Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (11 page)

Blessed with the temporal reach of all narrative,
Persepolis
is not confined to its three-year central drama but contains a number of haunting episodes from the more distant past, as Marjane learns about her family origins, especially about the princely identity of her dead grandfather (as the text has it). This sequence illustrates to perfection how Satrapi makes use of her graphic language and child perspective. At first the child is simply thrilled to learn that her grandfather was royal, and we see an image of a gentleman with a crown astride an elephant, in charge of his domains. Then we see the shah confiscating all his possessions, only to ask him, in a later frame, to serve as prime minister. At this point Mother—the blood daughter of the prince—takes over the storytelling and evokes, in a few harrowing frames, the punishments meted out to her father because of his Marxist leanings: frequent arrests, frequent prison sentences, torture via water cell, rheumatism, ruined health. But because this is a graphic text, we now see the mother as child, as uncomprehending as Marjane herself is, visiting her father, leaping and riding on his (damaged) back. Most striking here are the images of the innocent Marjane’s open-eyed bewilderment, the blankness of her face as she receives this political and familial education. She had earlier asked to play Monopoly but is now so dazed that she wants only to take a bath, “a really long bath.” The penultimate frame shows her, still vacant-eyed, lying in the tub while conversing with God, who has been a frequent nightly visitor of hers; He sits next to the tub and seems manifestly unequal to the task. The last frame of this episode displays the naked little girl, having exited the tub, standing in a small puddle of water, examining her hands intently. The caption reads, “My hands were wrinkled when I came out, like Grandpa’s.”

Granted, this is scarcely a version of Huck’s “All right, then I’ll
go
to hell,” but it shares something of the same generosity and moral growth. Perhaps this is how political understanding is born, in low-to-the-ground moments when a ten-year-old girl tries to feel the torture inflicted on her grandfather. What is certain is that Satrapi’s clean, almost bare images seem like the perfect conduit for news of this sort. And it is news, for we have few lights on the ways in which we come to maturity, of the moments when we suddenly realize the density and preciousness of others’ lives, of that otherwise unrecorded little odyssey that gives a drastically new meaning to the word “water.” One cannot easily imagine this sequence having the same power had it been consigned entirely to language. The graphic novel’s very means of expression possesses a kind of conceptual innocence, prior to ratiocination and cognitive argument, cued to elemental insights.

Satrapi is wonderfully faithful to the child’s bewilderment at adult realities. In one early episode, we witness, through the father’s accounting, a dead young martyr being carried to the cemetery; this is followed by an angry crowd with yet another dead victim, protesting the repressive violence of the shah’s police, but then we see an old woman trying to stop them, explaining that her husband died of cancer. Satrapi offers us an astonishing frame of confused adults holding a dead body whose upside-down face stares out at us; the crowd decides that this cancer victim is still a hero, that the king is a killer, and then the widow actually joins in the fracas. Mother and Father find the irony of this tale too delicious not to laugh at it, and so too does Grandmother, who now realizes that she’ll be a martyr no matter how she dies. But Marjane is befuddled, and we see a small frame with her sweet, puzzled face trying to process all this. The caption goes “Something escaped me,” then “Cadaver, cancer, death, murderer,” then “Laughter?” In the next frame, little Marjane trots out her new wisdom by going to her parents and grandmother and laughing as hard as she can: “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” They are now bewildered. The next frame shows Marjane poring over a book with the title
The Reasons for the Revolution
. The caption reads, “I realized then that I didn’t understand anything. I read all the books I could.”

I didn’t understand anything
. Do you? What we do grasp—what Grandmother grasped—is something of the cheapness and one-size-fits-all nature of the term that used to be used sparingly: “martyr.” And this is a sobering lesson, since in many parts of today’s world there are huge marketing campaigns for turning “martyr” into a household expression denoting sanctification at bargain rates, while opening the door to dying made easy. And we (in the West) have no clue as to how to discredit it. The graphic text is very eloquent when it comes to the reign of slogans. And children are no less eloquent when it comes to the gap between slogan and reality.

