Western Trinkets and Disneyland: Trying to Escape War

What strikes me the most about Satrapi's Persepolis is Marjane's struggle to remain a human being, an adolescent, as the world around her is literally exploding with the stresses of wartime and oppression. She hears horror stories about torture and execution. She witnesses beatings at demonstrations and loses friends as they flee the country. And these atrocities are all happening at a time when she is still maturing, growing into her own skin, questioning religion and what she's taught by authority figures in and outside of the classroom. I think this juxtaposition is particularly clear in the chapter entitled "The Key." 

"The key to paradise was for poor people. Thousands of young kids, promised a better life, exploded on the minefields with their keys around their necks. Meanwhile, I got to go to my first party. Not only did my mom let me go, she also knitted me a sweater full of holes and made me a necklace with chains and nails. Punk rock was in" (102).

An illustration of the silhouettes of  children wearing keys around their necks and being blown apart is directly above an illustration of Marjane dancing at a party, hair blown back and arms in the air, in punk fashion. This is the extremity of war. She is trying to be a normal child- experimenting with black market nail polish, jean jackets, and Michael Jackson pins. But, these Western trinkets are a means of escapism and a feeble attempt at rebellion. The reality is that the children of Iran, especially the underprivileged, are being exploited and forced to grapple with adult issues bigger than fashion or cassette tapes.

"It's awful. Every day I see buses full of kids arriving. They come from the poor areas, you can tell...first they convince them that the afterlife is even better than Disneyland, then they put them in a trance with all their songs..." (101).

 So, Marjane cuts class, strikes the principal, and takes her first puff. "With this first cigarette, I kissed childhood goodbye" (117). Ultimately, her parents send her to Austria because this is such a dangerous world, and they are attempting to save her childhood, her life, from the disaster that surrounds them all.  

Persepolis and its youthful narrator reminded me of a documentary entitled Promises  that was released in 2001. The film exposed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the eyes of seven children. The project was also an attempt to cultivate genuine friendships between the children by breaking down the boundaries of prejudice created by earlier generations- having them speak on the telephone and ultimately meet. One scene that stands out in my memory is of two boys describing the daily ride to school and their fear of a bus bombing. Just as Marjane is going through typical coming of age experiences in a not-so-typical, dangerous world, these boys simultaneously talked about their love of soccer and their fear of being killed. In similar documentaries about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that I've watched, children traumatized by the daily impact of living under war openly expressed a desire to die and go to Heaven. Their spirits had been obliterated by wrecked homes and starvation.

Rape equals racism?

The topic of rape is the one of the central theme in the book of Disgrace. Though, many of my classmates have argued that the relationship between Melanie and David was not rape but somewhat based on consent. I believe it was rape on the basis of David’s unwanted introversion to his young student life and his inability to see past his own desire and take into account hers.  On the extreme version, Lucy’s life is violent ruined when she is brutally raped and her dogs are killed. Rape, I believe is Coetzee’s metaphoric method of discussing the complexity surrounding race relations in post-apartheid South Africa.

            The ambiguity surrounding the relationship between David and Melanie is similar to that of the middle class blacks and whites. Though, the inequality and hostility of the pervious years are gone there still exists a disconnection between the two parties. David describes his sexual explorations with Melanie as “not rape but still unwanted”. Just like the presence of whites in South Africa to some blacks particularly those in cities is no longer a threat but still unwanted. Unwanted in the sense many whites like David do not see themselves as imperialists but rather victims of an unfair system that has placed them in a negative light. This is similar to the Laurie’s response to accusation surrounding his relationship with Melanie. He saw himself as a merely a victim of Eros or a person of simply respond to his desire and does not deserve to be actually punished for it. They are therefore not truly aware of the underlying racial tensions that still exist and become confused in situation where they treated less that they believe themselves to deserve.

            However, in rural areas where poverty and class division is more rampant, the presence of whites is seen as a rape of the people’s freedom. This is because the effects of the apartheid still raw in the hearts of the locals. Petrus is described as a well to do man who as a result of the changes in society is able to obtain a piece of land for farming. Though, it is technically a great thing, many still see the injustice of people like Petrus who are natives of the land still having to rely on Lucy for a way of living. The automatic upward social mobility granted to whites is still being denied to blacks especially for those in the poor sections of the country. Unlike those in the living in the cities, their disapproval comes out in terms of violence or creating a clear distinction between the two races.  Petrus, though fond of Lucy seeks to disassociate himself from her and those close to her in order to establish clear boundaries.  Therefore the rape is Lucy is symbolic of the “justifiable” hostility many rural black South African continue to have for their white countrymen.

