Photo of a reddish-brown haired and smiling woman with a necklace and black and white tank top next to a man with brown hair and a collared blue shirt.
TODAY, WITHOUT YOU
Talk to me, as if you don't know anything.
Recognize me, as a woman in a poem
I will go find your music,
Please turn the sound down, it's too loud.
Turn your gaze to mine
A halo of hope would have been enough.
How much winter threatens to freeze your skin,
It would be enough to finish the time
The moment your eyes closed.
Today without you, I only feel cold
Frequent uncertainty
Shadow gaps
Fear that paralyzes
You are no longer...
A thousand voices shout at me and I dissolve in them
You burst like a whip into my wounded side.
I arrived crying...
I look for you in the house,
I hug a sigh.
I look at the horizon that doesn't know
Where I lost the memory,
Your absence embraces me,
The tide of tears does not pause.
And so I fall asleep, while your
Dear husband
Rest in peace
June 20, 2024
GRACIELA NOEMI VILLAVERDE is a writer and poet from Concepción del Uruguay (Entre Rios) Argentina, based in Buenos Aires She graduated in letters and is the author of seven books of poetry, awarded several times worldwide. She works as the World Manager of Educational and Social Projects of the Hispanic World Union of Writers and is the UHE World Honorary President of the same institution Activa de la Sade, Argentine Society of Writers. She is the Commissioner of Honor in the executive cabinet IN THE EDUCATIONAL AND SOCIAL RELATIONS DIVISION, of the UNACCC SOUTH AMERICA ARGENTINA CHAPTER.
Education Unleashed: Unlocking Potential and Creating Opportunities
Introduction:
Education is a powerful force that has the ability to unlock the potential within individuals and create a world of opportunities. It is a transformative journey that empowers individuals to grow, learn, and contribute to society. In this article, we will explore how education, when unleashed, becomes a catalyst for personal and societal growth, enabling individuals to overcome barriers, pursue their passions, and shape a brighter future.
1. Breaking Barriers: Education has the remarkable ability to break down barriers that hinder personal and societal progress. It provides access to knowledge, skills, and opportunities that can bridge the gap between social and economic disparities. By leveling the playing field, education enables individuals from all walks of life to pursue their dreams and aspirations, regardless of their backgrounds or circumstances.
2. Empowering Individuals: When education is unleashed, it empowers individuals to take control of their lives and shape their own destinies. It equips them with the necessary knowledge, critical thinking skills, and confidence to make informed decisions, solve complex problems, and adapt to an ever-changing world. Education nurtures curiosity, creativity, and a thirst for lifelong learning, empowering individuals to explore new horizons and seize opportunities.
3. Fostering Innovation: Education is the breeding ground for innovation and progress. When individuals are equipped with knowledge and skills, they become agents of change, capable of driving innovation in various fields. By encouraging critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration, education unleashes the creative potential within individuals, fostering a culture of innovation that leads to breakthrough discoveries, technological advancements, and societal development.
4. Cultivating Global Citizenship: Education goes beyond academic learning; it cultivates global citizenship and nurtures empathy, compassion, and respect for diverse cultures and perspectives. When education is unleashed, it fosters an understanding of global issues, promotes tolerance, and encourages individuals to actively participate in creating a more just and sustainable world. It instills values of social responsibility and equips individuals with the skills to address pressing global challenges.
5. Driving Economic Growth: Education is a key driver of economic growth and prosperity. When individuals are educated, they are better prepared to enter the workforce, contribute to the economy, and drive innovation and productivity. Education unleashes human capital, creating a skilled workforce that fuels economic development, attracts investments, and fosters entrepreneurship. It paves the way for economic mobility, reducing poverty, and creating a more equitable society.
Conclusion:
Education unleashed has the power to transform lives, societies, and the world at large. It breaks barriers, empowers individuals, fosters innovation, cultivates global citizenship, and drives economic growth. As we recognize the immense potential of education, it becomes our collective responsibility to ensure equitable access to quality education for all. By investing in education, we unlock the true potential of individuals and create a future filled with endless possibilities and opportunities for everyone.
Remember, education is not just about acquiring knowledge, but about the journey of self-discovery and personal growth. Embrace education, unleash your potential, and let it be the guiding light in your pursuit of a better tomorrow.
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.
J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is old enough to know better. He’s been widely published over the years, most recently at Horror Sleaze Trash, The Asylum Floor, The Rye Whiskey Review, Disturb the Universe Magazine and The Beatnik Cowboy. His new book with Casey Renee Kiser, Altered States of the Unflinching Souls, will be coming out in August of 2024. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights.
