Occidentalism: Rewriting the West in Marjane Satrapi's Persépolis

Abstract

Occidentalism:Rewriting the West in Marjane Satrapi's Persépolis Typhaine Leservot Persépolis, Marjane Satrapi's acclaimed graphic memoir of growing up in contemporary Iran, is said by many reviewers and critics alike to bring Iran to the West. This claim is in part due to Satrapi's many interviews in which she explains her desire to help western readers see Iranians as simply humans rather than vilified exotic others. To achieve this goal, Satrapi's comic highlights how westernized Iranians are. In spite of government censorship, western products and cultural references abound in Satrapi's Iran. Marji, her character, listens to popular western music, wears western-style clothes, goes to parties, and, as Christopher Theokas remarks in his 2003 review, rebels against her parents and society like any western teen (1-2). In their 2005 article on Persépolis, however, Nima Naghibi and Andrew O'Malley acutely note how Satrapi's work engages with the West in a much more complex way. Satrapi, they remark, constantly juxtaposes eastern and western imagery so as to both familiarize and de-familiarize the heroine in the eyes of western readers. By juxtaposing an "Eastern Marji" and a "Western Marji," "a veiled figure of radical otherness [. . .] alongside a familiar image of Western underground hip," they argue, Satrapi's esthetics creates a "dialectical relationship of East and West" (231) that eventually contests the "stereotypes of the Islamic Republic as oppressive and backward against the Western conviction over its own progressive liberalism" (224). Although Naghibi and O'Malley convincingly show how Satrapi challenges the oppositional relationship between the East and the West, they, like reviewers of the memoir, take Satrapi's images of the West at face value. Satrapi's work, however, doesn't so much offer a more accurate portrait of the West or the East as it reveals how the [End Page 115] West in Iran is constructed by Iranians themselves rather than imported from abroad. Satrapi's memoir shows the gap that exists between the West outside of Iran and the West inside of Iran. Far from being constructed to answer the West's own visions of itself or of the 'Orient,' Iranian constructions of the West—or Iranian Occidentalism—serve as political discourse aimed at Iranians, not Westerners. Satrapi's depiction of Iranian Occidentalism provides a new perspective on the relationship between Islam and the West for Francophone postcolonial theory, and adds to the still limited research on the notion of Occidentalism. I. Postcolonial Occidentalism and Iranian Occidentalism Ever since Edward Said's seminal 1979 study on Orientalism, the understanding of how the West constructed the Orient to assert itself during colonial times has been central to Postcolonial studies. Postcolonial theory's thorough investigation of Orientalism led to the assumption that the West is always present as the dominant paradigm in the so-called Orient. In the field of Francophone Postcolonial studies, Francophone postcolonial writers have perhaps indirectly encouraged such readings of the West in its relation with the Maghreb and, more generally, with Islam. Franco-Maghrebi writers such as Assia Djebar and Albert Memmi, for example, have long made us familiar with the difficult relationship between Islam and the West during and after France's colonization of the Maghreb. In L'Amour, la Fantasia (1985), Djebar depicts a young female narrator in twentieth-century colonial Algeria caught in between a private sphere that follows arabo-berbero-islamic traditions, and a public sphere that follows the French rules of secular schooling and unveiling. Although postcolonial readings of such cultural hybridity became increasingly nuanced, revealing for instance, how postcolonial hybridity allowed for agency on the part of hybrid subjects, they also consistently underlined the uneven power relations between the West and (post)colonial societies. Even when scholars, such as Homi Bhabha, saw this in-betweenness as a site of resistance that questions authoritative discourses, they typically saw it as a site of resistance not against any authoritative discourse, but against western discourse in particular. Concurrent with this perspective on postcolonial hybridity as a phenomenon always implicating the West, any presence of the West [End Page 116] abroad today tends to be linked back to nineteenth-century European colonialism, and tends to...