Written and Illustrated by Marjane Satrapi
Published by Pantheon Books
The stories of Persepolis being banned and challenged in the
U.S. are a bit insulting to the book and its subversive powers. No one seems to
know why they want it banned it exactly. They say they want it banned for a few
panels depicting torture—not actual torture, but a child trying to imagine
torture. But the subtext to their arguments just feels like “No! No! Muslim
stuff! Bad!” Even worse, Persepolis gets lumped in with a slew of other books
being challenged, as if it is just a banned-book hanger-on and not its own
magnificently bannable entity.
In words and pictures, Persepolis follows author Marjane
Satrapi’s life from 1979, when she was nine and the Iranian revolution began,
to 1984 when she was 14 and sent by her parents to live in Austria in the midst
of the Iran-Iraq war. It captures the curiosity, passion, and humor (both
intentional and unintentional) of a bright child in a strange and scary time. Her
family welcomed the overthrow of the Shah, and then were dismayed by the rise
of the Islamic Republic and the war with Iraq that followed.
The irony of this book being banned is that censorship and
manipulation of the education system are recurring themes in Persepolis. First
there is the teacher telling the grade school class to tear out the first page
of their textbooks, where it was written that the Shah was chosen by God to
lead the country. It wasn’t lost on young Marjane that the same teacher had
dutifully fed them first one party line and then another. Later, Iran closed
down all universities for two years. The ministry of education said, “The
educational system and what is written in books, at all levels, are decadent. Everything
needs to be revised to ensure that our children are not led astray from the
true path of Islam.” Just replace Islam with Christianity, and plenty of people
in the U.S. would be all right with this statement.
But Persepolis is dangerous not just because of its content,
but because of how that content is handled with persistent deadpan in art and
words. Satrapi wrings nuance out of her thick, deceptively simple black and
white lines. We see the individuality of Marjane and her parents despite the
lack of detail in their faces. We get a feeling for the people of Iran, even as
Satrapi tiles veiled women and soldiers into repeating patterns. Through much
of that scary time, young Marjane is swaddled in parental protection, dry
humor, and everyday life. Then when these layers of protection fall away,
Satrapi hits us hard with blunt horror of what she learned and saw. Still she
is restrained, because the plain facts are bad enough and don’t need color. Imagine
if young Americans learned this type of discipline and passion in
self-expression. God knows what they might use it for.
Even when books don’t stoke revolution, they do plant seeds
of empathy. Through the long summer of debating the Iran nuclear deal, the air
was full of rhetoric suggesting it would be safer and saner to bomb Iran off
the face of the planet rather than try any other method of dealing with that
country. It takes empathy to entertain the idea that Iranians are real people.
It takes a little bit of imagination and information to see that the Iranian
people are not their government. No one can stop that HONY guy from heading
over there and showing Facebook a warm, intelligent, and adaptive people but that
doesn’t mean we can’t keep books about likeable Muslims out of middle school
libraries.
Persepolis is also a story about how banning doesn’t work. Satrapi
shows us the thirst for art and pop culture from without and within Iran, and
an enduring sophistication of education and thought. When Marjane was stopped
by frightening Islamist culture police for wearing a denim jacket and Michael
Jackson pin (snuck in from Turkey), she went home and vented her anxiety by
jumping around to Kim Wilde’s “We’re the Kids in America” on a bootlegged
cassette tape.
People who want to ban Persepolis call it filth, because of
a few panels about what can happen to the human body. I like to think that they
can sense the real strength of Persepolis, even if they can’t articulate what
it is. I salute this visceral revulsion. In this age of entertainment that’s
commoditized and meant to anesthetize, who respects the true power of books
more than those who would seek to ban them?
