Word: satrapi
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...Sometimes the past is too strong for words. It won't lie quietly under the bonds of syntax and grammar. Marjane Satrapi's childhood in revolutionary Iran?a childhood hijacked by religious fundamentalism, that witnessed the imposition of the veil, that saw the legal age of marriage for girls lowered to nine?is almost too full of trauma to be confined to a prose narrative. Satrapi powerfully captures the Ayatollahs' tyranny by rendering it in the spare, black- and-white images of a graphic novel, much as Art Spiegelman did in Maus, his comic-strip version of the Holocaust...
What does it mean when a comic book does a better job conveying the true predicament of Iran than the leaders of the free world and the best efforts of its free press? Perhaps it means that Marjane Satrapi, the author of the autobiography Persepolis (Jonathan Cape; 153 pages), is not distracted by the contradictions that riddle Iran. In black-and-white ink drawings, she presents the memories of her childhood - the repressive morality police marching the streets, the Iraqi F-14 jets streaking past the window panes, and the parties, intellectual debates and love stories carried on behind closed...
Probably I will not see Iran the way I want to see it in my lifetime. But so what? — MARJANE SATRAPI...
...Persepolis is told through the eyes of a child. And that is the ideal way for the uninitiated reader to absorb the whiplash of Iran's history. Wide-eyed, Satrapi as a young girl demands an explanation for the crimes of the Shah, and then for the violence of the revolution, and finally for the bombing of her neighborhood during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. The country - and Satrapi and her family - career from one ideology to the next. She is taught from first grade on that God chose the Shah; every time his name is mentioned...
...with the swan that he fashioned out of bread in his cell. During the day, she and her friends make up "torture games" to play in the street. But within days, her uncle is taken back to prison and executed. The family friend is found drowned in his bathtub. Satrapi's non-religious French school is shut down and she is sent to an all-girls school. All the while, people cope by living in the small cracks in the system. It is in these cracks that Persepolis shines. When Satrapi and her friends are handed veils to wear, they...