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ABSTRACT
Marjane Satrapi's 2003 graphic memoir Persepolis is a coming-of-age story set in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. 19 years after its publication, at a time when we are witnessing increased cultural displacement across the globe, Persepolis's representation of an adolescence lived across and between cultures feels as insightful and provocative as ever. Satrapi explores Marjane's childhood development as she grows into adolescence and experiments with identities. In Persepolis, Marjane's coming-of-age does not result in her becoming comfortable or fixed in a particular identity (or identities) but represents Marjane's acceptance of her liminal and marginal status in the various cultures she occupies. Marjane is shown to be engaged in an ongoing journey through identity formations that does not end when the memoir does. In this essay, we consider the chapter titled ‘The Cigarette' from Persepolis to explore how Satrapi develops a narrative style and an aesthetic for representing a liminal adolescent experience. Through her use of an episodic structure; simple, graphic repetition; and dialogic and multivocal encounters between the child and adult self and the protagonist and her mother, Satrapi shows the complex negotiations with ‘the self’ that characterise her coming-of-age.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 According to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, ‘At least 79.5 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are nearly 26 million refugees, around half of whom are under the age of 18’ https://www.unhcr.org/en-au/figures-at-a-glance.html.
2 As Gilmore and Marshall note,
Persepolis arrived in the United States in 2003 … [and] was a popular success. The memoir was lauded as a New York Times Notable Book, and Time magazine Best Comix of the Year, and a San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times Best Seller. Persepolis continues to elicit scholarly attention as well as inclusion in secondary English and college curricula … In 2007 an animated film version of the two graphic novels made its debut (678)
3 Naghibi, Nima, and Andrew O’Malley. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 2020. pp. 305–9.
4 Douglas Wolk, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo Press, 2007), p. 12.
5 Wolk, Reading Comics, p. 12. Wolk links Emerson’s review to the phenomenon of thinking ‘if-it’s-deep-it’s-not-really-comics’, emphasising that,
If you don’t see what’s wrong with that passage, imagine it beginning: “It has never been a habit of mine to watch movies … ,” and ending by asserting that, say, Syriana is not actually a movie but a “cinematic narrative” in the tradition of Saving Private Ryan (12).
6 Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz, ‘Looking at/in Maus: A Survey of Critical Approaches’, in Dorian Stuber (ed.), Critical Insights: Holocaust Literature (Massachusetts, MA: Grey House Publishing, 2016), pp. 63–81, 67.
7 Laurence Langer, ‘A Fable of the Holocaust’, The New York Times 3 Nov. 1991, pp. 35–36, 35. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/03/books/a-fable-of-the-holocaust.html.
8 Rocco Versaci, This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature (New York and London: Continuum, 2007), p. 2. Versaci argues that ‘comic books have, throughout their history, been seen as a disposable medium that is meant primarily for children. As a result of this view, they have been relegated to the margins of representational media’ (10).
9 Wolk, Reading Comics, p. 12.
10 Elisabeth El Refaie, Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), p. 41.
11 Versaci, This Book Contains Graphic Language, p. 11.
12 Naghibi, Nima, and Andrew O’Malley. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 2020. pp. 305–9.
13 Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall, ‘Girls in Crisis: Rescue and Transnational Feminist Autobiographical Resistance’, Feminist Studies 36.3 Special Issue on ‘Sex and Surveillance (2010), pp. 667–90, 667.
14 Kate Douglas and Anna Poletti, Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
15 Gilmore and Marshall, ‘Girls in Crisis’, pp. 678–9.
16 Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson, ‘The Visual-Verbal Contexts of Life Narrative’, in Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 167–92.
17 Rocio. G. Davies, ‘A Graphic Self’, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, 27.3 (2006), pp. 264–79, 270.
