Remembering Iran in Black and White, in Glaring Light

John Berger, in his book Keeping a Rendezvous, a compilation of essays on art criticism and life observations, notes that "Painting brings home. The cinema transports elsewhere" (14), meaning that a painting is rooted in the sense of a shared setting between the viewer and the piece of art, while cinema serves to allow the viewer to escape her setting and journey out into the realm of the film directs her to, the surreal, the other-real, the historical-real. A movie moves, it transports, and it changes time, size, shape, and tone. A painting is absorbed whole, in a moment, and the leaps that occur around it occur not through the director's guidance, but in the mind of the viewer.

In thinking of this, I begin to see Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi, as the memoir that most resembles film, while Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, a graphic memoir also about Iran, as the memoir that resembles painting. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi wanders, she reflects, pontificates, observes and moves closer to and away from the political and personal trauma experienced during the shifting regimes and fundamentalism polluting Iran from the late 70's. Her memoir, to me, hearkens the film Y Tu, Mama, Tambien. There are piercing rays of light bouncing off shores, boys too bright in cars, a woman in white on a balcony, a hut, shadows, dapples of light, a road, leaves. Mostly it is the lighting of the film that most resembles the memoir, the shifting distance and brightness, the way it hurts to look at it, and the way it makes everything hazy.

Nafisi frames her memoir around books. She splits her thoughts into four sections--Lolita, Gatsby, James, and Austen--books I would hardly associate with the restrictions felt by the tightening grasp of Iranian fundamentalism during the time period she observes. She writes about her encounters with her students, of their discussions of the text, and in between, of the atrocities felt in her culture as freedoms are stripped from the people, oddly, as veils are forced to cloak the women. 

The balance in this memoir between personal and academic tips mightily in the direction of academic. Nafisi is a thinker, a fact she asserts herself when she says "I am too much of an academic: I have written too many papers and articles to be able to turn my experiences and ideas into narratives without pontificating" (266). She devotes one page to her terror over the bombings in Tehran when she was pregnant with her second child and says simply, "Tehran was the object of continual bombings and I had become hysterical" (171) but gives three chapters to a class period during which the class put the novel The Great Gatsby on trial as to whether or not it was corrupting society. She does not bring us into her hysteria. She brings us into her classroom.

In contrast, Persepolis, like a painting, brings to its readers an immediacy inescapable. Satrapi portrays no flickering lights. Her memoir is not angles of light shining too brightly, not hazy edges, shadows, or dappling spots on a landscape. Her memoir is black and white. It is instant. Whole. Visceral. Emotional.

Both memoirs, for instance, describe the suicide soldiers convinced to fight for the Islamic army in exchange for a tin key painted gold, the key to paradise. Nafisi describes this in prose. Distant, reflective, intelligent prose. Satrapi frames an image in two blocks of text, at the top: "The key to paradise was for poor people. Thousands of young kids, promised a better life, exploded on the minefields with their keys around their necks" and after the image, the line, "Mrs. Nasrine's son managed to avoid that fate, but lots of other kids from his neighborhood didn't" (102). More powerful, though, is the image, bodies convulsing upwards, lines indicating explosions, and fingers grasping at keys. Satrapi brings us to the horror she felt, without the eloquence, but with lots of guts.

The two memoirs couldn't approach their subject more differently, but there is, of course, good reason for that. Two women do not experience the same thing in the same way. The Iranian society registered differently in two different women who were at two different time periods in their own development and who had two different sets of coping mechanisms in order to confront the Iranian regime.

Satrapi makes it clear that her Persepolis is "A Memoir of a Childhood" and so the memoir hangs on the arc of her growth from childhood to adolescence, ending when she leaves Iran as a teenager to go to school in a safer place. The arc, the structure, allows her to naturally let the political events and her personal response to them shape the memoir. She conveys the experiences she felt as a child by going into that child's emotional make-up. She uses image to bring a sense of immediacy to the reader. She cuts the narrative to a skeleton and lets images convey the flesh. 

Nafisi, a grown woman at the time of these political changes, cannot use the "coming-of-age" structure to build her memoir. She must find some other shape upon which to drape her story. Her selection makes perfect sense for her background. Frame it in books. Let the stories inform her story. 

In a way, Nafisi has the much harder task. And her unwillingness to plunge into the personal emotions she felt is, in a way, noble. She focuses her attention on her students, on her magician, on her encounters with other faculty. She sees herself, clearly, as lucky and does not dwell on her own frustrations for long. Moreover, it is not hard to imagine that as a mother, relying on books for sanity saved her from giving over to the terror that she must have felt during a time in which terror became boring and so it makes sense that this became the framework for her book.

And so, the interesting question is this: which is better? The film or the painting? Womanly and reserved? Child-like and visceral? What is the task of the memoirist? What depths must the writer plunge to? Allow the reader to see? 

Memoir, like art, has no rules. It may, in the future, have patterns, and even evolution, but at this point, there is no rule about what memoir must do other than be focused on what is remembered. 

This is not to say that memoir requires no craft nor academic awareness, but only suggesting that memoir, like visual art, serves many purposes. Movies transport the viewer away from the present setting and into a new setting. Paintings bring the other setting to the viewer. Memoirs can do both and do so under the instruction of their writers. 

For myself, (and I say this begrudgingly) I believe my personal writing must unearth the emotion. It must root in the muck. It must dredge up the dirty guts and reveal them to the reader. I don't like doing it, but there is a certain instinct in me questing for the barest truth, the autopsy of the memory.

We are the century born after Freud. We have adapted in ways Darwin couldn't have predicted. The emotional is not to be scoffed at. It is part of the evolution.