Read this time for my Graphic Novels class with memoir work by her and Alison Bechdel and Corinne Mucha. This is deceptively good, in that it is a graphic memoir from the perspective of a woman looking back at her life as a young girl during the Iranian Revolution, in 1979. Why deceptive? Because it's in the form of a slightly cartoony comic book that one could mistake for trivial, at a glance. It's not in the least bit trivial. It's interesting to read this during the time of the continuing 2015 Charlie Hebdo story in Paris, where Satrapi now lives. Her liberal and relatively well-off family in Iran did not support the use of the veil, she makes fun of it with her friends in various ways in the book, and now she lives in a city that bans the veil though she does not support that ban. Lots of layers going on here. Complicated, or parts of it are complicated. Maybe all of it is, I don't know.
The book was banned by Lane Tech Middle School a few years ago in Chicago for showing images of torture to 7th graders some parents felt were too graphic for that age group. I didn't think those images were very graphic, even for 7th graders, but I also have been working with Sarah Donovan who wrote a dissertation on the importance of teaching genocide literature to middle schoolers, which she does and does amazingly. I do think I would not read Persepolis with my elementary school kids, so I myself have lines I wouldn't yet cross, but on the whole I side against the book censorers in this and most any other case, of course.
What makes the book work in spite of some pretty disturbing details from her life is that the style is quite stylized and cartoony, and it's a story told in terms of a little girl, mostly, so it sort of mutes the effect of the fundamentalist siege in a way rather than amplifies it. We see it from her point of view rather than from, say, her mother's point of view. Or her uncle's. But bad things happen to her family and the country, things that the world were aware of through the news at the time, and she specifies these things. It's one story of fundamentalism and fascism that we are still dealing with today and its useful to see her version of it, and useful to see that it is banned in various places while taking what seems to me a fairly uncontroversial perspective on these events.We have history book accounts no one probably knows about in this country at all anymore, so this personal account introduces a new generation to these events.
But I can see why (f not justify) the book was and is being banned by some countries/political groups, because it does take a political position that may be unpopular for some, and that's just what people do when they disagree with stuff, they ban it, which is very useful for worldwide book sales, of course. One of my Iranian-American students once told me she hated it because it was so one-sidedly against the Shah. But for me it is still powerful to read. And much different than what Satrapi deals with in what seems to me a less satisfying second volume of her story.