Map of Salt and Stars

I am posting woefully late on a Tuesday at 4 a.m, so a lot of posts have discussed the parallel/perpendicular plots, the gorgeous prose/can a novel be too pretty?, past tense 3rd vs. present tense 1st, the effect of Nour's (deep) questions, and the metaphor of Rawiya's story as Nour.

I want to discuss how a narrator can reveal plot elements while being personally oblivious to what's "really" happening (this happened also in Lucky Boy regarding Soli and Silvia. It seemed like the reader knew Silvia was taking advantage of Soli while Soli was naive to her motives).

I was interested in the way Nour reveals that Huda is severely sick with a fever through the detail of her forehead fogging up the AC window on the bus, on page 200:

Huda leans against the window and winces, shivering, before she closes her eyes. Her forehead is so hot that it fogs the air-conditioned glass.

Umm Yusuf has that look grown-ups get when they want to protect you, the look that says: Don't let her see.

 The nature of Nour's character is that she sees details around her with precision and curiosity. She's almost stunted by a deeper read of how others interpret the world, that she has not yet developed analytical skills of those details she sees. And why would she? She's still a child. She's also quite dreamy and unfettered by specific rationale for adult decision-making (side note: people like this do really well with others who have anchored personality types, those whose Jungian outer traits are organized and apt at planning. Not that I'm match-making Nour...).

Page 216:

"What's wrong?" I ask.
"It's just hot out," Mama says.
The rosy brown of Huda's lips has gone ashy, and the thin skin under her eyes has turned gray. I ask, "Are you sure?" 

Still, Nour isn't actively worried about Huda. Other plot elements unfold around this time to stave off directly addressing Huda -- Zahra and Nour make up, Nour gets closer to Yusuf.

It isn't until page 239 that Mama seeks medical attention for Huda, and she sends Nour and Zahra off on their own. Between the first hint that Huda is developing complications from her injury to something being done about it, there are at least 40 pages.

I also want to float this out there before class on Wednesday: we've discussed how child narration functions in certain texts, such as Persepolis and Monsoon Mansion. I feel as though Nour's character being through the lens of a child has many of the same attributes as these other texts... she gets to be politically neutral if she wants, she gets to narrate atrocities of war in ways that hit the reader especially hard because of her innocence, and she gets to ask a lot of questions.

My question is, in what ways does Nour being a child influence other characters' actions around her? I am thinking of all the advice the adults impart around her at every given opportunity. Is that a function of her being a child, or a function of it being a war, and adults are desperate to pass on knowledge and wisdom before it is too late?

Excess and Myth

The limitations of the plot in The Map of Salt and Stars are arranged around the viewpoint of a thirteen year old who doesn't fully understand the language around her. The reader still gets access to what is discussed, so this limitation doesn't transfer to the experience of reading it—we don't share Nour's perspective entirely. We get reminded of her narrow understanding of Arabic regularly, and she starts to pretend she can understand less than she does in order to gain more access to the adult world, where decisions of life and death are made. Nour spends the majority of the book not understanding why they must be on the move constantly, while still managing intense feelings of grief about the loss of her father. She leans on an ancient story he used to share with her, to draw connections to the land she travels and to remember him.

While reading I was sometimes struggling to get past the flourish of the storytelling. I started to feel like the beautiful language cluttered the action of the narrative. There were so many instances when the artful language felt like it was in the way, like I had to get past it or through it to get to the action. It was so overdone, that individual poetic moments had less weight amidst the clutter of it all. I also got really tired of the synesthesia, it didn't add anything to Nour's character for me. It became predictable and corny very quickly.

All that said, I was really hooked into the dual narratives, especially the way the migrations of each character linked through time. The ancient settings of the places that Nour and her family went through populated my imagination. The way Nour clung to her Baba's story made sense of the trials they went through trying to find their way to safety. The mirroring challenges and fights were illustrative, when Huda almost got raped it lined up with Rawiya's fighting Ibn Hakim and losing Bakr. There was a strong sense that even though they escaped the young men who would have taken Huda, that something deeply important was still lost. Later in the novel when Huda loses her arm, I wondered if the infection that caused the amputation was started in that tussle.

Another time that the dual narratives lined up was when al-Idrisi and the gang are lost in the sand storm along the canyon, and Rawiya desperately tries to throw stones with her sling to knock the walls of the canyon to direct them back to safety, and Nour finds herself lost in the alleyways of Amman. Although Rawiya is responsible for finding the way, and Nour ends up cowering under a tree where Abu Sayeed finds her, the incidence of Nour running into the night/dawn seemed to be inspired by the ancient tale. These reflected narratives give the action a rhythm that is really satisfying and well-balanced, it felt like a carefully choreographed dance between the two exciting stories.

The modern story moves in and out of mythology with Nour's continued survival amid mounting dangers. The rising waters in the stowaway of the passage ship should have drowned them, yet she and Zahra both survive getting tossed on the rocks. The whole group except Abu Sayeed survive the aid boat capsizing, and she and Zahra tucked into the refrigerated truck swelled my suspension of disbelief. Yet when Nour starts to match up with the ancient story, finding the purple-green stone of the roc's eye, and "remembering" al-Idrisi's fountain home when they reach Ceuta, knowing that Uncle Ma'mun lived in the same hilltop house, that felt right to me. It was so far outside of actual possibility that it fulfilled the need I had for meaning—Nour shared that need, that there should be a reason for all this heartbreak and tumult. She wanted a connection to make sense of it all. Real life doesn't have such tidy arrangements.

