Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Paperback)

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis is an exemplary autobiographical graphic novel, in the tradition of Art Spiegelman's classic Maus. Set in Iran during the Islamic Revolution, young Satrapi is the six-year-old daughter of two committed and well-to-do Marxists. As she grows up, she witness first-hand the effects that the revolution and the war with Iraq have on her home, family and school.

Like Maus, the main strength of Persepolis is its ability to make the political personal.

Told through the eyes of a child (as reflected in Satrapi's simplistic yet expressive black-and-white artwork), young Marjane learns about her family history and how it is entwined with the history of Iran, and watches her liberal parents cope with a fundamentalist regime that gets increasingly rigid as it gains more power. Outspoken and intelligent, Marjane chafes at Iran's increasingly conservative interpretation of Islamic law, especially as she grows into a bright and independent teenager. Throughout, Marjane remains a hugely likeable young woman

Persepolis gives the reader a snapshot of daily life in a country struggling with an internal cultural revolution and a bloody war, but within an intensely personal context. It's a very human history, beautifully and sympathetically told. --Robert Burrow --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

The most successful example of the “graphic novel” is Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which has sold more than a million copies and won the cartoonist a Pulitzer Prize. Yet Spiegelman’s work is fictional only in form and not in content. Although told in the form of an animal fable, with talking mice and cats, Maus is in fact an acutely accurate account of how Spiegelman’s father, a Polish Jew, survived the Second World War.
As it happens, one of the most interesting “graphic novels” of the season follow Spiegelman’s formidable lead in using comic book storytelling techniques to examine personal history.
Why are so many contemporary cartoonists drawn to the autobiographical form? In some ways, this is a surprising development: historically comics have achieved their greatest popularity in the realm of fantasy, ranging from the pow-bang heroics of Superman to the more whimsical Disney universe of talking ducks and two-legged mice. Even the relatively naturalistic world that Charles Schulz created for his Peanuts characters had a dab of fey make-believe: think of Snoopy using his dog-house to wage war on the Red Baron.
The idea that comics could be a vehicle for introspective and naturalistic storytelling only really developed in the 1960s, a curious byproduct of the cultural ferment of the era. In those heady days, the hippy counter-culture had its own artistic wing: artists like Robert “Fritz the Cat” Crumb and Gilbert “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” Shelton produced comics that were rife with anti-establishment attitude, featuring characters not afraid to use foul language or engage in psychedelic excess.
At first, the undergrounds were content to simply shock. But by using comics, which had long been a heavily commercialized and censored artform, as a forum for self-expression, underground cartoonists paved the way for the turn to autobiography. Adopting the let-it-all-hang-out ethos of the sixties, some of the best underground comics were frankly confessional. Perhaps the most influential comic in this vein was Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972), an intense and obsessive examination of childhood lived in the shadow of Catholic guilt. By crafting this singularly powerful tale, Green directly influenced the development of other cartoonists, notably Spiegelman and Harvey Pekar, whose piquant comic book stories of working class life have just been adapted in the much-praised film American Splendor. The continuing vitality of the underground comics tradition (now going by the more genteel rubric of “alternative comics”) can be seen in the works of two North American cartoonists, Craig Thompson and Chester Brown. Although dubbed an “illustrated novel”, Craig Thompson’s Blankets is in fact a lightly fictionalized memoir of his life growing up in a fundamentalist family in the American mid-west. Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You. (This graphic novel was first released in 1994, but Brown has tweaked the presentation of the material somewhat for the recent “definitive” edition released by Montreal’s Drawn and Quarterly) similarly revisits, with clinical detachment, Brown’s teenage years in the 1970s as a high school student in anglophile Quebec.
If Thompson and Brown are heirs to the North American tradition of underground cartooning, Marjane Satrapi belong to the parallel French tradition of alternative comics. As in North America, Robert Crumb had a liberating effect on European cartooning, encouraging artists to do more personal and daring work. However, the sharp division between commercial and alternative art that governs the North American comics world doesn’t seem to exist in the French scene, where there is much healthier interplay between the elite and popular arts.
In any case, much of the best work in French cartooning in the last decade has been published by an upstart publisher called L’Association, formed in 1990 by a group of accomplished cartoonists who wanted a venue for their more outré work. Satrapi’s Persepolis demonstrates the ability of cartooning as a medium to grapple with the inescapable and painful past.
Marjane Satrapi, whose memoir of her Iranian girlhood is perhaps the most talked-about graphic novel of the year. The topical interest of Satrapi’s work is not hard to discern: born to a wealthy and secular Iranian family, Satrapi witnessed some of the most bitter years of her country’s recent history. In the seventies, Satrapi’s family stoutly opposed the decadent repressions of the Shah. One of Satrapi’s uncles, a communist, was even a political prisoner of his. Welcoming the overthrow of the Shah, the Satrapi’s family are shocked by the rapid ascent of fundamentalist mullahs, who prove even more tyrannical than the previous regime. Pointedly, after a brief spurt of freedom, Satrapi’s Marxist uncle is re-arrested and executed. The outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war leads to a descent into real social madness, as teenage “martyrs” are sent off to die with the visions of paradise as their only consolation.
Everything Satrapi portrays will be familiar to alert newspaper readers. What makes the book fresh, indeed unforgettable, is the way that Satrapi shows how these remarkable events looked through the eyes of a child. As with many kids, Satrapi took the raw material of the adult world and re-created it on her own level. Political and religious disputes became fantasies where Satrapi turns into either the last prophet (her spiritual phase) or Fidel Castro (her Marxist period). When Satrapi hears stories about torture in the Shah’s prisons, she and her neighborhood buddies invent games where the loser is tormented with mock brutalities. For the teenage Satrapi, one of the worst things about the fundamentalists is that they curb her budding taste for Western fashion. A piquant humor accompanies all these little vignettes.
By showing how the big events of history had impact on her girlhood, Satrapi does the important work of humanizing history. If we just went by media accounts, we wouldn’t guess that Islamic revolutionary Iran was and is filled with people who bristle against the everyday indignations of the regime. Our sense of the diversity of Islamic culture is immensely aided by attending to books like Persepolis. Satrapi’s work, with its mixture of dream logic and dry wit, does a great deal to expand our horizon.
Jeet Heer (Books in Canada)
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.