Art History

		LATEST COVER STORY Asia's Journey Home  Pico Iyer: The Journey Home  Hamid Karzai: Home Free  Ved Mehta: A Divided Place  Ma Jian: Unsafe Havens  Gish Jen: Racial Profiling August 18-25, 2003 Issue Past Issues Cool Japan August 11, 2003 Gloria Arroyo August 4, 2003 ----------------- Women in China July 28, 2003 ----------------- Asian Longevity July 21, 2003 ----------------- Hong Kong July 14, 2003 ----------------- Southeast Asia July 7, 2003 ----------------- Kim Jong Il June 30, 2003 -----------------   ASIA  Indonesia: The Jakarta Bomb ARTS  Books: Persepolis Unveiled NOTEBOOK  Korea: Requiem for a Policy  India: Star News in the Spotlight  Hong Kong: Spanning the Delta  Milestones  Verbatim  Letters TRAVEL  Singapore: It's In to Be Out CNN.com: Top Headlines

Sometimes the past is too strong for words. It won't lie quietly under the bonds of syntax and grammar. Marjane Satrapi's childhood in revolutionary Iran—a childhood hijacked by religious fundamentalism, that witnessed the imposition of the veil, that saw the legal age of marriage for girls lowered to nine—is almost too full of trauma to be confined to a prose narrative. Satrapi powerfully captures the Ayatollahs' tyranny by rendering it in the spare, black- and-white images of a graphic novel, much as Art Spiegelman did in Maus, his comic-strip version of the Holocaust.

Persepolis conveys both the horror of the regime and the comic absurdity of living under it. In one panel young Marjane's mother warns her, "If anybody asks what you do during the day, say you pray." In the next panel, Marjane and her friends compete to see who prays the most. "Five times," says one boy. "Eleven," fibs Marjane. The kids also boast about whose family has suffered most. Those whose parents have the grimmest prison tales gain their friends' admiration; those with the most relatives killed in the Iran-Iraq war get better marks at school. Satrapi's darkest passages are leavened with wry humor. A teenage Marjane is stopped by the religious police for wearing a Michael Jackson button, a symbol of American imperialists. She tries to convince them it's a Malcolm X pin and that she supports America's oppressed minorities. "Back then, Michael Jackson was still black," she notes. By deflecting moments of abject fear with humor, Satrapi proves the best way to exorcise tyranny may be to laugh at it.