Book Review: Persepolis and My New York Diary.
by Carmen Nge


Iran and Canada: East and West. Two women. Two stories. One medium.

In a world populated mostly by men, Marjane Satrapi and Julie Doucet are two female graphic novelists/comic artists who have solicited the kind of critical praise and adulation once reserved for the crème de la crème of comics: Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb. Respectively citing both men as influences, Satrapi and Doucet wield a powerful tool in their work: truth in images. With all of the candor and grittiness of Spiegelman and Crumb, both women have managed to narrate and illustrate the story of their lives in a style that fuses intimacy and distance, self-awareness and self-absorption.

Heralded as “one of the most critically acclaimed graphic novels since (Spiegelman’s) Maus was released in the 1980s,” Satrapi’s Persepolis (her first book) is a bestseller in France--having sold more than 120,000 copies--and has been translated into five languages. Julie Doucet, widely regarded as one of the top female alternative comic artists working today, has had 5 of her graphic novels translated from her native Canadian French and published in countries such as Japan, Germany, Italy and Finland. Although highly respected in the comic book world, the two women, both in their 30s, have had very different career trajectories and their books, Persepolis and My New York Diary, are also lessons in contrast. Satrapi and Doucet’s drawings are vastly different—the former has a spare, minimalist, contrasting black-and-white style whereas the latter fills her panels to overflowing with overlapping shades of black and grey. They are testimony to precisely how varied and divergent women’s stories can be.

Born in 1969 in Rasht, Iran, Satrapi grew up in Tehran and studied at the Lycee Francais until the age of 14. She is, however, no ordinary Iranian for her maternal great-grandfather was the last Emperor of Iran, deposed by the late Reza Shah. Persepolis traces her life as the only daughter of committed middle-class Marxist parents and a family of intellectuals and dissidents. Set entirely in Iran, the novel ends with Satrapi’s departure to Vienna, sans her parents, who see no other alternative for their daughter in the repressive Khomeini regime.

Using jet-black China ink and atypical drawing implements: plumes and brushes used for Chinese calligraphy instead of the more conventional markers and pens, Satrapi considers herself old fashioned. Her illustrations have been described as “child-like” but in this writer’s view, they are anything but. Her simple, clear lines and her bold, assured depictions of Iranian society, history and politics exhibit a style that is minimalist and uncluttered, economical and effective—hardly the work of a child. Satrapi allows her images room to breathe, cleverly highlighting the dramatic contrasts of black and white by distilling each panel to its essentials. Here is a graphic novelist unafraid of white space, unafraid of the unadorned.

This confidence of style and clarity of visual perception give precocious young Marjane—the book’s protagonist—wisdom, antagonism and forthrightness that is unusual in a child of ten years. What is most refreshing about Persepolis is, however, the strident, opinionated and courageous voice of a girl growing up in Tehran—a rare encounter in today’s world of male-dominated comic book heroes. This is a child who grew up reading the Quran, and devoured books about Palestinian children, Fidel Castro, the Vietnam War and the revolutionary luminaries of her home country: Dr. Fatemi, F. Rezaï and H. Ashraf. Her favourite comic book was entitled “Dialectical Materialism”!

For a comic book to be openly critical of the Iranian monarchy and the subsequent Islamic republic is perhaps not as inflammatory as one that puts Marx and God side by side in a panel and remark on how alike they both look, except that “Marx’s hair was a bit curlier”. Satrapi’s willingness to discuss the problem of the inequality of the social classes, to reveal the cruel and barbaric actions of the ruling regimes, and to denounce God when all hell broke loose in her country makes it understandable why she now lives in Paris, certain to never reside in Iran. Precisely because Iranian history is told from the perspective of a child, Satrapi’s graphic memoir is infused with an unaffected, non-didactic, tell-it-like-it-is sensibility that demands attention and belief.

In a recent public reading in Boston earlier this month, Satrapi explained that for her, one of biggest difficulties in comics is depicting movement because “to draw movement you have to know anatomy and we weren’t allowed to see naked people to learn anatomy.” The power of Persepolis, however, is not the depiction of bodily movement but the dynamic energy of ideas, the vibrant and kinetic mental and philosophical movement that takes shape in the foreground of the novel. To her credit, Satrapi manages to successfully portray mobility by using a stylized method of drawing fleeing street protestors, fist-raised crowds of political demonstrators, and weapon-wielding police and military personnel. It is a style that de-emphasizes verisimilitude in favour of visually communicating a united, homogenous mass of people with common aims and aspirations.

At the same time, Satrapi does not elide the facts of history either. Events such as the deaths of 400 people in a fire at the Rex Cinema at Abadan and the sequence of massacres following the slaughter of anti-government protestors at Jaleh Square on ‘Black Friday’ are masterfully and artistically illustrated. It is Satrapi’s concern about imperialist history and the events within her country that propel Persepolis to widespread critical acclaim. Here is a comic artist who chooses the genre of autobiography to tell a tale with political and historical significance of an international scale. By so doing, she has effectively turned the navel-gazing genre of graphic memoirs on its head.

Julie Doucet is a comic artist of the other extreme. Immersing herself in the post-feminist, punk ethos of the Western graphic novel, she roots My New York Diary in a visual rendition of the autobiographical that is so blunt, so seamy and sordid, that it makes one nauseous.

Doucet’s graphic novel is as raw, revealing and raucous as they come. Her dense, inky, messy style is symbolic of the confused, untidy and fragmented life she leads as a naïve, gullible anti-heroine. If the protagonist in Persepolis is schooled in the clear-cut contrasts of dialectical materialism, then the bedraggled young woman in My New York Diary is a victim of postmodernism’s overabundant, jumbled excess. Every panel in Doucet’s book is completely filled with people, objects and more objects. In fact, in light of capitalism’s free market consumer over-indulgence, it is ironically befitting that every panel contains more garbage than this writer has ever seen in a comic book.

As readers, we have no respite from this product onslaught; try as we may to focus on the characters peopling the book, our eyes inevitably get drawn to the mismatched flip flops thrown to the side of the coffee table strewn with beer cans, soda bottles, cigarette butts, drawing implements, writing instruments, plates of half-eaten food, pieces of paper with doodles. Light bulbs hang loosely against peeling wallpaper covered with thumb-tacked pictures and picture frames at skewed angles; cracked and curling linoleum take over the floor space in dingy, cramped apartments while heaps of refuse and flying debris colonize the streets outside the dilapidated buildings. My New York Diary is Doucet’s grim, confessional, no-holds barred autobiography and she spares us no white space of relief.

As a wide-eyed art student ready to experience creativity and sex, Doucet gives herself no glory in this fairly depressing novel. She finds herself falling into bed with one lecherous man after another, each one more gross and needy than the last. The New York depicted here is characteristically grimy and dark, infested with the kind of crime, fear and trash one usually associates with the pre-Rudy Guiliani era. Like Satrapi, Doucet is brutally honest but her honesty is bleak and unrelenting. This is America’s urban response to global capitalism. Set in the late 1980s, it is also Republican politics at its worst.

Doucet’s art is weighed down by the stuff of life and the heavily inked panels feel claustrophobic. And because Doucet illustrates a world that is intimately self-absorbed and narcissistic, we feel trapped in a reality we do not fully understand. Rather than blame the artist for providing us with no context for this carefully crafted New York life, perhaps we should point the finger at a world that affords her little perspective to deconstruct and excavate the bubble within which she lives.

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This piece was published in the September 2004 issue of Options2, The Edge