Abstract:
The purpose of this study is to inspect and establish a reading of the
intricacies of trauma, memory, and violence in
Persepolis, a bildungsroman graphic
novel that charts the transition of Marji's
childhood to adulthood. The textual self of Marjane Satrapi, a ten-year-old in
1980, a year post-Iranian Revolution, narrates her experience of growing up
through a graphic novel in an attempt to highlight the shortcomings of written
language. Marji is a very intriguing character to analyse Marianne Hirsch’s
coinage Postmemory - the tie that "generation after" has with the trauma
experienced by those who came before - events that can only be recalled, "via
stories, pictures, and actions in which they were raised" (Hirsch).
Satrapi’s choice to end
the novel at the beginning of another journey demonstrates Marji’s wish to keep
searching for closure, or perhaps closure to accept that there is no closure for
herself. Through the work of
theorists like Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Cathy Caruth, Marianne Hirsch,
Geoffrey Hartman, Jan and Aleida Assmann and more the paper seeks an exploration
of a generational flux of traumatic memories and sensitizes the reader to the
magnanimity of testimonial and confessional literature as an act of survival.
Keywords:
Trauma, memory, Affective Postmemory, Graphic novel, childhood, testimony.
The subtitle of Persepolis
is “The Story of a Childhood”, which immediately stretches and centres our focus
on Marji. Since the 1990s, the emergence of child-centred autobiographical
narratives has taken hold of how we imagine and construct a childhood. These
narratives since seen from the eyes of a child-persona of the past have been
able to entice readers’ interest in the socio-cultural circumstances of the
narratives. Especially those which are situated within disruptive, war-torn,
nations. The larger umbrella-like the world over the head of Marji manoeuvers
and shapes her entire life and not just a violent part of her childhood. Satrapi
admits through her narrative self that her life was of privilege and comfort.
The panels depict her grandmother sitting comfortably crocheting on an armchair.
Marji has her room, with a study table, books and toys, a hearty celebration of
Navroj, A Cadillac, and whatnot. And yet, one sees, that despite material
comforts and social standing, Marji finds it hard to comprehend the violence
around herself and even assimilates it which I discuss later in this paper.
Marji, the “cartoon self”, is the author’s fictional persona and is responsible
for the emergence of realist effects in an autobiographical novel like
Persepolis. This self-caricature is an absolute necessity so that a certain
alienation and estrangement can be established. It allows the narrator to become
the other, to feel heard and seen.
“Graphic Journalism” (Hatfield 111) or “cartoon journalism” (Rall 72) is
employed in the novel to perform a commentary about the Iranian Revolution and
the Iran-Iraq War. Alongside it also hinges on the intimate tone of
autobiographical recourse to assert the agonising circumstances of oppressed
groups to a Western public.
Misagh Parsa points out that social classes and other marginalized groups were
the ones who started the collective operations against the monarchy.
The overwhelming majority of participants in the protests and strikes
called for political freedom, democracy, social equality, and economic fairness
in opposition to the oppressive nature of the current system. They also promised
to stop foreign exploitation and denounced foreign dominance.
However, the Revolution lacked rural class solidarity, unlike the Russian,
Chinese, and Vietnamese revolutions and there was no incorporation of guerrilla
warfare against the secret army. A lot of protests were also handled through the
institution of mosques and therefore eventually Islamic Theocracy took charge of
the ruling power after the Monarchical dissolution (Parsa 12).. As a graphic
novel Persepolis serves to be a
notable component of the canon since “trauma has become part of the Zeitgeist”
(Fassin and Rechtman 212). It has the freedom and plasticity that comes with the
genre to indulge in Narrative time or Chronotope (space-time).
