Rocı´o G. Davis

A GRAPHIC SELF as autobiography in ’s Persepolis

This essay traces a crucial transition in the enactment of the autobiographical text and addresses its creative appropriation by Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian immigrant living in France, in Persepolis. I will examine her use of comics – a thematically and representationally complex form that deploys the strategic juxtaposition of sequential text and image – as the medium for her memoir that enacts her process of self-identification and negotiation of cultural and/or national affiliation. Here, the juxtaposition of image and words constitutive of graphic narratives yields a new artistic, literary, and creative experience – a revised aesthetic. Combining theories on the childhood memoir and comics, I argue that we must approach contemporary graphic autobiographies as increasingly sophisticated forms of inscribing the past and read Satrapi’s text as a site for the negotiation and management of the memory of childhood perceptions and positioning, family, history, politics, religion, and art.

Keywords comics; autobiography; Marjane Satrapi; Persepolis; childhood memoirs

A sustained analysis of the forms of life writing being enacted in this century obliges us to reconsider the notion of the autobiographical act itself. Specifically, when we analyze increasingly complex questions about self-formation and the process of signification and the expansion of the boundaries of traditional autobiography by negotiating narrative techniques, the consequences in the context of transcultural self-representation become complicated.1 In this essay, I trace a crucial transition in the enactment of the autobiographical text and address its increasingly creative and subversive appropriation by a transcultural writer, Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian immigrant living in France, whose recent autobiography, Persepolis, was published to critical acclaim.2 I will examine her artistic project, particularly her use of comics – a thematically and representationally complex form that deploys the strategic juxtaposition of sequential text and image – as the medium for her memoir that enacts her process of self-identification and negotiation of cultural and/or national affiliation.3 As contemporary transcultural autobiographies negotiate renewed forms of experiences, these texts become experimental and revisionary narratives, which challenge textual authority and prescriptive paradigms. I want to argue that a significant challenge to the prescriptive paradigms of autobiographical writing comes through genre. In the case of Satrapi, the juxtaposition of image and words constitutive of

Prose Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 December 2005, pp. 264-279 ISSN 0144-0357 print/ISSN 1743-9426 online q 2005 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/014403500223834 COMICS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN MARJANE SATRAPI’S PERSEPOLIS 265 graphic narratives yields a new artistic, literary, and creative experience – a revised aesthetic. Indeed, to engage these narratives effectively, we must move beyond an analytical model of merely reading the surface of texts for potential meanings and attend to the cultural and generic codes addressed by the authors to unravel what the texts execute within the contexts of larger questions of cultural and political mobilization. Genre definition and choice directs the act of writing as well as readers’ reception of the ideological issues and concerns embedded in the narrative. This affirmation implies that a reconstruction of the memoir is necessarily inflected by the relationship between creative writing and immigrant or ethnic configurations of subjectivity and national affiliation. Writers sensitive to how differences in cultural contexts and paradigms create specific responses revise established genres to destabilize ideology and conventional strategies of meaning in order to enact distinct sociocultural situations. Readers who encounter these revisionary texts are thus obliged to reexamine their expectations and critical perspectives. As they gesture towards new perceptions of cultural contexts and choices, transcultural autobiographies challenge the generic scripts prescribed by Euro-American autobiography. The transaction between formal and cultural modes produces texts that consistently challenge inherited ideas of autobiographical structure and content. Importantly, the nuanced approaches of these narratives clearly serve a significant didactic purpose. The increasingly dialogic nature of life writing reflects a multi-voiced cultural situation that allows the subject to control and exploit the tensions between personal and communal discourse within the text, and signify on a discursive level. Issues of ethnic representation therefore become central to the autobiographical strategies employed by these writers and the manner in which each text performs individual processes of self-awareness. The engagement with the act of narrative evolves into a strategy that blends subjectivity and history, in an attempt to stress individual sensibility, challenge contextual authority, or claim agency. From our renewed appreciation of the constructedness and performative potential of life writing – where saying something is also doing something – we need to consider, albeit briefly, the author’s choice of this particular autobiographical form. Satrapi’s memoir of her childhood in explains in particular ways the present self, and reasserts how the past can only be known and understood through narrative – in her case, a multilayered form of narrating. In a sense, reading her text involves asking pressing questions about the act of construction (or reconstruction) of the self-in- narrative. Her strategy serves as a highly effective vehicle for two fundamental concerns of transcultural self-inscription: the performance of selfhood and how meaning itself evolves. Importantly, transcultural autobiographers, particularly of experiences of childhood set outside Europe or the United States, may also be engaged in a didactic project – the reader accompanies the writer as her self-as-child learns about heritage culture and experiences historical events, fashioning a seemingly artless insider perspective that is, nonetheless, complexly layered.4 These revisionary models of transnational and transcultural position and affiliation have transformed reductivist ideas of the idea of otherness, and the process of othering. I suggest that Satrapi’s comic autobiography can exemplify that new “intermittent time and interstitial space” in literary studies that Bhabha refers to (1994: 312). Many writers engage in increasingly complex ways of understanding and articulating migrant and ethnic identity by choosing a transnational position, one that is neither purely assimilationist nor 266 PROSE STUDIES

