Women in Satrapis Persepolis

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Out of the Family: Generations of Women in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis Nancy K. Miller Available online: 21 Mar 2007

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Life Writing VOLUME 4

NUMBER 1

(APRIL 2007)

Out of the Family: Generations of Women in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis Nancy K. Miller 2 1 0 2 e n u J 3 1 3 4 : 1 2 t a ] y e n d y S f o y t i s r e v i n U [ y b d e d a o l n w o D

Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis offers a new perspective on familial legacies and feminist generations. Through the use of black-and-white stylised images and the interplay of panels, Satrapi shows how three generations of women interact in the spaces of memory as well as history. In this autobiographical narrative of a transnational artist’s development, dissident genealogies turn out to be as much a matter of books as of blood. Persepolis presents a complex vision, both political and personal, of an intergenerational legacy derived from acts of rereading and translation. As we contemplate the question of gender and generations from the still-fragile threshold of the twenty-first century, Satrapi offers images that counter our stereotypes, both foreign and domestic. Keywords

Satrapi; autobiography; generations; feminism

They will know that there are books waiting for them as there were no books for me; will know that others have been there, have recorded their experience; will know that help is available and that they can name their anger and find companionship in enduring it. (Heilbrun 101)

In the last few years I’ve been involved with academic conferences in the humanities whose theme was identified as ‘gender and generation’. The organisers of these conferences actually intended something more specific than all the meanings those two words could encompass. ‘Gender’ meant women, and usually feminism; ‘generation’, the relations between women of different generations and ages, usually between women writers and between feminists. At stake, it seemed to me, was the question of ‘transmission’ on the threshold of the twentyfirst century */in the aftermath of a century marked by the violence of world war, global atrocity, and collective traumatic experience, but also several important positive social and political revolutions, including that of modern feminism. ISSN 1448-4528 print/1751-2964 online/07/010013-17 # 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14484520701211321

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I found myself on these occasions asking a set of questions, which are both theoretical and personal: How does one generation of women, in particular second-wave feminists, transmit its work, thoughts, and desires to the next? What does the next generation of women do with */or want from */the legacy of its precursors? Should we think in terms of filiation (inherited family lines, mothers and daughters, for instance), or should we think about affiliation (chosen association, invented genealogies)?1 Since autobiography has long been one of my passions, and a form with which many women writers and second-wave theorists have passionately engaged, I turned to its many first-person examples (including my own) looking for answers. In what follows, I sketch out a paradox of sorts that confronted me on my journey into the recent feminist past: that the mother Á /daughter relation, central to a great deal of women’s writing, and notably to the contemporary autobiographical tradition, has been good for literature */that is, aesthetically productive */and at the same time, politically bad, by which I mean divisive, as a model (or metaphor) for the relations between women involved in feminist transmission.2 The mother Á /daughter relation that locates its origins in conflict has at least two famous avatars. The first, the opening line from Luce Irigaray’s manifesto, ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other’: ‘With your milk, Mother, I swallowed ice’ (60). The second, equally famous, declaration is from the late 1970s, from Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born : ‘The cathexis between mother and daughter */essential, distorted, misused */i s the great unwritten story’. Rich goes on to describe that silenced narrative as ‘the flow of energy between biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other’ (225 Á /26). While Rich cites many literary examples from the works of women writers to illustrate the difficulty that often inhabits this intimate bond, the complicated chapter in Of Woman Born devoted to mothers and daughters posits the relationship as foundational to the future of feminism, even as that relation cries out for transformation: ‘any radical vision of sisterhood demands that we reintegrate’ inherited ideas about mothers and daughters, rejecting the economy of ‘patriarchal attitudes’, which lead us to ‘project all unwanted guilt, anger, shame, power, freedom, onto the ‘other’ woman’ (253).3 Irigaray’s monologue, which is almost an enactment of Rich’s language, also points to the necessity of fixing an angry and frozen relationship. I’d like to frame this reflection about the ways women have written and rewritten their lives through and against maternal models and metaphors with a vignette from my own experience, showing my hand and speaking from the perspective of an older, academic, 1970s feminist who is not a mother. The passage below comes from my book Bequest and Betrayal , published in 1996, long after my mother’s death. It’s 1981 and I’ve just gotten tenure at Barnard, the women’s college of Columbia University. I’m running the Women’s Studies Program. There’s to be a panel

