Your blog post should be two paragraphs as a reply to this post.
In the first, choose an arresting page and explain how it makes its effects visually and in layout.
In the second, discuss how the character Marji develops over the course of the first half of the book.
Page 69 describes the last meeting between Anoosh and Marji before Anoosh is executed. It has three tiers each with two panels. Every panel has a stark black background. The simplicity of the background lends solemnity to the page, and the color dampens the mood. The layout is also very simple: One after another, panels march by with Anoosh drawn in the left of the panel, holding silent Marji. That the arrangement of characters does not change makes the scene seem longer. Because the page dwells on one moment, it suggests to the reader that this moment is important, although we don't find out about Anoosh's death until we turn the page and our eyes are drawn to the white space at the top.
ReplyDeleteMarji is deeply invested in the truth, and she is also callous because of that. This is most obvious in her conversation with Laly about Laly's father--to keep up pretenses does not seem to her like the better choice. She does not easily accept the changing of rules, either, which is shown when her teacher changes the curriculum to fit the new regime. To Marji, rules seem like truths: In her book she sets down rules of living that she thinks are equivalent to religious tenets, and equates declaring a rule with solving a problem ("But tell me how you'll arrange for old people not to suffer?" "It will simply be forbidden." p 7) She is headstrong, too, demonstrated by her going to the protests against her parents' wishes. Her character is largely developed through situations in which she has a choice to either uphold her beliefs or change them.
Page 29 shows a conversation regarding Marji's father being late to come home, and reveals that he has gone to take photographs of the revolution. The first three panels are orderly and contained, showing the relatively mundane nature of the setting and conversation. At the same time, though, we see the space around Marji become increasingly inclosed, adding to a claustrophobic, trapped feeling as she worries about her father. The final panel on the page depicts Marji's father taking pictures of the revolution, which are strewn across the frameless panel like photographs. Here, we see the father much as how Marji may have viewed him: as an outsider from the action, separated from all else due to the sole fact that he is her father, not a faceless revolutionary, looking inwards but not without risk. Indeed, the bottom right photograph shows a soldier pointing a gun in such a way that it looks suspiciously like he is aiming at the father. The frameless nature of this final panel adds to the feeling that the revolution is spilling into Marji's home life, and that the lines between these two worlds are blurring.
ReplyDeleteThroughout the entire first section, Marji remains opinionated and headstrong. However, as she grows older her worldview changes considerably. From a young age, her head is filled with grandiose stories of kings, adventures, gods, and hardships. Her imagination runs wild, and she often takes things that she hears quite literally, interpreting them in the best way that she can. For example, on page 28 we see her imagined image of the Shah journeying to the grave of ancient ruler Cyrus the Great, who appears as a giant lying under his throne. Her gravitation towards epic stories shifts away from the imaginative world and towards the real world and the revolution as she becomes older. An example of this is how she fixates on the true story of her Uncle Anoosh. Her intense passion shifts away from things like wanting to become a prophet to the revolution and the perils of her family. This is shown quite literally when she orders "God", who acts as an imaginary friend-type figure in her earlier years, to leave her alone. Still, Marji carries the same fundamental character traits throughout the story; as she grows older, they are simply angled different directions in conjunction with her world view opening up.
Page 52 was an eye-catcher for me. It was the page that best utilized the art style of the book, conveying the crudely drawn chopped-up body parts as if they were parts of a doll. To me, it served as a metaphor that conveyed the inhumanity of torture. Also, having that relatively large frame appear just after the page that depicted a series of horrors done to Ahmadi dramatically increased the impact of that scene. I was caught off guard by it.
ReplyDeleteWe are introduced of Marji in the beginning as a wannabe hero of justice. She, over the course of the book, changes her methods of attaining that goal. Initially, she wanted to be a prophet to bring peace to the world by the virtue of God. But as the story progressed, she found out the cause of the crisis she's in the middle of, and proceeded to change her ideals by rejecting God.
On page 14 Marji’s conversation with God gets cut short by her parent’s discussion of the events at the Rex cinema. In the first tier, only the wall separates the second and third panel. Marji’s interactions with God symbolize her innocence. The thinness of the wall and lack of a traditional gutter highlights how these issues intrude upon her childhood. After listening to her parents, the scene shifts from Marji’s game with God to her narration of the events at the Rex. The long panel at the bottom of the page emphasizes the movement of the police. The burning souls on the adjacent page continue the diagonals created by the officers. The lines guide the reader’s eye, creating the illusion that the police are driving their victims into the fire.
