March family book report by Jason

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (presented at Sunday reading night)

Persepolis was recommended to me several years ago by Mommy’s cousin Suzanne, who is an old friend and classmate of mine and at the time was a professor of English at the high school level and is now a college level professor, teaching teachers to teach English.  I had good reason to respect her recommendations, but never got around to buying the books she recommended until this year.  Persepolis is a graphic novel, which means a novel written in the form of comic strips that are joined together to create a longer story.

Ms. Satrapi created this graphic novel to tell the story of her childhood.  She grew up in Iran during the period of extreme unrest and political transition that happened during the late seventies through the early eighties.  As is typical of political unrest and transition, things were not stable in her social and educational environment, and it was not a straightforward question of a new political party winning power, but rather a swirling, unpredictable, chaotic interplay of many different political and religious factions and ideologies all competing for followers, power, and control of the public discourse.  Sometimes people would ally themselves with a faction that seemed to promise some desired result, assuming that once the particular goal was achieved the disagreements that might emerge could be worked out.

This proved untrue, and the results were often dangerous.  Marjane’s family was politically involved and active even before the period of change began, and watching them navigate the complicated social and political environment constituted the most important part of her education.

Also interesting and striking was to see how Marjane coped with the challenges herself.  While many of her peers capitulated to the emerging social pressure and chose to adopt strict religious practices which never had been part of their lives before, Marjane eventually decided her strategy was going to be to stand up for herself and—paraphrasing her—to shout louder than her oppressor.  This got her into trouble many times, of course, and some of the things she chose to stand up for seem to me to be not especially worth it.  For example, she loved American popular culture and persisted in trying to acquire, listen to and wear the trappings thereof.  It’s strange to think she was risking her freedom or even her life to wear a Michael Jackson pin on her denim jacket in public.  But the point was not the specific things she chose to do to express herself…she was standing up for the right of a young girl to make those choices.  And that I admire deeply.

Eventually her parents could see that such a firebrand of a daughter was not going to last very long as a free or even alive young woman in the place that Iran had somehow become.  They arranged for her to live “temporarily” with a relative in Austria.

Reading this book did not take very long.  I knocked it out in an evening.  Which was good, because it filled the function Mommy thought it would be good for…satisfying my March book requirement so I could keep going on my next one which will certainly take longer than the end of March to complete.  But the length of the book does not indicate its impact.  It was deeply stirring to read…a person’s heart goes out to little Marjane trying to make her way in such a troubled society.  It makes one deeply thankful for our relatively peaceful context and causes one to think about what might be done to safeguard the level of peace and autonomy that is so easy to take for granted in our lives.