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celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Barnard Women’s Center. I’m going to speak as the director of the program. I have not mentioned this to my mother. I still feel about my mother coming to see me perform just as I did in junior high on Open School Day, when I feigned laryngitis in order not to read my paper aloud in front of her. But because of a conference she attended at the Women’s Center a few years earlier, my mother’s been on their mailing list. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were going to speak,’ she demands to know, eyes flashing with hurt and indignation. ‘Why did you think I wouldn’t be interested,’ she continues, undaunted by my stony silence. ‘You know I’m always interested in what you do.’ ‘Well, you’re not a feminist,’ I reply sullenly. ‘Maybe I’m not a feminist the way you’re a feminist, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a feminist. I believe in women’s rights.’ My mother rests her case. I open my mouth but no words come out. Rather than repeat my analysis of how you can’t be a feminist if your husband (a man!) supports you financially, even if you have worked part-time all your life, I revert to adolescent gracelessness. ‘Well, you can come if you want to, but I’m going to be very busy and won’t be able to talk to you. You’ll have to have lunch by yourself,’ I add, hoping for maximum discouragement. ‘I’ll be at a table with the speakers.’ My mother says she’s coming anyway. The day of the panel, my mother arrives early to see my new office, even though I’ve told her it’s temporary: a hole in the wall behind the dining commons in which the event is to be held, but my first office to myself. She doesn’t really want to see the office, it turns out; she wants to show me a button she’s found to replace the one I’ve lost on my winter jacket (she’s bought us matching jackets in different colors). She’s pleased with herself and eager to detail the trouble she’s gone to. I’m supposed to exclaim what a great find it is */the button */what a bargain, how nice it was for her to do this for me. After all, she’s busy too, even if she doesn’t have a job. Fine, it’s fine, but I don’t want to think about buttons now. I have to give a talk. I move my mother into the hall, make her go sit by herself. I am forty years old. She is sixty-eight. She is still fixing my clothes, shortening hems, letting out and taking in seams. A tailor’s daughter, whose Hebrew name, Malka, she used to say, meant queen. She is dying of cancer, but neither of us knows this yet. If we did, we would still have the fight. (89 Á /90)

That dispiriting account of mother Á /daughter misunderstanding, which you can find more elegantly rendered in the works of a long list of well-known twentiethcentury women writers from Simone de Beauvoir to Marie Cardinal and Annie Ernaux, Vivian Gornick, Jill Ker Conway, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Carolyn Steedman, to name a few, provides the literary backdrop against which I want to contrast Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis , an experiment in life writing that offers the reader of European and American women’s autobiography a fascinating twist on the late twentieth-century model of mother Á /daughter generations. Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis , the first Iranian comic book, is the story of a girl’s coming of age during the Islamic Revolution. 4 In 1980, when Satrapi was ten years old, the young narrator explains, it became obligatory for girls to wear a headscarf to school. The very first image of the first volume is a class picture of Satrapi’s ten-year-old self, her face like that of her female classmates, framed by the black hood. The last image of the second volume shows a veiled Marjane leaving Iran for France in 1994. Her father, mother, and grandmother (both women also veiled) wave her off. The mother’s last words at the airport forbid

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the daughter to return as long as Iran remains under its repressive regime. Between the first image and the last, Satrapi’s panels chart the unfolding of a female coming of age, but the dilemmas of identity and development that typically provide the material of women’s autobiography are drawn against the demands of a collective narrative of sexual difference where the marks of gender are not just ideologically constructed, as we like to say, but also literally policed. Persepolis is an overtly political autobiography in which the matter of what it might be to live */or write */a woman’s life is inseparable from the constraints of a specific slice of historical time. In part because of the weight of this history, Persepolis escapes the classical oedipal psychodrama of conflict and separation theorised by second-wave feminists, which shapes so many women’s autobiographies. It’s not that the daughter doesn’t struggle with her parents before she finally leaves home, but Persepolis tells a different kind of story of attachment and separation, a form of intergenerational collaboration of the sort more commonly invoked by black feminist theorists. In Satrapi’s memoir, the daughter’s leaving */she actually leaves home twice: once for Austria, the second time for France */is refigured as a mode of transnational dislocation. Through the separation produced by political exile family ties are both suspended and reforged.5 What gives Satrapi’s project its distinctive place in the expanding domains of life writing, then, is neither the obviously new */the Iranian revolutionary saga in graphic form */nor the familiar story of the daughter leaving home and separating from her mother, but the arc of the autobiography created by the interlocking visual and narrative trajectories that link the two. In the interaction between the words and drawings, in the gaps, connections and silences that structure what we might think of as the ‘trans-verbal’ spaces of the comic-book world, Persepolis realigns the domains of the personal and the political, the singular and the collective, for the twenty-first century. Thinking about Satrapi’s innovation in representing generations of women led me back to Julia Kristeva’s now-classic ‘Women’s Time’, an essay I taught recently in a course on post-war women writers and intellectuals. Kristeva begins her meditation on generations of women in feminism with a slightly apocalyptic account of history. She replaces what she sees as an antiquated view of nation with a concept called ‘Europe’, against or within which she locates a ‘transEuropean temporality’ experienced by women, or at least by ‘existential feminists’ (18) and their political demands. Although I don’t share Kristeva’s dark views about feminism’s future, I want to borrow her redefinition of the notion of ‘generation’ as ‘less a chronology than a signifying space , a corporeal and desiring mental space’ (33). This shift from a temporal to a spatial metaphor makes it possible for Kristeva to posit the ‘ parallel existence’ (33) of the different women’s times she identifies, an interweaving of lived experience in spaces both separate and shared. The spatial metaphor collapses the vertical hierarchy of generation onto a horizontal plane */like the pages of a book, or a map, especially the contiguous panels of a comic book.

