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Real life Middle East Handmaids´tale

Persepolis 1: The Story of a Childhood

An epic tale of sociocultural evolutions, silent revolutions, and never losing hope and trust in progressive, new solutions although backlashes and setbacks are omnipresent and daunting.

Each country has its big, subtle, and socially critical work that is right in the face of the shoals, bigotry, and cognitive dissonances of an established form of government and this is one of the best ones from the lands of One Thousand and One Nights. As always in these cases, the authors´ risk everything by using creativity and art to point the finger at the abysses, malfunctions, and dark sides of systems.

Unique because of the special, cultural background
In other cases and countries, especially democratic Western ones, this would be an average coming of age novel, forced reading if it´s a possibly bad, patriotically idealized writer from this nation, free reading if it´s a really good one with the target audience and style necessities considered, and thereby not acceptable for boring school reading, but Persepolis is different. Rebellion, emancipation, and freedom aren´t just some quarrels with parents, teachers, and conservative uncles and aunts, this is all against the system so that the courage and risk of everyone daring to speak out can´t be compared with Western emo teenage dirtbag goth problems, where there is nothing at stake except possible future psychiatric couch time fun regarding why mummy and daddy didn´t love, understand, and support ones individuality and creativity enough. Compare that to torture prisons and dictatorships, to totalitarianism, and discrimination of all females, and one gets a picture of what first world teenage problems really mean.

POV and authenticity.
Just as the unique, cultural background, the female perspective in this, again, misogynist society makes it extra impressive, irritating, and bizarre, because backlashes come with a special taste of bitterness. Never having something is a different and maybe even worse thing than losing everything that was in range again. Difficult to say if a male, not discriminated author, could or would (have wanted) to write a similar work, or if he would have had the talent to create the same, authentic, emotional masterpiece, but subjectively I don´t think so, because there are (don´t lapidate me, no matter if Western do gooders or jihadists) natural differences in male and female writing, strongly based on interests, audience (show me all the female hard sci-i readers and writers and the male romance equivalents), and yes, of course too, epigenetic conditioning to conform to gender roles and stereotypes. That´s the potentially bad part with discrimination, gender wars, and political correctness gone ultra bonkers. But this would go a bit too far, so let´s expand and get hyper meta towards

Global, political, religious, and, most important, economic reasons.
I tried to read a bit about the geopolitical background, especially regarding resources such as oil

the US and UK playing with manipulative coup god mode in world history, again

the endless beef with Saudi Arabia

, comparable to how different Christian faith´ battle until the end times about how the read holy books, the open or secret influence of other big players such as Russia, China, India, etc., but it´s far too complicated and controversial to get a clear picture and I simply haven´t enough background knowledge to give any competent comment or opinion. Although I assume that I´m not the only one, because to say that this is tricky would be an extreme understatement, especially including all the other US, Russian, Israeli, etc. war and proxy war "humanitarian interventions� in the whole Middle East over the last decades. Now that´s a messed up constellation one shouldn´t touch with a ten foot pole.

Great transition, let´s faith enter the stage
As so often, it boils down to ideology, no matter if political, economic, or, in this case, religious, but instead of endless agnostic, atheistic, nihilistic, or whatever istic, or philosophical, ethical, sociological, etc. argumentation (and thereby endless debate full of logical fallacies, cognitive dissonance, bias, etc.), one should just compare


and



Not much to add to that.
Except that I might now, again, be on some more watchlists and blacklists, and the number of countries I could safely visit without being considered a dissident demagogue reduced. Again. Good that I´m a homebody without any need to see the world.

Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

As if the Iranian Revolution hadn´t already been bad enough, growing up in a Western country has its flaws too

Because in both worlds, she´s an outsider
But at least she has a group of friends that aren´t integrated too that help her to settle down in a very strange, foreign place (I´m from Austria and have f world privileges). The problem is, it would take much more than just good friends to deal with such a traumatizing past she can´t leave behind alone in a foreign country. So she decides to

Give it another try
This could be seen as a second attempt of fighting the system but, as the first time, it just can´t work. One human against a system mostly just wins in fairytales. Still, this novel is one of the

Most important works showing women suffering under fundamentalism
Because no matter under which flag, symbol, or ideology, discrimination, exploitation, torture, and killing is always the same. Maybe a bit more sophisticated to give it a civilized touch, but the totalitarian approach always stays the same. While other books dealing with certain issues are interesting for relatively small groups of people of a certain age, sexual orientation, political ideology, etc., this one is written for hundreds of millions of women that are suffering. It´s the

Real life Handmaid's tale
If states in Africa and the Middle East were democratized, they would look in shock at a description of a possible, dystopic alternative future, a uchronia of theocratic hardliners smashing progressive emancipation.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique: