CREATING AN ESTATE OF HAPPINESS FOR YOURSELF
-Dr. Jernail S. Anand
Those who love silver and crave for gold
Will say one day, we have committed suicide.
- Kaifi Azmi
The men of business in olden times would write on their 'Gullaks' (chests) would write ‘Shubh Labh’ (Just Profit). Those times when people were not so ambitious for personal growth, were better times, because the general tone of society was that of goodness, kindness, and an all pervading sense of mutual understanding and love for humanity.
PROFIT JUST OR UNJUST
Profit is fine, but how can it be ‘Shubh’ [Just]? Who knows the difference between Shubh and Ashubh [Just and Unjust]? If the business is carried out with just practices, it gives joy. But when we resort to unjust practices to maximize profits, it spreads pain. As most of the people are after unjust profits, as widespread is the incidence of pain. Pain is symptomatic of some abnormality in the body. And when it remains untreated over years, it gives rise to chronic ailments. We are all afflicted with a malaise: psycho-spiritual sickness. We are running after wealth and in the pursuit, lose the joy of living. At the same time, we push thousands below the poverty line with our indiscrete actions aimed at self-promotion.
FAIR IS FOUL: THE ZONE OF THE UNDESIRABLE
Fair is foul, foul is fair,
hover through fog and filthy air".
Macbeth's witches make a great statement. The civilization represents the ‘fair’ which the witches declare as ‘foul’. For ordinary intelligence, it is difficult to distinguish between Right and Not Right. People doing ordinary jobs and living somehow, don’t even realize when they have stepped into the Zone of the Undesirable. But the essential question is: Even if they know, will they stop? The entire populace is busy in making fast buck. Some lose their scruples when life is too hard on them. And some, on whom luck has smiled, think why we should look back?
LOVE AND WAR
Love is a sacred emotion, yet people believe that everything is fair in love and war. ‘Tam sam dand bhed’ are the words oft repeated by men who have no scruples. Men, in general, are bound by a sense of the moral and the immoral, but we take the first opportunity to override these considerations. It has to be noted that men in general hold on to principles. But there is only one variety of people who lack all scruples. It is the politicians. For whom, every day is an undeclared war, which must be won. So, principles are a suicidal passion for a politician. Those who use uneven methods to win their love, too are never forgiven by gods who are closely monitoring our conduct. Have we seen any politician dying an enviable death, except in case of a few, who acted as statesmen, and upheld their principles? In love too, if we miss the moral mark, all unions fizzle out leaving behind a family on the rocks.
THE RIGHT CONDUCT
Friends who are well endowed often ask: what is bad in making money? One of them deals in shares. If they rise, what is wrong in it? Some have invested their money in real estate from where they get interest on their wealth. The question is: what is unethical about it. Further on, if you start an industry, and if gods are kind and it starts prospering, what is wrong in it? Is ambition an unethical passion? Can we stop people from growing up?
These are scorching questions. We cannot stop people from starting their business, and everyone wants that the business should prosper. In the same way, the man of the stock market too cannot be faulted if he gets a fortune by a rise in the value of his shares.
The basic issue here is: Do you want happiness? Or you simply want Wealth?
If your preference is for Wealth, then all your pursuits are justified. But don’t blame gods if your son develops some problem, or your daughter elopes with someone. Your wife can have asthma. And you too can have blood pressure. You may have to visit a heart surgeon, to get a stent. Wealth brings in its train all these unceremonious things. If you have too much of it, one of your sons may decide to get rid of you and grab the entire wealth you have created. Anything can be expected from jealous gods. You are entirely innocent. There is nothing wrong in making fast buck. Millions have been making millions. And you can hear the high voices of celebrations from across the continents. Men of success, enjoying the fruits of their labour.
However, if Happiness is your passion, then, it all depends on how you use your wealth. If you are a man of business, let me take you back to the beginning of this article. Remember ‘Shubh Labh’. Every penny that you earn should be through ‘just’ means. If gods are kind and bless you with wealth, you can share it with those who need it. It will make the cosmic forces happy. And this happiness will reflect in your eyes, on your forehead, and in your body language. Look at the body language of those who died for the country. S. Bhagat Singh, Lala Hardyal. And look at the body language of our great money makers who have their wealth in Swiss banks. It is all a matter of choice. Happiness or Wealth- both cannot be put together, unless you have a mind trained in cosmic sympathy, and you possess the power to part with your wealth so that you can create an estate of happiness for yourself.
The final word is: Think of your happiness, and create as much wealth as much as you can, but make sure, it does not make anyone poor. If it can uplift others also, it is an act of goodness, and loved by gods.
Dr Jernail Singh Anand, President of the International Academy of Ethics, is author of 161 books in English poetry, fiction, non-fiction, philosophy and spirituality. He was awarded Charter of Morava, the great Award by Serbian Writers Association, Belgrade and his name was engraved on the Poets’ Rock in Serbia. The Academy of Arts and philosophical Sciences of Bari [Italy] honoured him with the award of an Honourable Academic. Recently, he was awarded Doctor of Philosophy [Honoris Causa] by the University of Engg and Management, Jaipur. Recently, he organized an International Conference on Contemporary Ethics at Chandigarh. His most phenomenal book is Lustus:The Prince of Darkness [first epic of the Mahkaal Trilogy]. [Email: anandjs55@yahoo.com Mobile: 919876652401[Whatsapp]
Link Bibliography:
https://atunispoetry.com/2023/12/08/indian-author-dr-jernail-s-anand-honoured-at-the-60th-belgrade-international-meeting-of-writers/
IF I WERE A TREE
If I were a tree
the tree, hidden inside me.
Perhaps a large Mango tree,
all the bird's nests, all the beehives
built inside me;
Bees are flying flowers to flowers
to collect bud nectar.
Birds sing and dance in the branches of flowers.
If I would be a tree
The tree, hidden inside me.
My branches and leaves are umbrellas
that shelter from summer dust and heat.
People sit under the trees
in hot waves of air and humidity.
Like an air cooler, but in a safe way
trees reduce climate misery.
I wish I would be a tree
the tree, hidden inside me.
The rain drops on my leaves
the insect hides below to flee.
The sparrows are bathing feathers are falling
like a paratrooper swinging in the air.
In the beehive, the queen came out from her chamber
Her Majesty bath in the tender;
the rainwater flashing through the root
The ants are climbing to reach the bark
Beneath the bark, there are colonies of troops.
I wish I could be a tree
the tree, hidden inside me.
My fruits are sweet and sour
with green, golden and red cores.
Flavour and freshness,
mind-blowing fragrance.
It's beauty and happiness
It's courage and kindness!
I wish I would be a tree
the tree, hidden inside me.
THE BLUE MIMOSA
I had seen,
the blue Mimosa trees in blossoms
and was overwhelmed by its beauty
but I don’t know its name.
You’re talking about it,
when the season of flower is gone.
And; when you come to my life
I noticed in your eyes,
the season has gone again.
This time, the season of love.
Because-
you were in enormous pain
for your past.
ANOTHER TRY
Sometimes,
I am not afraid of life
nor afraid of death.
But I think,
what will happen
after our death.
Will there someone waiting for you
someone else will be mine
or will we become dust
or a molecule with an endless life.
How far we will travel
how many galaxies
how many stars
will you read my poems
when I will be the universal traveler.
Shall I feel this loneliness while
traveling star after star.
I want this human life back
with another try.
You will sit with me
I will sit beside.
And that will be time for our divine love
without endless cry.
THE SUNSET IN NAGARKOT HILLS
I am standing with a friend
yet I am alone
and thinking about you.
The sun is setting in the west
of Nagarkot hills.
Twilight is visible at skyline
clouds kiss the forest greens.
Birds and insects are making noisy sounds
evening temperature is getting chilled.
fogs and clouds are flying like soft cottons
and I am alone
with many people.
Most tourist couple have already left,
how unlucky they are
those did not kiss each other
in this foggy mountain evening.
IF YOU CALL ME
Distance creates disappearance
time kills memories.
The world is a small village
but we are from two countries.
Two different races, religion
and ethnicity.
If you call me,
I will fly like an eagle
if you call me
I will try like an ant.
if you call me
I will love you like a human
giving up the obsession.
If you call me
I will build a home;
our two bodies
will become one
with the love of the divine.
so, please call me
please call me back
let’s be you are mine
I am yours
let’s fulfill this human life.