oppositional. Writing the self the way Satrapi does – privileging the transcultural experience through a genre that has not completely achieved mainstream acceptance – illuminates the more challenging strategy of normative self-fashioning and self- representation. As such, the performance of the Iranian child who will become the transcultural adult complicates issues in the discourse of nationalism and affiliation. In this context, William Boelhower’s approach to ethnic autobiography stresses historical contexts as well as the socially-constructed dimensions of the cultural discourses adopted by immigrants, specifically the macrotext of immigrant autobiography which revolves around the contrapositioning of different worlds. Boelhower explains that the process of transculturality becomes a metaphor for the contemporary, postmodern, condition and he argues that “the more one’s local ethnic encyclopedia is disestablished, the more its semiotic nowhere becomes a cultural everywhere, with the ethnic subject now forced into a floating practice of genealogical ordering and interrogation” (1991: 137). When the spaces represented in the text are located outside Europe or the United States, the implications for national and cultural allegiances become more complex.

Comics as autobiography: possibilities and challenges

Will Eisner, in his germinal work, Graphic Storytelling and Visual, posits that the last decades of the twentieth century have obliged us to rework the definition of “literacy.” The proliferation of the use of images as a communicant,” he argues,

was propelled by the growth of a technology that required less in text-reading skills. From road signs to mechanical use instructions, imagery aided words, and at times even supplanted them. Indeed, visual literacy has entered the panoply of skills required for communication in this century. Comics are at the center of this phenomenon (Eisner, 1996: 3).

Similarly, William Nericcio notes that the study of comics operates a significant link between textual and visual studies and that “the time seems right for the critical community to confront the innovative space of graphic narrative: to understand it as both epitome of and reaction against an age obsessed with ‘moving’ pictures” (1995: 106). But the renewed position of graphic narratives in cultural production did not evolve from merely technological innovations, and requires that we, as critical readers, consider the multilayered strategies marshaled in this creative endeavor. Graphic artists/writers are increasingly conscious of the possibilities of the form itself – the way the interaction between word and image reconfigures manners of meaning – as a medium of communicating complex ideas and positions. Though comics are still often considered a popular (read “inferior”) form, Matthew McAllister, Edward Sewell, and Ian Gordon argue that the nature of comic art deploys significant ideological meaning, in the manner in which it combines words and pictures allowing for much “flexibility in the manipulation of meaning”, which has important implications for “both representation and interpretation of ideological images and meaning” (2001: 3).

On the one hand, the communicative elements in comic art encourage the form to occasionally create a closed ideological text, imposing on the reader preferred COMICS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN MARJANE SATRAPI’S PERSEPOLIS 267

meanings. The limited space in which the artist/writer has to work, for example, may entice the creator to use stereotypes to convey information quickly. Similarly, the use of storytelling devices such as captions and thought balloons can make the themes and values in a comic especially explicit. On the other hand, techniques— such as the use of comics to visually change the point of view in a comic strip or book and the semantic space created by the sometimes ambiguous relationship between the word and the picture—make comics a potentially polysemic text, encouraging multiple interpretations, even ones completely oppositional to any specific artistic intent (McAllister, Sewell and Gordon, 2001: 3–4).