The Map of Salt and Stars

While reading through this week’s novel I couldn’t help but be reminded of Laurie Frankel’s This is How it Always is in how oral stories are woven into the narrative who’s central character is a child. Both of these novels contain a sort of “bedtime” story that a father creates, expanding it to last several sessions as a point for the narrative to return to throughout. Frankel weaves Penn’s fairytale story into the dialogue, with it being verbally shared as a bedtime routine. We saw what effect the story had on the characters and how they related to it as it was being told. However, with Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar’s novel, the story of Rawiya is provided through its own narrative. Though it was Baba that first shared it with Nour as their bedtime story, it is Nour now sharing it with us, (technically she’s telling the fig in order to reach Baba). Rawiya’s story is given its own space, to be told outside of Nour’s narrative. In the first chapter, the beginning of Rawiya’s story is sandwiched in Nour’s first person narrative, separated by asterisk. From the second chapter onwards, each chapter opens with Rawiya and these two stories run side by side. 

Although Rawiya’s story is taken out, Joukhadar indicates that it’s all being told through dialogue. The beginning line is repeated, first with Nour explaining how she will “start the way Baba always did: ‘Everybody knows the story of Rawiya...They just don’t know they know it’” (page 6). At the end of that section, Nour says she will “start again,” right before Rawiya’s first chapter begins. Rather than having an obvious intent for telling this story—as opposed for Penn having a lesson or message told through his characters—the reader is left to interpret how these stories relate and allows Rawiya and her group to become their own characters. I do not recall being attached to Stephanie, I saw her as a tool for parent and child to communicate, but I did see Rawiya as another central character. Penn intended for Stephanie to be somewhat like a reflection of Poppy, this wasn’t always so with Nour. At one point, Nour insists to herself that she isn’t Rawiya, which became a huge point of intrigue for Rawiya’s character.  

Both of these novels tie childhood, parent-child bonding, with storytelling and create secondary characters within that world. These other characters then provide another window through which to see the children, and how the parent telling the story sees the child. However, I enjoyed hearing about Rawiya’s adventure as opposed to Stephanie’s, which felt summarized. Joukhadar took the time to create a world within the novel’s world. Nour holds the story dear because of its connection to her father, and I sensed that deep love in the careful retelling. 

A Map of Salt & Stars

Can a book be too pretty?

I found myself constantly asking that question as I read The Map of Salt & Stars. The language is undeniably gorgeous, fantastical even. Nour's synesthesia is brought to life vividly, to the point that it builds a rhythm between reader and narrator. When Nour talks of burnt pots and pans clanging together being a pitch black or sullen gray, I can see it. The synesthesia acts as a vehicle, a palpable way for the more loftier metaphors to connect with the reader through color, but with that being said, it got to be too much at times. The language in general did. I began to wonder if a twelve year old truly thought like that? I mean, I know Nour is supposed to be a precocious kid and her circumstances are extraordinary -- she goes from NYC in an apartment with her parents to a literal war zone -- the loft language just seems so elevate and out of touch. It reminds me of This Is How It Always Is, in a sense; Poppy often felt too old to me in that, too, because of how she spoke/carried herself.

But I think it works here because of the subject matter: The Syrian Civil War. I thought it was an interesting choice by Joukhadar to ground the novel first in the U.S. Why not put his protagonist in Syria from the start? And then the exchange with Itto regarding Nour's heritage.

"New York?" Itto looks down at me. "You may be American, but you are still Syrian." 

I rub  the camel's coarse hair with my palms. "How?" 

"A person can be two things at the same time," Itto says. "The land where your parents were born will always be in you. Words survive. Borders are nothing to words and blood." 

This is where the parallel stories truly hit home for me. It's where Rawiya's story and the map making and how the narrative is told truly comes to fruition.  When I first started reading, it took me a while to realise the story was being told in parallel(ish) (or maybe perpendicular?) narratives. I kept having to stop and pull back to check where I was or who I was with. I attribute it mostly to the use of the 'I' narrator. I hate the 'I' but I digress. Its Rawiya's map making and Nour's constant reiteration of the story that embodies the above exchange. 

The Map of Salt and Stars

    The language and syntax of this book pulled me in immediately. Starting even just on the poem that opens section one, I was drawn to the intricate way beauty and pain seemed to be weaved together. And this continues throughout the book. I’m not entirely sure where to start analyzing the language, but I can can attempt to put my thoughts out into the world in some way.