SOLITUDE
Here,
I have no family
no country
no beloved
yet, I hold the entire
universe in my heart.
-alone and lonely.
THOSE TWO EYES
I have fought
in so many difficulties
yet, I lost
in front of those two eyes.
Tareq Samin is an Author, Human Rights Activist and Social Entrepreneur. He is the editor of the bilingual literary journal Sahitto. He has authored ten books. His poems have been translated in more than 25 languages of which English, Spanish, Chinese, German, French, Italian are few to mention. His poems, short stories and articles have also published in more than 40 countries.
Tareq Samin received the ‘International Best Poets Award-2020’ from The International Poetry Translation And Research Centre (IPTRC), China and the Greek Academy of Arts and Writing. He has been awarded ‘Honorable Mention’ in Foreign Language Authors category for his poem ‘Another Try’ in ‘The prize il Meleto di Guido Gozzano Agliè’ poetry competition held on 12 September 2020 in Turin, Italy. In July 2021 he won Naji Naaman Literary Prize 2021.
Tareq Samin is a former fellow of Martin-Roth-Initiative Scholarship. The Martin Roth-Initiative is a joint program of ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) and the Goethe-Institut. As a Martin-Roth-Initiative Scholarship fellow he was a guest writer in Goethe-Institut, Kolkata, India, and Kathmandu, Nepal.
In 2021, he was an International guest writer in Château de Lavigny International writers-in-residence, Switzerland.
In 2023, he has been selected for Hungarian writers-in-residence. Also he has been nominated for the Oak Institute for Human Rights.
“Clear a path,” cried Stacy, spreading wide her arms. “Here comes Shamu!” As if by magic, the students in the grade school corridor parted like the Red Sea. Lori, the object of this derision, gritted her teeth and said nothing. She walked past the taunting students, wincing in shame at each smirking face. Some of the children hooted or made other ugly animal sounds.
“Be careful what you say to Shamu,” cautioned Stacy. “She might morph into Carrie!” The girls giggled, and the boys guffawed. Lori passed out of their sight. Stacy smiled contentedly.
ii
“Students,” said Ms. Black, the fifth grade teacher, “today we’re going to get your vital statistics.” The children stared back at her blankly, perplexed.
“I mean,” Ms. Black went on, “that I’m going to measure your height and get your weight.” Lori had a sinking feeling. First, the teacher measured their heights, and that went off without incident, but then came the weighing. The children lined up before the physician’s scales, each taking their turn to step onto the platform while Ms. Black balanced the weights. At length, last in line, Lori stepped on the scale and Stacy didn’t remain idle.
“Hey, Shamu, don’t break the scale,” she barked. Several children chuckled. Lori felt her cheeks burn.
“That’s not polite, Stacy,” scolded Ms. Black. “I mean, how would you like it if…?”
“If I were fat?” Stacy finished the teacher’s sentence.
“Now, that’s enough, students!” Ms. Black spread the guilt over the entire class, inasmuch as Stacy Shelton was the daughter of Bruce Shelton, the superintendent of schools. That made him Ms. Black’s boss. He was known to dote on his daughter. None of the teachers were eager to get her in their class.
As Black maneuvered the weights on the scale, Stacy remarked, “They’ve got a special scale down at the stockyards.” The children erupted in gales of laughter. Even Ms. Black, in spite of herself, chuckled into her fist, then tried to hide it. Lori felt her betrayal keenly.
iii
At noon, the children scattered for lunch. Although it was a closed campus, Lori ran home, tears of humiliation streaking her eyes. When she arrived, she crept silently through the house and into her father’s den, where she found the gun cabinet, unlocked as usual. Lifting out a heavy, ugly black pistol, she then rummaged through the ammo drawer and extracted a box of bullets she knew would fit the handgun. Her father had instructed her on how to handle firearms safely.