The possibility of multiple, even palimpsestic, meanings constitutive of the graphic text has been harnessed in increasingly sophisticated ways by contemporary graphic artists who want to limn political, social, and personal agendas, or challenge the dominant tropes of writing.5 For instance, Joseph Witek asserts that comics are currently “one of the most dynamic cultural forms in the United States” and “while some cartoonists do aspire to social and commercial respectability, others turn to comics as a readymade tool for critiquing and subverting the values of mainstream America” (1992: 71–72). Because ideological positions are consistently deployed in these texts, it is necessary to interrogate the intersections between the possibilities offered by the form and effectiveness of this strategy, as part of an attentive reading of the layers of meaning offered by comics. Since the 1960s, comics for older readers have developed into a variety of genres and styles, and in particular are a distinctive and rewarding domain for exploration from a critical, cultural and gender perspective.6 In this study, I read comics as a sophisticated and developed medium, a set of cultural signifying practices in which the intersections of culture, history, ethnicity, and gender can be effectively negotiated by cartoonists and their adult readers. Moreover, the potential of the graphic narrative as a highly dynamic text, as opposed to the more static single-image narrative painting or plain text, determines the dialectic between text and image, providing creators with a wider range of artistic and imaginative possibilities. Thus Satrapi writes within a tradition of comics that is becoming increasingly multilayered in Europe and the United States. Creators of autobiographical comics use a uniquely palimsestic graphic medium (both visual and textual) to narrate and construct a life story. Paul John Eakin’s idea that “the tension between the experiential reality of subjectivity on the one hand and the available cultural forms for its expression on the other always structures any engagement in autobiography” encourages us to critically negotiate Satrapi’s generic choice (1992: 88). For writers who want to creatively limn their experiences, the specificities of the comic book format, Will Eisner argues, which “presents a montage of both word and image,” obliges the reader to

exercise both visual and verbal interpretive skills. The regiments of art (e.g. perspective, symmetry, brush stroke) and the regiments of literature (e.g. grammar, plot, syntax) become superimposed upon each other. The reading of the comic book is an act of both aesthetic perception and intellectual pursuit (2003: 8).

Autobiographical comics have existed for almost as long as comic art has. Susanna Egan explains that Art Spiegelman’s “produced an (auto)biography so powerful 268 PROSE STUDIES

that the role of comics in autobiography must now be assured” (1999: 16). Spiegelman successfully deployed comics to portray the horror of the Holocaust – to draw the indescribable, so to speak.7 Hugo Frey and Benjamin Noy, in their introduction to a special issue of Rethinking History on the use of the in historical representation, note that this text, more than any other, transformed the status of comics as a legitimate vehicle for the telling of history.8 It has also become a staple in women’s comics, with important comic artists such as Jessica Abel, Erika Lopez, Julie Doucet, and Lynda Barry expanding the possibilities of the form. Barry, in particular, considers issues of self-representation in the introduction to her One Hundred Demons, where she introduces the concept of “autobifictionalography” to describe her project, interrogating the limits between truth and necessary invention or elaboration: “Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true? Is it fiction if parts of it are?” (2002: 7).9 These graphic artists have demonstrated the flexibility of the comics to literally represent memory, dreams, possibilities, and engage the idiosyncrasies of the present. Terri Sutton considers women’s autobiographical comics as the most “adventurous” of the genre, noting how their art is enacted most significantly in the private sphere (1993: 111). Interestingly, Trina Robbins explains that:

big chunks of women’s comix tend to be about the artist’s dysfunctional family, miserable childhood, fat thighs, and boyfriend problems. Although [Aline] Kominsky seems to have invented the form, the autobiographical comic actually harkens back to the confessional style of mainstream romance comics (1999: 91).10

Robbins’s perspective links women’s graphic autobiography with earlier forms, even as she notes that these contemporary women significantly transcend the limits of those earlier texts – artistically, thematically, representationally. Contemporary graphic autobiography dialogues with other narrative conventions, as well as furthers the possibilities of graphic expression. Satrapi’s use of comics as autobiography illustrates Egan’s assertion that “[e]very occasion for mixing genres demonstrates how distinctive sign systems can intersect and merge to signify meanings at which neither one could arrive alone” (Egan, 1999: 21). This form limns the interactions between drawing and language, and its ostensible simplification is actually a complex strategy for the representation of events and perspectives that may be difficult to communicate only through words. Scott McCloud explains this strategy when he describes

cartooning as a form of amplification through simplification.Whenweabstract an image through cartooning, we are not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details.Bystripping down an image to its essential “meaning,” an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t (McCloud, 1994: 30, emphasis in original).

