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12. Witnessing Persepolis: Comics, Trauma, and Childhood Testimony
- University of Wisconsin Press
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Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood () is a graphic memoir about family crisis, historical upheaval, and coming of age that features Satrapi’s young self, Marji, as autobiographical protagonist. The text tracks the Satrapi family through the turbulent years following the shah’s overthrow in and the establishment of an Islamic theocracy in Iran. It concludes as Satrapi’s parents send her at the age of fourteen to exile in Austria. Both a chronicle of personal and political turbulence as well as a careful exercise in educating Western readers, Persepolis aims not only to teach these readers how to think about the Middle East, broadly, and Iran specifically, but also how to feel. Satrapi’s use of comics is part of this affective strategy, as is her choice of an autobiographical child/adolescent protagonist, whose direct witnessing of adult violence encourages sympathetic readings. Yet for all the didactic moralism such a description might scare up, Persepolis presses beyond a global, neoliberal agenda of asking readers simply to identify with distant individuals. Satrapi’s autobiographical project suggests that the critical adult perspective of the text’s framer is ultimately the position of politicized witness her readers should strive to inhabit. Satrapi uses a narrative of her own girlhood to urge Western readers to recognize her and her family’s political difference from what they think they know, and what they feel, about the Arab world after /. Persepolis aims to play a part in how Western publics construct political affect, and it does so through an autobiographical representation of childhood and trauma created by an adult working in the politically informed genre of comics. In this essay, I will draw out Satrapi’s interest in the perils, pleasures, and politics of looking back and explore her use of the child as a witness to war framed by an adult author who positions Witnessing Persepolis Comics, Trauma, and Childhood Testimony leigh gilmore readers as witnesses.1 Witnessing is both theme and critical project in Persepolis , ascribing an ethical and pedagogical dimension to the complex pleasures of reading comics. Persepolis concludes on a cautionary note about the risk of looking back, and the obligation of witnessing trauma underwrites Satrapi’s visually spare and stylized pen and ink drawings. Anxiety over looking back suffuses the history of self-representation. Like Lot’s wife fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah or Orpheus departing Hades with Eurydice, autobiographers who look back sometimes represent themselves as risking their tenuous hold on the present and their hope for a future. For those whose lives and stories are ruptured by violence, narrating traumatic experience is both an unavoidable burden and a necessary risk. Trauma complicates the burden of memory and narration inherited by anyone who would write and draw their lives. Trauma fractures time into past and present. It threatens the survivor’s sense of and belief in generational continuity and persistence of self. Many of the most cited authorities of trauma studies, including Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and Cathy Caruth, stipulate that language fails to adequately convey trauma and thus those who survive it stand outside an experience they cannot fully claim, in Caruth’s reformulation of Freud, or represent to others. I have argued elsewhere that although this claim seems to have achieved consensus, it is nonetheless the case that representations of trauma abound (Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography). Any insufficiency in language or representational forms per se is offset by this abundance and ingenuity. Representations of trauma, however, make demands on audiences. As new forms emerge, including visual autobiography and memoir, new interpretive practices must develop to address them. Persepolis was published during the memoir boom of the late twentieth century, which was characterized by a proliferation of trauma stories. The majority of these stories were traditional in form. While audiences were challenged by the content, they were not automatically enabled to shift previously constituted expectations about whose lives represented an appropriate focus of public attention, nor were they prepared to engage differently with these autobiographical accounts (Gilmore, “Jurisdictions”). New forms, like the limit-cases I examined, evaded some of the censure that befell scandalous memoirs by adapting forms at the limits of mainstream memoir while remaining legible within the parameters of self-representational discourse . They also attempted to lead readers into altered and more capacious understandings of trauma and its representation. Satrapi’s choice of visual leigh gilmore autobiography can be seen as a limit case. Comics present her with...