How
How my heart breaks at every storm my love ones face
How I want to shield them from the rages of lightning's race
How I wish I can cover them from winds of impulsive phase
How I desire to gather them all in a warm cozy place
How my heart breaks at every drought my love ones have to endure
How I want to shield them from the scorching thirst their throats measure
How I wish I have a vessel full of cool refreshing water to treasure
How I desire I can save them from the chains of poverty's pressure
How my heart breaks for every thorn my love ones step on their journey
How I want to shield them from the injustice of vengeful destiny
How I wish I can fight for them against fate's unreasonable tyranny
How I desire I have the power so comfort and peace be their company
How my heart breaks that for my love ones there is nothing I can do
How I want to shield them forever and to them my love I can show
How I wish I could love them less, my worry and fear away I throw
How I desire yet that is not to be so... for my heart cannot let go
Bottom of Form
Ignorance's Bliss
Have I not seen the beauty of dawn
I'd be contented of midnight lawn
Yet the pains of desire is sown
Hopeless pains of once numbed pawn
Have I not seen the field of star
I'd be blinded by neon lights afar
Yet not even diamonds come on par
The hope of peace in midst of war
Would it have been better to be ignorant
Following the instincts of an ant
From the sea of norm be deviant
Would satisfaction be a blessed grant?
Why must my eyes be opened wide
To the vastness of truth can't hide
Confusion of uncertainty to confide
White, black, red or blue, gown of bride
Knowledge is power and poison of peace
When certainty knows not of wisdom's ease
How much rain can be contained by fleece
Doubts and fears even sage's soul tease.
Lilian Dipasupil Kunimasa was born January 14, 1965, in Manila Philippines. She has worked as a retired Language Instructor, interpreter, caregiver, secretary, product promotion employee, and private therapeutic masseur. Her works have been published as poems and short story anthologies in several language translations for e-magazines, monthly magazines, and books; poems for cause anthologies in a Zimbabwean newspaper; a feature article in a Philippine newspaper; and had her works posted on different poetry web and blog sites. She has been writing poems since childhood but started on Facebook only in 2014. For her, Poetry is life and life is poetry.
Lilian Kunimasa considers herself a student/teacher with the duty to learn, inspire, guide, and motivate others to contribute to changing what is seen as normal into a better world than when she steps into it. She has always considered life as an endless journey, searching for new goals, and challenges and how she can in small ways make a difference in every path she takes. She sees humanity as one family where each one must support the other and considers poets as a voice for Truth in pursuit of Equality and proper Stewardship of nature despite the hindrances of distorted information and traditions.
Those times were the time when the autumn season had arrived. The time when the school had just stepped on the threshold…. When I always remember these times, I get a strange feeling, because I still remember the first time I went to school and it makes me excited. The decorated bags on the desks, the cute classroom set up just for us, I felt like it was all for me. The school became such a place for me that when I went there, I felt like I was walking into another world, into the world of knowledge… The dreams in my heart did not let me rest at all, it did not even allow me to sleep. I can say that my constant pursuit of news and interest in knowledge in my youth brought me to this point. However, I realized that one incident in my life was a real miracle that changed my big dreams. Being stuck in a wheelchair depressed me, it was as if life stopped for me.
At that time, I did not want to talk to anyone, when I was no longer interested in anything. forced me, that is, I started walking by writing gratitude, and I felt that my life became more beautiful as soon as I started setting goals for myself. Since my biggest dream was to send my parents on Umrah trip, my health has also changed, even my father: “Daughter, you have been through so many trials, and you are gone. You are almost in the same condition as before, Alhamdulillah, they gave me strength. Even in my worst moments, my dreams and goals did not make me weak, on the contrary, they helped me to recover and return to life.” It is my DREAMS that encourage me to walk.
QURBONOVA GULSANAM was born on April 16, 2006 in Dehkanabad district of Kashkadarya region. Today she studies at school 68 in Dehkanabad district. Her articles have been published in international magazines. Journali, “Kenya Times” newspaper, “Page 3 News” newspapers and other international newspapers and magazines covered his creative works. In the field of science, the winner of the regional Olympiad in the German language, prize winner; in the field of sports, table tennis, chess, has won a number of prizes in checkers. Her favorite activities are making decorative flowers, reading books, playing sports. She participates in Young Reader contests due to her love for books.
