Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books by Arnold Weinstein Page B
Authors: Arnold Weinstein
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pumping up, imploring “Kill me!” Their teacher arrives, asks Marjane what she’s doing, and gets this answer from the supine child, who seems to be winking at us: “I’m suffering, can’t you see?”
Here is the second shoe dropping. Marjane learns to empathize with those she knows and loves—Grandfather, her extended family, her friends—but finds the ethos of wholesale martyrdom and suffering in God’s name simply incredible, hence puffed up, hence a subject for laughter and histrionics. “Out of the mouths of babes,” we sometimes say when they puncture some of the inflated ideological bubbles that so many cultures send out into the air. Puncturing bubbles. In some odd way, the graphic novel—with its one-liners, its simple drawings, its embubbled electric lights to signal “thinking”—is ideally suited to conveying the reductive jingoism of modern life, alive and well in the West as well as in the Middle East, where monosyllabic abbreviations take the measure of politics, morality, religion, and behavior, all in one fell swoop.
Persepolis
centers, I think, on the issues of violence, rhetoric, and childlike perception that I’ve discussed. Its most endearing feature is its principled retention of the child’s vision, its refusal to get lost in politics or ideology, its quiet insistence on keeping score as rhetoric moves ever farther from reality. Hence, one of the heartbreaking episodes depicts the response of the state to its swelling number of martyrs: it hands out keys (plastic, painted gold) to young boys at school before conscripting them as cannon fodder for Saddam Hussein’s superior firepower, but the keys are magic, we gather, for if “they were lucky enough to die, this key would get them into heaven.”
We actually see this special key: it is lying on the palm of the Satrapis’ maid’s hand, the last connection she has with her son, who is off to war. The Satrapis ask the maid what her son thought of this “exchange,” and he apparently reported to her that he was content, that he had been promised “food, women and houses made of gold and diamonds.” “Women?” Marjane’s mother inquires, confused. “Yeah, well, he’s fourteen years old. That’s exciting,” the maid replies. Marjane is intrigued. Is that what fourteen-year-olds are excited by? She herself is not far from fourteen. She wants to question her cousin Peyman about these matters, and he responds by inviting her to a party. Her first party. We then see a few frames depicting busloads of young boys from the country, poor and uneducated, who are, in the words of the text, “hypnotized” and “tossed into battle.”
The next page is staggering. We are, as it were, “blown away.” There are two frames only, sharing the space. The first one shows us children exploding into the sky, each with a key attached to his neck. They are presumably entering Paradise, but these careening, flying bodies have all too earthly a feel to them. We are not all that far, conceptually, from the logic of William Blake, whose chimney sweep was also brainwashed into service and death, while being told that this was the high road to Heaven. No expressions are visible in this piece—the bodies are all in black—so we cannot know what they feel at their dying. But the frame underneath shows us another set of children, their faces filled with ecstatic joy as their bodies leap and cavort to the music of punk rock. This is the “first party.” Marjane herself fills one-third of the frame, her hair flowing upward, her eyes wide in excitement, her mouth open in sheer pleasure; the final caption reads, “I was looking sharp.”
Perhaps this is what a new Blake might look like today. Perhaps this is the very character of innocence: children in adolescence dancing wildly to punk rock. Much of the integrity of
Persepolis
is on show here: children remain children, Marjane is, yes, unhappy that so many young boys (with keys to Paradise)
Here is the second shoe dropping. Marjane learns to empathize with those she knows and loves—Grandfather, her extended family, her friends—but finds the ethos of wholesale martyrdom and suffering in God’s name simply incredible, hence puffed up, hence a subject for laughter and histrionics. “Out of the mouths of babes,” we sometimes say when they puncture some of the inflated ideological bubbles that so many cultures send out into the air. Puncturing bubbles. In some odd way, the graphic novel—with its one-liners, its simple drawings, its embubbled electric lights to signal “thinking”—is ideally suited to conveying the reductive jingoism of modern life, alive and well in the West as well as in the Middle East, where monosyllabic abbreviations take the measure of politics, morality, religion, and behavior, all in one fell swoop.
Persepolis
centers, I think, on the issues of violence, rhetoric, and childlike perception that I’ve discussed. Its most endearing feature is its principled retention of the child’s vision, its refusal to get lost in politics or ideology, its quiet insistence on keeping score as rhetoric moves ever farther from reality. Hence, one of the heartbreaking episodes depicts the response of the state to its swelling number of martyrs: it hands out keys (plastic, painted gold) to young boys at school before conscripting them as cannon fodder for Saddam Hussein’s superior firepower, but the keys are magic, we gather, for if “they were lucky enough to die, this key would get them into heaven.”
We actually see this special key: it is lying on the palm of the Satrapis’ maid’s hand, the last connection she has with her son, who is off to war. The Satrapis ask the maid what her son thought of this “exchange,” and he apparently reported to her that he was content, that he had been promised “food, women and houses made of gold and diamonds.” “Women?” Marjane’s mother inquires, confused. “Yeah, well, he’s fourteen years old. That’s exciting,” the maid replies. Marjane is intrigued. Is that what fourteen-year-olds are excited by? She herself is not far from fourteen. She wants to question her cousin Peyman about these matters, and he responds by inviting her to a party. Her first party. We then see a few frames depicting busloads of young boys from the country, poor and uneducated, who are, in the words of the text, “hypnotized” and “tossed into battle.”
The next page is staggering. We are, as it were, “blown away.” There are two frames only, sharing the space. The first one shows us children exploding into the sky, each with a key attached to his neck. They are presumably entering Paradise, but these careening, flying bodies have all too earthly a feel to them. We are not all that far, conceptually, from the logic of William Blake, whose chimney sweep was also brainwashed into service and death, while being told that this was the high road to Heaven. No expressions are visible in this piece—the bodies are all in black—so we cannot know what they feel at their dying. But the frame underneath shows us another set of children, their faces filled with ecstatic joy as their bodies leap and cavort to the music of punk rock. This is the “first party.” Marjane herself fills one-third of the frame, her hair flowing upward, her eyes wide in excitement, her mouth open in sheer pleasure; the final caption reads, “I was looking sharp.”
Perhaps this is what a new Blake might look like today. Perhaps this is the very character of innocence: children in adolescence dancing wildly to punk rock. Much of the integrity of
Persepolis
is on show here: children remain children, Marjane is, yes, unhappy that so many young boys (with keys to Paradise)
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