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In Persepolis the generations of women (inexorably and unambiguously identified as women by the regime) coexist in the overlapping spaces of dialogue and memory */a psychic and physical space made even more palpable to the reader by the conventions of this emergent genre: a graphic memoir whose narrative mode depends as much on the visual arrangement of relations as on chronological order. At the same time, however, because Persepolis is also an act of political witness, of testimony, the panels cannot be deciphered fully outside the grid of historical time. Generations of women, we might say in this borrowing, are shaped in their bodies and beliefs (Kristeva’s ‘corporeal and desiring mental space’) by their response to laws designed precisely to circumscribe their common realities. Thus, when in reaction to the government’s imposition of the veil, women, including Marjane’s mother, march for and against the wearing of the veil. In one of the earliest sequences Satrapi draws her mother, unveiled and wearing dark glasses, raising her arm in fierce protest. A German journalist snaps a picture of Marjane’s mother at one of the demonstrations and publishes it in a European magazine. In facing panels, the mother protests outside in the streets and the daughter, from the safety of her room, contemplates the photograph of her mother in the magazine with pride (Childhood 5). What happens to the mother Á /daughter plot when your mother is a dissident and a feminist, and your grandmother a nonconformist? Early in the narrative, in a sequence of three small panels, little Marjane stands between her mother and her grandmother in the kitchen as the women anxiously wait for Marjane’s father, who is outside taking forbidden pictures, to return home (Childhood 29). (Although the women are dissident and protest, the men */primarily */are the ones who go to prison and are subjected to torture.) In the drawing, the child stands waist-high between the solid bodies of the women, who protect and comfort her. The dangerous content of the conversation between the two women (whose heads in one panel are missing) as they speculate about the father’s return is marked by a code in the dialogue balloon that the little girl doesn’t understand (the women literally and figuratively speak over her head). The physical bonds among the women of three generations waiting in the kitchen form a strand of female identification; the scene of the women drawn against one another in the confines of domestic space produces a pause of intimate history within the broader strokes of national upheaval. (I should add that, while the bonds between women are especially strong, male family members */Marjane’s father, in particular */are also portrayed as sympathetic and wholly supportive of the women’s lives and ambitions.) The politics of revolution finally make schooling impossible for children from families who believe in intellectual freedom, and Marjane’s parents send their teenage daughter to Vienna. Lonely and confused, in the throes of a full-blown adolescent identity crisis, Marjane realises that she has to educate herself. Her education begins with books that she hopes will lead her to understand her existential dilemmas as an Iranian girl attending a French-speaking school in a German-speaking city.

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The experiment of female self-discovery through reading is represented across seven panels on a single page (see Figure 1). At the top, from left to right, against a black background are two panels that portray teenage Marjane first reading voraciously, then studying a book by Simone de Beauvoir. At the far left, three small panels flash back to Marjane’s memory of being a little girl watching her mother engrossed in reading. The daughter tries to decipher what has captured her mother’s attention, and identifies the title on the cover */The Mandarins (Beauvoir’s autobiographical, prize-winning novel), but stumbles over the author’s name: ‘Simone de Bavar’ is as far as she gets. ‘No, Beauvoir,’ her mother corrects. In the last of the memory panels the mother reads aloud from the novel in Persian, as Marjane ponders the meaning of the words, question marks forming above her head. ‘But I was a little young,’ the older narrator observes, thinking back on the incomprehension of her younger self (Return 21). Immediately adjacent to the memory panels of the earlier scene of reading are two images of Marjane trying to pee standing up and peeing sitting down. The narrator explains that she learned from reading The Second Sex that if women urinated standing up their entire view of the world would change. She tries but is discouraged by the results. In the second panel Marjane is hunched glumly on the lowered toilet seat, concluding that before she could learn to pee as a man, she’d have to learn to become a liberated and emancipated woman. The puddle on the floor of the failed experiment in changing her standpoint in the world migrates into the folds of the trousers gathered around her feet as she meditates philosophically on what it means to be a woman. Beauvoir’s analysis of the implications of the ‘erect position’ for males appears in the section on childhood that begins with the famous line, ‘One is not born, rather one becomes a woman’ (267). Beauvoir underlines the crucial role of customary positions in ‘contemporary Western society’ for the girl’s perception of gender relations: ‘This difference,’ she argues, ‘constitutes for the little girl the most striking sexual differentiation’ (273). Later in that chapter, still narrating the drama of becoming a woman, Beauvoir observes: It is a strange experience for an individual, who feels himself to be an autonomous and transcendent subject, an absolute, to discover inferiority in himself as a fixed and preordained essence: it is a strange experience for whoever regards himself as the One to be revealed to himself as otherness, alterity. This is what happens to the little girl when, doing her apprenticeship for life in the world, she grasps what it means to be a woman therein. (297)

Marjane has this painful experience of finding herself ‘othered’ twice: once in her own country, when the regime reifies the differences between the sexes, and again in Vienna, where being Iranian makes her seem foreign to herself. In this crucial turning point along the journey of self-knowledge, Marjane reads Simone de Beauvoir not only as a troubled adolescent looking for herself in books, trying to understand what it means to become a woman, but also as a young Iranian

