Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books by Arnold Weinstein Page A
Authors: Arnold Weinstein
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understanding is born, in low-to-the-ground moments when a ten-year-old girl tries to feel the torture inflicted on her grandfather. What is certain is that Satrapi’s clean, almost bare images seem like the perfect conduit for news of this sort. And it is news, for we have few lights on the ways in which we come to maturity, of the moments when we suddenly realize the density and preciousness of others’ lives, of that otherwise unrecorded little odyssey that gives a drastically new meaning to the word “water.” One cannot easily imagine this sequence having the same power had it been consigned entirely to language. The graphic novel’s very means of expression possesses a kind of conceptual innocence, prior to ratiocination and cognitive argument, cued to elemental insights.
Satrapi is wonderfully faithful to the child’s bewilderment at adult realities. In one early episode, we witness, through the father’s accounting, a dead young martyr being carried to the cemetery; this is followed by an angry crowd with yet another dead victim, protesting the repressive violence of the shah’s police, but then we see an old woman trying to stop them, explaining that her husband died of cancer. Satrapi offers us an astonishing frame of confused adults holding a dead body whose upside-down face stares out at us; the crowd decides that this cancer victim is still a hero, that the king is a killer, and then the widow actually joins in the fracas. Mother and Father find the irony of this tale too delicious not to laugh at it, and so too does Grandmother, who now realizes that she’ll be a martyr no matter how she dies. But Marjane is befuddled, and we see a small frame with her sweet, puzzled face trying to process all this. The caption goes “Something escaped me,” then “Cadaver, cancer, death, murderer,” then “Laughter?” In the next frame, little Marjane trots out her new wisdom by going to her parents and grandmother and laughing as hard as she can: “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” They are now bewildered. The next frame shows Marjane poring over a book with the title
The Reasons for the Revolution
. The caption reads, “I realized then that I didn’t understand anything. I read all the books I could.”
I didn’t understand anything
. Do you? What we do grasp—what Grandmother grasped—is something of the cheapness and one-size-fits-all nature of the term that used to be used sparingly: “martyr.” And this is a sobering lesson, since in many parts of today’s world there are huge marketing campaigns for turning “martyr” into a household expression denoting sanctification at bargain rates, while opening the door to dying made easy. And we (in the West) have no clue as to how to discredit it. The graphic text is very eloquent when it comes to the reign of slogans. And children are no less eloquent when it comes to the gap between slogan and reality.
Now, these are adult matters. So, true to form, Marjane does not subject them to ideological analysis. Instead, as the tempo of political violence and murder—by the shah’s army and police, then by the fundamentalists who succeeded them in power, finally by the still-larger-scale catastrophe that was the invasion of Iran by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—escalates and heats up further and further, we begin to see cadavers piling up in unprecedented numbers, as if martyrdom were the common fate. As a logical complement to this turn of events, we see that instruction in the schools has altered dramatically: separation of the sexes, covered hair, scarves, black uniforms, and so on. Even self-flagellation in the streets occurs. Yet, predictably enough, the children see clear, and do what children have always done: they make fun of the pieties being imposed on them. One frame shows them hysterically laughing and shouting “The martyrs! The martyrs!” The next one shows two girls grinning from ear to ear as the third one, Marjane, lies on the floor with her feet
Satrapi is wonderfully faithful to the child’s bewilderment at adult realities. In one early episode, we witness, through the father’s accounting, a dead young martyr being carried to the cemetery; this is followed by an angry crowd with yet another dead victim, protesting the repressive violence of the shah’s police, but then we see an old woman trying to stop them, explaining that her husband died of cancer. Satrapi offers us an astonishing frame of confused adults holding a dead body whose upside-down face stares out at us; the crowd decides that this cancer victim is still a hero, that the king is a killer, and then the widow actually joins in the fracas. Mother and Father find the irony of this tale too delicious not to laugh at it, and so too does Grandmother, who now realizes that she’ll be a martyr no matter how she dies. But Marjane is befuddled, and we see a small frame with her sweet, puzzled face trying to process all this. The caption goes “Something escaped me,” then “Cadaver, cancer, death, murderer,” then “Laughter?” In the next frame, little Marjane trots out her new wisdom by going to her parents and grandmother and laughing as hard as she can: “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” They are now bewildered. The next frame shows Marjane poring over a book with the title
The Reasons for the Revolution
. The caption reads, “I realized then that I didn’t understand anything. I read all the books I could.”
I didn’t understand anything
. Do you? What we do grasp—what Grandmother grasped—is something of the cheapness and one-size-fits-all nature of the term that used to be used sparingly: “martyr.” And this is a sobering lesson, since in many parts of today’s world there are huge marketing campaigns for turning “martyr” into a household expression denoting sanctification at bargain rates, while opening the door to dying made easy. And we (in the West) have no clue as to how to discredit it. The graphic text is very eloquent when it comes to the reign of slogans. And children are no less eloquent when it comes to the gap between slogan and reality.
Now, these are adult matters. So, true to form, Marjane does not subject them to ideological analysis. Instead, as the tempo of political violence and murder—by the shah’s army and police, then by the fundamentalists who succeeded them in power, finally by the still-larger-scale catastrophe that was the invasion of Iran by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—escalates and heats up further and further, we begin to see cadavers piling up in unprecedented numbers, as if martyrdom were the common fate. As a logical complement to this turn of events, we see that instruction in the schools has altered dramatically: separation of the sexes, covered hair, scarves, black uniforms, and so on. Even self-flagellation in the streets occurs. Yet, predictably enough, the children see clear, and do what children have always done: they make fun of the pieties being imposed on them. One frame shows them hysterically laughing and shouting “The martyrs! The martyrs!” The next one shows two girls grinning from ear to ear as the third one, Marjane, lies on the floor with her feet
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