The graphic novel: a look at Iran’s ‘Persopolis’
The inclusion of a graphic novel in the Leaving Certificate syllabus is welcome recognition of a remarkable art form, says Conor Murphy
Persepolis is the first Graphic Novel to appear on the Leaving Cert English course. As such it is a huge shift in thinking for those choosing the texts to be studied. The Graphic Novel, with this inclusion, is now seen as a legitimate art form in Ireland. Good times indeed.
Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, is a memoir of the author’s youth in Iran. Told in the first person, often with an image of her talking directly to the reader, the novel is both humorous and devastating, often at the same time.
Satrapi uses simple, bold, black and white images. She avoids greys and subtlety in her panels. The one time she uses greys in a representation of the real, is an almost photographic image within a panel. The image is of the destroyed building of her friend Neda. Neda’s bracelet shines from the rubble. Satrapi keeps herself and her mother in the simple, almost abstract, images of the novel. In these panels the juxtaposition of subtle greys with stark blacks serves to reinforce the awfulness of the event. Mortality has dramatically entered Satrapi’s life.
This violence and death is often represented with symbolic power by the use of one-page panels. We often see Satrapi bending her style to incorporate ancient Persian stylistic representations. Lines of people, piles of bodies, lines upon lines upon lines of two-dimensional horses are used frequently to tell her story of the country she loves and mourns. The violence represented through the new medium of a comic with historical references through style choices adds pathos, the tragedy of a nation told in single page panels.
Frequently Satrapi uses a series of similarly drawn panels to represent time movement or possible choices to be made. Two pages stand out. A nine-panel page contains eight panels of Satrapi’s face as she starts to cough, and the cough gets worse and worse until she coughs up blood, represented effectively with black tears dropping from her mouth. The final panel is of her having fallen over, sick. The humour here is dark, very dark, as we come to realise that this was a near death experience.
The use of the images here has an emotional punch that only the well-written Graphic Novel can give. We look at the page and see it all at once. We know the final panel is her having fallen over, we know the next page is her in hospital. We take this all in immediately. There is an inevitability to the story, fate. Yet we have to slow down and take one panel at a time, tension rises. The simplicity of the image choice is tricking us, the humour embarrassing us.
Later we see a two-panel page, a before and after of life for women in Iran. The top page has a panel showing a group of women standing together wearing their full veils and gowns. They stand a distance from us. We see them in full. Nearly completely black their white faces smiling within the frame of their veils.
The image below is a stark contrast. Where the upper panel was an image of repression, of other in the eyes of a western audience, the lower image is recognisable from any number of magazines. We are closer this time. We see hair, legs, cleavage. They are wearing lipstick. They are still smiling but now we see that they are the same as us, they are human, they were always human. Satrapi talks about how these two images, these two ways of living, made her and her friends schizophrenic. But to us it is a message of community, as is the whole novel. Throughout the memoir we see a life that we recognise, a life that we share. This is the power of the book and this is why the Graphic Novel has finally come of age.