No Man's An Island, Until There's An Earthquake

Watching Persepolis tonight was a nice coda to Milan Kundera’s Ignorance, which I had finished reading last week. Since finishing that book, I’d been thinking a lot about the concepts of exile and return, and feeling like a stranger in one’s own homeland. In the film, the protagonist and narrator, Marjane, flees Tehran as a young girl for Vienna. While Tehran is rocked by putative reactionary dogma, mortar shells, and tragedy, Marjane’s life is a whirlwind of love, loss, and lots of moving. With each day, her experiences and encounters drag her further and further away from her family and friends, who won’t ever know what it means to be Marjane, Iranian and in Austria, in 1982. Marjane, indelibly altered abroad, returns home to discover that she is no longer the Iranian who left her parents arms four years prior, but an Iranian-European hybrid, searching desperately through the eyeglasses of nostalgia for the world that she once knew that no longer exists. Marjane is there, but Marjane’s Iran is not. Unsurprisingly, the film ends with Marjane sitting in an airport in Paris, her final departure from Tehran. Will Marjane find peace and fulfillment in this second adopted homeland? If Kundera’s book is any sort of guide, it would seem that the answer is no. Once the homeland is lost, so is hope for a life not haunted by loneliness and the pangs of nostalgia.

Persepolis addresses these feelings of social alienation, depression, nostalgia, and anger through simple yet expressive cartoon, backgrounds that are expressionistic and highly emotive, and a beautiful score that enhances the power of the image without feeling obtrusive. It leaves its audience with the question: how do we define ourselves? Are we beholden to our bloodlines, nation or memories? Perhaps with the exception of our brothers and sisters in arms, few Americans have to face this crisis of identity that comes with a forced divorce from the homeland. Upon return, the people that were left behind are no longer the same people whose smiles are frozen in old photos and videos. If the ties that bind us are our shared experiences, what happens when those experiences are replaced by new ones? Does the thread remain strong; does it start to unravel or does it break? When an earthquake shifts the plates, they don’t go back together. Is it the same for people? According to both Persepolis and Ignorance, it is. Both works are endowed with a profound sense of isolation—especially Ignorance. Milan Kundera attacks the 'No Man is an Island' philosophy head on by providing the reader twin case studies of loneliness. In the novella, two exiled Czechs—one man entering the twilight of life, one woman firmly in middle age—return to their home country only to find that their roots have been dug up. Unable to reconnect emotionally or in memory with their former brothers, mothers, lovers and friends, these orphans float like those two ships passing in the night, “reaching out, seeking one another”, and find nothing but water and abyss.