Her own grandfather was a Persian Prince who was often imprisoned and tortured under the rules of the Shah. Forced to grow up quickly, Marjane begins to learn about the history of Iran and the many invaders and rulers it has had over its centuries’ long history. Marjane’s parents, however, are modern and secular in outlook though they supported the Revolution again the Shah, who was a despotic ruler, they are alarmed and dismayed at the fundamentalist turn of the new Islamic Republic. Further, the regime forces all women and girls to wear veils. Marjane Satrapi describes how she used to attend a French co-educational and non-religious school, but how this is outlawed because the Islamic Republic distrusts and rallies against all Western influences. Posted in Blogs on Octoby Geoffrey Tam.Persepolis opens right after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which results in the downfall of the American-backed dictator known as the Shah of Iran and leads to the rise of the religious hardliners who establish the oppressive Islamic Republic. Sarah Polley’s Documemoir Stories We Tell: The Refracted Subject.īiography,38 (4), 543-555. Though the line between genuine and falsified truths is blurry in such literature, it is often left to the interpreter to determine where and how to establish it. At the same time, this memoir’s latent realities allow both the author and their audience to reflect not only on the story but their own lives. Persepolis shows how melodramatic scenes can passively demonstrate an author’s intent to obscure truths from their audience. While Marjane Satrapi may hide some realities in her comic, she undoubtedly addresses powerful concepts throughout her book. Both have also selectively viewed members of her family as protagonists and others as not. Like Marji, Polley’s relation to her family changed when she found that Michael was, in fact, not her biological father. As a result, she let go of her “God” and even parts of her childhood. In a way, this discovery changed her personality and forced her to mature. For instance, on page 70, she learned that her Uncle Anoosh, whom she loved very much, was executed. Moreover, the theme of coming-of-age is significant in this story, especially at times when Marji is struck by crude truths. Though ironic, Marji viewed her Uncle Anoosh as a hero for being imprisoned. To emphasize, Satrapi implicitly expresses how one’s heroes are closest to them. While bounded by the simplicity of a comic book, several realities and morals are depicted throughout Persepolis. Furthermore, this falsification welcomes the audience to establish their own perspectives of the implicit truths. In both “Persepolis” and “Stories We Tell,” these fictional supplements have ultimately misrepresented reality in their respective artforms. Waites, American literary scholar, in her biography on Sarah Polley’s documemoir, “Stories We Tell.” Waites recognizes that Polley employed actors for re-enactment purposes, and supposedly to also favour her own perspective of her family’s story. This is comparable to the acknowledgements made by Kate J. In that case, it may have even helped the author, Satrapi, to forget and deny the harsh realities of her rocky childhood. Perhaps this was a facade to conceal greater, deeper issues which Marji’s family was dealing with at the time. While the audience may assume the family did not actually fly on a carpet, it is implied that the trip appeared, through Marji’s perspective, to be magical and practically unreal. The author may have dramatized some scenes in her comic for entertainment purposes, but at what extent of dramatization does a portion from a graphic memoir become pure fiction? As illustrated in a large panel on page 77, the Satrapis went on a vacation during a time of major governmental and societal change.
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