    When we first hear of Rawiya’s story it is through Nour repeating the story just as she heard her father tell it countless times, “Everybody knows the story of Rawiya. They just don’t know that they know it.” (6,7). And this line is repeated verbatim on the following page. It is such a striking way to tell a story because, and I’ll speak for myself here, I try not to repeat things too often or too closely together. So why did this line work so well in this story? And why did the repetition of this line work just as well even though we had just seen it? I don’t really know. Perhaps because we know that Nour has such an attachment to this story, we know it has to be told a certain way. Perhaps because we hear Nour’s voice tell us a story that is separate (although not entirely) from her own. Or perhaps the narrator of this story to us is Nour’s Baba, possibly through Nour. I tended to think of it as the voice of Nour’s Baba, especially after Nour admitted to Abu Sayeed that she could no longer remember the sound of her father’s voice. I like the idea that his voice and Nour’s get to create this story together.

    Another thing I found myself extremely interested in was all the questions that Nour asks the reader. There are countless rhetorical questions we see while reading, and they aren’t meant for us to answer necessarily, but I do think that they are meant to make us feel something.

“How many polaroids are there of places that no longer exist?” (67)

“Is somebody sleeping in my burnt out bed? Are people coming to take our charred blankets and clean everything out and build a new house where ours used to be?” (83)

“Can the name of a street on a piece of paper prove that our family was there?” (102)

“Why didn’t I realize that you can’t just superglue a dining table back together, a house? How long will it be until we get back the things we lost?” (121)

    These questions are not for us to answer, and maybe they don’t really have answers. But each one burrowed into my heart and made me take a pause in the story. For me, they seemed to point outside of the book, to the world that I’m living in, not Nour’s world. It questions my perspective as a reader, my knowledge, what I can and can’t control both inside and outside of this story. It made me think that I needed to answer these questions for myself. Which does feel like a very selfish way to read this story, but I liked that it made me question my positionality.

The Map of Salt and Stars

            The Map of Salt and Stars impressed me with its poetic language and deeply magical metaphors and images.  Early on, lines like, “My words sunk down like seeds, my vowels and the red space for stories crushed under my tongue.” (Joukhadar 3) and, “I imagine the vibrations of my voice traveling thousands of miles, cracking through the planet’s crust… where the world is all colors at once, where nobody dies.” (Joukhadar 6-7), caught my attention and kept me listening very closely to what the narrator was saying, since it was so interesting and beautiful.  The color-sound pairing gave the book another layer of descriptive detail that I haven’t seen in another novel, even Nabokov only mentions his abilities, he doesn’t try to translate them for the reader in Speak, Memory.

            I really enjoyed Rawiya’s parallel journey.  Side by side, it’s easy to see what creates a narrative with complex characters, (Nour and her story), and what create a fairytale, (Rawiya’s story.)  The author chooses to tell Rawiya’s in past tense, and in the third person, which helps the reader put some distance between themselves and Rawiya, whereas with Nour we are inside her head and in the present tense, heightening the emotions we feel from her.  I wouldn’t have noticed it if the stories weren’t side by side, but it’s clear how different the amount of details are in each girl’s life, as well as the kinds of memories and relationships they have with the other characters.  With Rawiya, I get some lines about what her body is feeling, and the kinds of things she’s worried about, but it is kept to a minimum.  With Nour, I feel every swell of emotion, every doubt, and I feel like I’m seeing the world through her unique lens.  Rawiya has memories of her home and family, but these are brief, and she only lapses into them momentarily.  With Nour, we dive headlong into the pain of losing her father, the coyote she saw in central park, and the dead falcon she found on her building’s roof.  There isn’t much that is spared from her experience, and her sections go into memory often, sometimes once every page or two, to help round out this real human being.  Nour’s relationship with those around her are also more complex, sometimes she is angry with her mother, her relationship with Zahra is very strained, and she changes her opinion on people over the course of the book, like Yusuf.  Rawiya’s relationships are fairly simple.  She loves Khaldun, who loves her back, Al-Idrisi is angry with her for not being upfront about her gender, but gets over it after a minute or two, and her mother and brother love her when she returns home and not much has changed.  They each have the same kinds of elements and technique running through them, but it’s easy to see how much deeper Nour’s story goes when alternated with Rawiya’s. 

            Something that fascinated me the most about this book were Nour’s memories.  We go into Nour’s earlier memories very often, I was surprised by how much at first.  I expected to hear more about her father, he’s so important to her, but I was surprised with the variety and frequency of other memories.  The author slips into them with no hesitation, with no prompting, and lets Nour’s mind wander to memories that are brought up by what she’s experiencing in the moment.  When she’s helping her family search the ruins of their house in Syria, she remembers when she lost her doll as a child.  When they’re walking around their neighborhood, trying to see if Abu Sayeed’s house is in any better shape than their own, Nour remembers a coyote she saw in central park.  The memories build, and very soon we have a clear and deep connection with Nour that goes beyond the time we spend with her in the book.

-Iris

Metaphor in A Map of Salt and Stars

One of the things that struck me about The Map of Salt and Stars was how metaphor-heavy the text was. In some ways that made the prose feel almost like poetry, in fact (this may have been a reason I loved it so much, honestly). The use of metaphor allows the reader to feel more fully and accurately the hurt and longing Nour and Rawiya feel on their journeys away from home.