Interestingly, this approach to understanding graphic art is structurally related to one of the constitutive elements of the memoir of childhood, where specific details acquire heightened meaning. The process of memory often involves the symbolic interrogation of particular artifacts, sensory detail like the taste of specific food or the smell of a childhood home, brief conversations or episodes that resound emotionally in the author’s memory. Because these texts are written in adulthood, the significance of COMICS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN MARJANE SATRAPI’S PERSEPOLIS 269 these “shards of memory,” to use Salman Rushdie’s term, is heightened as they might be the only remnants left of that lost past and lost time. In memoirs like Satrapi’s, the specific event or detail gives meaning to the whole, as with the comic, where the simplest drawing might acquire the most universal meaning. Another structural connection between the writing of childhood and graphic art lies in the manner in which both forms negotiate specific ways of perceiving. The issue of perspective is fundamental to how we read both autobiographies and graphic narratives, as the forms themselves require the reader to position him- or herself strategically in order to comprehend the performance which has been enacted. In relation to comics, McCloud explains that

Cartooning isn’t just a way of drawing, it’s a way of seeing. The ability of cartoons to focus our attention on an idea is, I think, an important part of their special power, both in comics and in drawing generally (1994: 31, emphasis in the original).

Childhood memoirs similarly focus our attention on specific ideas and forms of understanding the world, the writers’ individual itinerary of selfhood. Noting constitutive intersections in these modes of inscription, we must approach contemporary graphic autobiographies as increasingly sophisticated forms of inscribing the past. Further, metaliterary elements serve as signifying strategies and these comics engage, in particularly effective ways, the writers’ perception of themsleves and their process of education. Indeed, graphic narratives are highly effective ku¨nstlerroman (novels on the education of an artist) – because the subjects of the autobiographical comics are, most often, graphic artists themselves. The reader is privileged to participate in the performance of both memory and art, and the complex interaction between them.

Persepolis: the graphic memoir

In the context of transcultural writing that negotiates the historical and cultural upheaval in Iran in the latter part of the twentieth century, Marjane Satrapi harnesses the expressive possibilities of the comics form to enact the dramatic changes she experienced as a child – beginning with the Islamic revolution and ending with her solo journey to Austria. I propose to read Satrapi’s transcultural graphic autobiography as a literary and cultural site for the negotiation and management of the memory of childhood perceptions and positioning, family, history, politics, religion, and social transformation. The narrator-protagonist’s emerging subjectivity in Persepolis is based upon a series of shifting affiliations and growing awareness of the complexity of religious, ideological, gender, class, and even literary issues. Her choice of medium is deliberate, though it appears to challenge conventional prescriptive ways of inscribing experience. As she explains in an essay titled “On Writing Persepolis”:

People always ask me, “Why don’t you write a book?” But that’s what Persepolis is. To me, a book is pages related to something that has a cover. Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw it seems a shame to choose one. I think it’s better to do both.11 270 PROSE STUDIES

Further, in an interview, she explains:

[Comics] is my way of expressing myself, and I think the pictures, they say always more than the words can say. Also, in pictures, they help me to have the distance without becoming cynical, and be able to describe a part of the story with humor—which I couldn’t do otherwise.12

Because of the nature of her childhood experiences and the vivid quality of her memories, Satrapi believes that this form is particularly apt for this engagement: it is also the medium through which she habitually expresses herself, and is thus a form that comes naturally to her and whose complex possibilities she has mastered. More importantly, by doing “both,” Satrapi’s powerful autobiographical aesthetic interrogates the crucial intersections between public, private, and, I would add, secret, histories – her perception of herself, and those dreams and feelings impossible to articulate verbally. Thus she harnesses linguistic and visual elements to effectively represent not only the events of her childhood, but her place in those events, as well as her own process of self-awareness. A constitutive aspect of the renewed process of seeing involves the issue of the gaps in the narration of comics. Comics require the reader to fill in the gaps between the panels, to imaginatively link what is represented in one panel with that drawn in the next one. Graphic narratives contain more gaps than a traditional autobiography – even those written in as separate stories – and we must therefore read the design and intention behind the textual destabilizations and the cultural implications of such fragmentation. The structure of Satrapi’s text is typical of most comic books – short titled narrative pieces that form a larger whole. Her chapters have simple titles: “The Veil,” “The Bicycle,” “The Water Cell,” “Persepolis,” “The Letter,” “The Party,” “The Cigarette,” “Kim Wilde,” among others. This ordering emphasizes breaks, beginnings and new beginnings, episodic structuring of lives and selves, inviting the reader to fill in the gaps, to find whole meaning from the fragments retained in memory and on the page. The organization of the discrete narratives becomes the author’s attempt to control a series of fundamental memories, to define their meaning and their significance with regard to her own formation. Nonetheless, in spite of the fragmentary characteristic of the narrative strategy, the text exists as a coherent whole, irrevocably linked by the protagonist/narrator and by a series of motifs, issues, and strategies. Yet, as Boelhower points out, “through a strategy of reconstruction, autobiographical interpretation defamiliarizes actual self and place by converting them into figurae, or tropes, which defer to an alternative cultural scenario” (1991: 134). Thus autobiographical comics cannot therefore be read solely as a personal account, the cultural connotations of the stories and the narrative choices signifying on the level of national drama and attesting to the complex interweaving of the strategies of meaning. Significantly, Sutton has noted that criticism “ignores one of the more potent roles of autobiographical writing: witnessing” (1993: 111) which is clearly part of Satrapi’s complex project. Also, the comic’s emphasis on recurring themes as well as its traditional resistance to closure and remote works suggests a wider universe of significance for the writer and her stories. The diasporic nature of Satrapi’s personal and national chronicle, which COMICS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN MARJANE SATRAPI’S PERSEPOLIS 271 foregrounds the need to return and rediscover a home – physically, imaginatively, representationally – is effectively subsumed into the genre. Moreover, this narrative strategy demonstrates how the transcultural subject is not exposed to one ideology, but to a plurality of discourses. This multiple positioning radically determines her textual negotiation of subjectivity. Eisner has explained how, in comics,