Bakhtin suggests that trauma in graphic literature can be represented as
not just possessing power but also a collection of images and pictorial
expressions which make it more approachable. Trauma is “the event which is not
experienced as it occurs but is fully evident only in connection with another
place in another time” asserts Anne Whitehead, and this is where Graphic novels
can become a part of the contemporary “Trauma Culture”(Luck 28). The disruption
of a strict, linear narrative leads to a “de-narrativization” which is
synonymous with traumatic recall. The significance of such a “non-narrative” is
dependent upon the context and temporality of the recall as observed in
Persepolis. Therefore, the onus is on the reader to establish a lucid narrative
and bypass the chronological ambiguities.
Marji is surrounded by multiple historical memories, Her Uncle Anoosh is one of
the most seminal characters in the text. Anoosh’s narration of his past life to
Marji, during a bedtime story, is full of escapades and torture and is pivotal
as a necessity to pass “communicative memory”, to borrow Jan Assmann's term, to
the children in the family. This “communicative memory”[1],
of Marji’s family, is located within a generation of contemporaries, witnessed
by them as adults and its affective connection is passed to Marji through the
trope of bedtime story which is an “act of transfer”[2],
as maintained by Paul Connerton. Anoosh’s memories are not just memories but
also emanations of traumatic and turbulent experiences. Anoosh presents a swan
made of bread to Marji as a keepsake to remember him; this is an endeavour to
preserve what Eva Hoffman calls a “living connection”[3]
through tokens of conversations, and actions of everyday life to immortalise the
familial memory.
Anoosh’s death pulls the ground beneath her feet, and she feels “lost, without
any bearings… What could be worse than that” (Satrapi 71), The three dots in
this sentence are Marji’s and perhaps even Satrapi’s hopelessness about the
ability of language to express what she felt.
This gap doesn’t only represent the ill capacity of semiotics but also
the magnanimity of a child’s grief. In the panel, Marji can be seen floating in
the Space “without any bearings…”. This Spatial and Temporal dissociation can be
explained by Deleuze’s concept of “stutter”. The hesitance in articulating her
emotions through language is symbolic of its heterogeneous and “assemblage” like
nature.
Tales of violence and death are a stream of events in Marji’s comparatively
sheltered life. Her grandpa’s father was once the Emperor of Iran and her
grandpa, a prince who later joined the communist struggle against the Tyranny of
the Shah was incarcerated for most of his life. Marji is told by her mother that
he was locked for hours in a water-filled jail cell and suffered from Rheumatism
as a result, which is itself an Alexithymic disorder[4].
Marji is the child witness to the
recounting
of traumatic events, as she is listening to her grandmother, not only the story
is inscribed on her brain but also on her body. The only way for Marji to
apprehend is to undergo a re-enactment of an analogous incident, she wishes to
“mark” herself through this
postmemory of her grandpa as Sethe’s daughter asks in only way for Marji to
apprehend is to undergo a re-enactment of an analogous incident, she wishes to
“mark” herself through this
postmemory of her grandpa as Sethe’s daughter asks in Morrison’s
Beloved. Upon being inquired by her
father if she’d like to play Monopoly, she replies with a straight face, “No, I
want to take a really long bath… I wanted to know what it felt like to be in a
cell filled with water. My hands were wrinkled when I came out, like Grandpa’s.”
(Satrapi 25).
This wish to re-enact a fatal event that happened long ago, is what Geoffrey
Hartman phrases as “witness by adoption”[5]
to smoothen the tardiness of an event and correlate the present with the past.
Grandpa’s family spent their days in poverty, as Marji’s grandmother explains,
“Oh yes so poor that we only had bread to eat, I was so ashamed that I pretended
to cook so that the neighbours wouldn’t notice anything” (Satrapi 26). She shows
a photograph to Marji in which there is no Grandpa, and upon her inquiry about
it, Grandmother tells her that he was in jail. The absence of grandpa in the
photograph, as Barthes enunciates in
Camera Lucida, “tells me death in future”[6].
The photograph predicts the death and absence of the Grandfather in Marji’s
family, and it enhances and proves this gap in the memory of Marji and even her
mother.
