Author: Katherine Fell

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a Big Wild concert at The National. Big Wild is an EDM artist whom I had heard of, however I was not entirely familiar with him when I purchased tickets and agreed to go with friends who are fans of his music. What struck me the most about the performance was how the artist made the effort to engage more of the senses than just hearing the music. There were massive LED screens on the stage that displayed different patterns and designs that went along with the songs, and this made the concert much more about the music.

It was overall incredibly entertaining and I enjoyed being exposed to a music genre who’s culture I was not entirely familiar with and was then completely immersed in a mosh pit of EDM fans who were completely lost in the music. I think that cultural events, and concerts more specifically, can bring people together in a way that not many other things can. Everyone was there to have a good time and enjoy the music and that night, I was able to escape the stresses and problems that I normally have to deal with in everyday life.

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Last week, I attended one of the Sharp Series events called “The Race Card.” The speaker was Michele Morris, and she came to campus to talk about race in the United States and The Race Card project. The project essentially allows for people to submit six word stories on post cards. Today, they have received over 500,000 cards from 50 states and 96 countries. Some stories include “Lady, I don’t want your purse” and “Black babies cost less to adopt.” Morris talked about how the most important part of work that she does is listen. For instance, another one of the six word stories that she shared was “I’m white and pay the price.” It is important to hear from all perspectives, even if we don’t necessarily agree with them. Morris also talked about the importance of having a conversation about race in a public forum, since it is such a difficult subject to talk about. If these discussions are held in a public forum, then it allows for growth and progress. We need to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable and stepping out of our comfort zones. It was especially interesting to see this discussion take place on the University of Richmond’s campus, as the city of Richmond’s history with race is so layered and the school is very dedicated to being more integrated and inclusive, given the lack of racial interaction across different races that currently occurs on this campus.

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When we think about social justice and activism in the twentieth century, I doubt that Native American activism would be the first thing to pop up in anyone’s mind. If someone were to ask me to give examples of activism and social justice in the twentieth century, the Women’s Suffrage Movement and the Civil Rights Movement come to mind much more easily. While both women and African Americans have faced horrible injustices in the United States, neither group has been subjugated to as much abuse as the Native Americans. Native Americans were facing horrible injustices before the United States even came to be, and the article on Native American activism outlines Native American’s efforts to find justice in the United States.

I had known about almost none of the events highlighted in the article. When I learned about activism and social justice when I was in school, though, I was taught about countless different events that shaped both the movement and the United States as a whole (i.e., The Seneca Falls Convention, “I Have a Dream,” Rosa Parks). When it comes to Native Americans and the struggles that that group of Americans has had to endure, I cannot remember a single event that I learned about in school regarding their path to social justice. I think that this says a lot about the ways in which Native Americans and their history are treated in today’s culture. These people have faced countless instances of appropriation and people trying to erase their history. After reading this article, I have learned just how relevant and important they are in conversations about activism and social justice.

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We continue to learn about the many layers of the Republic of Gilead and Offred’s story as we begin to reach the end of The Handmaid’s Tale. In this chapter, called “Jezebel’s,” we learn about the Commander’s membership of an underground brothel in the city when he takes Offred on a “night out” and exposes her to “the club.” Here, Offred is brought back to the time before Gilead, seeing women wearing revealing outfits and makeup and smoke cigarettes. It’s a significant departure from the oppressive life that she’s been forced to lead during her time as a Handmaid. At the brothel, Offred sees her friend Moira for the first time since Moira escaped the Red Center by stealing Aunt Elizabeth’s outfit. We learn that we was in hiding for several months before being found out near the Canadian border as she was trying to escape. When given the choice between being sent to the Colonies and becoming a prostitute, she tells Offred that the decision was easy. This is the last encounter that Offred has with Moira.

What struck me the most about this section was the part in which Offred recounts Moira’s time on the run from the Gilead authorities. Moira tells Offred about the Underground Femaleroad. The Underground Femaleroad is an obvious reference to the Underground Railroad that was used to help escaped slaves find freedom in the nineteenth century. When discussing the Underground Femaleroad, though, Offred was sure to intentionally leave out the exact methods in which Moira was able to navigate the Underground Femaleroad and potentially escape Gilead because she did not want to compromise the Underground Femaleroad if it was still smuggling women out of Gilead.

This reminded me of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass purposely did not divulge the specifics of his escape from slavery. He knew that his escape was one of the most important parts of his life, and would definitely have been the selling point of his autobiography. However, he instead chose to protect the slaves who were still relying on the Underground Railroad, and he knew that by revealing these secrets he would have compromised the escape of countless other slaves. Offred does the same thing in this section because while it would have been fascinating to hear the nature of Moira’s near escape to freedom, Offred could have jeopardized other women’s escapes by revealing this vital information because her story could have fallen into the wrong hands.

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The most striking part of this section of The Handmaid’s Tale in my opinion was Offred’s recollection of Moira’s escape from the Red Center. Moira caused a toilet to overflow in order to distract Aunt Elizabeth, and then Moira jabbed something into Aunt Elizabeth’s ribs in order to get her into the furnace room. Moira tied up Aunt Elizabeth and stole her clothes. She used to pass to walk freely out of the Red Center and no one has seen or heard from Moira since then. She is the only woman that we have seen so far in the book who has actively rebelled against the Republic of Gilead. What she lacks in physical strength is made up for in her ability to outwit the system of oppression.

