Aside from the five stars, I also gave it four Tracey Jordans on the Hard to Watch/Read scale. Don’t get my wrong, it’s an absolutely beautiful book, but it’s also moving and powerful. Lots of emotions in this one.
Satrapi chronicles her life as a teen in Iran during the unrest in the 1980’s. The cutesy, childlike drawings are juxtaposed against the atrocities they depict. For example, one panel is a short bio of one of her parents’ friends, newly released from jail for being a protester. A few pages later, we see his fate of “accidentally” drowning in a bathtub, while wearing all of his clothes, and only his head was underwater.
That ending. I might even get teared up typing about it. Satrapi’s parents realize that their daughter is everything they wanted her to be – intelligent, outspoken, passionate. All the things that could easily get her killed in this new Iran. So they do what any good parent would be and send her out the country. It’s rendered in only a few panels, but that last one, of her father having to carry her mother out of the airport, will break your heart.
Thanks to my American public school education, I have hardly any grasp of geography that isn’t in North America and I have only enough world history knowledge to mumble out something about Mesopotamia and cuneiform if put on the spot. (Which isn’t an excuse, I really should become better informed about world history.) For that reason alone it’s a shame this book frequently winds up on banned book lists. I learned more about Iran reading this 151 page book than I did in school and college.
