In our class meetings thus far, we’ve often returned to the concept of transnationalism, discussing the vocabulary of the transnational and what kind of an experience we are describing when we talk about transnationalism. One idea that we have returned to is that of simultaneity. Transnationalism is a not a story, or a phenomenon experienced as a step-by-step process. In real lives, the transnational exists because of the all-at-once, uncontainable nature of people, products, cultures, histories, and imagination. These all exist at the same time around the globe, and occur both at the same time and in the same place within the individual consciousness. In Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, the visual form of the graphic novel contributes to Satrapi’s ability to represent the simultaneous, placeless nature of transnationalism in ways that a purely linguistic narrative form could not. As an English student, I’ve been trained to see the complexities of the text and the various ways authors use language to communicate multiple and even conflicting messages in their works. While reading the graphic novel, however, I was most often struck by the extra-lingual, information that was not only communicated by the drawings rather than the text, but in particular information that could only be communicated by the images, because it went beyond the text’s capacity for signification. I believe these extra-lingual messages are essential to the representation of transnationalism in Persepolis.

One way Satrapi mobilizes visual imagery to more vividly express transnationalism is by representing meaning with blank space. An unlikely frame emphasized this strategy to me: that of the before and after comparison of Marjane’s hairy and shaved skin (274). In this frame, Marjane’s hairy skin is represented by a rectangular swatch that is covered in hair (“Me before.”). Alongside that image is a completely blank rectangle that Satrapi writes is “Me after” (274). On a surface level, this makes sense; the hair is present in one image, while the next shows it removed from Marjane’s now smooth and blank skin. Beyond the surface, however, this frame struck me in its use of blank space to convey meaning, prompting me to think about Satrapi’s use of this device throughout her graphic novel. I was especially interested in the difference that this use of blank space highlighted between textual and graphic representation. While blank spaces appear in text to indicate divisions between words, paragraphs, and sections, blank space cannot, in prose, represent part of the body, or the removal of hair. Yet in this black-and-white work of fairly uncomplicated illustrations, blank spaces often represent important parts of the story. For example, blank background space is present in Satrapi’s illustrations of Iran, Austria, Turkey, and Spain. By making the nothing of blank space represent physical spaces in her illustrations, Satrapi creates a sense of nonspatial places. While the illustrations represent real places, comparing their shared negative spaces demonstrates that they all lack fixed or isolated location as it is relative to the people in those spaces. The only times when spatial location is truly defined is when it is at its most abstract and meaningless, such as on the map of the Middle East that Marjane and her parents see on television in Madrid (78). The map presented in the broadcast clearly defines borders, yet such a representation of space is as meaningless to the individuals moving across and within those borders as the Spanish report that the Satrapis cannot understand. From within the borders of a country, or of a frame in the graphic novel, place lacks national definition. The blank spaces that represent walls, skies, and ground, the very points of orientation by which one might ascertain location and relation to one’s surroundings, are indistinguishable. Thus nothingness comes to represent location, and in doing so, enacts the same dismantling of local orientation that simultaneity of location effects in transnational experience.

The representation of simultaneity is accommodated especially well in Persepolis not only through the extra-lingual expression of meaning through nothingness, but also in the graphic novel’s capacity to bring elements together in single frames. When Satrapi presents frames that represent, for example, the influence of Britain, the propaganda of the Iranian government, and the intimate space of the family home all in one simultaneously accessed image, these elements are experienced as contemporaneous (83). The frame illustrates that such forces exist all at once and in shared spaces, both physically and internally in individual experience. Their relations are complex, the result of multidirectional tension and simultaneous interpretation and reinterpretation in the context of one another. To represent such nontemporal and nonspatial presence with the inherently temporal form of language is a daunting prospect. Thus, I believe Satrapi’s placement of transnational messages, individuals, and products on the equal and displaced footing of her graphic frames is another way she utilizes the graphic novel to represent transnationalism in a more lifelike manner than she could have achieved through language alone. As a final image of Satrapi’s use of images to displace, level, and merge transnational elements, I consider the frame that depicts Marjane’s and her parents’ trip to Italy and Spain (77). Perched on a magic carpet and surrounded by the swirls that often indicate Marjane’s imagination at work, the three are simultaneously in Italy, Spain, and the nowhere space of Marjane’s mind. Buildings that may represent both Spanish and Italian architecture and landmarks bracket the interior, where a dark haired woman twists among the strands of Marjane’s imagination, perhaps embodying one culture, perhaps two, perhaps more. Like the Satrapis, she is entangled in the transnational nowhere and everywhere. The evacuation of fixed location, visual simultaneity of national symbols, and merging of individual consciousness and multiple cultural experiences in this frame exemplify how the form of the graphic novel amplifies Satrapi’s figuration of the transnational. In Persepolis, transnationalism is presented as a placeless, timeless, uncontainable phenomenon that can only be experienced all at once, just as Marjane is at once, and inseparably “a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the west” (272).