Counting Sheep

Persepolis is, as its subtitle states, the story of a childhood and told through a graphic novel which makes it have a much stronger impact than words alone could have had.  This story brought forth a range of emotions from joy to sorrow and at times I found myself laughing out loud, even though I was alone in my room.  Although the images are simple and in black and white, they hold surprising detail and it allows the story to come alive in your mind much more easily.  The section of the book that I found most impactful was the Sheep chapter, where Satrap learns that her friends are moving away and when people start being executed, culminating in the death of Anoosh.  Anoosh tells a story of how people id amongst a flock of sheep to survive and this line struck me as having another meaning as well.  The people that are killed in this revolution are lost among the sheep, another number, a statistic.  Satrap does not want to forget and although not stated, I imagine she sees them, the people she has lost, in her dreams acting as her sheep, allowing her to sleep and think about why the fight is so important, to remember that these people had hopes and dreams like she did. When her father tells her about Anoosh’s departure she already knows in her heart that something bad has happened.  That alone struck me as she is still a young girl, only 12, and she has lived in such a trying and difficult time and place that she understands the cruel truth of the world.  Someone cannot have been simply in a rush, or left without saying goodbye, she has seen too much and her childhood innocence has been lost.  From this point on in the book she takes a larger role in protests and she wants to have a revolution, wants to change the country that took Anoosh from her.  The final frame of the chapter on page 71 was my favorite of the book.  Satrap lies on her back, surrounded by blackness and stars, showing her state of mind, how lost and confused she is.  From this point where can she go? Her plans are in shambles and she is trying to cope with one disaster when another one strikes.  They are being bombed, another potential life changer to add to the chaos that has become her young life.  The strength of her character by the end is clear as she has had to deal with more in 2 years that many of us had have to deal with in our entire lives, loved ones torn away, having to live in fear of your own neighbors, and leaving your parents when they should be taking you to your first high school dance.  Persepolis is indeed the story of a childhood, but not one we can imagine, and that is where its beauty lies.   

Iran isn't a fan of Persepolis

Marjane Strapi's graphic novel, Persepolis, was adapted into an animated film which won the jury prize at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in 2007. Apparently the leading figures from Iran didn't appreciate the prize.  

Mehdi Kalhor, a cultural adviser to the Iranian prexy Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said: "Islamophobia in Western drama started in France, and producing and highlighting the anti-Iranian film 'Persepolis' in Cannes falls in line with Islamophobia,"


"Ali Akbar Velayati, former foreign minister and adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the French-produced film is another example of U.S. attempts to 'encourage forces opposed to the authorities in any way possible.'"


Upon recieving her prize, Satrapi dedicated the victory "to all Iranians."

Coetzee's Disgrace and the Fall from Grace

Humanity has always been interested in defining our own identity and with this comes explaining or qualifying our own actions, including our desires. J.M. Coetzee grabs the audience's attention by exploring this idea of desire in terms of sexuality. In society today, about 33% of the world defines themselves as Christian and Catholicism accounts for greater than 50% of those Christians. Catholicism worldwide is the second largest single religious group. What this means is that there is a large portion of the world who relates or gives some credit to the Adam and Eve creation story. General culture is aware of it and plays with the idea and desire in general in ads, media, and industry. Desire is a key driving force of our society. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96gBpOAw5MQ&feature=related
The idea is appealing today just as it was to Eve in the story of the Fall from Grace. When Eve indulged shame was created and thus disgrace. In Coetzee's disgrace we can see Lurie's seeming fall from grace into disgrace. The question of sexuality's presence in human nature is in effect a driving force of the novel.

The Root of Lucy's Attack: An Internalization of South Africa's Painful History

I must say that I have enjoyed reading Disgrace more than any other novel that we have studied over the course of the semester.  What struck me most about the novel were the recurring hints that the main character David Lurie gave as a possible explanation for the reasoning behind his and Lucy’s attack on the farm.  I believe that Coetzee gives Lurie’s own reasoning behind the attack to demonstrate the painful history of race relations in South Africa, and how the internalization of pain and suffering resulted in wrong and misdirected violence on two innocent people.  Lurie first hints at the cause of their attack when he tries to change her mind about not reporting the crime when she states, “Vengeance is like a fire.  The more it devours, the hungrier it gets…Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?”  (112) When Lurie finally succeeds in getting Lucy to open up about the rape she says “It was so personal.  It was done with such personal hatred…But why did they hate me so?  I had never set eyes on them.” (156)  In response to her sentiments Lurie says, “A history of wrong.  Think of it that way, if it helps.  It may have seemed personal, but it wasn’t.  It came down from the ancestors.”  (156)  Clearly, Lurie views his daughter’s rape by these men as a result of South Africa’s complex history or race relations and disparity in power.  These men have taken out their internalized anger and frustration on two innocent white people who have not directly caused them any harm.  While I was researching more information on rape in South Africa, I came across an interesting blog post that touched on the question of whether Coetzee was racist for having the main role of a black man in the novel be to rape a white woman.  In Coetzee’s defense Nigerian scholar Chielozona Eze states on his blog, “Well, the truth is that rape is not an African word and it wasn't invented for the African. Another fact is that African men do rape, and if blacks raped a white woman in the post Apartheid South Africa there are many ways to understand it, which of course, does not limit its horror…There is no doubt that the years of oppression and apartheid in South Africa left their imprint on the minds of average South African men, just like the years of military oppression did to the average Nigerian. People take laws into their hands. There is perhaps an internalization of the mechanism of oppression, which, unfortunately, expresses itself in various forms of violence directed against the weaker ones in society. In Nigeria, people turn against one another, shout at one another, exert all imaginable forms of violence on each other. In South Africa, violence appears to become a second nature to the segments of society that sees itself as the emasculated victims of the historical injustice of apartheid: men.”  I agree with Eze’s stance here.  I do not think Coetzee was being racist in his novel- he was trying to draw attention to the impact of South Africa’s painful history upon its citizens- black and white. 