Arriving back in class before the lunchroom let out, Lori sat silently in her seat in the back of the classroom. Students were assigned their seats alphabetically, and Lori felt lucky to be situated in the rear, where she’d garner less notice. Stacy’s keen eye and needling voice always seemed to find her, however. The gun sat hidden under the folds of Lori’s billowing dress.
iv
Finally, students began filing back into the classroom. Stacy, as per usual, was last to enter, making a spectacular entrance, of course, arriving as if onto a stage. The other girls giggled in appreciation. No one dared cross the girl. Lori frowned darkly. She hated that girl! When class commenced, Ms. Black instructed the students in social studies until two o’clock, at which time the children exited the school for the final recess. Lori remained in her seat, the gun cold against her thigh. When class reconvened, Ms. Black told the students there would be a test of their ability to write creative fiction. Pencils were turned up, and blank sheets of paper were passed out. Lori bent to her work, and SNAP! Her pencil broke cleanly in two; she had been pressing on it so hard, in frustration, that she ruined it. That was Lori’s last pencil. She looked up; the teacher had left the room, probably to take another smoke. Everyone else was busily scribbling on their own sheets; besides, no one would help the fat kid. Lori sighed. Then she thought: maybe this is the time to make her move. What did she have to lose?”
Stacy, observing what had transpired with Lori, turned to the girl and said, “Wanna borrow a pencil?” At first, Lori expected her to snatch the pencil out of her reach and taunt her some more. But no. Stacy was serious, and Lori accepted the small token of kindness.
“Thanks,” murmured Lori.
“Sure,” acknowledged the other girl, at last taking pity on her nemesis.
v
By the time Ms. Black collected the papers, the final bell rang, indicating it was time to leave for the day. Soon the classroom was deserted, except for the teacher. Ms. Black rifled through the thirty completed essays and began correcting and grading them. When she came to the last essay, her mouth fell open in surprise. She sat up straight in her chair and murmured, “Oh, my God!”
Here’s what the final essay said:
I almost killed a girl today. She made fun of me one time too many, and I had a gun, and I was going to shoot her dead. My dad taught me how to shoot, and I’m a good shot. But she let me use her pencil when mine broke, so for now she gets to live. This is, naturally, only make-believe fiction, as Ms. Black said.
A precious man
The nights and the days come and go without a smile
The days are so big without a smile
The nights are a waiting for a call or a message
It is so expensive this time away from your eyes.
You are my precious pearl..
A diamond hide in the mud..
Waiting the time to hug you and kiss you.
You are my treasure hidden from the sun
Waiting the day I meet you again..
Waiting your look..
Waiting your lips..
You are my precious pearl hidden in the oyster deep in the sea.
You are my precious man.
You,
the face I did not see for years
You,
You are the most amazing human being
But i cannot touch
You,
The beauty is hiding in small pieces in your body and mind...
You,
I can explain why
But i know my what...
You,
That one day you crossed my path
Forces of love or passion touched me
Without reason...
I am looking the east
You are looking the west
Miracles happens every day
You,
A passion I can live in a privately moment
Love I give
Love will never be understood
You,
In an another space of galaxy
You,
My ideal
My secret
Garden
You,
The moments I never had
You
The distance between two countries
A bridge i will try to build to reach you
Good night poem
What a caterpillar maybe call the end
A butterfly call it the beginning of a beautiful journey...
The stars are so far but we can see the lights
And feel their heat
As i am thinking of you
Days and nights are together
No distance
Only sun
Only Moon
And for once they are together
In this beautiful sky
Thinking of you
The days
Think about you
My heart
My body
My soul
Wake up
And
Dance in a circle
Imagine u are here
Imagine u are close to me
Imagine our life starts
This is my wish
My prayer
As you are my hope
My inspiration
In those long years of loneliness...
❤️💐💐💐
Love poem
Your smile...
I dream a future with you
I dream a blue sky
Sunset to a an island
I dream a white house
And have a view to the sea
I dream a future close to you..