Though we primarily follow Nour's story and she is the narrator, she isn't the only one to speak in metaphor. Al-Idrisi, in his ordinary speech, uses beautiful metaphors: "I loved it in spite of the terrible weight of its hope" (loc 1525), he says, speaking of his earliest adventures. Nour is young, but her metaphors are mature; they come naturally to her from her father's stories of Rawiya. She has inherited them: "What did Baba used to call me? I try and remember his voice: Ya baba, my sapling. My daughter is as strong as a new palm" (loc 2494). Nour discovers the poetry she has inherited from her mother when she chips away the paint on the map she was given. Here is another metaphor: "The words were on our backs, . . . It's a map of us" (4272).

One could argue that the story and character of Rawiya work a double and metaphor for the journey and character of Nour. Though Rawiya's return home is more literal--she came from Ceuta and she returns to Ceuta--Nour, in a more complex way, returns home. Home is not Manhattan. Home is not Homs. Home is a place of both becoming and memory--and for the time being, at least, that is Ceuta. Nour is with her remaining family. She is with her own and mother's memories of her father. She is in a place of love, and wherever she goes next that love will be with her.

In no way would I say that the metaphors of this book take the reader to a land of make believe. Neither would I argue that the story of Rawiya is an escape. No, I would say the opposite. The metaphors here serve to make the story more physical, more visceral and complete. Through metaphor even the emotional pain is presented to us physically. Nour carries the deaths of her father and Abu Sayeed in her pocket, a heavy rock. These deaths are physical. Her sorrow is physical. She carries it throughout her journey. She carries her family's history, a map on her back. That history is literal before it becomes symbolic. She carries it on her back throughout her journey, an object that she protects, that she keeps dry in the sea, that she is careful to keep from greedy hands.

Meanderings on Satrapi, Feminism, Prose, Craft, and Why I'm No Longer Interested in Comics

We’ve read quite a few graphic novels/memoirs this semester. And I’ve been assigned two more in the Creative Nonfiction class with Shanthi that a few of us are also taking. I feel overly steeped in image. 

I’d read Persepolis before being assigned the book in class. I liked it the first time I read it. I don’t have anything negative to say about it now. In general, I enjoy reading graphic novels/memoirs because they’re fast and easy, in that I can generally finish a complete story in an hour or two depending on how long it is. I love this about stories told in graphic form. I like the act of completion, finishing something I started. And I like looking at pictures. Image is compelling. I even use it from time to time in my creative work. And I recognize that there’s certainly an immense amount of time and craft involved in creating a graphic novel. 

—In response to ABC News’s question, “What do you think of the term graphic novel?” Satrapi responded, “I hate this thing, "graphic novel," because "graphic novel" is a term the publisher created for the bourgeoisie. Like instead of saying you are going to read "comics," you are going to read a "graphic novel," like people would be ashamed to say in front of their friends that they read comics. I have made comics, I am a cartoonist and that's it.” I was interested in her vehement opposition to the term graphic novel. Comics for me have always been a serial production. It’s like the difference between a serialized show composed of hour-long episodes and a stand-alone film (though now, I admit, these lines are blurring much more). —

We're supposed to be learning about the craft of prose. So I wonder, is this book, Persepolis, prose? What is prose anyway? OED says prose is “Language in the form in which it is typically written (or spoken), usually characterized as having no deliberate metrical structure (in contrast with verse or poetry).” I suppose in this sense, Persepolis definitely includes prose. But is it a work of prose? Is the craft of prose what we’re primarily concerned with when we talk about image, panels, bleeding gutters, foregrounding, etc? 

Looking back at Persepolis through a craft lens made me wonder: why choose to tell a story in graphic form? I wasn’t sure. So I read some interviews with Marjane Satrapi. 

In Vogue, Satrapi said, “As a literary genre, comics are really connected to fine arts. In comics, with the illustration, you write with your drawing, with your images. So whatever you don’t write, you draw and vice versa. So instead of writing, “Well I was sitting in my bed and I was watching out of the window and the bird was singing” and so on, you just draw all of that. So whatever you draw has meaning that people read.” I think this notion of reading images is interesting because so much of what we read has to do with color and mood, yet Satrapi chose to make the entire book black and white (and as others have pointed out without gray). There’s negative space and filled space. I’m not sure this is an answer to the question I posed above. But maybe, Satrapi was more comfortable in image. 

She also said in her interview with ABC, “I am absolutely not a feminist, I am against stupidity, and if it comes from males or females it doesn't change anything. If it means that women and men, they are equal, then OK, certainly I am a feminist. It happens that I am a woman, so it becomes a "woman coming of age story." I think if I was a man it wouldn't change so much, they never call it a "man coming of age story." It is a human coming of age story, let's go for the humanity and humanism, it's a much better thing than this "womanhood" and "manhood" and I don't know "hermaphrodite-hood, and etc., etc.” I have trouble with her disdain for “feminism” as a movement and her casual use of the term "hermaphrodite" in a way that seems to suggest androgeny or gender fluidity or perhaps a state beyond gender classifications, but ultimately reads as offensive (or at the very least insensitive to the ways this language has been used). 

