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.
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