Satrapi begins her autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis with the bold and pertinent title 'The Veil’. Whitlock elaborates that the announcement of ‘The Veil' is mixed with high drama and irony synonymous with Satrapi’s style of expression' (2007, p. 189). In this opening chapter the young Marji receives the 'veil' with childlike irreverence taking the item and immediately finding alternatives for its use. These initial frames illustrate Marji’s playfulness and youthful rebelliousness, as well as the beginning of her resistance to impeding totalitarian control. She and her school mates begin to use the newly acquired 'veil' as toys consciously subverting the authority in which it is imposed. The adult narrator Satrapi utilises a child’s perspective showing how it is possible to dilute some of the significance attached of the object, elucidating that the 'veil's' meanings can shift and be re-reinterpreted from different perspectives. As Whitlock argues 'Satrapi uses the child’s view to cut things into size and put the ‘veil’ into a different frame' ( 2007, p. 190). Satrapi resists stereotyping the imposition of the ‘veil’ and instead illustrates a complex view of the religious garment within her black and white frames. Satrapi uses her simple graphics to complicate the site of veiling by offering a visual representation that refuses to render the girls as singular or unidentifiable. Chandra Talpade Mohanty's theory about the ongoing production of the monolthic singular subject of the Third World woman for Western consumption is useful here. She argues ' outside history and unchanging , this woman remains the passive and powerless subject, unable to represent herself' ( Mohanty, 2003, p. 35). Satrapi's illustrations refutes the passive and powerless subject by imbuing her images with marked individuality (see the image below). She does this subtly through the raising of an eyebrow or the showing of the hair thus disrupting the western construction of singularity and embracing a code of plurality. Satrapi complicates this imposition of the 'veil' by simultaneously nominating it it as a oppressive garment while also elucidating the possibilities of the ‘veil’ as a site of resistance, challenging authoritarian control. Thus Satrapi's decision to open the novel with the title ‘ The Veil’ reveals her identity as adult narrator capable of offering diverse understandings of the meanings attached to it and the ways it continues to be a great signifiers of cultural difference between 'East and the 'West'. Nahibi and O’Malley point out that 'the visual image of the veiled child can be particularly disturbing from some perspectives: a dissonant combination of the familiar (the universal cartoonish figure of the child) and the strange (the veiled and radical other)' ( 2005 p. 11). This dissonance effect occurs throughout Satrapi's novel and especially in her discourse of the 'veil', thus the assumptions of recognition and familiarity experienced by a Western reader are constantly undermined by the interjection of culturally specific and unfamiliar references.
( Image Satrapi, 2003, p.3)
What seems to be of most concern in contemporary discourses on the ‘veil’ in 'Western' societies (and there are many in current circulation) - is largely due to significant cultural differences and particularly the ways that this difference is constructed as ‘other’. According to Leila Ahmed ' the veil is never just an item of clothing, it is a signifier which is ‘pregnant with meaning’ ( 1992, p.166). The imposition of Islamic veiling under the totalitarian regime in Iran in 1979 this a very different situation to Muslim women living in the 'West' who are free to actively participate in the wearing of the garment and often do so with pride, as it reflects their religious identity. This is an important distinction to make and marks a substantial divide in the discourse of equality and rights that is coming from a largely western liberal feminist perspective. As Chandra Mohanty observes, 'the veil marks the limits and limitations of western feminist thinking about agency and cultural difference. She continues that the figure of the woman in the veil returns to haunt feminism with seemingly intractable cultural difference' (Mohanty, 2003). Satrapi, while not claiming to be a feminist, uses Persepolis to illustrate the ways that patriarchy and fundamentalist Islam become inextricably entwined in Iran after the revolution in 1979. Below is an excerpt from an interview with Satrapi illustrating this point).
For Satrapi this merging of patriarchy and the totalitarian state of Iran is a systemic problem that makes its most visible and unapologetic expression through the imposition of the 'veil'. Satrapi elucidates in Persepolis that it was Iranian women in particular whose spatial geography became radically restructured under the Khomeini regime. For the young Marji then the 'veil' increasingly becomes a symbol of oppression that 'radically transforms relations between public and private space violently and in gendered terms'( Whitlock, 2007, p. 164). This veiling of the body is bound up in the overt sexualising and objectification of women in Iran under a hyper- masculine political regime. Young Marji is a child who bares witness to the beginnings of a political and religious ideological war, one that holds specific and violent ideals of gender at its core. These violent ideals of gender radically alters young Marji’s every day life. It changes who she is as a person, as well as her family and the people she loves. In a later chapter titled 'The Trip' we (the reader) see the Satrapi family sitting in front of their television; an image reflecting how everyday familial experiences are complicated by extreme socio -poilitical conditions. The adult narrator Marjane Satrapi shares with the reader that the conversations that were occurring in her household were anything but 'normal' and were often about survival. She writes ' and so to protect women from all the potential rapists they decreed that wearing the veil was obligatory' (Satrapi, 2003, p. 74) In this chapter Satrapi also complicates the public separation of women and men in Iran through the adorning the 'veil'. She acknowledges that it is not only women who are constructed in limited reductive ways under a totalitarian regime. She argues that when woman bodies become framed as ‘other’ and in highly sexual terms, ‘modern’ men, such as her father, become simultaneously represented as sexual predators. Her fathers speech bubble captures this process of interpellation when he exclaims’ ‘incredible, they think all men are perverts’ (Satrapi, 2003 p.74).