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woman on her own in Europe, in relation to her emerging transnational existence, a bi-cultural identity for which she does not yet have a language.6 More specifically, for the model of transmission I’m proposing, the daughter reads a book that is already part of her mother’s library (though not written in her mother tongue) */a volume her mother is willing to share with her, even prematurely. The scene of reading, then, is one that not only connects mother and daughter through the book The Second Sex ; it also connects mother and daughter through memory across geographical and temporal separation. On the very same page, Marjane’s mother is sitting in her armchair in Teheran reading Simone de Beauvoir, observed by the little girl, while Marjane the adolescent is stretched out on her bed, then sitting in her room, reading in Vienna. The interplay of the panels spatialises the relations of separation and connection. The three small boxes stacked up like a set of blocks articulate the daughter’s visual memory of her childhood self watching her mother read and interrupting her reading. Juxtaposed to the memory boxes, against a stark, black background, two vertical panels convey the daughter’s unsuccessful attempt to understand her place in the world, turning theory into practice: peeing standing up. The rooms and the experiences of self-realisation that take place in them, though attached to different geographies and temporalities, sit side by side on the page; past inhabits the present and the present reinterprets memory. The daughter tries to find herself through remembering not just her mother’s words or love but also her mother’s reading */the scene of her self-absorption in which mother is separate from daughter, yet potentially connected through a shared narrative. The daughter’s reading, however, if inspired by her mother’s feminism, can become part of her life only through her own experience, through her own body, as it were. The word ‘feminism’ is never used, but feminist consciousness, often expressed through irony and juxtaposition, infuses this universe constrained by gender polarities. (For example, on the page directly opposite the Beauvoir experiment, Marjane dips into Sartre, the favourite author of her lefty schoolmates */‘The notion of consciousness comes from man’s lived experience’ */only to confess that she found him ‘a little annoying’ [Return 20].) We might think of this effort of self-understanding (what we once called consciousness-raising) among women of different generations as a case of feminist intertextuality. The arresting juxtaposition of Satrapi’s images helps us imagine a set of relations between texts and readers */readers existing in different historical times and ideological situations, as well as quite literally different physical locations, who connect through the mediation of books. Let me offer another concrete example of this kind of feminist intertexuality, uncannily similar to the reading scene Satrapi illustrates, that derives from the personal history of Laura Freixas, a Spanish novelist. At a conference of contemporary European writers around the theme of gender and generations held in Bath in 2005, Freixas, born in 1958, described her mother’s obsession with reading, reading French novels, and, in particular, the work of Simone de Beauvoir. The little girl felt ignored. ‘My mother was always reading,’ Freixas said, ‘and so when I was young, I wanted to be a book */or failing that, to become

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a writer.’ In the repressive years of Franco’s Spain, the ‘patron saint’ of the novelist’s mother was Simone de Beauvoir.

Reading Generations


During a recent sabbatical in London, I was working on a memoir about the years I lived in Paris, from 1961 to 1967, when I was young. One cold winter evening, I went to hear Doris Lessing read from her new book The Grandmothers in a West End theatre. Lessing’s landmark novel, The Golden Notebook , which was published in 1962, stunned me when I first read it (in 1966, while I was still trying to make my life turn out well in Paris, a little like Marjane in Vienna). The audience at Lessing’s reading was populated primarily by women who looked, I thought, like some version of me: lots of women with grey hair, lined faces, glasses, sensible shoes, and the occasional cane. Grandmothers, presumably. Also, a few younger women as well as a sprinkling of quite young, leftlooking men. Not being a grandmother myself, I had been slightly hesitant about going to hear Lessing speak about a book titled The Grandmothers . I feared a celebration of grandmotherhood, which is even more fashionable today, including among second-wave feminists, than motherhood as destiny in the 1950s. But the novella ‘The Grandmothers’, which gives the new book its title, is more about older women having good sex with young men, and the friendship between women, than that stage of life itself; each woman has a long affair with the other’s teenage son (maybe this is a celebration of grandmotherhood). During the discussion period, I felt emboldened to ask Lessing what she thought now, in retrospect, about the reception of The Golden Notebook , since she had often been very irritated by having the book seen as an opening salvo of second-wave feminism, especially in the United States. Rather than blowing me off as an irritating American feminist, Lessing answered anecdotally, almost warmly. She quoted a woman who came up to her at a conference to say: ‘I read your book, my mother told me to read it, I told my daughter to read it.’ Then she described visiting a reading group in London and hearing women discuss the novel. She realised with something akin to shock, she said, that what for the young women belonged to the realm of history, for her belonged to the realm of memory. She remembered on her pulses, as it were, a time that for the younger readers belonged only to the past */a then of their mothers, or even their grandmothers. The novel, she concluded, ‘had a life of its own’. Lessing had actually written something quite similar in the preface to the 1994 reissue of the novel: I meet women in their fifties who say, ‘I was influenced by this book, and I gave it to my daughter and she loves it.’ Or a young woman says, ‘My mother gave me this book because she said it was important to her and now I understand her much better.’ I used to hear, ‘My mother read it and now I do’ */so that’s two

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Figure 1

Books.

