Marjane Satrapi’s Elaborate Simplicity
were massive undistinguished figures, mere statues, like this model:
By Esther Claudio
P
Additionally, Satrapi subverts the tendency of westerners to dehumanize veiled women as if they
ersepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s autobiography. It covers her childhood and teenage years in her
hometwon, Tehran; her experiences abroad while she studies at the French Lyceum in Austria;
and her return to a country devastated by war and mistreated by the Regime. Therefore it is hardly surprising that the protagonist’s identity is formed at the crossroads of
two cultures, the Western and the Eastern ones, without really belonging to either of them. Satrapi herself has stated that “[she is] a foreigner in Iran. . . Nowhere is [her] home any more” (Tully, 2004) and this feeling of alienation is materialised throughout the work. Thus, Persepolis revels in the middle-grounds between opposite stances, with images which are able to show the complexity both of the situation in her country and of the author’s personal life. One of the richest and most representative images may be this one: This image shows the picture that she had
Satrapi, M. (2006) Persepolis (London: Jonathan Cape, 301, 3-7)
to draw to pass the exam for university, where she would study fine arts. She knew that, in the wake of Iran-Iraq war, when propaganda was
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Satrapi, M. (2006) Persepolis (London: Jonathan Cape, 283, 3)
overwhelming and 40% of places were reserved
In these panels, Satrapi draws herself with her friends around the veiled model – the archetype
for martyrs’ and handicapped people’s children,
of the silenced Muslim woman that the Regime provides to be copied not only on their canvases,
one of the exam topics would be the martyrs’ rep-
but also in their lives as women. However, this model is also the stereotype of the Muslim woman
resentation. This image constitutes an interesting
which has spread in the West.1
re-interpretation of both Christian and Muslim
In contrast, we see Marjane and her mates looking at the woman in the chador with discontent;
religious symbology. Thus, we can read, in the
and in the next page, we learn the subversion tactics that many Iranian women from her generation
text box above, that:
employed after the revolution (“showing your wrist, a loud laugh, having a walkman”…).
I practiced by copying a photo of
The contrast between the woman in a chador and the women like Marjane and her mates high-
Michelangelo’s “La Pietà” about twenty times. On
lights the difference between the image projected of the Eastern woman both by the Regime and by
that day, I reproduced it by putting a black chador on Mary’s head, an army uniform on Jesus, and
then I added two tulips, symbols of the martyrs, on either side so there would be no confusion. But there is, of course, considerable “confusion” here. Satrapi alludes to the tradition of “La Pietà” to subvert the politically correct forms required by examiners by incorporating a Christian archetype of compassion and suffering with a nationalist Iranian composition. Simultaneously, she is stressing or commenting that the tendency to glorify martyrdom and suffering in propaganda is not a strategy exclusively used by Muslims or Iranians and that also Christians and Westerners have glorified it throughout History.
The Comics Grid. Year One. 2011–2012
1
As post-colonial feminists have stated, western feminism has set up as the paradigm of modernity, thus creating a
stereotype of non-western women as a homogeneus block of passive, traditional women in the margins of progress. One of the most influential post-colonial feminists, Chandra Mohanty, states that western feminism “colonize[s] the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the third world, thereby producing/re-presenting a composite, singular ‘Third World Woman’—an image which appears arbitrarily constructed, but nevertheless carries with it the authorizing signature of Western humanist discourse.” Thus, she argues “that assumptions of privilege and ethnocentric universality on the one hand, and inadequate self-consciousness about the effect of Western scholarship on the ‘third world’ in the context of a world system dominated by the West on the other, characterize a sizable extent of Western feminist work on women in the third world.” (“Under Western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses”. Feminist Review, Nº 30, Autumn 1988, 61-88).
The Comics Grid. Year One. 2011–2012
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