Removing a literary ‘veil’: Maus, Persepolis, and the graphic novel’s sociopolitical significance

During my first year of English and History studies at Warwick, my literary ‘veil’ was lifted on a few giants of the graphic novel form. Here, I’ll discuss why two of them in particular matter – Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust narrative, Maus, and Marjane Satrapi’s elegy to a changed Iran’s past, Persepolis. In both books, the simple power of the cartoon image was palpable, sketched with vivid personality onto pages saturated with lived and still-negotiated emotions. By shedding personal light on such themes as genocide and the damaging impact of religious fundamentalism, Maus and Persepolis have respectively set a moving precedent for the graphic novel’s capacity to provide a medium of expression for individuals, for people whose worlds and cultures have been ripped to shreds by devastating sociopolitical phenomena.

Maus sees Art Spiegelman dramatise his own artistic process as he interviews his father Vladek about his experiences during the Holocaust, periodically flashing back to pre-war and inter-war Europe as he transfers Vladek’s crushing testimony to us readers. Art’s journey is about coming to terms with inhabiting the universe of the survivor, a complicated task for the generation succeeding genocide. There is a sense of indebtedness and worthlessness pervading him on hearing what his father suffered. Maus reckons with how to navigate the post-Holocaust world  and move on with life, just as Art must accept the atrocity as a genetic part of him. This introspectiveness, coupled with such appalling details of the Holocaust’s progression, is what makes Maus so powerful, and why it remains on many a school syllabus.

turning the pages of Maus feels like an obligation to the six million who were murdered during the war

If I were to recommend one graphic novel to The Boar’s readers, this would be it; turning the pages of Maus feels like an obligation to the six million who were murdered during the war.

Spiegelman’s book cannot be spoken of without mentioning what is arguably the cartoonist’s most notable creative choice.

By depicting his characters as different animals according to their ethnicities …,  the ludicrosity of racialised stereotyping and prejudice is brought to the fore

By depicting his characters as different animals according to their ethnicities (Jews are rendered as mice in accordance with the Nazi belief that they were vermin),  the ludicrosity of racialised stereotyping and prejudice is brought to the fore. Furthermore, Spiegelman stated in an interview that “the animal heads are relatively neutral, relatively blank, and they ask for you to project [the human personalities] into that work”. In this way, reading comics necessitates the reader’s participation – as Spiegelman described it, they work by “drawing you into the actuality of what happened”, the terror that governed the lives of people as real as we are, whose only separation from us is through time. Emotions, then, are transferred across temporal boundaries through Spiegelman’s ink, allowing us to better understand and mourn the blurred faces behind the overwhelming statistics of mass murder.

Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical history Persepolis also concerns itself with humanising sociopolitical tragedy. Named after an ancient Persian capital, her novel recounts the Iranian author’s ‘story of a childhood’ and ‘story of a return’, detailing the struggles of non-conformity within the newly fundamentalist Iran of her childhood. Fleeing to the West gives the teenage Marjane the freedom of expression denied to those living under fundamentalist dictatorships (especially women), while also allowing her to mourn the deteriorating situation of the country she once loved, and deep down still loves.

Young Marji’s reification of Iran’s glorious heyday rapidly fades into history as death and destruction began to cloud Satrapi’s pages following 1979’s theocratic coup. The simple designs of her black-and-white art convey Marji’s wide-eyed innocence and at times comically fantastical imaginings, only to be juxtaposed with images of corpses on nearby panels. Friends and family fall prey like dominoes to an advancing authoritarianism, one which inhibits the living of normal lives and corrupts normal childhoods. For example, Marji and her female school friends are forced to wear the veil, a restrictive dress code still ruthlessly enforced in Iran (the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini in police custody after allegedly not wearing a hijab reaffirmed this travesty). All the trauma of Satrapi’s novel is narrated, despicably, by a young girl (a haunting injustice Satrapi would never wish on anyone).

But by narrating the dramatic events throughout her country, Satrapi is able to retell, and thus retake, the history of Iran as her story

But by narrating the dramatic events throughout her country, Satrapi is able to retell, and thus retake, the history of Iran as her story.

Reading the testimony of Maus and Persepolis, the art styles on display are clearly suffused with meaning. The authors’ indictment of the way in which sociopolitical upheavals corrupt happiness, how they snatch away basic human freedoms from under people’s feet, is a message we can continue to apply to the myriad of ethnic conflicts occurring across our world this very second. The personal pain of many individuals, unlike Spiegelman’s and Satrapi’s families, may never be visualised or verbalised on the page. In certain contexts, it may not even be allowed to.

Indeed, these two texts have one more thing in common: they have both been banned from some schools for their not-so-subtle content (Persepolis is of course prohibited in Iran, while Maus was controversially removed from a school curriculum  in Tennessee two years ago, with reasons cited as bad language and nudity).

Such censorship has silenced the very issues which Satrapi and Spiegelman seek to address through their art, thus endangering the voices of those left behind in the rubble of ethnic conflict.  

Such censorship has silenced the very issues which Satrapi and Spiegelman seek to address through their art, thus endangering the voices of those left behind in the rubble of ethnic conflict.

Graphic novels, then, have a very particular power in contrast with the mere written word. Through a succession of images, cartoons provide us with an immediate window into the stories of individuals in the eye of sociopolitical storms, those best placed to teach us about such maelstroms’ detrimental consequences. Rather than a perceptively childish or reductive art form, the graphic novel is one of the most potent and damning mediums of education and social protest that exists. If you’re in the position I was in last year and have not yet entered upon the worlds of Maus, Persepolis, or the numerous other brilliant graphic novels, then I’d urge you to seek them out wherever you can. We must all try to lift our literary ‘veils’ on such important works as these, even if unaccustomed to the cartoon form. By doing so, we can give the stifled voices behind more real veils the freedom and space to speak their harsh truths.