adequately illustrated by words-or by pictures-from the perspective of either children or adults” (Chute 102) and it is here we see the juxtaposition between Marji’s innocent views and the horrors that are happening around her.

Works cited:

Satrapi, Marjane Satrapi. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Random House, 2003. Print

Chute, Hillary. “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1&2 (Spring/Summer 2008): 92-110. Web. JSTOR. 7July 2015.

Image:

https://satrapism.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/kic0000013.jpg

Hello readers,

For the past week in my ASTU 100 class, we have been reading a graphic narrative titled Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. This graphic narrative reveals the life of Marji, a young girl growing up in Iran amid the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. When first being introduced to this book, I was surprised that I would be reading a comic book in university, however the surprise instantly turned into excitement due to my love of manga; which is the Japanese version of comic books.

When I read about the Revolution and the War in Persepolis, I instantly connected it to a manga that  has a parallel plot line titled Hakuouki Shisengumi Kitan. In this historical manga, a revolution and war is also happening. In Japan during the mid-1800s, the Shisengumi (the main protagonist group) sides with the old government wishing to preserve the old ways while the Imperialists wish for change in the government and ultimately these two sides go to war. Having connected these two texts, I again connected these texts to an essay that I have read in my ASTU class as well. Farhat Shahzad, an educational scholar cites Wertsch, an anthropologist, who states that “remembering and learning involve[s] a process of mediation between two main forces”, which the ‘human agent’ and ‘technologies of memory’ help the human agent learn and remember things which they have not experienced. In my case, I have not experienced the Iranian Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War and the Meiji Revolution. However by reading Persepolis and Hakuouki Shisengumi Kitan, the memories of these events have been passed onto me and I have learned about these events from them.

Like manga, by portraying the story in a comic book style, Satrapi has made it easy for the reader to easily digest the information coming from the speech bubbles all the while looking at the stark, simple black and white images which show the story through the eyes Marji.

Works cited:

Article:

Shahzad, Farhat. “The Role of Interpretive Communities in Remembering and Learning.”Canadian Journal of Education 34.3 (2011): 301-316. Web. ProQuest. 28 Sept. 2015.