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Return 21. Courtesy of Pantheon

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generations, but the other day I was told of a grandmother who gave it to her son who gave it to his daughter. Three generations. Yes, I am indeed flattered. (xi)


Like The Second Sex , The Golden Notebook continues to be read and understood by different generations of readers, by women of different ages, with different life histories, and translated into various languages. What seems important and potentially useful in looking for non-biological models of generations is precisely the life of the book */a book that in fact changes with its readers, through the dialogues of feminist intertextuality. At the event in London, Lessing reiterated what she said in the 1971 preface to the novel, that for her The Golden Notebook was about what the character Anna says to her friend Molly in the first sentence of dialogue: ‘The point is, the point is [. . .] that as far as I can see, everything’s cracking up’ (3). In the preface, Lessing explains how this notion applies to the relations between Anna and her lover, Saul, a blocked writer, as well as their relations to other people in the book: ‘This theme of ‘breakdown’,’ Lessing goes on to say, ‘that sometimes when people ‘crack up’ it is a way of self-healing, of the inner self’s dismissing false dichotomies and divisions’ for Lessing was the novel’s ‘central theme’. But the importance of this experience was overlooked, Lessing complains, because of the attention reviewers paid to the ‘sex war’ (xiv). When I discovered The Golden Notebook in Paris, I wrote to my mother suggesting that she read it. Given the state of our relations, this recommendation was probably not delivered in an entirely friendly fashion. My mother asked suspiciously whether I thought the book ‘applied to her particularly’, as she put it in her letter. My mother preferred non-fiction to fiction, especially biography, and we were not in the habit of discussing literature, especially not by mail, but my guess is that the book told me something about what I was living through that I wanted my mother to know: I was cracking up. I preferred to have her learn it through a book, rather than from me. Like Marjane, far from home I connected to my mother */or wanted to */through the pages of a significant book. At the end of Bequest and Betrayal , I drew a portrait of myself at a crossroads in my life, trying to understand my relations to the previous generations of my family. I described two moments: a dream involving my mother, and a scene in which I am standing in a cemetery where my parents and my paternal grandparents are buried. When I was deciding how to end the book, I found myself hesitating between two possible final images: the dream with my mother, which is a scene of unexpected reconciliation, and a scene in the cemetery, which is a scene of anger and refusal. A graduate student who had been helping me with the final edit of the book lobbied for the scene with my mother as the closing image. I resisted. I wanted to keep the anger alive. Since the recent death of two friends with whom I shared my years in feminism, I’ve wondered about that decision, about its wisdom, both as writing, and as a statement about women and generations. Why was I so determined not to end on a dream of collaboration?

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Before I published Bequest and Betrayal , I read from its first chapter at a conference organised around the themes of the body, memory, and life writing. The conference was a mixed event, in part to honour He ´le `ne Cixous, in part to give an example of contemporary feminist literary criticism. Before I read the paper I had prepared, I described the dream about my mother, which I had had the night before. After my presentation Cixous’s translator came up to me and told me that ‘He ´le `ne’ liked the dream. (Cixous, I should perhaps mention, was very attached to her mother */as well as to her dreams.) At her own presentation to the conference, she explained that she always wrote directly upon awaking, writing out of her dreams. I think her writing narrative inspired my dream. Perversely, though, Cixous’s positive reaction to my dream made me feel I should not end the book with the dream. Reuniting with the mother was too predictably feminist, and symbolic of a mode of feminism I had always resisted, even if, as Cixous herself had famously said, the ‘mother, too, is a metaphor’ (881). In an important essay about identification, psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin argues that the self ‘can and will allow all its voices to speak, including the voice of the other within’ (‘Shadow’ 108). It seems to me now that even fifteen years after her death, when I wrote my book, I was not able to admit there was something about my mother I didn’t want to lose. Now that I’m more practiced in loss, I can see that the dream was about something I do value, even if, in order to experience a sense of connection with my mother */both of us alive */she had to be dead, and I had to dream it.

The Grandmother’s Breasts Throughout the two volumes of Persepolis , the mother Á /daughter relation, which is represented as one of sporadic struggle as well as underlying complicity, is supplemented by crucial encounters with the grandmother. Her grandmother’s motto */‘Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself’ [inte`gre ] (Childhood 150) */haunts Marjane during the painful adolescent years in Vienna when selfknowledge eludes her. The words bear the wisdom of an earlier generation’s experience, but they are also inseparable from the connection between bodies that touch in the same space. The night before Marjane’s departure for Europe, her grandmother comes to spend the night. From her vantage point in the bed they share Marjane observes her grandmother undress; she marvels as the grandmother shakes jasmine flowers out of her bra and the flowers constellate the dark space of the room. ‘Grandma,’ the girl asks, ‘how do you have such round breasts at your age?’ Her grandmother explains that she soaks them in a bowl of ice water every morning and night for ten minutes ( Childhood 150). Marjane says she knew the answer; she just liked hearing the words. This scene, which precedes the farewell between Marjane and her parents at the airport, establishes the bodily grounds for memory: the smell of her grandmother’s bosom: ‘I’ll never forget that smell’ (Childhood 150).