I suppose I have broken the rules of the blog a bit here. I’m focusing on the author, what she’s said in interviews and the definitions of arbitrary terms like “prose” and “craft” as opposed to what she’s written/drawn. And, if I’m honest, it’s because I don’t see myself as a graphic novel writer, or a comic artist, or a cartoonist. So when we (and Satrapi) talk about the way you draw what you don’t write, and the way the reader reads the images in addition to the text, I fall on pg 42. “The country had the biggest celebration of its entire history,” Satrapi writes at the top of the whole page panel. The people are happy, jovial, celebrating. And there’s a lot of people smiling, but not much else. And I think this book is a similar kind of book to Belle Yang's Forget Sorrow. The illustrations are black and white; the stories deal with family history, trauma, society, and culture; the books received positive critical acclaim. Both are stories that I think should be told, should be available for people to read/see/consume, should be critically acclaimed. But considering their similarities and the fact that the only nonfiction we’ve read in class so far this semester is memoir, I’m wondering about the other ways we can use nonfiction to tell stories. Can I get an essay?

Persepolis

I love child narrators because of the craft that has to go into the novel to portray the world through a child’s eyes. Cruelty especially, becomes more horrifying when a child is interpreting it because of the subtlety involved. It was interesting to experience the child narrator through a graphic novel. Marji, however, grew up well educated and had an understanding of what was happening around her. She interpreted the revolution and war in simplified terms as a child might—from conversations and books—and was confident about her own understanding. So when she was exposed to the “truths” of the political climate, her beliefs and childhood innocence was picked away at little by little as the story progressed. 

The way Satrapi expresses the narrator’s understanding of death, visually, ends in darkness. Early in the novel, Marji tells her friend that “when they keep saying someone is on a trip it really means he is dead?” and reveals that she has an understanding of death and a truth that no one else but her seemed to accept (page 48). Like a child, she speaks bluntly without considering how her friend would react. Then the lie is used on her with her uncle Anoosh and she detected it instantly. She was aware of the trick and how she was being treated as a child and continued to question her parents until her father revealed, “The truth is, they have arrested Anoosh,” to which Marji responded with, “I know” (page 67). The phrasing is interesting here because of what Marji actually knows. She hopes that Anoosh isn’t dead, implying that she has no information of his current state. However, when her father tells her and she says, “I know,” it is Satrapi expressing that what Marji knows is “the truth,” no as Anoosh’s fate but that she what is hidden by adults to protect a child’s innocence. The section then ends with a single panel of Marji alone in space, the majority of it inked in black. 

The closest Marji comes to death is on page 142 when she finds her friend’s bracelet in the ruble, that was, “still attached to...I don’t know what…” with the last panel completely in black except for the narrated text. In contrast to Marji’s earlier “I know,” here she states the opposite despite the implication that she is aware of it. I as the reader understood that the bracelet was most likely attached to the wrist, and Marji probably became aware of it, but refused to say so, covering her mouth in that same panel. And in the next panel, she covered her eyes, in a way refusing to look at the truth about death that she once claimed about knowing. Now faced with it, she was the one not accepting it in that moment. 

I am always interested in how children respond to harsh realities through writing, especially since it is a difficult feat to do correctly. Satrapi handles it in increments, tying death and violence with a truth the narrator both seeks and suffers for. Similar to how Marji covers her eyes from the bracelet, in the last panel of the graphic novel, she claims that she should have gone ahead without looking back and seeing her parents. For children, the “knowing” is visual. They can repeat what they hear, much like Marji would, but visually there is no escape from it. It has to be done in the details. For me, having death be shown by the bracelet was more effective than describing a dead body. There is more dread and weight to the small object severely out of place. It’s these details that children latch on to and remember. 

153 pages and all this information? (Persepolis)

I was struck by Satrapi’s ability to cover so much ground in 153 pages: war and childhood in the midst of violence, becoming a young adult during a revolution, loss of religion, changing relationships between family and friends, forms of rebellion and methods of survival.


While graphic novels have the ability to cover a lot of ground due to the efficiency of images (rather than spending a page of prose to describe a scene, for example), I think there is something especially unique about memoir in graphic novel format. Memoirs are subject to different expectations in terms of plot structure. Multiple threads of narrative have their own moments of tension-release-climax, which occur at different times. I like when authors juggle these storylines and maintain a singular arc; I felt that the larger arc in Persepolis was the war, and various threads orbited around it: the acquisition of Western clothes/posters/tape cassettes, rebelling against teachers, growing close to her uncle before he was sent to prison, loss of faith, and many many more.


Originally in this post, I was going to point out places where characters exerted their own agency through acts of rebellion. I thought about relating this to a prose, where you’ve got to give your characters grit and something to fight for if you want the reader to be invested. But really, I’m fascinated by the graphic novel as a medium for memoir. If Satrapi were to sit down and talk with you about her life, I doubt she’d lay it on you in the form of individual scenes with dialogue. To tell your story with images is to give yourself more breathing room, more creative ability to articulate an emotional truth with fewer words and therefore, fewer pages.


I’ll try to explain this a little further with a direct example (would I really be a neuroscientist’s sister if I didn’t use analysis in my blog posts?). So, I'd like to look at page 22, the bottom panel, when Marji finds out her grandpa used to be a prince.


