[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_10

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis, 2000

I have always drawn a lot for as long as I can remember. Everyone in my family told me that I had inherited the "drawing genes" from my father, who loves to paint, but, in hindsight, I think it's all thanks to my mom.

When I was little, she was always worried that I would cause trouble, so much so that she had devised the "pen-and-paper-strategy," as she called it: she gave me pen and paper (sometimes the pen was enough, and I used the napkins as sheets) and I stayed for hours drawing, quiet and good. Everyone told her I was an angel while their children were devils who never sat still.

Maybe jumping up and down like other children would have done me some good, but the truth was that at a certain point, I started to find the characters I created on paper much more interesting than my peers. And that is never a good sign. In any case, despite my love for storytelling, I have never managed to become very passionate about comics. After a very early phase, which lasted from 6 to At ten years old, I became a fan of "The Mickey Mouse Comic"; visual fiction quickly stopped fascinating me. I continued to draw my own stories, but my interest in other people's productions was, in a certain sense, bipolar: I liked drawings (without writing) and books (without drawings). And this dichotomous vision accompanied me until my 26th birthday when a friend gave me Persepolis.

“Please don't let it be a comic,” I thought as I unwrapped the paper and noticed the illustrated cover of the book “Everything but Not Comics.” No, it was a comic. I had just enrolled in the Faculty of Philosophy and only read "intense things" because I was convinced that reading Western Enlightenment philosophers opened up horizons. What a dark era of my youth!

I read Persepolis reluctantly, not wanting to displease my friend, who seemed enthusiastic about it. “I've never understood comics,” I thought, “nor the people who find them exciting,” and I also thought of it with a hint of contempt, as if those who read comics had remained in the times of "Mickey Mouse" and had not made the cultural upgrade I had made. Persepolis changed my outlook, and not just on the world of comics. Unlike all the Enlightenment philosophers I had accumulated on the shelf, which multiplied the doors in my brain without unlocking them, Mariane Satrapi, with a single graphic novel, had opened a window where there had previously been a wall.

I came into contact with a culture I was convinced I knew a lot about only because I believed there was little to know. For the first time, I noticed similarities, whereas before, I only saw differences (many characters in the story reminded me of my own). This kind of miracle happened slowly, page by page, daily. I wasn't struck by a beam of light that illuminated a street in the shade before: books can change people, but they don't do it this way. I don't think I closed the comic and said, "Before, I didn't see, and now I see".

I want to say that before reading Persepolis, I felt comfortable with my beliefs. Since Kant said that thinking implied formulating judgments (without that, reasoning could not be created), I felt that having prejudices was a natural part of the same process, and I was very proud of myself. “At least I have opinions,” I used to tell myself smugly.

Persepolis gave me a bit of healthy shame for myself, the desire to know more, to draw something new and the doubt that Kant is not always correct.