Hidden Resistance
For this blog post, I chose to reflect on Week 12’s theme, literature and art as critique and resistance, with a collage inspired by Persepolis. In one frame, Marjane is depicted with half of her in front of a “modern and avant-garde” background and the other half wearing a veil in front of an Arabesque background. This shows a struggle with her family’s life style and the changes occurring with society. This struggle grows throughout the book as war breaks out between Iran and Iraq, as well as a civil war between those for the Islamic Republic and those who did not conform. As time went on and as Marjane got older, she witnessed more and more war and experienced more and more push back from society against her family’s modern and avant-garde life style. While she continued to wear her veil in public, her home and apartment hid all the prohibited joys that made life bearable and kept her sane. Those objects include, cassette tapes, Michael Jackson, denim, nail polish, cigarettes, board games, parties, and alcohol. I assembled them on the collage to resemble the shape of the veil Marjane had to wear. In the background, I pasted pictures of the repressors, bombs, broken glass, and causes of turmoil. The oil rig is present because Marjane’s dad had said “as long as there is oil in the Middle East we will never have peace.” This collage is a piece of work that highlights Marjane’s use of self-expression to resist the wrong beliefs of those in power. She wears these characteristics like a veil that protects her from the hardships in the background. She uses the art of the west to critique the current regime and resist it.