In Persepolis there are many instances where Marjane is impacted by the revolution and she really reflects it but in a more toned down and child-like way. For example, she mimics torturing kids during her games and she gets jealous that other kid’s parents are heroes. These instances serve to show, that even though she’s growing up in a very dangerous time, she’s still a kid (something that I tend to forget because of the seriousness of her situation). Not only does her innocence give the reader a different viewpoint of this time, but I think it also exemplifies the violence to the reader because we’re not expecting a ten year old or six year old (or even 11 year old) to be exposed to it.
Marji’s depiction of violence shows us the effect that revolution and violence have on children. Her childhood is very different from anything we’ve ever experienced, yet we can still relate and see the child-like tendencies that she has. Children generally don’t come up with these violent thoughts or imagine cutting a person up into pieces, so the fact that Marji is already exposed to this, thinking about it, and using it in her games is pretty horrifying to me. Many of her depictions of this violence is just so similar to what we’re used to seeing (like in the playground scene on page 3), but it has a extremely dark twist.
However in the recent reading Marji said that she saw violence for the first time. That image was very different from her other depictions of violence. Even though it wasn’t exactly the most graphic image, it wasn’t at all like Marji deciding to torture her friends if they lost in a game or her images of torturing prisoners with an iron. The facial expression on page 76 was of true fear and pain which is so different from the cartoonish drawing of the man cut up into pieces and getting burned with an iron on page 52. I think that Marji having finally witnessed violence really changes the way she depicted violence. She no longer always sees violence as heroic actions, and she begins to see the protesting as it actually is.
I also wrote about this and how Marji is affected by it. After the torture game is played, Marji goes home, looks in the mirror and finds herself in tears, overwhelmed. I think it's easy for us to overlook that Marji is just a kid and discusses and thinks about this stuff on a daily basis. Although it is disturbing in a way, I also think of Marji as a brave girl who really can take whatever the world throws at her. I mean, I was certainly shocked or disturbed by some of the images such as Moshen in the bathtub. To imagine the young Marji dealing with that or even the older Marji drawing her childhood during the illustration process for Persepolis is something I imagine would take a lot of courage and bravery.
ReplyDeleteI didn't really consider the bravery inherent in all of Marji's experiences with death and violence before. It is so easy when reading this novel to forget that the narrator is just a ten or twelve year old girl, until we reach a scene such as the almost comic drawing of a chopped up body. Clearly Marji is very impacted by experiencing violence first hand, and it will be interesting to see how this experience impacts the future depictions of violence in this novel.
DeleteAs you said, the ways in which the revolution impacted Marji are shocking, and this is even more true given how similar Marji was to us before the revolution started. Many of the scenes in the first chapter, such as Marji going to a French speaking, non-religious school, makes it seem as though she is a perfectly normal kid, but the pervasiveness of the violence in the revolution corrupts her, and at first she doesn't understand that torture and beating people with nails is wrong.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the romantic/heroic sheen of violence starts to wear off over the course of these episodes (as the "execution" of her uncle as a "Russian spy" sours her on the martyr-model of heroism), but I think Marji still views the protests as heroic--maybe even moreso in defiance of such thuggish and violent suppression. But she realizes that she and her family are maybe not heroes after all--it has become too dangerous to voice dissent (just as, for her mother, it has become dangerous to go outdoors dressed as she's always dressed before), and they opt for a vacation instead.
ReplyDeleteYeah dude I totally think you hit a good point on how she changes in the way she depicts things. All the violence didn't seem real to her at first, so the way she portrayed it was as how she understood it-- sometimes as games, sometimes as competition (in the being a hero if they were at war thing). But as she gets older and starts seeing the real violence of things, she sees that it's not about being a hero (like you said) and is maturing into seeing the reality of things, not through such a child's perspective.
ReplyDeleteI really liked the emphasis on Marji's childlike reactions to all of this, because it allows us to empathize with her really well. For me, the empathy I found at the beginning helped me to understand where Marji was coming from better as she grew older, especially as her views and reactions to things were growing apart from anything I had a parallel too.
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