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Later, back in Teheran, when she is a student at the university, Marjane takes a public stand against the administrators who demand that women assume the responsibility of covering themselves completely so as not to excite men, whereas the men can wear revealing clothes. As a result of her intervention, Marjane is invited to redesign the uniform for women */‘Subtle differences that meant a lot to us’ (Return 144), the narrator concludes. This episode of rebellion makes up for an earlier one of surprising cowardice for which her grandmother had chastised her severely: ‘It’s fear that makes us lose our conscience. It’s also what transforms us into cowards. You had guts! I’m proud of you’ (Return 137). Marjane invokes her grandmother’s discourse as the model for her own selfknowledge: ‘And this is how I recovered my self-esteem and dignity. For the first time in a long time, I was happy with myself’ ( Return 144). And it is again the grandmother who gives Marjane the advice she needs when she breaks down in tears, on the verge of divorcing her husband. Her grandmother cites herself as a model, invoking her own divorce of fifty-five years earlier: ‘I always told myself that I would be happier alone than with a shitmaker!!’ (Return 179). Although Marjane’s mother and father both also support their daughter’s right to divorce, it is the grandmother’s advice, based on her own history of non-conformity, that empowers Marjane to tell her husband that their marriage is over. When Satrapi recreates her life as autobiography in Persepolis , she draws on her mother’s and her grandmother’s dissident narratives, as well as the emotional intimacies of their shared experiences. In Kristeva’s imaginary third-generation space, conflicts over rights for women disappear along with an insistence on sexual difference. This new era in women’s time becomes instead the backdrop against which the ‘singularity of each person and, even more [. . .] the multiplicity of every person’s identification’ (‘Women’s Time’ 35) can emerge. Kristeva’s vision of singularity combined with multiplicity reappears in almost the same language twenty years later, at the end of her recent book on Colette, the third in her trilogy of portraits of ‘feminine genius’, which includes Hannah Arendt and Melanie Klein. In the conclusion to the analysis of Colette, which recapitulates in slightly different language the phases of women’s emancipation struggles and the demands for equality described in ‘Women’s Time’, Kristeva seeks both to dissociate herself from ‘feminism as a mass movement’ (Colette 404) and to acknowledge Simone de Beauvoir’s role as a precursor in the study of female subjectivity. Kristeva positions herself as taking the analysis of what Beauvoir called in The Second Sex ‘individual opportunities’ to the next level, redefining, or updating, Beauvoir’s quest for freedom as a quest for happiness. In an act of intellectual affiliation, Kristeva expresses the wish to ‘dedicate this triptych to [Beauvoir’s] memory’ (Colette 407). The last words of Persepolis express an intense desire for freedom, and a freedom inseparable from the condition of women generally */the women who as a group still must fight for equal rights along with political freedom from a repressive regime. Unlike Kristeva, I don’t think that feminism as a mass movement needs to disappear in order for singularity to be expressed */on the contrary. And this is precisely why The Second Sex appears as it does in the

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memoir of a young woman’s struggle to assume her individuality */even, in Kristeva’s terms, her singularity as a dissident artist. The panels devoted to Marjane’s reading of The Second Sex are a sign of Satrapi’s affiliation with a long history of feminist engagement */an affiliation that is both transgenerational and transnational. At the same time, I’ve been arguing, there is a piece of this history that is changing, that needs changing. The mother, Adrienne Rich powerfully argued in 1976, glossing the pernicious effects of matrophobia, ‘stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr’ (236). Perhaps it is time to re-place those models in their political context and history */better yet, in the vast and living library of women’s time */seeing them as landmarks of a struggle for change, symptoms of a nightmare of oppression from which we longed to escape, rather than a universal and timeless structure. The mother Á /daughter dyad enshrined by second-wave feminism as an icon of over-identification */for better or for worse */needs to be interrupted, disrupted, by literary texts. Works like Persepolis , from the third generation, both read the past and move us into the future.7 Whatever the conflicts involved in the young woman’s coming of age, the story she tells moves past the stuck places of mother Á /daughter violence, which characterised so much 1970s feminism.8 We might today more usefully re-imagine earlier generations not so much as our mothers, or indeed grandmothers, which tends to keep us locked into the fatal logic of Rich’s ‘biologically alike bodies’ (generations separated by time but caught in the same story, which they are doomed to repeat), but rather as contiguous spaces, or texts and intertexts: palimpsests of difference recording earlier struggles that enable and renew our own. It is in that sense that books */whether The Second Sex or The Golden Notebook */serve better than bodies as transitional objects that permit generations of women to talk to one another across the temporal divide that separates them; to connect through history and memory. These books are indeed spaces of the imagination */and is it an accident that they are, to a greater or lesser degree, autobiographical? */that bridge the gaps between mothers and daughters, daughters and grandmothers. Colette describes the phenomenon in the expansive last lines of her autobiographical novel Break of Day , when she transforms her banished lover into literature, time past into space: ‘a quickset hedge, spindrift, meteors, an open and unending book, a cluster of grapes, a ship, an oasis’ (143). Maybe it’s only in novels and through a writer’s wish that bodies become books, but we can try. Break of Day is a fiction of failed romance that intersects with a mother Á /daughter correspondence; alternatively, it’s a narrative about a meeting between mother and daughter (punctuated by the love story) that never takes place, except in memory and on the page. The book opens with the narrator, Colette’s mother, announcing that she will not be visiting her daughter because she is waiting for her flowering cactus plant to bloom; it closes on the image of the mother’s last letter */‘all messages from a hand that was trying to transmit to

