Marjane Satrapis childhood in Iran - Essay Example

of due: Marjane Satrapi’s childhood in Iran War has always been something to be dreaded by people since nothing good comes from it. War affects people of all ages, cultures, races and religion. It brings change, destruction and death and these affect people to great extents. “Every day as a result of war and conflict thousands of civilians are killed, and more than half of these victims are children” (Graca & Salgado, 81). War is hard on each and every affected person, but the most affected are the children. Persepolis is a book that centers on the author’s family during the Iran-Iraq war that lasted for eight years. Marjane’s experience of the war is quite innocent since she saw it from the eyes of a well protected child. She grew up with need to help and make things better for everyone without really understanding what it takes to make the world a better place. In her mind the only possible way to make a change is by becoming a prophet and using supernatural powers to make the world a better place. Marjane’s childhood is proving that children form defense mechanisms to deal with difficulties. These defense mechanisms take children to “happy” places where things are better and everyone is happy unlike in the real world. My thesis statement is that children’s innocence enables them to cope in difficult situations. Children generally have a tendency to lighten the mood in sad situations because of their innocent nature. They turn even the saddest situations to mild, innocent situations. This is evident when Marjane says “these stories had given me new ideas for games”, (Satrapi, 55). By saying this she refers to her uncle’s stories of how he and other prisoners were tortured in prison. Stories of torture have never been easy to hear even for adults but Marjane so innocently finds them fascinating and decides to play torture with her friends, who so willingly accept. By applying their innocence in to torture stories, Marjane converts the torture stories in to a new play game. The story begins with Marjane’s picture in the year 1980 when she was a school girl at age ten. In the picture Marjane is with other girls but they are not so happy. It is odd since a lot of children like taking pictures with their friends especially in school. Marjane says “then came 1980: the year it became obligatory to wear the veil to school” (Satrapi, 6). With the revolution came changes and the veil was a part of the change. It was required for all women and girls to cover up. They did not quite understand why they had to wear them and so they used them to skip and threw them around like new toys that they have been give. They also playfully make fun of the revolution by mimicking what they see people doing. In their minds, nothing is really so serious and the things they see people doing in the streets becomes just another new game to be played in the field. The whole revolution and political unrest was met with a lot of curiosity where Marjane asked so many questions in trying to understand the events of the revolution. Marjane says “that night I stayed a very long time in the bath. I wanted to know what it felt like to be in a cell filled with water” (Satrapi, 28) this was after she was told what actually happened to her grandfather, and she wanted to have a deeper understanding of what he went through as a prisoner in a water cell. This innocent act of hers actually gives her an idea of how bad life in prison was. Marjane says “I was born with religion” (Satrapi, 9). By this she means that she was born with a purpose of becoming the last prophet. She is determined to become one and she says that she wants to become a prophet because the maid in her house does not eat with the rest of her family, because her father drives a cardillac and her grandmother has pain in her knees. Of course her reasons are childlike and her reasoning that becoming a prophet will change these things for the better is quite innocent and childlike. She says that she will use Zarathustra’s commands to makes all people have cars, all maids to eat with everyone else and all people not to suffer by making anything apart from these forbidden. Marjane thinks that things can be made better so easily since her thinking is still so small and innocent. In the book, the black and white images reflect the harsh reality of living in an oppressive nation. However, this black and white creates a realistic facade. There exists no gray in Satrapi’s graphic novel. There is not one shade of color combining the black and white tones in the book. In our reality gray exists—it represents any aspect of life shaded by uncertainties and unknowns. The black and white images in Persepolis hence “de-complicate” any reality discussed in the graphic novel. The lack of gray paints a picture that everything is known and that everything is definite i.e. things are exactly the way they have been represented in the book. The images in Persepolis are simplistic, childlike in nature. The child like graphics goes hand in hand with my de-complication idea. Just as a lack of gray de-complicates the story’s reality for us to digest, the construction/ style does the same. In this analysis, we see the child Marjane being affected by the changes that are going on in her country and in her family’s life. She is being forced by circumstances to grow up so fast and to start thing about solutions and remedies for the problems around her. Since she is too young to full understand the changes, she uses the only knowledge she has of religion. Marjane wants to change the world and make things better using religious powers that she feels she should have to make her world a better place. According to Rousseau’s theory, the main aim of educating children is to enable them to live righteously. Being a naturalist he believed that “a child should be allowed to grow close to nature and they should be given the chance to think in their own way” (Simpson, 45). Rousseau divides the development of a child in to three stages where in age 12, the child behaves like animals and this is seen when the girls at the school play with their veils. The second stage they start to develop from age 12-16. This is evident when Marjane obsesses about the revolution calling it a bicycle. The last part is when a child develops into an adult as from the age of 16 onwards. we see this when Marjane finally understands everything about the revolution as she grows and her reasoning and feelings towards the revolution change. His main idea is that a child should grow up as a child-innocent- and not as a small adult like in Marjane’s case. Marjane says that “every situation offered an opportunity for laughs: like when we had to knit winter hoods for the soldiers” (Satrapi, 100) instead of studying, they were made to become useful to the war by knitting hoods. The girls were being denied their right to childhood but they did not get affected by this situation since they found humor in everything that they were asked to do and they made fun of everything. However their innocence was being exploited. This book does not merely represent the universal childhood of a child where growth, safety and education are the key issues of discussion. It takes us deeper in to the mind of a child living in a revolutionary era that is not the best environment for a child to grow up in to. We experience innocence, bullying and premature growth where a child is forced to start looking for solutions for everything that is wrong instead of simply being a child. This analysis prove that children have their own way of seeing things and interpreting them. Their defense mechanisms allow them to live through hard and difficult times by creating jokes and games out of the real situation. This enables then to escape the difficulties of the real world. Works cited Carll, Elizabeth K. Violence and Disaster. Westport, Conn. [u.a.: Praeger, 2007. Print Machel, Graca & Sebastian Salgado. The Impact of War on Children. London: C. Hurst, 2001. Salkie, Raphael. Text and Discourse Analysis. London: Routledge, 1995. Internet resource. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2003. Print. Simpson, Matthew. Rousseaus Theory of Freedom. London: Continuum, 2006. Internet resource. Read More