Notice how all of a sudden, Satrapi uses texture? The air is swirling with magic. If this were prose, we might expect a shift in language to indicate we were going into a fantastical realm, and we might get this “information” through the form of internal dialogue. Who knows. But one thing I am certain of is that this panel feels like entering the world of Narnia for just a brief moment, if for no other reason than the Teletubby sun in the corner, the lion with a sword (which I think is a figure on the Persian flag?), the teensy castle and forest on the left, and her grandpa pleasantly riding an elephant while wearing a crown. It’s a world of fantasy in the space of one frame. But in that frame, I see a window into a child’s mind. Notice the cursive “My grandpa was a prince” and how Marji is right underneath it, like it’s the credits to her own movie? Isn’t that Marji actively imagining and letting the reader in? I think this frame was meant to contain multitudes... and I think that's why I'm in love with graphic novels that are memoir. There's more possibility to savor or linger or confront, with so much more economy.

Persepolis

            I liked the artistic choices the author made when illustrating the main character’s imagination.  On page six I enjoyed the simple illustration of Marji caught between two worlds, the modern world of her parents and the religious feelings she felt conflicted with this.  On page 45 I liked that we see the main character imagining her ears nailed to the wall, it was funny and effective to see her fears literally drawn out. 

            Because it’s in black and white, I tried to pay attention to when there was more of either color in a cell.  When there’s more black, and shadow, the situation is more serious.  On page 38, when Marji and Mehri go protesting, the cell has a solid black background.  On page 49, when people are demanding the Shah’s departure, the angry people, as well as the disgraced Shah, have shadows over half their faces.  Shadow and darkness help usher in heavier emotions.      

            I liked how the author split their narration and comments on what is happening in a particular moment between different banner placements.  Narration stayed in the upper text banners, while asides or personal thoughts on what’s happening took place in the lower text banners.  I think this was a clear and easy way to divide the different information.  I liked that there were comments from the narrator that weren’t thought bubbles or dialogue.  I think it’s crucial to hear the narrator’s opinion from time to time, especially when looking back, so I was glad that the author found a distinct way to add this.      

            On page 39, after Marji and Mehri have come back from the protest, the mother’s slap stays on their faces long afterwards.  I thought this was a great way to show the character’s shock and how they keep stewing on this event.  Even without the hand mark, I would know that they are sitting, speechlessly thinking about this, but the hand makes it impossible to ignore.  It also made me think of how they could probably still feel it, even a long time after, and it probably felt like other people could see what happened just by looking at them.  Their surprised shame at being slapped was driven home with the idea of the lasting mark, as they probably felt like they had just been slapped for a long time afterwards. 

            On page 50, everyone in the house is in one frame, centered, and too close to one another.  This showed their discomfort, and investment in what they’re being told.  I liked how there is empty space on their side, showing their crowded sitting is of their own doing.  It shows how troubled they are mentally at this moment, and how they’ve reproduced that physically, or are seeking comfort from each other unconsciously. 

             On page 152, I felt that the cell that had the most impact about Marji’s separation from her parents is the one where there are no words.  It extends the last moments they have together, and emphasizes what can’t be said.  This chapter ends with powerful words and images, but the scene of them together and silent was very memorable to me.  I liked how the author trusted that this scene would accomplish what was needed and didn’t try to over burden the cell, they let it breath.  Throughout the whole comic I found that the author married text and images in clever ways, letting each do their work without getting in the way of the other.  They trusted their words as much as they trusted the images to make the right impression.    

-Iris

Persepolis

     So, when I first started to read Persepolis, I found myself stomping every few minutes. I couldn't find an on ramp for the story. My knowledge of the Iranian Revolution was super limited and rather than creating curiosity for me, it created annoyance (I like to be a know-it-all; leave me alone). I also think that the illustrations didn't catch my eye, either, which made it difficult to jump in, too. I started to become interested in what I was reading on about page 14. At this point, we're still receiving mostly historical context with spurts of who Satrapi's family is. We learn a little about her character, too -- she's an oddball, a precocious kid obsessed with marxism and speaking directly to God (or Marx?). Her father is a proud man and her mom is a progressive woman. I consider page 14 my entry point though because -- ironically enough -- the illustrations. The ghosts on page fifteen, the spirits of the murdered theatre inhabitants, caught me eye. From then on I started paying closer attention and I thought of a comment made by our craft instructor last semester (this is very loosely paraphrased so someone please correct me if you wrote it down. : 

you don't tell the war story, you tell the story of the bloody sock by the road. 

But Satrap is doing the opposite here and it works. And one of the reasons I think it works -- and so well -- is because of the narrative voice + form. Telling this tale in the form a graphic novel was genius on Satrapi's end along with the illustration style. The child voice is blunt, often crass (the whole brass knuckles scene), and unflinching, but also at the same time still innocent. On page 59, Satrapi is discussing revolution with her uncle who is visibly bitter about his relationship with a woman in Russia. Her uncle says that Russians aren't like Iranians and Satrapi says 'why, they don't have heads?' It's such a small moment, but in the scheme of things -- executions, uprisings, revolutions, its a beautiful moment of innocence that contrasts starkly against Satrapi wanting to beat a classmate with nails between her knuckles. This voice anchors the reader who is, sadly so, more than likely not familiar with Iranian history because the story can't be separated from the war and just a bloody sock on the side of the road wouldn't do the story justice here (though we do  have those moments -- Satrapi's friend's bracelet; the lies parents tell about the absence of a loved one).