And i get a bad dream
Sleeping alone
Feeling weak
But in my heart
i am not alone because i feel your heart beat
I feel your breath
EVA Petropoulou Lianou
Multi Awarded Author children literary
Official candidate for Nobel Peace prize
Greece
William Shakespeare Look What You’ve Gone and Done, or European Starling Birds and the Winter Morning Sky Born
it was not the morning but the afternoon in actuality when all the Starlings did alight in the tree. it was however in the next morning that I remembered them and thought about them. they were still and to me, stoic for they didn’t really bother w/the wind or the world around them. the history of birds, their origin and migration routes; their interaction with rural landscapes and metropolitan areas, is as vast as the history of stamps, of books or of anything for that matter. but for me then, it was just a flock of birds in a tree. I didn’t know where they arrived from. I didn’t know what their ‘game’ was, or their ‘trick.’ I just knew that they blended in as if they were not there.
nobody jumped from branch to branch. nobody talked. nobody else arrived and nobody left. hmm. real certainly,- they didn’t seem so, and more like a painting or dream; or perhaps a moment in a poem. nice, I thought. but I am a naive one and always have been so. I decided to read about them. someone had the idea of introducing every bird Shakespeare mentioned into North America. and it turned out that though they controlled some insect problems,- the Starlings were overly aggressive and caused many problems to things like crops and even infrastructure.
I wondered about them, about the ones I had seen. maybe they were cold (I am a bleeding heart). later I glanced out there again. the Starlings had gone. only the branches remained,- vacant. and they weren’t talking either. and now the sky is born again. there used to be a Christian proselytizer that promoted his metaphysics by the lake to every manner of passerby. when the weather got bad, - cold, or a storm was coming, he would leave. it meant to me he was only an average devotee. a true captain is supposed to go down w/the ship so to speak. it is really the sky, for better or worse, that remains, not bird or person. the sky will one day whisper against reason and logic to some mystic, some seer, not, ,’Beware the Ides of March,’ but simply, ‘See. I tried to tell you. Stick with me. I am the forever kind.’
Possible Causes and Effects of Cited High Blood Pressure
[Originally published in Fleury’s book You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self]
If your Father died of heart disease
If you have Sleep Apnea
If you have irregular sleeping schedule
If you are overweight
If you have a late night binge eating habit
If you take caffeinated Energy Supplements
If you Drink Caffeinated Tea and Hot Chocolate
If you Use heavily salted spices like Chicken Bouillon Cubes
If you’re not getting enough “regular” cardio exercise
If you’re inconsistent with your daily meditation practice
If you ruminate about the past: its afflictions and perceived malfeasances
If you harbor resentments regarding sociopolitical and racial injustices
If you feel constant stings of Minority Stress through Micro Aggressions of racism
If you are BLACK!
The Only Way to See the Stars…[Originally published in Fleury’s book You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self]
I often wonder why I smile even when sad
Thudding of my heart hearkening back
To recidivist scars running my fingers
Over the scabs abrading the cut of the
Blade and making my way in a world full
Of hurt people who hurt people
A pejorative and abortive choice
So smiling instead of snarling helps me
Remember even if bliss turns to distress
To see the stars is through the darkness…
Image of a light skinned young woman with a knit sweater and short blonde hair up in a bun holding a copy of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which has black and white cartoon images of a family up against a black background and green and white text.
Critically examine Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” as a graphic novel. Or
Discuss the significance of the veil in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Or
How are the Islamic fundamentalists represented in the book Persepolis? What suggestions does Satrapi make about the relationship between faith and fanaticism?
Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” is the woven into the new found literary form positing the new found respectability of book length graphic novels—-accessible, vernacular and with mass popular appeal—-historicized memorabilia corresponding to mass murder, massacre, genocide, holocaust, brutality, harassment, execution and bombing amidst Iran-Iraq war. Fragmented, disembodied, and divided between frames suggestive of psychological trauma as connoted in the epiphany of “The Veil”. A visual chronicle of childhood rooted and articulated through momentous, and traumatic and historic events about the verbal and visual practice of never forgetting.
An unsmiling veiled girl sitting with her arms crossed in the center of the frame. She situates the exposition to the reader “This is me when I was 10 years old […] This was in 1980.” A hand, a bent elbow, and chest length veil separates herself from the class photography as spacings within pictorial frame purports disruption of her own characterological presence. An icon of single eye, directly engaging the reader, dangling over the book’s very first gutter, reminding readers at the outset that we are aligned with Satrapi’s penetrating vision and enabling retracing of that vision: “I give myself this duty of witnessing.” A crowd of masses throwing their fists in the air in front of a stark black background represents Islamic Revolution and then the veiling mandate of 1980.