Now, these are adult matters. So, true to form, Marjane does not subject them to ideological analysis. Instead, as the tempo of political violence and murder—by the shah’s army and police, then by the fundamentalists who succeeded them in power, finally by the still-larger-scale catastrophe that was the invasion of Iran by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—escalates and heats up further and further, we begin to see cadavers piling up in unprecedented numbers, as if martyrdom were the common fate. As a logical complement to this turn of events, we see that instruction in the schools has altered dramatically: separation of the sexes, covered hair, scarves, black uniforms, and so on. Even self-flagellation in the streets occurs. Yet, predictably enough, the children see clear, and do what children have always done: they make fun of the pieties being imposed on them. One frame shows them hysterically laughing and shouting “The martyrs! The martyrs!” The next one shows two girls grinning from ear to ear as the third one, Marjane, lies on the floor with her feet pumping up, imploring “Kill me!” Their teacher arrives, asks Marjane what she’s doing, and gets this answer from the supine child, who seems to be winking at us: “I’m suffering, can’t you see?”

Here is the second shoe dropping. Marjane learns to empathize with those she knows and loves—Grandfather, her extended family, her friends—but finds the ethos of wholesale martyrdom and suffering in God’s name simply incredible, hence puffed up, hence a subject for laughter and histrionics. “Out of the mouths of babes,” we sometimes say when they puncture some of the inflated ideological bubbles that so many cultures send out into the air. Puncturing bubbles. In some odd way, the graphic novel—with its one-liners, its simple drawings, its embubbled electric lights to signal “thinking”—is ideally suited to conveying the reductive jingoism of modern life, alive and well in the West as well as in the Middle East, where monosyllabic abbreviations take the measure of politics, morality, religion, and behavior, all in one fell swoop.

Persepolis
centers, I think, on the issues of violence, rhetoric, and childlike perception that I’ve discussed. Its most endearing feature is its principled retention of the child’s vision, its refusal to get lost in politics or ideology, its quiet insistence on keeping score as rhetoric moves ever farther from reality. Hence, one of the heartbreaking episodes depicts the response of the state to its swelling number of martyrs: it hands out keys (plastic, painted gold) to young boys at school before conscripting them as cannon fodder for Saddam Hussein’s superior firepower, but the keys are magic, we gather, for if “they were lucky enough to die, this key would get them into heaven.”

We actually see this special key: it is lying on the palm of the Satrapis’ maid’s hand, the last connection she has with her son, who is off to war. The Satrapis ask the maid what her son thought of this “exchange,” and he apparently reported to her that he was content, that he had been promised “food, women and houses made of gold and diamonds.” “Women?” Marjane’s mother inquires, confused. “Yeah, well, he’s fourteen years old. That’s exciting,” the maid replies. Marjane is intrigued. Is that what fourteen-year-olds are excited by? She herself is not far from fourteen. She wants to question her cousin Peyman about these matters, and he responds by inviting her to a party. Her first party. We then see a few frames depicting busloads of young boys from the country, poor and uneducated, who are, in the words of the text, “hypnotized” and “tossed into battle.”

The next page is staggering. We are, as it were, “blown away.” There are two frames only, sharing the space. The first one shows us children exploding into the sky, each with a key attached to his neck. They are presumably entering Paradise, but these careening, flying bodies have all too earthly a feel to them. We are not all that far, conceptually, from the logic of William Blake, whose chimney sweep was also brainwashed into service and death, while being told that this was the high road to Heaven. No expressions are visible in this piece—the bodies are all in black—so we cannot know what they feel at their dying. But the frame underneath shows us another set of children, their faces filled with ecstatic joy as their bodies leap and cavort to the music of punk rock. This is the “first party.” Marjane herself fills one-third of the frame, her hair flowing upward, her eyes wide in excitement, her mouth open in sheer pleasure; the final caption reads, “I was looking sharp.”

