Word: satrapi
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Dates: during 2003-2003
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Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon; 2003) It couldn't be more prescient or unexpected: a comix-style memoir by a woman who grew up during the Iranian revolution. Totally unique and utterly fascinating, Satrapi's simple style reveals the complexities of this veiled-off world. Full Review
...Marjane Satrapi is a typical headstrong girl on the cusp of adolescence: she questions her teachers, her parents and her society. It just happens that society is a misogynistic theocracy. Persepolis (Pantheon; 153 pages) is Satrapi's memoir of growing up in a well-off progressive family in the wake of Iran's Islamic revolution. Marjane's mother tapes their windows (to guard against bombs) and covers them in black curtains (to guard against their devout neighbors' prying). Drawn in simple, bold lines with wide, inquisitive eyes, Marjane is precocious and passionate, and her small rebellions (sneaking a cigarette) mirror...
...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...
...prays the most. "Five times," says one boy. "Eleven," fibs Marjane. The kids also boast about whose family has suffered most. Those whose parents have the grimmest prison tales gain their friends' admiration; those with the most relatives killed in the Iran-Iraq war get better marks at school. Satrapi's darkest passages are leavened with wry humor. A teenage Marjane is stopped by the religious police for wearing a Michael Jackson button, a symbol of American imperialists. She tries to convince them it's a Malcolm X pin and that she supports America's oppressed minorities. "Back then, Michael...
...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...