body posture and gesture occupy a position of primacy over text. The manner in which these images are employed modifies and defines the intended meaning of the words. They can by their relevance to the reader’s own experience evoke a nuance of emotion and give auditory inflection to the voice of the speaker (2003: 103).

Satrapi’s artwork is minimal and stark, with curved figures rarely involving much detail, yet simultaneously humorous and painful in its depiction of escalating violence and madness. Andrew Arnold notes that the art’s simplicity – “solid, high-contrast black shapes [which take on] a wood-cut look”13 – reflects and resonates with the perspective of its child protagonist, as it negotiates the complex nuances of the story. Satrapi uses black and white to effectively illustrate clothes and backgrounds in shifting ways that create dramatic contrasts. Her flexible geometric style eloquently conveys both childhood innocence and indescribable pain. Fernanda Eberstadt describes this style as “bold and vivid” (2003: 8). Satrapi, she explains, draws

in a faux-naif pastiche of East and West [and] deploys all the paranoid Expressionism latent in the comic strip’s juxtapositions of scale – the child dwarfed by looming parents, would-be rescuers dwarfed by giant policemen guarding the locked doors to a movie theater that’s been set on fire—but when Satrapi depicts a schoolyard brawl, it’s straight from Persian miniature (Eberstadt, 2003: 8).

In one of the most dramatic moments, Marji walks by a neighbors’ home which has just been bombed. The drawing of the rubble is highly sophisticated, worked in shadows and intersecting lines. The last three panels on that page illustrate her reaction to suddenly seeing and identifying a bracelet on her friend’s arm under the rubble: her horrified expression, her covering her face with her hands, then a panel in black above the words “No scream in the world could have relieved my suffering and my anger” (Satrapi, 2003: 142). Satrapi uses the conventions of Western perception of Iranian culture to criticize it from her transcultural position. Persepolis combines political history and memoir, portraying a country’s twentieth-century upheavals through the story of one family. As Frey and Noy argue, we need to transcend the perspective that reads graphic novels merely as a new set of historical sources and read them as “a site where ‘history’ itself, or the representations of history, are put into play: interrogated, challenged, and even undermined” (2002: 258). Graphic representation confers a multilayered performativity to Satrapi’s text: we simultaneously read and see the story, words and images coalesce to produce “an inextricable narrative gestalt” (Witek, 1992: 74). The juxtaposition of visual and verbal constructs a nuanced text that obliges readers to rethink previous concepts about Iran, about childhoods, about memory, and strategies of self-representation. It also gives the author fuller control of her subject – herself – as her life writing act involves actual, though stylized, self-portraiture. Satrapi’s 272 PROSE STUDIES