The graphic autobiography Persepolis is undoubtedly a highly political novel producing images and text that reflect Satrapi's political/historical/religious context in Iran. However, Persepolis is also very much a personal coming of age narrative that mediates between the political and the personal seamlessly, weaving her everyday experiences with discourses of war and oppression. Satrapi engages the discourse of the 'veil' in her graphic illustrations as one of the most immediate signifiers of her personal and political landscape. Although this story is largely told through the perspective of a child, Satrapi draws on the retrospective awareness afforded in her adult identity as a French/ Iranian woman. Marjane Satrapi in undoubtedly a woman who is well aware of the contemporary nature of the debate of the 'veil' within secular democratic societies. The 'veil' continues to have important and changing meanings in both 'Eastern' and 'Western' discourses and Satrapi reminds us of the nature of these conflicting debates that intersect with both the personal and political formation of one's identity.
Satrapi: "You see, the basic problem of a country like mine, apart from the regime, apart from the government, is the patriarchal culture that is leading my country. That is the worst. That is why the government is still there. Whatever it touches, it gives its interpretation of the thing. When it touches psychology it says that the woman is more sensitive than the man. When it touches the medicine it says that our brain is a little less weight than the man’s. When it touches anything it gives its own interpretation, and the interpretation goes towards politics, towards religion, towards everything. So that is the situation. You know, the feminists become very angry when I say I am not a feminist. I am a humanist. I believe in human beings. After what I have seen in the world, I don’t think women are better than the men" ( Tully, 2004).
For Satrapi this merging of patriarchy and the totalitarian state of Iran is a systemic problem that makes its most visible and unapologetic expression through the imposition of the 'veil'. Satrapi elucidates in Persepolis that it was Iranian women in particular whose spatial geography became radically restructured under the Khomeini regime. For the young Marji then the 'veil' increasingly becomes a symbol of oppression that 'radically transforms relations between public and private space violently and in gendered terms'( Whitlock, 2007, p. 164). This veiling of the body is bound up in the overt sexualising and objectification of women in Iran under a hyper- masculine political regime. Young Marji is a child who bares witness to the beginnings of a political and religious ideological war, one that holds specific and violent ideals of gender at its core. These violent ideals of gender radically alters young Marji’s every day life. It changes who she is as a person, as well as her family and the people she loves. In a later chapter titled 'The Trip' we (the reader) see the Satrapi family sitting in front of their television; an image reflecting how everyday familial experiences are complicated by extreme socio -poilitical conditions. The adult narrator Marjane Satrapi shares with the reader that the conversations that were occurring in her household were anything but 'normal' and were often about survival. She writes ' and so to protect women from all the potential rapists they decreed that wearing the veil was obligatory' (Satrapi, 2003, p. 74) In this chapter Satrapi also complicates the public separation of women and men in Iran through the adorning the 'veil'. She acknowledges that it is not only women who are constructed in limited reductive ways under a totalitarian regime. She argues that when woman bodies become framed as ‘other’ and in highly sexual terms, ‘modern’ men, such as her father, become simultaneously represented as sexual predators. Her fathers speech bubble captures this process of interpellation when he exclaims’ ‘incredible, they think all men are perverts’ (Satrapi, 2003 p.74).
The graphic autobiography Persepolis is undoubtedly a highly political novel producing images and text that reflect Satrapi's political/historical/religious context in Iran. However, Persepolis is also very much a personal coming of age narrative that mediates between the political and the personal seamlessly, weaving her everyday experiences with discourses of war and oppression. Satrapi engages the discourse of the 'veil' in her graphic illustrations as one of the most immediate signifiers of her personal and political landscape. Although this story is largely told through the perspective of a child, Satrapi draws on the retrospective awareness afforded in her adult identity as a French/ Iranian woman. Marjane Satrapi in undoubtedly a woman who is well aware of the contemporary nature of the debate of the 'veil' within secular democratic societies. The 'veil' continues to have important and changing meanings in both 'Eastern' and 'Western' discourses and Satrapi reminds us of the nature of these conflicting debates that intersect with both the personal and political formation of one's identity.
(Image Satrapi, 2003. p. 6)
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