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me a new alphabet’ (142). The separation from the mother in Colette’s pen becomes the matter of an entire life’s work.9 The apparently euphoric mother Á /daughter relation in Break of Day would seem to occupy the opposite end of the spectrum from Irigaray’s dysphoric diatribe. But perhaps adoration and dread are simply the twin poles that define the figure whom Jessica Benjamin calls the ‘omnipotent mother’.10 The end of ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir without the Other’, with which we began, might be said to transcend the cold rage with which it opens: ‘With your milk, Mother, I swallowed ice’ (60). The last line points to a desire for something else */something like a letter in a new alphabet that the daughter sends back to her dying mother, the wish to find each other on the same page of a different book: ‘And what I wanted from you,’ Irigaray writes to the woman who occupies the space of the mother, ‘was this: that in giving me life, you still remain alive’ (67). If the daughter of the mother shaped by patriarchy remains coiled in anger, ready to spring into attack, the daughter of feminist mothers have other tales to tell */in which the mother remains alive: as another, but not the other woman. This is one of the reasons why I’ve turned to Satrapi, whose stylised life drawings escape and complicate the ineluctable binary of being dead or alive. The complication involves sympathy for the mother and the recognition of the role of history as it shapes the destiny of a given generation. In Mary Kelly’s ninety-second film loop, ‘WLM Demo Remix’, recently displayed in New York at Postmasters Gallery (Winter 2005), the images of a 1970 feminist demonstration marking the fiftieth anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, dissolves to be replaced by a rally of women held in 2005. Because of the group pose, the women look similar but are not, of course, identical. Kelly’s video makes it possible to visualise the changing relations between generations, without the one ever eliminating the other; there is always a return, but it is never the exactly the same. In Women’s Lives: The View from the Threshold , the book from which I drew my epigraph, Carolyn Heilbrun acknowledges the need for a ‘different model than that of mothers and daughters’ (100) to emerge if there is to be continuity between generations. ‘We have learned,’ she writes sadly, ‘that the woman professor cannot hold her own as a maternal figure.’ She urges feminists of older and younger generations to ‘search for new ways of relating one to the other’; to exit from ‘a play in which our parts are written for us’ (101). This drama of the threshold */the liminal place, as she puts it */between destinies is precisely the one that Marjane, the artist in exile, occupies on the eve of her departure. What I am wishing to add here to Heilbrun’s analysis is a slightly different view of the book and the library. If feminists of Heilbrun’s lonelier generation did not have books waiting for them, 1970s feminists do: we have the work of younger writers who, like Satrapi, are capable of looking back to feminist precursors and who can inspire us to look forward to places we might not be able to occupy ourselves, except in our imaginations. At the end of the first volume, when Marjane departs for Vienna, after encouraging her daughter to be brave, the mother collapses at the airport. In a

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posture that evokes the iconography of the pieta`, Marjane’s father carries his prostrate wife in his arms, literally supporting the weight of her suffering. Although we are not given many details about the mother’s life beyond her dissidence, her feminism, and her desire for her daughter’s freedom (‘I have always wanted you to become independent, educated, cultured,’ she says when Marjane announces her plans to marry, ‘and here you are getting married at twenty-one’ [163]), as readers we are offered clues (Return 49) rather than an independent storyline about the cost of maternal sacrifice. Bottom line: it’s too late for the mother to leave.11 The tableau at the end of volume 1 registers the mother’s pain as part of the cost of the daughter’s freedom, but her suffering is not oppositional. On the last page of the memoir, after Marjane’s mother tells her that she must leave ‘for good’, that she is a ‘free woman’, and forbids her to come back, Marjane waves goodbye to her parents and grandmother; the generations physically, spatially, overlap in their relation to history and to feminism */to freedom for women and for nations. Leaving this time, the artist/narrator comments, is easier than the departure ten years earlier for Vienna at the same airport */both for her mother and for herself. But she draws her grandmother’s face streaked with tears (her father cries too). The memoir’s last words are for the grandmother, with whom there will be no reunion.12 ‘She died January 4, 1996 [. . .] Freedom had a price’ (Childhood 187). The presence, even muted, of the mother’s story and discourse about freedom, as well as the grandmother’s cantankerous wisdom, means that in Persepolis there are always the scenarios of three generations. Abandoning the constraints of Iran for the freedom of Europe as a young woman, the narrator recreates herself in the form of a dissident artist, and she takes her mother’s and grandmother’s stories further than they could */while keeping them alive through the journey of reparative memory. On the page of farewells, however, the beloved grandmother’s face remains inscribed in sadness, her tears pearling the memoir’s final panel. Separated from her family by a glass barrier, Marjane turns to wave as she moves to face a new destiny alone. The reader’s eye follows the diagonal of hands waving that almost seem to touch across the pane of transparent glass. The hands do not meet but they exchange signs, signs of farewell but also of a new beginning, signalling the first page of the ‘open and unending book’ that is the artist’s voyage out. Satrapi tells the story of a girl who leaves home and becomes an artist. She leaves home not to get away from an oppressive family but to escape an oppressive political culture. But, as we know, it’s not easy to get out of the family, even if you leave home.

Acknowledgements The image from Persepolis: The Story of a Return appears courtesy of Marjane Satrapi and Pantheon Books.

