This book, a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, is one that I will not discuss at length but I thoroughly enjoyed. I'm currently halfway through a several-day essay splurge and am reading pretty much everything about historical processes of democratisation in Turkey and Iran that I could easily find - this book, being as it is a more or less autobiographical account of the author's life from ages six to fourteen in Tehran during the years leading up to the 1979 revolution, the subsequent establishment of the repressive Islamic Republic, and the ruinous war with Iraq, was on the same shelves as many of my required sources and so I borrowed it from the library as a sort of pudding* and have just blasted it in one sitting and I'm hoping to comb through several more academic chapters after this blog post so sorry if you don't like mad run-on sentences. (I love them.)
Persepolis is gripping, heartwarming, full of as much vivacious humour and character as it is incisive political consciousness - the relatively simple black-and-white illustrations convey a huge amount of emotional context and carry the story really well. Ultimately it's an education in historical empathy: western audiences are rarely exposed to narratives told in the Middle East unless it's a story about war, oil, politics, or all three, in which the main character is a western soldier, businessman, politician, or something, probably fighting cartoonish terrorists. Marjane Satrapi's work in Persepolis (including the sequel which I have not yet read) is the kind of story we need to see, hear, read, whatever, more of - as it helps better show the personal and social realities of what it was like to live in Iran through one of the most turbulent times in its modern history, and bridges the sense of our simply not knowing - though conveyed in the format of a comic, there is a deep and profound humanity in this book, and I would enthusiastically recommend it to anyone, whether or not you know much about the Middle East, whether or not you like graphic novels - it is a powerful and well-told story that will make you laugh and be sad and know more about Iranian history and what it's like to be a teenage girl with ambitions of punkdom living under an autocratic religious regime.**
Anyway, that's the post. I'm going to drop this book in the returns bin in the library.
Fin
* When you've been reading heavy academic non-fiction all week and you need something lighter, or at the very least more aesthetically pleasing.
** I mean, if that last bit doesn't hook you I don't know what will.
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