The link to Eze’s blog is: http://chielozona.blogspot.com/2009/03/south-african-women-fall-victim-to.html

In my research on rape in South Africa I also learned that in addition to the issue of rape as a means of vengeance, “corrective rape” is also used as a tool against lesbian African women.   Since Lucy is lesbian, I thought that her attack could have also been used as a means of corrective rape against her. 

Here’s a link to an interesting article on rape against lesbians in South Africa: http://abcnews.go.com/International/south-africa-task-force-fight-corrective-rape-lesbians/story?id=13528169#.T4PJjK5NOQ

The Disgraceful Secret of Professor David Lurie

I enjoyed reading Disgrace. It was very different from what we have been reading so far in class. I felt as though this novel went a lot deeper, it was something that our generation could connect more towards. Not saying that everyone would be able to personally relate to these characters, but they are dealing with issues that we have at least read about in the news.

I found the construction of Professor David Lurie’s character very interesting. In the first sentence of the novel we find out what David Lurie holds as important information the reader needed to know, “For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well” (1). In the first chapter and throughout the entire novel the reader follows David through his sexual experiences to find out more about his character. The first thing that the reader realizes about the character is that he will take sex where he can get it. From Soraya to Melanie, not saying he did not find these two women extremely alluring, because he did. But, one must look at who these women are. Soraya a prostitute and Melanie is a student of David’s. He finds the chase extremely thrilling. Take his relationship with Soraya. He confuses their relationship with one that a couple would have together. In realty their relationship was a contract. He is constantly chasing her and trying to get more out of her, “He likes giving her presents. At New York he gave her an enameled bracelet, at Eid a little malachite heron that caught his eye in a curio shop. He enjoys her pleasure, which is quite unaffected” (5). David finds himself in inappropriate situations because he confuses his relationships. When David and Soraya’s contract is terminated he then moves to Melanie. When reading the interactions between these two characters, David becomes a predator. Even during their first interaction, David’s nature becomes forceful. He has to persuade her to come into his house, stay for dinner, and later to stay over, “’I’m going to invite you to do something reckless.’ He touches her again. ‘Stay. Spend the night with me.’ Across the rim of her cup she regards his steadily. ‘Why?’ ‘Because you ought to.’ ‘Why ought I to?’ ‘Why? Because a woman’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it’” (16). He must convince, in a very forceful nature to get her to stay, to sleep with him. In this instance he confuses a nice evening of friendly conversation with one a lustrous one. At first I thought of David as a gross old man who was trying to get his goods where ever he could find them. But, the more I think about it I find him lonely. In the being of the novel he says, “It surprises him that ninety minutes a week of a woman’s company are enough to make him happy, who used to think he needed a wife, a home, a marriage” (5). David’s use of women convinces him that he no longer needs those things, but I would argue he does. Through the novel he bounces from woman to woman, finding less and less pleasure from it. I would argue that he is empty because not only his misuse of women but he looking to fulfill a void he cannot fill from the women he gets into relationships with.

Coetzee and Racial Roles Before and After Apartheid

In Coetzee's novel Disgrace, the reader is thrust into the whirlwind setting of post-apartheid Africa. Coetzee, a native of South Africa, has typically written novels based on life in his home nation. However, these novels have taken a different thematic approach over time with the country's transition from apartheid to a post-apartheid nation.

Coetzee was one of several novelists that helped bring apartheid to global attention. These novels typically covered the crooked racial policies and violence of South Africa. However, after apartheid, Coetzee's thematic portrayal of his native country depicts another dire situation in regards to violence, crime, and bloodshed. In Disgrace it is obvious to the reader that even without the apartheid, the nation is in a dire situation with the crimes committed against Lucy and David.