Also, the way the novel illustrates the war is very simplistic. There aren't a lot of shadows and no shades of grade (pretty much the way Satrapi tells the story, too). The simplistic drawings are effective and easy to follow (almost too easy to me at first). The graphics serve as a guideline and a way to present the child voice more effectively.

   

Non Linear Time

At first I was thrown off by the sequencing in Persepolis. It seemed like the sections began in a linear time order but changed to reflect a memory-based approach as the story went on. I started to feel like I wanted them to connect, for a summary of their meaning. They seem to waver within a small number of years between ten and fourteen, each becoming more significant with the piling on of new ones. However as the book continues it becomes clear that these smaller stories are collected to show a growing foment within Marjane that leads to her parents' decision to send her away to protect her. This decision finally explains the subtitle, The Story of a Childhood, because the childhood ends the day she is sent to Europe.
In terms of craft I looked for reasoning in the order of these different stories. I found that some of the sections work to instruct the reader about the war history and the social changes that were taking place in Iran, while other sections are more personal and serve to share what Marjane went through as a result of the social changes. These more personal sections show how Marjane's childhood was shaped by the revolution. In "The Cigarette", Marjane concludes that the regime needed the war to stay in power, and she realizes that this was at the expense of a million lives. She compares the regime's tactics for control with her own mother—who merely doesn't want her to cut class—and rebels by smoking a stolen cigarette. She declares her childhood over, once she's discovered the connection between the regime repressing "the enemy within", and her mother's attempts to control her freedom. Regarding the craft at play, Satrapi is using a bigger theme in an internal setting. The character draws connections about the larger rules of society and ties them to her own experience. The trick is to make it not seem obvious, which I think works in this case because the character is being a typical dramatic teenager, but is also dealing with such extraordinary circumstances of war in her society, that it comes across as a serious revelation. She knows several people who have died, and can imagine her own death, which makes her choices that much more important to her self-actualization. Why would one submit to authority if the stakes in one's life were that high? Where she can't really be free?
In Dowry, the grim reality of rape and murder wakes up Marjane to a point where she really comes to terms with the threats of war. She gets expelled for knocking down the teacher, and her parents have to pull strings to get her into another school. She immediately gets the attention of her new instructor by contradicting her instruction with the cold hard facts of her uncle's execution and prison time. The principal calls to warn her parents, and her mother freaks out and tells her about what happens when young girls get arrested. It's a stark adjustment of her willingness to submit to the system that does not reward outliers. This event seems to tie together the previous events, making her both willing to leave Iran and in resolve of her own character, something she won't be able to subdue. It's a beautiful and hard moment, that Satrapi illustrates in bold, dark cells. A good majority of the cells have black backgrounds in the sequence where she becomes aware of the fate of arrested girls, giving the characters a prime function in the art. Once Marjane accepts the decision her parents have made, the backgrounds go light again. This seems to be a way to convey her hope as she begins to transition from her role as their child into her role as an independent adult. Satrapi gives her a mix of despair, hope and longing in these final pages. I appreciated how the last cell dispels the mood that her parents were comfortable with this loss, with her father carrying her fainted mother into the foreground while Marjane turns away, wishing she hadn't seen them.
The finality of this last cell still left me with a sense that there's a lot more to this story. I think she left it open because that's the sensation of not knowing what lies ahead, moving by yourself to another continent. It's an incredible story.

Persepolis

After I finished Persepolis, I found myself repeating the line "to die a martyr is to inject blood into the veins of society" (115), a slogan Marji finds graffitied on a wall. She disagrees--after seeing so many of her loved ones die, death seems to contribute nothing to the revolution but despair. These deaths, though, propel personal and familial revolutions, instigating the changes that push her life--and the story--forward.

Just after this quotation is a full page panel: Marji's small figure walks down a flight of steps on the top left into a large explosion that holds the figures of fighting soldiers. There's no way to tell which soldiers are fighting for which side. A speech bubble says "They eventually admitted that survival of the regime depended on the war." On the bottom right Marji's figure walks out a door. Another speech bubble says "When I think we could have avoided it all...it just makes me sick. A million people would still be alive" (116).

The regime becomes more repressive as Marji indulges in the stereotypical teenage rebellions. She tries her first cigarette, she wears punk clothing, she listens to rock music. And her parents generally indulge her rebellions in a way that is protective, knowing the danger she is in if her rebellion is known to the state, for the repressive regime is killing those it perceives to be its enemies.

The "martyr" graffiti is subtly referenced when Uncle Taher has a heart attack (brought on by a grenade attack). There are calls to give blood to the war wounded--these speech bubbles aren't the soft, semi-rectangular ones in other panels, but are enclosed by sharp, jagged edges. The words "give blood" are thick and black. The regime is asking for more blood, but they have already taken so much blood will another transfusion really make a difference?

Marji's parents attempt to get a passport for her uncle so he can get appropriate medical treatment in England or at least see his son. They even attempted to get a fake passport. The man who was supposed to make the passport was harboring a revolutionary, a woman named Niloufar. Two days later she was spotted, arrested, and executed. Uncle Taher died without being able to see his son.

