(Picture from Wikipedia.org)
In my last two posts (here and here), I mentioned Paul Gravett’s Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know as my guide for exploring graphic novels. The current post is the second of two posts about Marjane Satrapi’s memoir, Persepolis. Here, I highlight some of Satrapi’s challenges to Orientalist stereotypes.
Gravett describes Persepolis in the same chapter as he examines Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Joe Sacco’s Palestine (Chapter 5: The Long Shadow). This placement makes sense, especially given Satrapi’s comments in a recent Washington Post interview:
“My favorite cartoonists are all American. Robert Crumb to Chris Ware to Batman artists. Dan Clowes. Charles Burns. I like [the Maltese-born] Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman, and I love the way they make comics. American comics have always been a source of inspiration …” (emphasis original)
These authors’ works seriously engage “real world” issues, as one would expect in good (or even great) literature. I choose to highlight how Satrapi’s Persepolis addresses “real world” stereotypes; particularly ones based on shallow, Orientalist tropes.
Orientalism is a way of viewing the world as divided into two unequal halves: the Occident and the Orient.
The “Oriental” – or, the “Other” – is but a caricature, as opposed to real people, whose lives are messy: filled with dreams, love, friends, family, community, but also disappointment, hatred, loneliness, sadness, loss, and frailty.
Attributing a degree of complexity to people hinges, in part, on receiving news that does not conflate governments with the activities of its citizens. As Satrapi notes:
“The news hides the complexity of a society. They talk about politics but never about people who are suffering its consequences and who are fighting for more freedom. Nor about the poor, who don’t have the possibility of leaving” (Gravett, p. 59).
And, as other reviewers point out, Satrapi challenges various stereotypes in Persepolis.
Over at The Comics Grid, you can read, for example, Esther Claudio’s incisive essay, “Marjane Satrapi’s elaborate simplicity: Persepolis,” which recounts some of the “subversive” elements in Satrapi’s work. Claudio reminds us that stylistic simplicity is often quite powerful:
“…it questions the image of the western woman as the paradigm of modern femininity, educated and liberated. In this way, Marjane Satrapi’s style dwells on the contrast, on the contradictions which problematise reality through an apparently naïve and simple drawing and narration.”
I encourage you also to read Stephanie Cawley’s perceptive essay, “Persepolis: A Postcolonial Feminist Reading,” which, among other things, draws our attention to how:
“Satrapi consciously and recurrently emphasizes the individual subject position of her narrator through the trope of embodiment and the body and thus resists universalization of her experiences.”
This essay is part of Cawley’s larger project on hybridity and comics for The Stockton Postcolonial Studies Project, which is directed by Dr. Adeline Koh.
Feminist and postcolonial readings could fall under the umbrella of “Cultural Studies,” which is the perspective taken of Persepolis by Amy Malek in her, “Memoir as Iranian Exile Cultural Production: A Case Study of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis Series” (Iranian Studies, Sept. 2006, Vol. 39, Issue 3, pp. 353-380). I include here Malek’s conclusion in the hopes of enticing you to read her entire essay:
“The Persepolis series is a prime example of exile cultural production created by an author whose liminality has allowed her to create a third space from which to bend and blend Western genres of comics and memoir with Iranian cultural, historical, and social narratives to create a hybridized genre, fulfilling the potential Naficy argued was inherent in the liminal position. Satrapi’s honesty and truth, identified by scholars as the difference between memoir and novel, is key to her success as a memoir author. Just as her narrative and her illustrations cannot be teased apart, the humor and honesty that combine within Satrapi’s narrative itself are integral to the success of Persepolis. It is this admixture (to use Naficy’s term) of captivating and charming illustrations and a sharp, enchanting narrative that produces the depth and effectiveness of Persepolis.
As she has often noted, Satrapi’s graphic memoir is an attempt at cultural translation of the Iranian people and its history to non-Iranian communities. What she has also done, perhaps inadvertently, is to create a work that speaks to Iranians in diaspora as well: to their experiences, memories, and feelings of exile and home, as well as to the desire of the second and third generations to understand those experiences and memories. Her work thus not only creates a bridge between the diaspora and host communities, but works within the Iranian diaspora community as well, as she negotiates her own identity in exile, deals with the complications and desires of return, and creates, via culture and literature, a third space for her own identity as Iranian in exile.”
Each of these essays destabilizes simplistic Orientalist caricatures of the Other. I’m surely not alone in reading Persepolis as a critique of Orientalist tropes. In fact, Lila Barzegar wrote the following MA Thesis (Spring 2012) at Colorado Sate University: Persepolis & Orientalism: A Critique of the Reception History of Satrapi’s Memoir.
These are but a few of the interpretive possibilities for Persepolis.
For me, it was difficult to finish Persepolis without asking whether Orientalism informed my views of Iran, Islam, Muslims, women, or the “Third World”—the list could go on endlessly.
What was your take on Persepolis?
