In Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Marjane Satrapi draws a semi-autobiographical story about her childhood in Iran during the Islamic revolution. Something that I found interesting about this graphic novel was the use of a child narrator. I felt that through Marji’s voice, the reader was able to understand even more about what was happening in Iran during this time. There is a certain naivety that children have that allows them to ask any questions and sometimes understand the real meaning of the answers.
My creative piece explores in a similar medium, a comic, the parallels between children’s lives around the world. Something that affected my childhood was 9/11 and all of the proceeding events. As I was reading Persepolis, there were things that Marji did, like go into the streets to protest, that reminded me of things that I did in the early 2000s. In my drawing, I show Marji and myself at a younger age meeting, at first we connect on a more superficial level, realizing we both speak French, by the end we realize that the things we have in common go even farther than just speaking the same language. My drawings show a parallel between Marji’s life and my life, but put our similar experiences in different contexts.