narrative opens with a self-portrait, at the age of ten, wearing what is probably the single most recognizable symbol of the Islamic Revolution in Iran: the veil. Yet, Satrapi is consistent in privileging her child perspective – she does not mention the veil (though it is the most striking element in her self-portrait) until the third panel, and the first page concludes with a wide-frame drawing, reminiscent of Persian miniatures, of a group of little girls negotiating the imposition of the veil. The opening page effectively sets the stage for the narrative: it introduces the protagonist, Marji – a tough, smart Iranian girl, who constantly asks questions and refuses to be anything but the protagonist in everything going on around her – and signals the moment in which she begins to realize that her world is changing. Though Satrapi’s story is inextricably entwined with that of her country – her great- grandfather was Iran’s last emperor, who was overthrown by the father of the Shah ousted in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and her parents participated actively in the Shah’s overthrow – her narrative is fundamentally that of a child growing up. She successfully weaves the paradigms of children’s culture – family, school, idols – with the ethnic and national concerns that surround her and gradually impinge upon their private lives, and her secret one. In this context, the choice of the title Persepolis is significant; it is the title of the fourth story of the book, in which she recounts the history of successive regimes in Iran, as well as her family’s connection to the former ruling class. By giving her memoir Iran’s historical name, she posits the text as a doubled narrative of memory – that of a country and a childhood lost, as well as the intricate connection between the two. For Satrapi, the changes in the country are the changes in her family and her life – there is no difference among the three.14 Satrapi intelligently juxtaposes her own experiences with the larger political scene, consistently privileging the personal over the political, but always limning the connection between the two. As such, her childhood games includes playing at being Che Guevara and learning about methods of torture; her friends’ parents and her own uncle are executed; and a boy she has a crush on leaves for the United States to escape the oppressive regime. Her early representation of herself stresses the happy contradictions that often exist in a child’s perception of the world, as well as the more insidious conflicts between her home life – her parents are Marxists who encourage their child’s intellectual development – and public life that includes the pain that a repressive government causes. There is also an opposition between the brutality of the regime and the descriptions of the war and the warm and loving home life she experiences: her parents are affectionate and supportive, her grandmother is a source of solace and comfort, her depictions of her conversations with God are among the more poignant scenes in the text. As a young child, she declares that she wants to be a prophet, while informing the reader that her favorite book was a comics version of Karl Marx’s Dialectic Materialism. Her syncretic religious-political sentiment, which mirrors the country’s religious-secular dichotomy – “it was funny to see how much Marx and God looked like each other. Though Marx’s hair was a bit curlier” (Satrapi, 2003: 13) – is creatively depicted, illustrating the manner in which a child perceives, and allowing the reader to see what she imagines. Her secret relationship with God also attests to her personality, and to the kind of insecurities typical of childhood. Two self-portraits that Satrapi draws graphically dramatize her liminal position: the child literally finds herself caught between the religious and the secular worlds, between tradition and technology. The first portrait is of her at the age of ten, after the COMICS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN MARJANE SATRAPI’S PERSEPOLIS 273 imposition of the veil, at a point where she is struggling to understand what it means, and why she has to wear it (see Figure 1). The portrait she draws of herself at the age of 14 continues to privilege her liminality, but this time in a more eclectic formulation. Her sense of transculturality is graphically represented by the manner in which she literally wears the symbols of the position she has chosen for herself. At this point, Marji is no longer a child caught between two world-views: she has carved a place for herself (see Figure 2). The denim jacket and Michael Jackson button identify her as a typical 1980s teenager, a willing victim to the demands of fashion. The headscarf, with a few carefully orchestrated escaping strands of hair is her partial concession to fundamentalist imposition. The use of verbal and graphic images signals the tensions inherent to transcultural self-identification, and illustrates the vexed discourses of imposed forms and chosen manners of self-representation. From the very beginning, Marji’s story is one of contradictions, of a child finding herself between cultural, political, religious, linguistic and social demands and impositions. To understand this text, we must understand the manner in which the narrator-protagonist negotiates the crucial binaries of palimpsestic history, and how the author re-presents those often impossible contradictions. The narrative focuses on the child’s evolving perspective of life’s complications: she learns about hypocrisy when her Marxist father breaks up their maid’s love affair with their neighbor’s son, because he says that “in this country you stay within your own social class” (37); she ironizes Islamic fervor, recounting the story of the widow of a man who dies of cancer who shouts along with the masses that he has died a martyr (32); she experiences the execution of her favorite uncle, which leads to her loss of faith (70); and she notes on diverse occasions the socially accepted double standard of the religious government. Marji’s life develops in a context of increasing political turmoil and violence, yet she necessarily sustains the processes of childhood and adolescence.

FIGURE 1 (p.6) 274 PROSE STUDIES

FIGURE 2 (p. 131)

In the story “The Cigarette,” she intersperses her account of typical adolescent rebellion – cutting school to flirt with boys and being punished by her mother, who, Marji claims “used the same tactics as the torturers” (113) – with information about the Iran-Iraq war: “Naturally, the regime became more repressive. In the name of that war, they exterminated the enemy within. Those who opposed the regime were systematically arrested and executed together” (117). She ends the story with an effective merging of both transactions:

As for me, I sealed my act of rebellion against my mother’s dictatorship by smoking the cigarette I’d stolen from my uncle two weeks earlier. [...] It was awful. But this was not the moment to give in. With this first cigarette, I kissed childhood goodbye (117).

