Week 12 Persepolis (Cont.)

**Irony: The theory reading has an entry in the first line of page 138 where Satrapi condemns the press and sensationalism by saying "it seems that Paris is Beirut in 1982."  Given the time we read this and the terrorist attacks in Beirut and Paris this weekend, that was a little jarring. Especially considering that the people of Beirut feel ignored in light of the attention that Paris is getting.

Chute, Pg 135
"The author-subject makes makes political, collective claims by testifying to the very ordinariness of her trauma. In contemporary comics, there is a significant yet diverse body of nonfiction graphic work that engages with the subject either in extremis or facing brutal experience.


Satrapi, Pg 74

We discussed a little of this in class on Thursday, but the overarching theme for me throughout this book, is the inescapable reality that we are faced with a child narrator who retells these very extreme scenarios so matter-of-factly.  In the second window we see Marjane with her hands out to her mother and a concerned loo on her face, and in the last frame we see her with a blank stare as she walks ahead of her parents after her mother has retold the disgusting things that the fundamentalists said to her.  I can't imagine my reaction now as an adult if someone ever said something like that to my mother, let alone as a child. It's horific and barbaric, yet it's retold so simply ans almost casually - it highlights the brutality that they faced daily and the complacent attitude that they had about things of that nature.  That is not to say that they were not affected by it, but it seems as though it was just one more thing for them to accept from people.

Week 11

The following quotes struck a chord with me because I found myself floundering at times to make sense of political and religious references that I had no reference for:

"What gives Satrapi's work radical potential is its refusal to be wholly appropriated into a Western frame of reference; her texts offer recognizable signifiers for a Western reader and then immediately effect a slippage so that their meaning cannot be seamlessly appropriated into a Western framework (Naghibi/O'Malley p.230)."

"The first three rules came from Zarathustra. He was the first prophet in my country before the Arab invasion. I also wanted us to celebrate the traditional Zarathustrian holidays. Like the fire ceremony, before the Persian New Year, Norouz on March 21st, the first day of Spring (Satrapi p.7)."

I think it's important that people from a country like America spend more time invested in and learning about other cultures, but I also think that it's things like this that can deter people from doing so.  Already 7 pages in, and I felt like I was going to spend much of the time 'lost', being unable to pick up on nuance and the smaller details that the readers are assumed to know coming into the story.