Through Marji the reader associates and
finds a spot for empathetic federation with the trauma victim. Her Idiopathic
[7]identification with the tale of her
grandfather establishes and accelerates the reader’s Heteropathic identification
with the traumatic recall of Marji’s Grandmother.
This nonverbal and precognitive act in the familial space compounds to a
familial postmemory or perhaps even an Affiliative Postmemory as the photograph
depicts a “loosened familial structure occasioned by war and persecution”.
(Hirsch 36)
Mohsin and Siamak, two family friends of Marji’s dad, narrativise their
detention sufficed with torture to her parents which Marji overhears, once more
the only way for her is to enact those tales through games, as she says, “My
father was not a hero, my mother wanted to kill people … so I went to play in
the street.” (Satrapi 52) This implementation gives her a “diabolical power
trip” (Satrapi 53) which doesn’t last longer and she bursts into tears. Marji
cannot express what all these tales of traumatic happenings do to her as a
listener. Dori Laub conveys that these incidents become a part of the “political
and cultural memory” (Assman and Assman), “These are not inter but
transgenerational, … no longer mediated through embodied practice but solely
through symbolic systems.”[8]
(Hirsch 6).
Even in Vienna, her break up with her boyfriend Mario leads her to a near-death
experience, she lives on the streets for two months, later being evicted by her
landlady in sheer cold only to wake up in a hospital and realise she has
Tuberculosis. This streak of masochism and revenge against one’s self is to
justify her existence in the memories of all the people she has lost to war and
persecution as she says, “I had known a revolution that had made me lose part of
my family… and It’s a banal story of love that almost carried me away” (Satrapi
243). A sudden dispersal of her source of the object of emotional dependence,
and the constant lack of gratification as Stern asserts, induces a “catatonoid
reaction”[9]
in her after returning to Iran. She feels immobilised, and numb, as all
“affective and pain responses” are blocked, which Eugene Minkowski and Robert
Lifton call, “affective anaesthesia” and “ psychic closing off” respectively.
Even when Marji pursues psychotherapy to alleviate her depression, perhaps to
pass on the crisis which “fails to produce gratification, and only leads to
contempt against the self”, argues Cathy Carruth,
her addiction to prescribed pills is again sponsored by what Dori Laub
explains as a lack of healing reunion with those who went missing and are lost
forever with “no resumption of an abruptly interrupted innocent childhood”
(Caruth). After seeing all her life “absurd deaths due to mass destruction”
(Felman and Laub), eventually Marji tries to kill herself with an overdose, but
to her fortune, she wakes up with just a terrible headache. Upon being told by
the doctor that her survival is nothing short of a miracle Marji finds herself
rejuvenated. She grooms herself, becomes an aerobic dance teacher, applies for
the National Test, and marries Reza and yet, the closure doesn't arrive. The
quality of “otherness”, “a salience, a timelessness” (Laub and Felman) which is
associated with her disruptive life never quite goes away.
The exact moment of realisation, about her dignity and gratification, comes from
an interview with the Director of her College, where it felt “as if I were going
to meet my executioner” (Satrapi 300) which Caruth explains as a “successful
completion of mourning” (Caruth 95) so that one’s life could be successfully
integrated to the position where one need not justify their existence through
internalised trauma. Persepolis ends
with the definitive action of Marji taking another journey to France. The action
predicts the salience of Trauma, which is a kind of journey that never ends but
needs to be confronted, not in hopes of closure but of an understanding and
investigation and memorialisation, so that it can be shared, exchanged,
corroborated, disputed, and written down.
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Assmann, Jan.
Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in
frühen Hochkulturen. C.H.Beck, 2017.
2.
Bakhtin, M.
M. “The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.” 1981.
3.
Barthes,
Roland. Camera Lucida: reflections on photography. Hill and Wang, 1981.
4.
Caruth,
Cathy, editor. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Johns Hopkins University Press,
1995.
5.