The juxtaposition between word and image in graphic narratives allows Satrapi to inscribe her passage to maturation on two levels: as she writes Marji’s process of increasing awareness, the drawing style also evolves. The later drawings are more sophisticated, the black and white shading more nuanced and expressive. There is a representational coherence to the text that limns the reality of drawing as a language as expressive as words. The cultural influences of pre-revolutionary Iran are also evidenced in Satrapi’s graphic text. She explains that before 1979 she attended a bilingual French school and that her family was very cosmopolitan and liberal, leading us to understand the nature of her drawings: God, for example, is represented as an old white man, in the traditional Western style. Later, as an adolescent, she identifies with American popular culture – she hums “we’re the kids in America, whoa!” as she buys black market cassettes of Kim Wilde and Camel, and screams along with the cassette to unwind after a confrontation with the law (132, 134). Class issues are also negotiated on several occasions. The COMICS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN MARJANE SATRAPI’S PERSEPOLIS 275 representational strategy of word/image juxtaposition privileges inconsistencies between private (upper-class) and public (lower-class) lives. Marji’s family struggles to survive the situation, maintaining a semblance of normalcy in the face of escalating violence. Her parents smuggle a Kim Wilde poster into Iran for her, she wears 1983 Nikes, denim jackets, and a Michael Jackson button (though, when questioned by the Guardians of the Revolution, she claims that it is Malcolm X “the leader of Black Muslims in America.” “Back then,” she explains, “Michael Jackson was still black” [133]). The story “The Key” most vividly depicts the different worlds upper- and lower-class Iranians lived in during the war. As Marji reads about the casualties in the newspaper, her mother asks her to style her hair. “Mom, don’t all these dead mean anything to you?” the girl asks. “Of course they mean something to me!” her mother exclaims, “But we are still living!” “That’s very Persian,” the narrator comments, “the philosophy of resignation” (94). Then their maid comes to tell them that her son has been given a gold-painted plastic key: “They told the boys that if they went to war and were lucky enough to die, this key would get them into heaven” (99). Later, they learn that only poor boys were given keys, hypnotized with songs and patriotic ideals, and used as mine fodder. Meanwhile, Marji attends her first party (see Figure 3). This shocking sequencing, which suggests simultaneity, foregrounds the child’s vacillating perceptions: though intellectually she acknowledges that violence happens, her emotional life is that of an upper-class teenager and she locates herself in a world where typical adolescent processes can still, and must be, lived. This dramatic depiction of the contrast between the poorer teenagers’ lives and her own through a one-page juxtaposition is one of the most effective pages of her text. Marji’s parents begin to worry about their headstrong and independent daughter and resolve to send her away to Austria, to avoid the risk of arrest. This is the note on which the memoir ends, with a new beginning for the 14-year-old separated from family and country. This ending posits a dramatic rupture: family, and nation – and childhood – are left behind. The last story, “The Dowry,” recounts her preparations for her journey, her father’s admonition: “Don’t forget who you are and where you come from” (152), and her grandmother’s advice to “Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself” (150). These thoughts clearly remained in the girl’s mind, and may be read as metaliterary imperatives: the construction of her graphic autobiography limns her process of remembering and of finding a unique way of self-expression. Persepolis is the document that attests she has attended her father’s and grandmother’s parting words – graphic proof of the multidimensional memories she has retained in her mind, and reproduced on the page. Because leaving Iran and her parents was “a little like dying” (153), the text serves as Marji’s way of surviving, by revisiting and reenacting those memories of simultaneous violence and family togetherness, and her parents’ love that made them understand that only by sending her away would she be safe. Eberstadt notes how ambitious artist-writers all over the world “have been discovering that the cartoons on which they were raised make the perfect medium for exploring consciousness, the ideal shortcut—via irony and gallows humor—from introspec- tion to the grand historical sweep” (2003: 8). Through her successful graphic 276 PROSE STUDIES

negotiation of her early life, Satrapi has found a way to tell her stories without letting rage and bitterness take over:

“I cannot take the idea of a man cut into pieces and just write it,” she explained. “It would not be anything but cynical. That’s why I drew it. People are not ready to read a book about all the misery of the third world, and I don’t blame them” (Bahrampour, 2003: 1).