Persepolis narrates the trials and tribulations of precocious Marji and her upperclass leftist parents exasperation with the Iranian political regime; and Marji’s pricked consciousness ; holocausts, homicides and suicides of friend circle and family relations; havoc wreaked by Iraq-Iran geopolitical crises and Marji;s fierce and dangerous outspokenness eventually inspires her parents to deport her abroad at a safer sheltered asylum away from the trepidation and perturbance; her mother becomes comatose state of being as Marji departs Iran.
Satrapi’s text is framed diegetically and externally to the introductory injunctions of “never forgetting” as Uncle Anoosh, the naxalite prisoner advises her niece during executionary wish-fulfillment: “Our family memory must not be lost. Even if it isn’t easy for you, even if you don’t understand it at all.” Satrapi’s multiple autobiographical voices illustrative of the vignettes of selves——-Satrapi’s older and recollective voice registering of overarching narrative text while the younger and directly experiencing voice registering of dialogue and throughout pictorial space——the visual voice.
States of being of memory and matter of factness reinforce Satrapi’s renegotiations between versions of herself showing us the visual and discursive process of never forgetting. Satrapi unfolds the procedure of memory through spatializing form of comics, which visualizes and enmeshes overlapping of selves and their locations. Persepolis’s presentation of pictorial space is discursive. Satrapi displays the political horror of producing and marking ordinary childhood by offering what seems to the reader to be the visual disjuncture in her child’s eye rendition of trauma.
This expressionism weaves the process of memory into the book’s technique of visualization. Satrapi’s stark style is monochromatic—–there is no evident shading technique; she offers black and white. However the visual emptiness of simple, ungraded blackness in frames showcase the depthness of the condition of remembrance as pointed out by Kate Flint’s words: “maybe elicited by the deliberate empty spaces, inviting the projection of that which can be seen only in the mind’s eye to an inviting vacancy.”
Persian miniatures, murals and friezes of public skirmishes appear as stylized and symmetrical bodies, surfeiting mere mimetic representations interlaced with the Persianness of historical avant-garde. “I was born in a country in a certain time, and I was witness to many things. I was a witness to a revolution. I was a witness to war. I was a witness to a huge emigration”——collective ethos of harrowing sense of death casts her imaginative selfhood to a culture pervaded by violence and retribution. Penultimate panel of “The Letter” suggests the Iranian landscapes and the grimly grotesque configuration of horizontally stretched out and abstractly stacked corpses/ mass dead bodies. “We had demons demonstrated on that very day we shouldn’t have: on Black Friday. That day there was so many killed in one neighbourhoods that a rumour spread that Israeli soldiers were responsible for the slaughter.”
“The Cigarette” in “The Persepolis” demonstrates three-tiers of imbrications of the historical routine [execution] and the personal routine [sneaking cigar] depicting blindfolded prisoners about to be executed against a wall, directly above and below frames in which we view Marji in that prosaic, timeless rite of initiation: smoking her first cigar. This retrospective mode of narratorial address to the audience from within the pictorial space of the frame and the body politic of tender hearted Marjai is unusual in the text; blurring of voices and register here works with the blurrings of the historical and the everyday registers that is also part of the narrative suggestion of the page.
Ethical, verbal and visual practice of not forgetting is not merely about exposing and challenging the virulent machinations of historicization but is more specifically about examining and bearing witness to the intertwining of the everyday and the historical. Its polemical resonance lies in the fact that visually virtuosic is required to represent the political trauma that plagues Marji’s childhood. Persepolis is thus the reimagination and reconstruction that retraces the literal growing child body in space, reinscribing that body to generate a framework in which versions of selfsome stripped of agency, in which some are possessed by it——-in productive conversation. Persepolis’ feminist graphic narrative harnesses visibility politics magnified by the lenses of visual ethics aesthetics showcasing the censured and censored through representation and resymbolization.
McCloud pointed out that segmented pictorial illustrations in the form of comic book or graphic novel transforms the temporal relationships into the spatial matrix. Pictorial framing can be related to ideological framing——-the filtering of information, of news, of times, of identities, of nationalities and gender——through templates and through structures of feelings that produce predetermined judgements of values narrativized translations of experience. “We the kids in America” become the epitome of the youth generation’s voice as an ideological frame narrative symbolic of Western cultural imperialism intruding as a lurking anthem in the Marjane Satrapi frame-within-frame fantasy of Western counter cultural identity in the image of Kim Wilde.