Chambers,
Leigh Ross. Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric
of Haunting. University of Michigan Press, 2009.
6.
Connerton,
Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
7.
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Kirby. Post-traumatic culture: injury and interpretation in the nineties. Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1998.
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Didier, and Richard Rechtman. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry Into the
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Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: crises of witnessing in literature,
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Toni. Beloved. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004.
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[1]
Jan Assman uses the term “Kulturelles Gedachtnis” to refer to “Kultur”,
an institutionalised archival memory
In comparison or
rather against the concept of American “Cultural Memory” which is a
social subgroup. Cultural memory is shared by several people which leads
to association by identity which is shared. Communicative memory is
shared between contemporary generations in everyday life, actions and
conversations and is not institutionalised either.
[2]
Trauma can not be “transferred”, neither can its memory be to another
person, as Gary Weissman refers to in
How Societies Remember. The
indexical relationship between an event and its memory
pertains to the importance of the context of an event which is
not a belonging of children of survivors or the Postmemory generation.
Hence to them is lost the memory never exists and can be only understood
by its dependency on semiotics.
[3]
Here it would be wise to discuss Edward Said’s distinction between
vertical filiation and horizontal affiliation, a structure that
acknowledges the breaks in the authorial transmission that challenge
authority and direct transfer. The transfer of memory between imminent
generations under which “memory” as an umbrella term is referred to as
“living connection” by Hoffman concerning Jan and Aleida Assman’s work
on Cultural and communicative memory. In Satrapi’s
Persepolis, the tales that
Anoosh, grandmother and her parents recite to Marji, not necessarily in
completion, are indicative of “living connection”, as refrains which are
broken and incomplete.
[4]
Robert Lifton elaborates on “absurd death” and deaths due to mass
destruction impact survivor’s ability to tackle discontinuity and
disintegration which comes with grief. In this context, Marji’s
grandmother’s unwillingness to talk more about her husband is
symptomatic of a kind of “psychic closing off” which blocks or avoids
any discussion associated with the traumatic event beyond the point of
general conversation about it. Alexiythmia as per Henry Krystal in
Psychiatric Traumatization discusses muted or non-responsive
behaviour towards one’s own emotions, often traumatic. This can further
exacerbate psychosomatic illnesses like Rheumatism, Asthma, Irritable
Bowel Syndrome etc or Substance Abuse in the case of Marji’s school
years in Vienna.
[5]
Hartamn and Ross Chamber (with “foster writing”) wish to underscore the
ridges in biological transmission of trauma as it is protected within a
familial gaze. It also applies to the frustrating need to know a
traumatic past and project it to understand its implications.
[6]
Barthes in Camera Lucida uses
the two-dimensional photograph as a medium of postmemory which
eliminates distance between the present and the past and facilitates
affiliation. Therefore family pictures can be pervasive as artistic
media in the backwash of trauma. In the context of my argument, the
photograph that grandmother shows to Marji, is an image of a “before”
that signals an intense loss of safety in the world for her grandmother.
[7] Also see Hirsch's 1998
theory of non-appropriative identification draws on Kaja Silverman's
(1996) difference between idiopathic and heteropathic identification.
[8]
In Das kulturelle Geddchtnis
Aleida Assmann insists upon the “Inter-subjective symbolic system” of
affiliative transmission of memory. It can be moulded into any shape
appropriate to the experience of the listeners once it is verbalized.
Therefore the family is an institution which best transmits the “social
memory” to the next generation and, is hence intergenerational.
[9]
M.M Stern in “Anxiety, Trauma, and Shock.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly,
discusses “catatonoid reaction” as a paralysis of initiative consisting
of different kinds of immobilization which lead to an eventual automatic
obedience. People who undergo extremities of catastrophic trauma are
also unable to assert themselves in rage and anger, often have anxiety
dreams, are hypervigiliant whereas infantile trauma leaves no marks of
recollection or a history of traumatic years and therefore no traceable
pattern of behaviour can be spotted.