Perhaps this is what a new Blake might look like today. Perhaps this is the very character of innocence: children in adolescence dancing wildly to punk rock. Much of the integrity of
Persepolis
is on show here: children remain children, Marjane is, yes, unhappy that so many young boys (with keys to Paradise) became martyrs and were blown sky-high by the minefields, but we mustn’t forget that this is her first party. It is as if Satrapi were remembering Natasha’s first great ball in
War and Peace
, another text that relishes the juxtaposition of the social and the lethal. Desire has its own fierceness, and it is right to see that it can exist even in the Tehran of the ayatollahs’ reign, at least among the children of Marjane’s class. Stories about growing up remind us that we were once young, that all the horrors of the world, black though they are, coexist with moments of pleasure.

After all, this is a rites-of-passage tale of sorts, and this little girl is on the somatic and hormonal treadmill that all living creatures are on when young. The poor boys’ dreams of Paradise (with its goodies) and the well-to-do little girl’s thrills at her first party share the same basic human and animal wants. But it is here that Satrapi’s art proves its mettle: the boys are dead, and the girl is living. It makes a difference. And we see it with shocking clarity when we look at this page as a single page, thus noticing the horrible similarities between the two frames: writhing bodies of children, flying through the air. One set has been blown up by mines; the other is responding to punk rock. The order and rationale of art are visible here, via this conjunction of bodies and fates. This conflation of images is luminous, begs (and beggars) commentary. Pages of ideological sermonizing or theorizing would not come close, in my view, to the grisly eloquence of those two juxtaposed frames in a graphic novel.

Much more might be said of this fetching and hard-to-put-down novel. The privileged Marjane, en route to adolescence, is drawn ever more strongly into the orbit of Western rituals and pleasures: a culture of cigarettes, wine, rock music. But we also see the effects of war ever more powerfully, as the house next door, the home of a dear friend, is bombed to smithereens. We had earlier heard of another friend, Niloufar, who had Communist sympathies and was executed, but now the details start to come in, namely that Niloufar was first raped and then executed, since Islamic law proscribes the execution of virgins. After this lesson in hard facts, Marjane lies in bed pondering the phrase so favored by the regime, “To die a martyr is to inject blood into the veins of society,” and she realizes that Niloufar is indeed a martyr by a standard we may well call “double.” (One wonders whether Marjane herself, at fourteen, may have a special understanding of a girl’s bleeding. Much can be packed into a graphic text.) At just this juncture Marjane’s parents present the plan for her exit from Iran to Austria. The education story is almost over. It closes with the girl spending one last night with Grandmother, hearing once again that her fine breasts remain round because she soaks them in ice water twice a day, and then leaving her parents at the airport, looking back in horror at the black figure of her father holding her mother, who has collapsed.

She leaves. She is ready to go. She is not far from being a woman. She has had her Iranian education. It is time to go west. (My analysis stays with the first volume of
Persepolis;
its successor—outlining Marjane’s adventures in Austria and her return to Iran—has little to teach us about childhood.) In reading—
seeing
—her story, we understand once again the trumps of art, the way it has depicted at once a life in progress and the otherwise invisible exchange between self and setting, between a child’s wants and the mobile, careening political stage where her life is playing out. Many directionalities come into visibility: Marjane’s trek toward understanding, maturity, and freedom, and the lurching political evolution of Iran itself. In the tradition of Grimmelshausen, Blake, Twain, and Faulkner, Satrapi has deepened our grasp of what it means to grow up and make the move from innocence to experience. And she has, like them, shown us that innocence as lens brings an entire culture’s beliefs—hidden as well as enforced—into shocking visibility. Finally, this graphic text, with its sweet and ungussied images of children going through their paces, coming headlong into contact with adult rites and laws, is an appropriately bare aesthetic form for completing our discussion of innocence. Seen against the increasingly inward renditions of psyche that reach their culmination in Faulkner’s Benjy, Satrapi’s little princess, drawn and spoken with utmost simplicity, acquires thereby a pathos we do not easily forget, as we ponder the story of growing up.