Sharia Don't Like It

My earliest political memory is the Iranian Hostage Crisis.  I remember the shock that Americans were being held hostage in Iran.  I remember wondering why we didn’t do something about it.  I remember acute shock when the rescue mission failed because...and it is still shocking…our military helicopters couldn’t fly across the desert.  I  remember wondering why we didn’t try again after the first attempt failed.  And by the end of it all, I remember thinking Jimmy Carter was one lousy President.  In addition to the obvious joy, I felt a certain schadenfreude when the hostages were released at the moment Reagan became president.  Obviously, we now had a better President.

Apparently Marjane Satrapi’s first political memories are also the events surrounding the Iranian Revolution. But, she was on the other side of the matter.  She grew up in Iran.  She is just a few years younger than me.  And while my reminisces of the experience of the Iranian revolution take up a paragraph, she got a book out of hers.  And, I am pleased to report: it’s a rather good book.

Persepolis gives us the view of a 10 year old as the Iranian Revolution unfolds.  At times, it reads a bit too knowing to be truly the recollections of a ten year old, but then again, that makes it a better book.  We get the whole run—from the collapse of the Shah’s government and the hope and optimism of the early days after the Shah falls through the creation of the Police State that followed the Revolution.  We get the joy of the Shah’s political prisoners being released and the shock as a new round of political prisoners are rounded up.  We get the initial enthusiasm for the war with Iraq through the disillusionment with that war as children are sent to die.  Interestingly, the only part of the revolution I remember from those days rates just a page in Satrapi’s story—and the effect of the hostages in Satrapi’s story was simply the death of any hope of emigrating to America. 

As a story of political upheaval, this book is good; it’s not at the level of Maus by any means, but it is still good.  The comparison with Maus, by the way, is the obvious comparison; Persepolis is also a comic book.  This makes me wonder whether comics have some advantage in telling stories of oppressive governments.  This book would be far worse if it was just Satrapi’s words; the pictures are rather effective at conveying a mood. They are all black and white drawings, not terribly sophisticated, but crisply drawn.  You feel this story as it move along; you feel the chaos and the hopes and the crushing disappointments over and over and over.  It would not have been fun to live in Iran during this time; and by the end of the book it is not clear whether Satrapi’s parents are to be admired for their courage in sticking it out or pitied for their foolishness in not leaving.  The story ends as her parents send Satrapi off to Vienna for high school so that she would have some hope of getting an actual education.

Well, truth be told, that isn't the end of the story.  Satrapi wrote a second volume Persepolis 2 which is included in the book I read, The Complete Persepolis.  To say that the second book is worse than the first would be a mammoth understatement.  The first book is really good, detailing events of some importance and capturing an era.  The second volume: imagine the worst book you ever read all about teenage angst.  Imagine the whining and pointlessness and utter banality of it all.  That is Persepolis 2.  It isn’t worth reading.  At all.  It starts with a whiny adolescent in Vienna.  Sure, she goes back to Iran eventually and hope springs that the book will recover and be as interesting as the first volume, but alas, it’s just as pointlessly annoying when she gets back to Iran.  This is, in other words, the sequel problem.  And it is a rare case when just buying the original Persepolis is a much better value than owning the second volume too.

Reading Persepolis these days is a fascinating case of déjà vu all over again.  My first memory is of an incompetent President totally at the mercy of events in the Middle East and unable to act decisively.  And then I read the papers and discover lo and behold we have a hopelessly incompetent President letting the Russian (the Russians!) gain the upper hand in Syria.  A total national embarrassment unfolding once again.  Sigh.

But, at least the problems in the Middle East did result in a rather good song.