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Pantheon Books
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More reviews by Dania Shawwa
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi
EMBROIDERIES is a shockingly fast book to read. The reader is fooled at first, ingesting this charming comic-strip tale like a light, spun-sugar confection. But it has lasting impact, its humour reverberating for days afterward.
The story takes place over the course of an afternoon. A big lunch has been served, the hostess has been thanked and the men have retired for a nap. The women gather in the formal salon and, as they wait for their tea to brew in the samovar, their "discussion" begins. What follows is a dizzying sequence of intimate confessions and scandalous disclosures.
The book shows that women have needs that men can apparently live without: the irresistible urge to gossip, drink tea together, confess plastic surgery, impart wisdom, and solicit sympathy. Traditional propriety between the generations disappears as mothers and grandmothers reveal their life's inventory of sex secrets in front of the younger women. The word "graphic" applies to both the form and the content -- the book's drawings reveal the characters, and the characters unveil all sorts of taboos. MARJANE SATRAPI seems incapable of censoring herself. She shows the good, the bad and the ugly -- including her own grandmother's transformation under the effects of opium addiction.
Satrapi also succeeds in swiping artificial cultural definitions off the table. In fact, politics and geography matter little in EMBROIDERIES. She shows that characters from Iran have the same everyday stories, traits and contradictions as people from any other country. Anyone who has had a family, a husband or a lover can relate to her characters.
It does not matter one bit that these women live in a repressed society; they speak with abandon. It is as though Satrapi has given the women a present: the freedom to speak their minds publicly, to the entire world -- an unprecedented privilege that religion and tradition have always kept in check. These are the real faces behind the veils and the closed doors. Like typical urban women, the characters in this book are open, sophisticated and worldly.
The illustrations are powerful -- bold black-and-white shapes that show up the raven hair and eyes of the characters. Satrapi uses old-fashioned plumes and calligraphy brushes dipped in China ink. Her genius is in the way emotion -- reluctance, mirth or fear -- shows through in her utterly simple drawings. Although the text is uncomplicated, with much of the meaning wrapped up in the drawings, Satrapi did worry about losing her unique tone of voice and double entendres in the English translation. She has explained her concerns with a French proverb, "Translation is like a woman who is either beautiful or faithful."
Critics have endlessly compared her Persepolis volumes -- which catapulted her to fame in the past two years -- to Art Spiegelman's Maus, a 1986 cult cartoon classic about his father's experience at Auschwitz. Satrapi has apparently felt both flattered and embarrassed by this. "When I came to New York last year," she has said, " I apologized so much to Art Spiegelman. If I were him, I would have hated all these younger graphic novelists being compared to myself. So that is why I called him once, to tell him that none of this propaganda is being made by me. He thought it was very charming."
Despite the comparisons, MARJANE SATRAPI seems to have single-handedly elevated the graphic novel to the status of serious adult literature. Persepolis, originally published in French, describes the story of her family at the time of the Islamic revolution in Iran. Satrapi's parents, who were open-minded intellectuals, sent her to Europe at the age of fourteen to spare her from the oppressive conditions of the new regime. Persepolis 2 details the next stage of her life during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Perhaps Satrapi intended EMBROIDERIES as a breather; it is not as emotionally laden as the previous two books. It is, however, equally ingenious.
I plan to give EMBROIDERIES as a gift to an English-born Iranian friend who is engaged to be married. What better initiation into the secret terrain of male-female relations, which is sometimes silky but often scabby? It is best to arm her, in advance, with good humour.
Dania Shawwa
19/06/2005
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Dania Shawwa is an editor and writer living in Hong Kong. |
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