The Singular Power of Persepolis
Teachable. The biggest compliment a college professor can give to a book or a movie is to say that it’s “teachable.” Over the years, somewhat to my dismay, this has become the main criterion I use to assess new texts, especially books. To be teachable, a book or a movie or whatever has to possess a certain set of qualities. It has to be something you can count on a roomful of students to make their way through without too much trouble; if it is difficult stylistically or theoretically, it has to be difficult in a way that there can be some pleasure or satisfaction in puzzling out; it has to have multiple angles of approach, multiple kinds of questions that can be asked of it; ideally, it’s something that could fit into a variety of different disciplinary or thematic frameworks; it has to speak on multiple different levels or in multiple different voices. I have, as most professors do, a running shortlist of the most teachable texts. Both of Nella Larsen’s short novels are incredibly teachable. So is Rear Window. Fun Home, as well as every essay James Baldwin ever wrote. Of more recent vintage, Janicza Bravo’s Zola, George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, and Kristen Roupenian’s viral short story “Cat Person” are all shockingly teachable. But there’s one book and one movie that have been at the top of this list since the first time I taught them over a decade ago. They’re both called Persepolis.The first thing to say about both Persepolis the 2003 graphic novel and Persepolis the 2007 film is that they are perfect. Marjane Satrapi, the French Iranian comics artist and filmmaker who died last week at the age of 56, published Persepolis in the original French in four installments annually from 2000 to 2003. The whole series was translated into English shortly after. It’s sold millions of copies worldwide, it’s been listed as one of the best 100 books of the twenty-first century by both The Guardian and The New York Times, and, like many other great books, the United States can barely handle it—it has been frequently banned or challenged in schools across the country.Growing up is and can be about guilt, about cruel education, about hurt. Growing up, even as it cracks the world open to fill with possibility, can be an unrecoverable loss.The comic is an autobiographical account of Satrapi’s childhood in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution and, later, the Iran-Iraq War; her adolescence at school in Vienna; her return to Iran; and then her ultimate decision to leave her home for good and start a new life in Paris. The book is a story about revolution and war, violence and loss, education and ideology, repression and rebellion, family and loyalty. There are writers who will write better than I can on the book’s moral imagination, its insight regarding the history of Iran, European colonialism, twenty-first-century French politics. The way I encounter Satrapi’s book is as a book about growing up, in ways that are specific to Satrapi’s experience of it and in ways that are not. Growing up is and can be about guilt, about cruel education, about hurt. Growing up, even as it cracks the world open to fill with possibility, can be an unrecoverable loss.One of the visual signatures of the comic is its use of the color black. The entire comic is drawn in a stark, binary black and white palette, with hardly any grays or shading at all. Shadows cut across faces and bodies in hard lines, every figure threatens to become a silhouette of itself. This is most striking in the numerous panels where Satrapi represents some scene in the form of rows and rows of figures, nearly identically etched into a black background: protesters with raised fists and massacred civilians, jubilant figures in the streets after the fall of the Shah and geometric rows of schoolgirls in hijabs beating their breasts, God and Karl Marx facing against each other in Marji’s childhood imagination. These scenes, almost all of which take up the space of more than one panel, seem to represent uniformity, but in Satrapi’s hand, each face looks the slightest bit different. They are images of masses and of individuals.Its undulating aesthetic gives it a feeling of magic realism, a sense of hard political stakes and the terrible and wondrous embellishment of memory. The animated film adaptation of Persepolis that Satrapi wrote and directed in collaboration with the French artist Vincent Paronnaud, animates that blackness. Those images, which come to resemble block-print patterns, are given motion in the film. The school scene, for instance, cuts from the rows of girls to a close-up of one hand on one breast. The hand flies in and out of frame, leaving the screen blank as it swoops and claps. The film is one of the best literary adaptations I’ve ever seen, in the sense that it is liberal with its source text—unfaithful in the sense that it generatively deconstructs and reassembles the story as drawn but zealously faithful in its translation of the soul of Satrapi’s comic to motion pictures. It takes that inky blackness and makes it a roiling, background sea, a base medium for these stories to take form and then melt away. Its undulating aesthetic, breaking now into symmetrical lines and city streets, now into figures afloat in dream, gives it a feeling of magic realism, a sense of hard political stakes and the terrible and wondrous embellishment of memory. In 2005, Satrapi published a kind of graphic essay in the New York Times op-ed section. In it, she grappled with the book’s life in a country gripped by the post-9/11 normalization of xenophobia. She had come to the states to go on book tour, she writes, but also “to try to explain to people what Iran was really like.” Headed by a self-portrait with devil horns, Satrapi’s piece goes on to offer a litany of things she felt she was responsible for communicating on this trip. She had to explain:That not every woman in Iran looked like a blackbird. That the axis of evil also included people like myself. That it was a very bad idea to give democracy as a present to people by bombing them. That I saw a real war (the Iran-Iraq War) and there was nothing glorious about it. That war kills. That we Iranians were not an abstract concept but rather human beings for whom the words pride, dignity, patriotism and life mean exactly the same thing as they do to Americans.It’s hard not to see the contemporary relevance of this list of insights for readers in a country that is currently giving democracy as a gift to Iranians by bombing them. But part of the gift of Persepolis is that it is not limited to its momentary relevance, even as it is a story about the same things happening all over again that, year upon year, only reminds its readers of how the same things will continue to happen all over again. It is also a book larger and more intimate than that. Many essays before and after Satrapi’s death testify to the “universality” of her work. Like relatability, universality is a metric that sounds good but also threatens to flatten or denude texts of their thorny specificity. Satrapi’s story is not a universal one—that readers without her particular experience can nevertheless see and feel her story closely is not evidence of its universality but of its singular power.I realize that praising something for a seemingly similar vague metric like “teachability” might sound like an overly cold, utilitarian way to think about art—sentiments like: I like that Monet painting because it would fit nicely over the couch in my living room; Charles Mingus makes excellent music to listen to while I do the dishes. But, as a person who considers the seminar room a sacred space, teachability, for me, speaks to something ineffable, even potentially transcendent about a text. It’s a word for the thing that happens when a book transforms miraculously in discussion. It’s a word for the way a work of art can catalyze relationships between strangers. It’s a word for the work a text itself does in bringing a reader into its universe, finding them a place in its pages. It makes itself available to readers, it opens itself with generosity. I haven’t had a class that didn’t “get” Persepolis, and that’s a miracle of its own. Sure, that’s about authorship and authorial voice, but, especially reading it today in the wake of Satrapi’s passing, it’s about the way a book lives its own social life with and against every single reader who ever picks it up. That life—which does not end—is a memory of its author, but it’s also the remnant of that author’s singular labor of creation. As the artist said, “Punk is not ded.”