Blog 12-LAU

“While one way that Satrapi unfolds the procedure of memory is through the spatializing form of comics, which visualizes and enmeshes an overlap of selves and their locations, the other crucial aspect is her style. As I have asserted, Persepolis’s presentation of pictorial space is discursive: Satrapi displays the political horror producing and marking her “ordinary” childhood by offering what seems to a reader to be a visual disjuncture in her child’s-eye rendition of trauma. This expressionism weaves the process of memory into the book’s technique of visualization. Satrapi’s stark style is monochromatic—there is no evident shading technique; she offers flat black and white. The condition of remembering, Kate Flint points out, ‘may be elicited by the depiction of deliberately empty spaces, inviting the projection of that which can only be seen in the mind’s eye on to an inviting vacancy’ (530)”(144).

“The BCC said there were 400 victims. The SHAH said that a group of religious fanatics perpetrated the massacre. But the people knew that it was the SHAH’s fault!!!”(45).

The quote in Persepolis explained the totalitarian government killed the people in the cinema however the news reported that this terrorist incident was because of the religious group. The black and white images in this page were horrible that it recorded the miserable situation in the cinema: people tried to run out of the cinema however the door was locked from outside. The dark color enhanced the atmosphere of memory from the childhood. Their bodies caught fire and skeleton imagines made the readers feel scared. The combination of bodies and fires made the people look like the ghost in the air. It also means that they became the ghost who was murdered. They pushed and shove to the front door of the cinema. The images of their open mouths made the readers sounded the screams. The comic made the memory into visual pictures. The gloomy color also demonstrates the emotion of sadness about this news through the childhood of Satrapi. The quotes were on the top of the picture satirized the ugly face of the government. The children also felt nauseous about their behaviors that even the children knew the truth of the events. She read the news from the radios and newspapers. It seemed that these events were far from her life. However, quotations marks of ordinary showed that she did not have an ordinary life but full of dangers of death. She knew the cruelty of the government however her teachers still taught them the advantages of SHAH. The news was trying to cover up the facts and cheat the whole country. The irony pictures were used by the comic to recall the memory of the history and satirized the horror of the government to tell people the young Satrapi’s childhood.