4 Texts

Comic Book
p.110 item 3.11 Marjane Satrapi, Excerpt from Persepolis, 2004

I was flipping through Beyond Words and I found this. I read this comic book a long time ago, but this was the first time I contemplated this particular chapter by itself. Persepolis is the memoir of an Iranian women who fled Iran when she was in her early 20's. These memoirs are about her observations about her country as a child and as a young woman. This chapter is about the role of the veil in Iranian culture when she was ten years old (1980). What Satrapi is trying to get across in this chapter is that while the government was forcing children to wear a veil in school, her mother knew that religious freedom was something to be valued and religion and its symbols were not to be used as political devices. One of visual devices Satrapi uses in her storytelling is the very format in which her story is presented. The images carry strength in their black and white simplicity. As it is in comic book format, her stories are made real through caricature and symbolism. For instance, one of the blocks is captioned "I really didn't know what to think about the veil. Deep down, I was very religious but as a family we were very modern and avant-garde." To illustrate this idea, Satrapi has illustrated an image of her self split down the center. One half of her body is veiled and the other half isn't. The backgrounds are also split accordingly; the veiled side of her has a traditional Islamic design such as one that might be found on the wall of a mosque, whereas the non-veiled side displays gears, a hammer and a ruler, symbols of work and rationality (and moreover, Communism, an belief system totally rejected by Muslim extremists at that time.)This particular image effectively portrays the conflicted feelings a child may have had at that time in Iranian history.

Photograph
P. 283 Item 5.13 George Bush Meeting with Burned Soldier
This picture stirs up a number of painful emotions. It is difficult for me to look at a picture of a burn victim without an automatic sense of repulsion, but this feeling is always coupled with tremendous guilt because I know that the person is the same on the inside as they always were. It makes me feel horrible because I know that if I were hurt that bad, I would know that nobody wanted to look at me anymore, and I would feel really lonely because no one could get past my face and my body. This is the last person in the world who deserves to feel like that. For his country, he sacrificed a normal life in exchange for a life of alienation and pain. Not only does he have to live with his own disfigurement; he has to live with the memory of the pain he inflicted on others and the memories of terror that were the last emotions he felt as he exited his normal life. I wonder if at that moment George Bush questioned whether the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were worth fighting at such human cost.

Advertisement
Page 100, Item 3.6. Love Me Tender Movie Poster, 1956
This movie poster is in a format common to movie posters of its era. There is one central visual figure that is the "main draw" for the movie; in this case, Elvis Presley playing a guitar. Below the central visual figure are images that illustrate key themes of the movie; in this case, a man with a gun (action), Elvis kissing a woman's cheek (romance) and a cavalry with confederate flags (provides a setting.)Just from this simple construction of images, I know that Love Me Tender is going to feature some action/violence, a romantic storyline and it will take place during the civil war.

Poem
P. 222 War (in the City in Which I Live), by Benjamin Alire Saenz, 2006
I am not Hispanic, but I have never understood why so many Americans are so cruel towards the people who fight to live here. I don't understand why it has to be so difficult for a person to immigrate. I always hear people get all fired up about "Mexicans taking all the jobs", but what few people seem to realize is that undocumented immigrants are taking the jobs that nobody wants. What it really boils down to is racism. This poem is powerful because the imagery is excellent--the poem talks about the Rio Grande, and how deceptively calm it looks. I remember thinking that when I saw it. It didn't look so dangerous, but it has drowned thousands of people. This poem presented a few viewpoints that I had not considered before but were particularly enlightening. The author says that in his city, white people are moving away because they are scared of the Mexicans. He says that he wishes they would "stay and fight"--to "learn to love the people that make the food they love". This line was striking because it seems like people are willing to just pick and choose the things they want to keep out of other cultures. For example, Americans love Chinese food and crepes and burritos and margaritas, but they still have stereotypes about the cultures who brought these things to our culture. These sterotypes breed fear. If people educated themselves about other cultures and didn't just pick and choose what they wanted to see, hear or eat, they might be able to form meaningful relationships and at least form a truly safer environment.