ReplyDeleteMarji’s character develops in stages, as life and tragedy challenge her beliefs. She undergoes a steady loss of innocence. There are small episodes that cause her to question authority and society, like when she learns the truth about her grandfather or sees the outcome of the maid’s affair. The starkest display of her transformation is the parallels between baby Marji (6) and Marji lying on her bed after Anoosh’s death (70). While the baby is born with religion, the disillusioned Marji violently rejects God. Anoosh’s death encroaches upon her fantasies of heroism by revealing the dangers associated with dissent. Until his demise, she admires, yet fails to understand her uncle’s experiences. Now that she knows the price, revolution can no longer be a childhood game. Furthermore, his death underscores the revolution’s failure to bring about a Marxist state. Marji is then left to question the revolution itself. The end of this section leaves Marji adrift without God, heroes, or the revolution to put faith in.
Page 29. The Photographer.
ReplyDeleteThe first three panels, though perhaps not the central conceit of this page, are cleverly composed. With each panel, we gain a little more understanding as to why Marjane’s mother seemed so forlorn. As we gain more knowledge, the panels slowly zoom in on Marjane squished between the chattering adults. She is at once the center of the image and yet completely detached from the central action of the image: the discussion between her mother and grandmother. The mother and grandmother are whispering to each other because, as the bottom of the third panel points out, Marjane’s father has gone out to photograph. The following image is no longer about the three women (women and girl) but about her father, the photographer. The image takes up more than two thirds of the page. The image is divided into two parts. On the left, the photographer is intently taking a photograph. On the right, a series of snapshot like images appear. The form of these “snapshots” suggests familiarity, warmth and the comfort of a family album. The content cries out against the injustice of police brutality. We suddenly understand at once why photography was not only so dangerous to the photographer but also dangerous for the regime and it’s oppression a necessity for tyranny.
Marjane’s relationship with God is a defining one. She begins the book completely consumed by the idea of serving God, although it is not clear what kind of God she believes in other than some archetypal representation of a flowing white man with a flowing white beard. She only knows that she wants to be a profit. As her image of God is slowly dismantled by the events that occur around her she becomes increasingly detached from God. At first she ignores Him when he asks about her becoming a profit and eventually she rejects Him entirely. Her rejection of God is a direct result of her uncle’s death and the final panel in the first half of the book is of her lost in the stars and the vast expanse of the universe, only to be pulled back into reality by a simple statement: “Marji, run to the basement. We’re being bombed.”
Page 16 is composed of nine panels, all the same shape and size. Besides the first panel, Marji is in about the center of each panel, her patterned pajamas making her stand out sharply against the mostly black background. The uniformity of the panels and the focus on Marji emphasizes her energy as she moves around the room. It also illustrates how wrapped up in her revolutionary fantasy she is, particularly with the panel of God leaving the room with Marji dominating the foreground. Finally, Marji's energy takes her into the last panel, which shows the same room as the first panel, effectively bridging the conversation she overhears and the action her overhearing it prompts.
ReplyDeleteFrom the beginning, Marji has grand visions of making the world a better place. Her ideas of how to affect change, however, are highly dependent on the adults in her life. She latches onto figures of authority, co-opting their convictions into her own developing belief system; she also responds to what she learns from history and Iran's volatile political climate. Her religious schooling imbues in her a love of God, but her parent's influence turns her towards revolutionary Marxism. When Anoosh comes into her life, she completely gives herself over to this larger-than-life figure. Just as soon as she hitches her ideological wagon to him, however, he dies, leaving her without an authority figure to reference, and she no longer has anything to structure her beliefs around.
Page 51 (the torture page) is one of the only pages in the first half where the panel layout is completely broken. Since the only other two examples of panel-less sections on pages in the first half were page 29 (her father's photographs) and page 70 (the newspaper announcing Uncle Anoosh's death), I think the lack of border was a deliberate choice to emphasize the realness of the subject matter. In a literal sense, the atrocities experienced by Ahmadi were too terrible to be contained within the borders of a panel. Another way of looking at it is that the lack of borders messes with our perception of time-- because there is no clear end or beginning, our eyes linger on the borderless space and we understand that the torture Ahmadi experienced was continuous, seemingly endless. The last panel of the page, where Marji looks at the iron in her own house and contemplates that she'd never thought of it as an instrument for torture, brings home the cruel inventiveness of the torturers. We don't like to acknowledge the atrocities our own countries commit, so the bleak honesty with which Satrapi draws the numerous tortures devised by the Iranian prison guards is an effective eye-opener for the audience-- especially those of us who grew up with news of Guantanamo Bay.
