 |
|
hardcover $17.95
Pantheon Books
Paddyfield.com
Powells.com (USA)
ALSO SEE
The Economist
More reviews by Douglas Crets
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
|
|
|
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi
MARJANE SATRAPI is not that special. She may have written one of this year's most powerful graphic novels about war, liberty, heartache, fear, depression and the exile of the refugee. All abstract concerns, perhaps -- but the U.N. predicts that in the 21st century, just under 3% of the world's population is living outside of their homeland. In all sorts of different ways, many people are just like her.
Satrapi writes about the refugee experience in a way that suggests you are sitting down with her to have lunch. In a word, she makes it easy for us to understand the terror and heartbreak she lived through in a cool, straightforward masterful style. Her graphic novel, PERSEPOLIS 2: THE STORY OF A RETURN, a thought-provoking `comic book' that bites through the ennui and angst of exile, and gives you raw, funny and tangible concerns like hair cuts, cheating boyfriends, misguided Marxists with safety pins in their ears, and women who serve tea that tastes like horse piss.
PERSEPOLIS 2: THE STORY OF A RETURN is bright, even when the story it tells is depressing: it is a bold bitterly disappointed life boiled down to a philosophy of wit and life-protecting sarcasm.
This book picks up where the previous book left off. A young Satrapi has left Iran and the Iran-Iraq war. She lands in Vienna, Austria, taken in by her mother's cousin. For a while, she feels strange in this new world, but protected by familial relations. But that doesn't last long: early on, precocious young Miss Satrapi sits on a bed and muses on her new life:
- Now I had a real independent adult life. I was going to feed myself, do my own laundry... I headed straight for the supermarket to buy groceries like a woman.
She's just been kicked out of her cousin's house because of arguments between the parents and -- after reading further -- because of growing racist unease over foreigners in Europe. Not knowing how to deal with this complicated lifestyle she does what any Iranian girl might do: she goes shopping.
The rest of the story is this simple one-day-to-the-next narrative sketched out in an unpretentious ink of thought bubbles and caricatured characters. With guileless genius, she narrates the anxiety and loneliness of the immigrant, the bumbling puberty of a high school student who doesn't know how to find love and the manic depression of a divorce and lets it blossom in simple drawings with sometimes dramatic results. This, one might think, is what I wish high art would do -- move one almost to tears and laugh out loud.
Satrapi remembers how she was forced to reproach irresponsible nuns, jealous teenyboppers, stoned anti-establishment blowhards and, to some extent, her growing-up self. She finds herself with those who are always bound to be the most interesting and long lasting of friends -- "an eccentric, a punk, two orphans and a third-worlder, quite a group of friends... especially Momo! He was fascinated by death!" But even those people see her as just a party topic.
Satrapi tells a story that has one eye firmly on the West and the other firmly at home in West Asia. She lives that schizophrenic life of someone who has been made by European dogma but reared by her Iranian parentage: the books questions whether there are values that can be learned, or whether where you are born, regardless of where you grow up, is the sole determiner of your fate.
Upon her return to Tehran, she understands that something has entirely devastated her homeland but it has also formed her into an adult. After taking a walk in the city after a giant snowfall, she explains her exasperation to her father over the naming of all the streets after fallen "martyrs" who died in the Iran-Iraq War. Her father explains. She is a woman whose origins are of a trapped place, whose people are also trapped.
- This entire war was just a big set-up to destroy both the Iranian and the Iraqi Armies. The former was the most powerful in the Middle East in 1980, and the latter represented a real danger to Israel. The West sold weapons to both camps and we, we were stupid enough to enter into this cynical game… eight years of war for nothing! So now the state names streets after martyrs to flatter the families of the victims. In this way, perhaps they'll find some meaning in all this absurdity.
This statement provides a startling jab to the perception of the Middle East as being simply a chamber of horrors of genocide in which warmongers fight to fulfill their power fantasies.
The oppressive religious tyranny that is not obsessively probed, but which forms the background of most of this story, will remind the reader of the current War Against Terror and it's resonating effects. But what does that tyranny and imperialism look like on the other side, from the viewpoint of those who are deemed the ignorant oppressors?
Satrapi gives us the perfect medium for those answers: a comic book where instead of finding a fantasy, we find a dream life destroyed.
Douglas Crets
27/08/2004
|
Douglas Crets is the director of The Writing Life Project, a workshop series dedicated to offering intensive editing and creative writing experiences for secondary school students in Hong Kong. |
| |
|