18 Ian Gordon, ‘Bildungsromane and Graphic Narratives’, in Sarah Graham (ed.), A History of the Bildungsroman (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 267–82, 267. Gordon argues the conflation of (or confusion between) Bildungsroman and autobiography in graphic narrative is problematic, not least because,
[T]he term often applied to this form of comic art is ‘graphic novel’, which, although primarily a marketing term used in an effort to distinguish a supposedly more serious work from the commercial pap of superhero comic books, has become a descriptor for a range of work much of which falls more on the side of memoirs or autobiography than fiction. But yet because they are marketed with the word novel in the title, and probably because they are comics in form, somehow they seem to slip in to the world of fiction through the Bildungsroman door (267)
19 Harriet Earle, ‘My Friend Dahmer: the comic as Bildungsroman’, Journal or Graphic Novels and Comics, 5.4 (2014), pp. 429–40, 430.
20 Earle, ‘My Friend Dahmer: the comic as Bildungsroman’, p. 431.
21 Ibid.
22 Gilmore and Marshall, ‘Girls in Crisis’, p. 667.
23 Ibid., p. 679.
24 Amy Malek, ‘Memoir as Iranian Exile Cultural Production: A Case Study of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis series’, Iranian Studies, 39.3 (2006), pp. 353–80, 354.
25 Hillary Chute, ‘The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 36.1/2 (2008), pp. 92–109, 93.
26 Ibid., p. 94.
27 Davies, ‘A Graphic Self’, p. 271.
28 Chute, ‘The Texture of Retracing’, 99.
29 Chute, ‘The Texture of Retracing’, 99. Chute explains that,
Throughout, Persepolis is devastatingly truthful and yet stylized. The fact of style as narrative choice – and not simply a default expression – is fundamental to understanding graphic narrative … Satrapi’s pared-down techniques of line and perspective – as with modernist painting such as Cezanne’s; as with German Expressionism; and as with abstract expressionism, which justifies a flatness of composition to intensify affective content – is hardly a shortcoming of ability (as some critics have alleged) but rather a sophisticated, and historically cognizant, means of doing the work of seeing. (99).
30 Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 112.
31 Ibid.
32 Nancy K. Miller, ‘Out of the Family: Generations of Women in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis’, Life Writing, 4.1 (2007), pp. 13–29, 19.
33 Smith and Watson, ‘The Visual-Verbal Contexts of Life Narrative’, p. 172.
34 Gillian Whitlock, ‘Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics’, Modern Fiction Studies, 52.4 (2006), pp.965–79, 978.
35 Davies, ‘A Graphic Self’, p. 269.
36 Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis, p. 111.
37 Ibid.
38 Gilmore and Marshall, ‘Girls in Crisis’, p. 668.
39 Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis, p. 113.
40 Ibid.
41 Jennifer Worth, ‘Unveiling Persepolis as Embodied Performance’, Theatre Research International, 32.2 (2007), 143–60, 144.
42 Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis, p. 114.
43 Ibid., p.116.
44 Gilmore and Marshall, ‘Girls in Crisis’, p. 668.
45 Douglas and Poletti. Life Narratives and Youth Culture; Kate Douglas, ‘Malala Yousafzai’; Kate Douglas, ‘@Alabedbana’.
46 Chute, ‘The Texture of Retracing’, p. 102.
47 Smith and Watson, ‘The Visual-Verbal Contexts of Life Narrative’, p. 172.
48 Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis, p. 116.
49 Matilda Battersby, ‘An Exploration of Cigarettes in Art’, The Independent 24 May 2016., <https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/fuller-duty-paid-bristol-artist-an-exploration-of-cigarettes-in-art-a7046891.html>.
50 Ryan Gilbey, ‘It’ll kill you – so what is the eternal allure of the on-screen cigarette?’, The Guardian 22 March 2018, <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/22/screen-cigarette-netflix-smoking>.
51 Reese Erlich, ‘Iran Is Losing Its Jihad on Tobacco’, Foreign Policy 29 Jan 2018, <https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/01/29/iran-is-losing-its-jihad-on-tobacco/>.
52 Gilbey.
53 Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis, p. 117.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
56 Gilmore and Marshall, ‘Girls in Crisis’, p. 679.
57 Chute, ‘The Texture of Retracing’, p. 103.
58 Smith and Watson, ‘The Visual-Verbal Contexts of Life Narrative’, p. 168.
59 Chute, ‘The Texture of Retracing’, p. 94.