Weekly Response

"Throughout history, some people have adapted to terrible life events with flexibility and creativity, while others have become fixated on the trauma and gone on to lead traumatized and traumatizing existences." van de Kolk and McFarlane 487)

"To get into the college of art, in addition to the other tests, there was a drawing qualification. I was sure that one of its subjects would be "The Martyrs" and for good reason! So I practiced by copying a photo of Michelangelo's "La Pieta" about twenty times. On that day, I reproduced it by putting a black chador on Mary's head, an army uniform on Jesus, and then I added two tulips, symbols of the martyrs, on either side so there would be no confusion." (Persepolis, 281)

I think the thing that sets Satrapi aside from others is the fact that she found a creative way to deal with the struggles she went through. It's apparent from the details of the novel that Marjane didn't have the best life, with the revolution she had to grow up in, to losing her uncle, and having the possibility of her parents dying from their demonstrations, as well as having to leave her country when she was only 14 and live without her parents in a country where she didn't even speak the language. There are things in the novel that we kind of take for granted. I mean, we went through the familiar and unfamiliar in class, and that was pretty eye-opening. It seems like nothing to be able to have a party with friends and drink, I know my parents do it every year, without the fear of getting caught, but then you look at things from Marjane's perspective and it's just so unfamiliar. The novel itself is proof that she was able to adapt to terrible life events with flexibility and creativity. In her time, it was almost unheard of for females to go to college, and while she could have developed some sort of psychological disorder, like mentioned in The Black Hole of Trauma, she found a way to adapt to it and created a way to tell her story that was out of the ordinary. Persepolis is told in such a simplistic way, with the comic boxes and seemingly simple pictures, but when you look at it as a whole, and think of what it represents, it turns into a totally different thing. It's her way of coping with the terrible life events she faced.

I used the quote above from Persepolis because it was the first moment in the novel where she really got into her art. The rest is her kind of telling her story, and while her art is part of the story too, it's kind of the defining factor in writing this graphic novel. Think of if she had just traveled with her then-husband at the time. Would we still have her life story in the way it is? There's the possibility that we would not. And so I think that quote is really what started it all. There's where the book started.