Satrapi’s bricolage and appropriation, borrowing, mixture of heterogeneous culture resonates both state societal interpellation as pedagogical and civil societal interpellation as performativity that both function as frames and mirrors of self. Both constructs of fictions of the self. Marjane Satrapi’s grandmother advices the granddaughter: “But there is nothing worse than bitterness and vengeance […] Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself”, while the latter embracing folding cuddling of the former. “I smelled my grandmother’s bosom. It smelled good. I cannot forget that smell” resonates Proustian motif with the advice bestowed upon by the family matriarch about the jerks she is destined to meet throughout her life.
Lacanian terms of prelinguistic and extralinguistic formation of subjectivity—-the contrast in Persepolis is not only between a prelinguistic visual reflection of the self and an adult linguistic reflection, but the non visual bodily and sensory reflection of the self in the matriarch other and the visual and the exilic reflection of the self outside home and nation. The mirrored frames of the panels function in Persepolis as subjective fragmentation, unstability and uncertainty. Satrapi’s exodus life is as diasporic selfhood re establishes the cultural icon of hijab as the symbolic icon of familiarity of national and familial belonging casting off claustrophobic marginalization: “so much for my individual and social liberties […] I need so badly to go home.”
Marjane Satrapi’s contrasting frame of panels demarcating bachelorette virginity and consummated maidenhood by her reflections of brightly smiling long hair, makeup and short wear with trimmed laces, and sitting in front of a window overlooking a garden of birds; and Marjane’s reflection of a girl smoking cigar, wearing black pants and shirts, sitting in front of a dark night. Adulthood and independent agency reciprocate her mother’s amity with the tenderly hugging in the event and divorce of the daughter with the fiance Reza. Iran’s borders/cultures/geopolitics were clandestinely breached by the import of Westernization though the imposition of hegemonic tradition and culture such as Nike Shoes and Michael Jackson Badge smuggled by Satrapi’s parents from Turkey. Shallow consumerism by emulation of Western fashion overthrown to indictment that ultimately enforced diasporic exodus. Marjane’s expedition in pursuance of cassettes entails her knowledgeable and feisty dealings with the male black marketeers. Verily the confession of her affirmative tone justifies her duality of personae looming with the void of claustrophobia and xenophobia : “I was nothing. I was a Westerner in the Iran and an Iranian in the West. I had no identity.”
Patricia Storace critiques the transcendental transformation and brings to light the transmogrified narrative technique to the effect of transvaluation that uses style “which offers a benevolent, trustworthy world, like a fresco in a nursery and the matter of fact breaks our hearts with it, creating confrontation between what is drawn as adorable with the world that does not require its claims to protection, hope or love.” Satrapi is intuitive, inquisitive and precocious and her quest for identity causes a self questioning of gender, class and social status as cultural markers——self-reflection as the narrator of her illustrated past greatly contributes to the value of her memoir. “In a cartoon world she [Marjane Satrapi] creates, the photographs function less as illustrations than as records of actions, a kind of visual journalism. On the other hand, dialogues and descriptions are changing unpredictably in visual style and placement on the page within its balloons, advancing frame by frame like the verbal equivalent of a movie. Each element would be quite useless without the other; like a pair of dancing partners, Satrapi’s text and images comment on each other, enhance each other, challenges, questions and reveal each other.”
Further Reading
Hilary Chute’s The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Spring-Summer 2008, Vol. 36, No. 1 /2, Witness (Spring-Summer 2008), pp. 92-110, The Feminist Press at the City University of New York
Babak Elahi’s [Rochester Institute of Technology] Frames and Mirrors in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, symmboke, 2007, Vol. 15, No. 1 / 2, Cinema Without Borders, 2007, pp. 312-325, University of Nebraska Press.
Ann Miller’s [University of Leicester] Marjane Satrapi’s: Eluding the Frames, L’Esprit Createur, Spring 2011, Volume 51, No. 1, Watch This Space: Women’s Conceptualizations of Space in Contemporary French Film and Visual Art [Spring 2011], pp. 38-52.