ReplyDeleteAs for Marji's over-all character development, there is a clear theme of loss of innocence. We watch this hopeful, passionate, bluntly optimistic little girl as she is gradually exposed to the greater violence and horrors occurring in her country. At first, she is swept up in nationalism, in calling for revolution, but as her surroundings grow more and more dark, we see her confusion, her attempts to deal with the harsh truth of her reality (the loss of her comforting ideas of God and country, the loss of her beloved uncle) and the gradual falling away of her illusions helps the audience better understand the way that a country's upheaval impacts each and every person caught up within it.
Page 40 sets the tone for what degenerates into the darkest chapter so far. The first two panels, intended to be eye catching, take up their entire tiers. Panel one is simply a grid pattern of what the caption box establishes to be the screaming faces of the dead. All the deceased are basically identical, so that the river of corpses is an overwhelming statistic (bleeding out to the edges of the panel) even though no such number is given in the explanation. "Many" is thus implied to mean "more than I could even envision." The same identical ghosts are fully revealed in the next panel, as they form a konga line of martyrs pushing the reluctant Shah out of the panel (and metaphorically out of power). Once again, the visual explains the brief caption: "The end of the Shah's reign was near" ...because the survivors of the people he murdered had reached a critical mass. The final two panels occupy one tier and bring the connection back to Marji's family. The Shah is shown on TV in panel three, concluding the exposition of the first two panels, and then panel four zooms out to turn the TV into an object in Marji's living room instead of a framing panel itself. The Shah gets the first word (and first word balloon) but Marji's mother - as usual - gets the last.
ReplyDeleteMarji is questing for understanding, but so far has not quite achieved it. First she attempts to understand the world as a construction of God's Will, with her at the center of it, but the rising tensions all around her soon lead her to question that faith. As the revolution heats up, she tries to insinuate herself into adult conversations, but lacks any comprehension of their content. Eventually, however, her relationship with her family's maid leads her to an understanding of the reasoning behind the revolution. She finally forms the connection between the society she is living in, and the books that she has read on class warfare. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), after the revolution ends Marji once again finds herself in a position of ignorance. She now has to figure out how to function in a post-revolution Iran. Again, she has a wellspring of facts and no understanding of them. She simply parrots what she is told, on the television and by her elders. It is not until her uncle is executed at the end of "The Sheep" that she gains an personal context for the atrocities being committed all around her, and begins to fear for the future.
For some reason, a page that really stuck with me was page 30. On the page before, we're told that Marji's dad had one out to take photographs of the demonstration. He should've returned by now. In the first panel, we see the three women sitting at the table, waiting for his arrival, locked in the "same silence as before a storm." I found myself truly scared for her father, and the close-ups of Marji and her grandmother -- no words, just the silence of people too panicked to speak -- worsened my dread. The next image, of her father floating in a sea of lost souls, suspended me in Marji's imagination for a moment, giving me a painful chance to ponder, like her, what may have happened. And like her, I found myself incredibly relieved when her father came back. Though this page of panels isn't perhaps the most loud or eye-catching of all of them, I really appreciate how it managed to string out time in a very thoughtful way. For all the violence and horror that takes place around Marji's world, this page shows how frightening it can be to be the one sitting safely at home, not knowing, exactly, what's going on or what's going to happen.
ReplyDeleteInstead of picking one page, I'd like to compare two pages that I think speak to one another: Pages 42 and Page 71. Since Satrapi sticks judiciously to the 3-tier grid, having these pages that don't structure around the grid at all are eye-catching, provocative, and obviously important. The rejection of an established structure visually suggests the breaking-down of structure narratively, though each of these instances does so for different reasons. Page 42 illustrates a celebration by the people--as such, there are a lot of faces on this page, and the people seem to barely fit within the confines of the page. It evokes for me the suggestion that there are more people beyond the panel. Each person's body is drawn with patterns, which makes the crowd look more like one body with many faces, or like a herd of Zebra where you can't tell one individual from another. On the other hand, page 71 suggests extreme isolation. Marji's body contrasts starkly with the black background, separating her from her surroundings except for the black triangle on her shirt, which reads a bit like a hole that has been punched through her. This page simultaneously suggests the intense separation between self and surrounding, but also has the emptiness of that space infringe on the wholeness of that self.