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Notes


[1] The two terms are not without common properties and problems. For a discussion of these concepts from the early 1980s, see Edward Said’s ‘Secular Criticism’ and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s ‘Forward into the Past: The Female Affiliation Complex’. [2] This question is analysed by Astrid Henry in Not My Mother’s Sister from the perspective of a third-wave feminist. [3] Marianne Hirsch’s pioneering study The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism is perhaps the earliest full-scale analysis of mother Á /daughter relations in literature and second-wave feminism. See also her more recent essay ‘Feminism at the Maternal Divide: A Diary’, which revisits the history of feminist theory and motherhood, and in particular the political struggles undertaken by mothers. [4] The inaugural status of Persepolis as genre is signalled in the preface to the French publication of the memoir, which is authored by a fellow writer of a graphic memoir, David B. [5] This pattern of collaboration in the face of exile is also embedded in the metaphors of translation that conclude Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior . Satrapi lives in Paris and publishes in French. She also often publishes political and autobiographical commentary in the online version of the New York Times . [6] It is important to remember that Satrapi writes in French about her emergence into this new identity; it’s as though the language of the memoir is also the story of the passage out of childhood and the childhood self */a passage out of the family, while drawing on its material. [7] Henry makes a similar argument from the perspective of a third-wave feminist scholar about the way the mother Á /daughter model reduces the range of generational relationships. She shows ‘how the mother Á /daughter relationship is the central trope in depicting the relationship between the so-called second and third waves of US feminism and how the employment of this metaphor */or matrophor */has far-reaching implications for contemporary feminism’ (2). [8] I’m doing a little violence of my own to Kristeva’s model by assimilating the mother Á /daughter binary to the ‘symbolic contract’ (‘Women’s Time’ 21) that she sees as determining the nature of female subjectivity. But I believe that it’s not possible to separate a certain view of generations from the theorisation of mother Á /daughter conflict, as well as from the questions of sexual difference that drive Kristeva’s inquiry. [9] Kristeva gives the ‘new alphabet’ pride of place in her study of Colette; Marianne Hirsch titles her reading of Colette’s novel in The Mother/Daughter Plot with the phrase ‘An Open and Unending Book’; most recently, Katharine Jensen revisits the stakes of the mother Á /daughter relationship that has been idealised by many feminist critics in ‘Idealization and the Haunted Daughter in Colette’s La Naissance du jour ’. [10] Benjamin’s ‘The Omnipotent Mother’ approaches the problem of the monolithic mother Á /daughter dyad from a psychoanalytic perspective in which the ‘third term’ (96) is also a ‘space’ in which female subjectivity can and must be renegotiated. [11] I am grateful to Hana Wirth-Nesher for bringing the iconography of the pieta` image to my attention as the clue to deciphering the cost of the mother’s story. See also Patricia Storace’s remarks on the image in the New York Review of Books (42). In Vienna, when the mother visits her daughter in exile, she brings the comfort of gestures in which mother cradles daughter (Return 49).

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[12]

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Readers of Satrapi’s Embroideries will have further evidence of the grandmother’s life story. And although this is never commented upon, the grandfather’s name is Satrapi, like the author. Why Satrapi took that name could reflect the danger of political dissidence */i.e. the author’s desire to protect her parents */or the choice of the family name with the more distinguished lineage

References


Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex . Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage, 1989. Benjamin, Jessica. ‘The Omnipotent Mother.’ Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. / /. ‘The Shadow of the Other Subject.’ Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and * * Gender in Psychoanalysis . New York: Routledge, 1998. Cixous, He ´le `ne. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa.’ Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 (1976): 875 Á /94. Colette, Sidonie Gabrielle. Break of Day . Trans. Enid McLeod. New York: Farrar, 1982. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. ‘Forward into the Past: The Female Affiliation Complex.’ No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century; The War of the Words. New Haven: Yale UP, 1988. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Women’s Lives: The View from the Threshold . Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. Henry, Astrid. Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-wave Feminism . Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot . Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. / /. ‘Feminism at the Maternal Divide: A Diary.’ The Politics of Motherhood . Ed. Annelise * * Orleck and Diana Taylor. Hanover: University of New England Press, 1996. Irigaray, Luce. ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other.’ Trans. He ´le `ne Vivienne Wenzel. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7 (1981): 60 Á /67. Kristeva, Julia. Colette. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. / /. ‘Women’s Time.’ Trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake. Signs: Journal of Women in * * Culture and Society 7 (1981): 13 Á /35. Trans. of ‘Le temps des femmes.’ 34/44: Cahiers de recherche de sciences des textes et documents 5 (1979): 5 Á /19. Jensen, Katharine. ‘Idealization and the Haunted Daughter in Colette’s La Naissance du jour .’ Ms. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts . New York: Vintage, 1977. Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook . New York: Harper, 1994. Miller, Nancy K. Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death . New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution . 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1986. Said, Edward. ‘Secular Criticism.’ The World, the Text, and the Critic . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood . Vol. 1. New York: Pantheon, 2003. / /. Persepolis: The Story of a Return . Vol. 2. New York: Pantheon, 2004. * * / /. Embroideries . New York: Pantheon, 2005. * * Storace, Patricia. ‘A Double Life in Black and White.’ New York Review of Books 7 Apr. 2005: 40 Á /43.

Women in Satrapis Persepolis

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