Though Marji's friend Neda is killed by a missile, it is Niloufar's death that seems to have caused more of a change in the direction of her life.  After Marji got in trouble at school, her parents explained that Niloufar wasn't only murdered by the regime, she was raped--that one of her executioners married her and sent her family a small ($5) dowry to let them know that she'd been raped. She says: "All night long, I thought of that phrase: 'to die a martyr is to inject blood into the veins of society.' Niloufar was a real martyr, and her blood certainly did not feed our society's veins" (146).

Niloufar's death may not have fed society's veins, but it created a change in Marji's life. It provided that motivation for her parents to send Marji to Vienna to finish her schooling. Though her parents reassure her that they will be joining her soon, she is certain they will not be. And she is right.

Persepolis - Breaking the Rules of Narration

Something that I thought about while reading Persepolis was the rule of thirds (as Jamie discussed a couple weeks ago during class on Nimona) regarding how, in the visual form, it's a rule that you don't want to have your character in the middle of a panel as it doesn't feel natural to the narrative form and feels very static rather than dynamic. However, rules are made to be broken and in Satrapi's case she does this well because she already demonstrates an understanding of visual storytelling's conventions.
I noticed this rule breaking in moments when Satrapi's narrator directly addresses the reader. In panels such as the ones in the middle row and bottom left corner of page 114, her younger self narrates and explains the events of the time while walking down the stairs into the basement while also being situated in the middle of the panel much like a portrait. But Mo, you might be thinking, what's so special about these moments? A lot of graphic novels and memoirs have banners at the top or bottom of a panel which does this kind of thing! And i'm so glad you asked because this information isn't being given to us in the form of a banner but rather in speech bubbles of the young Satrapi speaking directly to us the readers. By doing this, she's breaking multiple rules of storytelling such as breaking the fourth wall. What this does, however, is it brings the reader into the narrative and creates that kind of oral storytelling feel which is illustrated throughout the graphic such as with Satrapi's uncle Anoosh who impresses upon her the importance of knowing the "family memory" (60). In this way, Satrapi is using the visual form to it's fullest as, in my opinion, stopping to explain certain aspects of the moment in time would have to be illustrated to the reader differently if this memoir were written in the traditional narrative prose.
This being said, in the moments in which Satrapi broke the rule of thirds and spoke directly to the reader, I didn't feel taken out of the narrative as a reader because she spaced these moments out by episodes in which we are given action and revelation rather than information. In this way, Satrapi is also varying her angle of discovery from that of the child narrator in the moment telling her mother that she's acting like a "guardian of the revolution of this house" (113) to the older narrator looking back and reflecting to better make sense of the events of her childhood.

Persepolis

    We’ve read graphic novels that work in black and white before, but Persepolis is illustrated without shading as well. Gray in any shade just doesn’t exist in this book. And as I read I found myself tracking the ways that shadows appear and are drawn in the text. Having no shading makes the shadows very dramatic throughout the graphic novel. Even when looking at dead bodies, which have “shadows” cast under their eyes, there is no gray tone, only stark black. Why keep shading out of this text? Does shading affect the way a reader reads this story? How can creating stark contrast like this alter the emotions of a reader? These were all things I was thinking while analyzing Persepolis.

    On page 25, Marji’s mother has a face cast in shadow. She is sharing the memories of her father in prison, how hard his life was. The following four panels all also contain shadows of their bodies. I noted this section because it was one of the first times when the characters are drawn with shadows. Why not always draw the characters with shadows? Or always draw them without? Why create these illustrations with inconsistencies in the shadows? I think the main reason for this is to accentuate more emotionally charged scenes. In this moment, Marji is learning for the first time what life was like for her grandfather, and it wasn’t pleasant. Her mother is crying, her father is consoling her mother, Marji removes herself by taking a bath. Although this is one of the first times the shadows appear as they do, it is not the most emotionally charged.

    Page 51 is when Marji learns of the tortures that her parents friend Ahmadi went through in prison. These tortures are illustrated in the largest panel on the page, and Ahmadi gets shadows while other bodies in this panel don’t. In a way his body is replicated on the page, doubled, and allows him to take up more space in this moment than others. This is important because to me, it seemed as though the narrator providing more space for him in the illustrations is a sign of respect.

    Going deeper into the novel, towards the end of this first volume, emotions run high while Marji prepares to leave for Vienna. From pages 148 to 150 we see a lot of black shadows in the panels. For example, on 150, we see Marji in bed with her grandmother. The whole panel/background is black except for the bed and their two bodies. I thought this seemed to encapsulate Marji’s emotions. The anxiety of leaving her country on her own, the fear for what was to happen with her parents, engulfing her body, while she finds safety and comfort in her grandmother.

    Shadows throughout the graphic novel carry different emotions and intents. The moments that Satrapi decided to include shadows can be helpful, a sort of emotional guide to show how positive and negative emotions are playing out on the page. By using this technique as a way to show the characters emotions throughout the novel, there is more room in the text/dialogue to focus on historical context and present information about plot to the reader.