ReplyDeleteMarji's internal conflict is explicitly set up early on in the story. On page 6, panel 1, she illustrates herself as two separate halves making one Marji ("Deep down I was very religious, but as a family we were modern and avant-garde."). Over the course of her story, these two parts of herself come more into conflict. She originally turned to God along similar lines of her family's Marxist philosophy: she saw injustices in the world (her maid couldn't eat with their family, her grandmother was in pain) and thought that her faith in God could fix those injustices. Her change concerning religion follows what she sees as failures on God's part to fix those injustices and begins to associate God HImself with those failures, such as when she worries that her dad had been shot (Page 30, Panel 4). This leads to her complete rejection of God, but the issue remains of how to solve those initial injustices (since the secular realm is failing her as well).
Page 25 really caught my attention with its stark contrast between the first panel and the very last panel. You can see in the first panel how the younger version of Marji's mother is innocently riding her obviously suffering father. The background is even white to note the lightness of the kid's mood. However, the rest of the panel's background are black, denoting a change in the time (past vs. present) and the mood. Even when they're both young, Marji is definitely more mature and she comprehends the gravity of the situation a bit more. The most striking part of this page was Marji's face on the sixth panel. The shadows on her face were exactly like her mother in the third panel, but unlike her mother who was crying and looking up as if in regret, Marji stares straight into the audiences eyes, as if she challenges us to understand what she's feeling.
ReplyDeleteMarji's character is quite obvious: she's opinionated, she doesn't shy away from the truth, and she doesn't understand the truth. Throughout the first part of the book, you see her often repeating opinions she has heard from others to her family or friends. She hears many atrocious stories, but doesn't quite comprehend what those stories mean to her. It is only at the near end of page 71 when everybody leaves her by either emigration or death that she understands the severity of the truth surrounding her. She is lost in a tumultuous era and most of her beloved are not there to help her.
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ReplyDeleteThe page I chose occurs earlier in the book at page 13. The layout is relatively simple, two upper panels, a long rectangular middle panel and two lower panels. The center panel shows a inner tension between two parts of Marji: her influences from Marxist ideology and her religious predelictions. Marx and God are diametrically situated (almost like confrontation). The only thing that connects them is Marji's observation of their physical likeness in the middle of the panel. For M, replacing God with Marx isn't too far of a jump emotionally. The center panel also separates M's two competing influences vertically as well. The above panels shows an excerpt of "Dialectic Materialism" while the bottom shows a different interaction between M and God. It's interesting to see M's discomfort in her conversation with God, as she not yet knows how to reconcile her two selves. Another interesting point is the choice of excerpt from "Dialectic Materialism". One might assume that M's interest in the book isn't from a complete understanding of its ideas but rather the cartoonish humor illustrated.
ReplyDeleteM's development is visually represented through her interactions and relationship with "God". In the first chapter, M states that she is "born with religion" and God could be seen as her natural conscious or moral compass. However, there is still tension between the different influences in her life: her "avant-garde" family, her school, herself, and eventually, her readings and the political situation unfolding around her. As M begins to put more faith into her Marxist readings and readings, her relationship with God (her original thoughts of morality) lessen. But even these new influences cannot help M navigate accurately through a morally ambiguous and at times contradictory sociopolitical setting. This includes her experiences with the maid ("Dad, are you for or against social classes?" M exclaims) and hearing the torture stories from Jari and Shabika. The revolution, M realizes, is not as romantic as she thought. And at the end of "The Heroes" chapter, M once again returns to the familiar, safe arms of God. But after the death of Anoosh, M abandons God as well as her own personal sense of justice and safety are shattered. She is left adrift, betrayed by the ideas that cannot explain the complicated landscape around her.
In the beginning, Marji is young enough that her imagination bleeds in out with her real world. On page 6, for example, real life cedes to a funny account of how she was convinced she was the last prophet. The imagery in these parts is most expressive; a lot of what Marji is narrating early on is what she has been told, what she knows of what's going on, filtered, too, through her imagination. But as the events come closer to home, especially with the arrival of her uncle, the panels become more direct and succinct and more true to narrative action. The exception is page 71 -- an arresting couple of pages because the panels are so big. The expressiveness reflects that of the early pages, but now, this one marks a transition. Instead of embracing God (and the freedom to imagine, to wonder, like a child does) she rejects him. As she floats in space, she hears the very real call of her mother to run to the basement because they're being bombed. The real world is calling; Marji's imaginative idealism, so free to roam before, now must be beholden to the very real threats calling, literally, from the sidelines.
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