This week we read two autobiographical graphic novels about young girls growing up in the Middle East. Both girls narrate their lives through similar themes of family, education, independence, and lurking political turmoil that often interrupts their narratives. 

I was thinking about these books in relationship to the recent headlines about Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg meeting in the UK last week. The meeting was symbolic to many of a universal girl struggle. Malala is known for being shot in 2012 on a school bus in Pakistan by an extremist who opposed girls education. Greta has risen to fame in the past year for refusing to attend school to protest for legislators to start listening to scientists and take urgent action on climate change. While at surface level, it seems like Malala is in favor of education in a way Greta is not, Greta’s speeches emphasize that she wants to learn and have a future but that the climate crisis denies her a future to make the education meaningful. Thus, we see, her demand is for the legislators to fix the climate crisis so that she can do what young girls ought to be doing — going to school. The two icons share similar values of education and this motivates them to speak out against patriarchal oppressors.

The graphic novels in some ways succeed in resisting Orientalist stereotypes in narrowing in on one story, with all of its complexity. I think what the graphic novels accomplish well is showing that there is in fact barbaric violence within “Islamic Societies” but they do not characterize the entire population. For example, in Persepolis, Marji’s mom encourages her to forgive her school friend whose father participated in the torture of political dissidents (46). Later, when family friends are recounting stories of their personal experience of torture, Marji’s mother modifies her position and tells Marji “Bad people are dangerous but forgiving them is too. Don’t worry, there is justice on Earth.” These conflicting positions regarding Justice and forgiveness highlight the fogginess that accompanies normative opinions. Academic writing, which always seeks to abstract and generalize, can create moral bright lines for the sake of analytical clarity, but these bright lines often do not neatly map onto real life. This moral mapping is a task that creative projects and memoirs can handle with more nuance.

Yet, like Malala, there is a tendency to neutralize the politics of girls’ education as common sense, which I don’t disagree with, but frames Western education (which both girls in Persepolis and Growing up in Turkey participate in) as a universal good. Malala becomes not just a protagonist in her own story but a symbol of a Muslim girl rising out of Islamic oppression into Western enlightenment. In Growing up in Turkey, at one point Ozge is hit by her teacher and her mother dismisses it as common practice (53). The reader is compelled to empathize with Ozge who is horrified, and schemes many ways to destroy the pink ruler to erase the memory of violence (55). Ozge talks about how her university, by contrast, is modeled after Western education and thus, conducted in English. Ozge notes how some of her friends critique this, but the comic make the critic (Hakan) look crazy. He says “You are like Americans…All you care about is finding a high paying job. You don’t care about the politics of Turkey. You only fight for your space in the school’s parking lot” to which Pelin responds “None of us have a car” (140). This makes the critique of the Western university seem vapid and manic, as though Hakan is being silly.

In class I would love to discuss more:

The stories present narratives of how unmarried women are trapped in Iran and Turkey. How might this interact with last weeks readings about the Western “universal” desire for autonomy, and education as a tool towards that value?

What is significant about the form of the graphic novel? I am thinking about the Homi Bhabha quote in the Abu Lughod reading that “access to any sort of real “tradition” has been made impossible by the historical cultural encounter with the West” (261). Might forms like the graphic novel carve out important new intellectual spaces for thinking about experiences in the non-West? Especially if the audience is white?