One apartheid-era novel that Coetzee wrote is entitled Age of Iron. In this novel, the female protagonist, while dying of cancer, witnesses the violent atrocities that are committed against the blacks of South Africa by those more privileged whites. With blacks being the victims of Coetzee's apartheid-era novels, it is interested to see how things have changed in Disgrace as two rich white people are victimized by three black men. This reversal of victimization is strikingly similar to the type of racial reversal that occurred in Wide Sargasso Sea with the slave emancipation of Jamaica in 1838. Antoinette went from holding superior positions in society to being victims of a larger demographic of emancipated slaves. In the same manner, David and Lucy have gone from more privileged members of society to victims after the extinction of apartheid.

Is J.M. Coetzee Racist?

Never one to stray from controversy, I would like to offer up the idea of the author of Disgrace being a racist and what's more, that David Lurie's views of black south African people in the book are actually his own: "Coetzee, in refusing to engage in public discussions of his work, does not make his life, or the lives of his interested readers, any easier. His decision to shun the debates he provokes is usually met with suspicion" ( Makhaya). One could argue that the author's aversion to talking about his books in a public forum is an artist's right. Perhaps he would rather have readers decide for themselves what underlying themes or even messages his works hold. Still, I would argue that due to the incredibly sensitive topics he writes about, not only should he openly talk about his writing, but he actually has a responsibility to talk about his writing. 


The character of David Lurie has strong opinions about the native people of South Africa: "He speaks Italian, he speaks French, but Italian and French will not save him here in darkest Africa. He is helpless [...] a missionary in cassock and topi waiting with clasped hands and upcast eyes while the savages jaw away in their own lingo preparatory to plunging him into their boiling cauldron. Mission work: what has it left behind, that huge enterprise of upliftment. Nothing that he can see" (95). Lurie's view of Africa and its natives is unusually similar to that of Marlowe in Heart of Darkness. In fact, I find it fascinating that such a colonial passage was written merely ten years ago. David Lurie holds an incredibly bourgeois opinion of "darkest Africa," a term which even I, a white American find offensive. The Africa Coetzee describes does not come across as dark or wild and as despicable and macabre as Lucy's rape is, this and atrocities similar to it would not have happened but for the degradation and humiliation the whites subjected the native Africans to for decades. In Disgrace, David Lurie rightfully tries to bring the men who violated his daughter to some kind of justice, however, not once does he stop to consider why these men may have acted in such a reprehensible manner, which means neither does Coetzee. Nothing could or should explain away their actions or provide them with any type of diplomacy, especially not Lucy's absurd reasoning for her rape as a sort of reparation act. David Lurie should have sought counseling for his daughter because she had clearly lost her grasp on reality and the true meaning of justice. Instead, he allows her to linger in the deepest of depressions, selling her self-respect and soul to Petrus for "protection." 


Whether or not Coetzee is truly racist can be debated, however, if the characters he has created reflect even an inlking of his own beliefs and/or morals, then he is just as troubled as the people in Disgrace. If we are to view him as a proponent of anti-racism and a credit to his nation then why did he move away and become a citizen of Australia? Chinua Achebe once wrote an essay about the racism within Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  One of his problems with it was the narrator's description of Africa as being this stygian, claustrophobic world unto itself. I find it interesting, and possibly telling, that this is exactly how Coetzee's narrator feels about Africa as well. 








http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/the-trouble-with-jm-coetzee/

Dogs Throughout Disgrace

Throughout the novel, the dogs on Lucy's farm play just as important role in the novel as the main human characters do.  The dogs gain their own presence throughout the novel and have their own reasons for being there.  Each dog helps to shape the characters and the story itself.  Lurie begins to see himself and understand himself, and the disgrace he is suffering through the eyes of the dogs.  "Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity...like a dog."(205)  Throughout the book, Lurie was always reaching for something.  Most of the time it came in the form of women and sex, but constantly he was reaching for something that essentially he couldn’t have, or was risking too much for.  He never simply lived, as the dogs and his daughter do and just experience life as it is.  The dogs, although are talked of as living disgraceful lives as well, “I don't want to come back in another existence as a dog or a pig and have to live as dogs or pigs live under us.”  It seems as though the dogs are placed in the novel to explain exactly what Coetzee wants to explain.  They play human attributes because they are their to show that we are constantly reaching and pulling ourselves into this, disgraceful life, where we dig holes trying to achieve everything we need that we cannot get out of.  They also show though, the different parts of society that we all pertain to.  A dying dog on its last leg “Its period of grace is almost over, soon it will have to submit to the needle.” (219) Disgrace is naturally apart of life, it comes over everyone, as it did Lurie.  Its learning when is the best time to bow out gracefully and admit defeat or wrong doing, that the dogs present throughout the novel.  Lurie finally putting the dog down, that is cripple and barely able to take care on its own, shows that he has come to understand this important part of life.