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?