FIGURE 3 (p. 102) COMICS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN MARJANE SATRAPI’S PERSEPOLIS 277

This successful juxtaposition of words and images offers us a revisionary manner of narrating a past that negotiates the intersection of history, childhood and itineraries of ethnic and national affiliation.

Notes

1. I use the term “transcultural” as explained by Rosalia Baena in the introduction to this book. I would like to thank Professor Baena for her careful and encouraging reading of my essay and her insightful suggestions. 2. Reprints from this text are used by permission of , a division of Random House, Inc. The English version of Persepolis contains the two volumes originally published in French as Persepolis 1 and Persepolis 2, published in Paris by L’Association in 2000 and 2001, respectively. Satrapi’s Persepolis 3 was published in French in 2003. The English edition, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return was published in 2004. 3. The term for the genre in question – “comics” – is itself subject to debate. The term was first used as a plural form to describe graphic narratives published in newspapers. Some critics have argued that “comics” sounds juvenile and its most colloquial synonym, “funnies,” detract from the form’s thematic and artistic complexity, and should be replaced. Will Eisner proposes the use of the terms “sequential art” or “graphic sequential art” in his crucial study Comics and Sequential Art (2003; first published in 1985). Art Spiegelman introduced the term “commix” as a way of suggesting the crucial “co-mixing” of words and pictures that distinguishes the comics from other types of visual narratives (Spiegelman, 1988: 61). In some European criticism, particularly the French, the expression bande dessine´e (BD) is the preferred term. In this study, I will use the word “comics” as Scott McCloud defines it, as “n. plural in form, used with a single verb. 1. Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (1994: 9). I will also refer to “comics” synonymously as “graphic narratives”. 4. See Davis (2002) and Davis (2005) for more on representing childhood in ethnic autobiographies. 5. For information on the ways women graphic artists have developed comics, see Robbins (1999), among others. 6. Matthew Surridge argues that “most Biographical and especially Autobiographical comics are better described as an extension of the personal essay, perhaps by way of first- person journalism. Basically, for whatever reasons, comics biography and comics autobiography have evolved their own codes; they have their own sets of expectations. Possibly most significant is the fact that biographical comics [...] tend to put artistry before information. They are, in other words, a separate genre than [sic ] prose biography, dealing with separate concerns, and probably should be treated as such.” See Matthew Surridge, “Based on a True Story.” The Comics Journal, http://www.tcj.com/ 3_online/b_surridge_09229.html, accessed 4 September 2003. 7. See Linda Hutcheon’s excellent essay “Literature Meets History: Counter-Discoursive ‘Comix’” (1999) for a thorough discussion of Spiegelman’s Maus as autobiography and history. 278 PROSE STUDIES

8. The existence of this book testifies to the increasing critical interest in the validity of comics in contemporary historiography, highlighting how, in the words of the editors, “the form has actually been the site for some sustained and sophisticated engagements with the problem of representing historical events” (Frey and Noy, 2002: 255). 9. See Melinda L. de Jesu´s’s article (de Jesu´s, 2004) for a thoughtful discussion of Barry’s autobiographical strategy. 10. Robbins also points out that “so many women’s autobiographical comics are depressing, and so many are about dysfunctional families, that it becomes tempting to believe that dysfunctional families breed women cartoonists” (1999: 127). 11. Marjane Satrapi, “On Writing Persepolis,” http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/ graphic novels/satrapi2.html. Accessed 3 September 2003. 12. Rebekah Denn, “A Moment with...author Marjane Satrapi.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/books/123973_momentwith29.html, accessed 11 August 2003. 13. Andrew Arnold, “TIME.comix on Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis,” http://www.time. com/time/columnist/arnold/article/0,9565,452401,00.html, accessed 5 September 2003. 14. Analysis of Satrapi’s perspective on the situation in Iran is interesting, but beyond the concerns of this study, which aims to focus primarily on issues of self-representation.

References

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Rocı´o G. Davis has degrees from the Ateneo de Manila University of Navarra (Spain), where she is Associate Professor of American and Postcolonial Literatures and Director of the Institute of Liberal Arts. Her publications include Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short Story Cycles (Toronto: TSAR, 2001), Sites of Ethnicity: Europe and the Americas (Co-edited with William Boelhower and Carmen Birkle. Mainz: Winter Verlag, 2004). She has recently edited a special issue of the journal MELUS on Filipino American Literature (2004, Vol 29 No.1), and is working on a book on Asian North American autobiographies of childhood. Address: Modern Languages Department, University of Navarra, 31080 Pamplona, Spain. [email: [email protected]]