In March, CPS CEO Byrd-Bennet personally ordered several copies of Persepolis, a ground-breaking graphic novel about the Iranian Revolution, confiscated from school libraries, adding it, (at least in the public's mind, to the distinguished list of banned books & sparking controversy & debate. It brought up a lot of questions; what is appropriate for teenagers to read, how illustrations effect that, and who, if anyone, should be allowed to ban books from schools, &etc...
As I pondered these questions, I re-read the graphic novel (which has also been made into a film), & the book itself seemed almost immediately to (wrongly or rightly) answer them, as the pages spoke with the voice of the little girl who survive through war, homelessness, heartbreak, & oppression to tell her story.
Marjane Satrapi was ten years old in 1980, when she watched her home country, Iran, go through a terrifying & bloody revolution that drastically changed her life.
She was taken from her mixed-gender, bilingual school & was forced to wear a veil & beat her chest for the war martyrs. She snuck away from her home to protest in the street on Black Friday, when dozens were killed.
She conspired to beat up a classmate with nails because his father was a murdering Secret Police agent. She was the last goodbye to a prisoner facing death. She saw her friends' corpse in a bombing.
She watched 13-year-old boys groomed (with "keys to heaven") for battles & adults beaten by police.
Then at the age of fourteen, her worried parents sent her off to live alone while attending a French school in Austria, where she essentially lived on her own.
In short, Marjane Sartrapi is very Hardcore, even as a kid. Throughout her life, she fights for every inch (literally, an inch of veil) of freedom in the face of state censorship & oppression.
Of course, not every child at every age is equipped to understand every aspect of serious historical tragedies & injustices, nor should they be required to. Parents & teachers should be careful about what images they show children, & Persepolis is certainly a more "adult" book, with serious and difficult subject matter & frightening pictures. There's lots of room for debate regarding what materials are appropriate for what kids & classrooms.
Persepolis presents a fearsome retort to the people who by suggesting that teens & even kids can sometimes handle & overcome more than we might expect, demonstrates the value of education & artistic expression, & shows us explicitly what we can lose if we let censorship be carried too far. It presents a story that everyone, even teenagers, should hear.
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