Intimacy, Irresistibility and Political Depth
by guest contributor Tasnim, originally published at Epiphanies of the Shocked and Awed
Persepolis, the animated film based on Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel, was released in the US on 25 December. The film, like the novel, is in black and white and just as visually striking. Satrapi says that she sees “images as a way of writing” in a more accessible, international language: “when you draw a situation—someone is scared or angry or happy— it means the same thing in all cultures”.
Satrapi refused several offers to buy the rights for ‘adaptations’, being aware that ”normally when you make a movie out of a book, it’s never a success.’’ But whether or not Persepolis the film gets it right, it does seems unrealistic to ask a 90 minute film to pack in all the qualities Gloria Steinem praised Satrapi’s book for having – “the intimacy of a memoir, the irresistibility of a comic book, and the political depth of a the conflict between fundamentalism and democracy.”
Such neatly phrased praise decorates the blurbs of bestselling books everywhere, and is possibly not intended to be taken as strict truth stripped of all rhetoric. But it seems to overlay a genuine feeling that reading the personal experiences of an oriental is conducive to comprehending “a world, most Westerners can scarcely comprehend”.
That quote comes from the Washington Post Book World, referring to Mernissi’s memoir, Dreams of Trespass, which is given its own triple set of helpful qualities: “its good humor is unwavering, it tempers judgmentalism with understanding, and it provides a vivid portrait…” of that other, alien world. That is, Mernissi’s memoir is intimate, irresistible and, also, as enriching its entertaining exotic aspect, it provides ‘political depth’, in the same way that waging war has the benefit of geography lessons.
It seems to me that having the political depth of the conflict between fundamentalism and democracy requires a lot of ‘depth’. Such depth as might perhaps extend beyond the personal frame of a memoir and into history. These are conflicts that Satrapi’s dry remarks acknowledge. As she says, “if I pretend that I was sitting in a house worrying day and night about my country, that would be a big lie.”
Memoirs don’t seem the most ideal form for books which attempts to explain a whole other world to western eyes. Being a memoir, its world-explicating power is rendered somewhat suspect by the fact that it is contained within such a subjective frame. Perhaps like the use of images – which, Hamid Naficy points out “provide kind of a visual supplement to the words that makes it easier for people — foreigners and whatnot — to imagine what she’s talking about,” memoirs make political depth easier to digest. The personal/political memoir leaves writers in a double bind though. On the one hand, Satrapi says “I have to defend my country because the world is not going well… I would have wished that I couldn’t sell any books because everybody already knew about it.” On the other hand, she depends on the world not “going well” to sell, her fame boosted by blurbs that recommend her as an aid to understanding an incomprehensible world. It’s a difficult balance. Satrapi does her best to get beyond the two dimensional view, saying that what is incomprehensible is not ‘her’ world, but the very idea of splitting the world into worlds. As she says: [Bush] calls us the Axis of Evil. If it was that easy then let’s exterminate the bad ones and let the good ones live happily.
Her cartoons might be in black and white, but her views aren’t, and in this her works differ from what Fatemeh Keshavarz calls the “New Orientalist” narrative, referring to novels by writers like Azar Nafisi, Khaled Husseini and Asne Seierstad, as fitting the pattern of the narrative that: “reduces the contemporary Muslim Middle East to an uncomplicated black and white world of villains (usually Muslims) and victims (usually sympathizers with the west). A vast number of people and events, that don’t fit either category, are simply left out of the picture.” Satrapi, on the other hand, is keen to point out that her books show that “The world is complex. Even in my book I show a mullah who is good.”
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