The nature of Moira’s rebellion was what really made this chapter stick out to me. The Republic of Gilead oppresses the women by forcing them into a caste system and projecting what caste they are in based on the clothes and colors that they wear. They are trapped in these roles and they are forced to project this oppression through their clothing. Moira, on the other hand, uses this system to her advantage and is able to use Aunt Elizabeth’s clothes to secure her freedom from the Red Center. If it were not for the oppressive systems and cultures of Gilead, this tactic would not have worked and Moira would not have been successful in her escape. What was once used as a symbol of domination over the women of Gilead became the vehicle for one woman’s escape. The subversion of this symbol of power is especially important because one of the hallmarks of the Republic of Gilead is being used against the institution itself.

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The first chapters of the Handmaid’s Tale paint a dark picture of what it means to live in the Republic of Gilead. While in Persepolis, the women in Iran were incredibly restricted in how they could behave and present themselves in public, the women of Gilead, especially the Handmaids, are not nearly given the amount of freedom that Iranian women have. The Handmaids in Gilead exist simply as property of the state, and have no autonomy over themselves. It is incredibly jarring as a reader, especially coming from a western perspective, to see women treated this way in a fundamentalist society.

I think the most important element of the opening chapters, though, and the book as a whole, are Offred’s flashbacks. We learn that she not only lives in a society that treats her so cruelly and dehumanizes, her, but she remembers living in a world that closely resembles our own. Offred has not lived her whole life in Gilead and has not only existed as a Handmaid. There was a time in which she did not know what this life was, and we know this given the perspective of the first chapter when she is in the gym with the other women as they discretely share their names with one another in hope to evade the Aunts. this is incredibly important because we ourselves like to think that our society is well founded enough and that we have systems in place to prevent something like Gilead from taking reality. However, I find that the most terrifying part of the beginning of The Handmaid’s Tale to be the fact that this kind of society was not always considered normal, however it was entirely possible for these extreme views to come into fruition and be imposed on the people.

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In this section of Persepolis, we see Marji return to Iran after living in Europe for four years. However, this return came at a very high cost after what she endured towards the end of her time there. Marji invested everything into Markus; her whole life would revolve around a relationship with a guy that she had only just met and Marji was in in no way prepared for when she eventually finds him in bed with another woman. She had spend much of her savings on him and had no plan outside of spending her life with him. This fairytale is completely shattered when their relationship ends, and Marji quickly finds herself homeless after she runs out of money. After she is forced to leave the buses and trains that she initially spends her nights in, she is relegated to sleeping on the streets in the middle of winter, greatly jeopardizing her health. Luckily, Marji is eventually hospitalized, but then has nowhere else to go. As a result, she collects money from Zozo and returns to Iran to live with her parents.

The chapter where Marji makes this major decision is a callback to the first volume of Persepolis; both chapters are titled “The Veil.” In both chapters, Marji goes from living without having to wear the veil to then transitioning into a culture where it is imposed upon her. However, this time, Marji is voluntarily returning to this culture because she has nowhere else to go. In this case, the veil is a last resort, and Marji is sacrificing her freedom of personal expression. Her personal expression was the reason why she initially left Iran, and now it is what she much sacrifice in order to survive after what happened to her in Europe. It’s interesting to see how much Marji has changed and come into herself since the start of her memoir, so I look forward to further reading how reentering the fundamentalist culture of Iran will personally affect her.

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After finishing this section of Persepolis, I was truly surprised to see how different Satrapi’s early teenage years were from my own. I made me realize how much I took for granted all of the freedoms that I was able to enjoy because I am fortunate enough to come from an affluent family in the United States. While I was able to grow up experimenting with new clothes and was pretty much free to dress however I wanted, Satrapi was ridiculed and scrutinized for wearing western clothing, and was even threatened with being sent to “the committee.”

What struck me the most, though, was how much I take for granted the medical care available to us in the United States. Because of Iran’s closed borders, Satrapi’s uncle needed special permission from the government in order to be allowed to leave the country and go to England for his life-saving surgery. Because the hospital director used to be Satrapi’s aunt and uncle’s social subordinate, instead of taking the measures necessary to help her uncle, he leaves the situation up to “God’s will.” This is incredibly hypocritical. He says that Taher will get medical help if God wants him to, but he does not act in accordance with God’s will, which would be to help Taher. While the healthcare system in the United States is not perfect, life and death situations such as this are not dependent on arbitrary decisions like in this case. Living in the United States, we are incredibly fortunate to have access to such good medical care and whether or not we have access to certain care is not simply left up to someone who maybe used to wash our windows.

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Last week, I attended a talk hosted by Dr. Omur Harmansah, an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. The talk was called “Ruined Gardens of Babylon,” and he discussed the dark ecology and heritage politics of the Middle East in his work as an archeologist. The talk was incredibly eye opening. There are multiple factors which have significantly impacted Dr. Harmansah’s work as an archeologist. For one, global warming has caused irreversible damage to our environment and archeological landscape, and therefore significantly impacts the ways in which him and his team are able to interact with the sites that they visit, and the sites themselves have changed drastically as a result of human activity in the twentieth century.

In addition to global warming, violence and terrorism have also unfortunately significantly impacted these incredibly precious and sacred archeological sites. ISIS has destroyed numerous archeological sites for the sake of promoting and protecting their political narrative, sacrificing ancient cultures and artifacts that have survived for thousands of years. Because of these environmental and political factors and their influence on landscape archeology, the ways in which we engage with our political leaders is incredibly important. If we engage and communicate with leaders who’s priorities are environmental protection and are looking to put a stop to organizations such as ISIS, then we will be better able to engage with the ancient civilizations that are at risk of being destroyed by the world around us.

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While I am familiar with Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and I read the first volume when I was in high school, I am only just now realizing the brilliance in Satrapi’s decision to tell her story in the form of a graphic novel as I revisit the first 70 pages. While growing up in during the Islamic revolution is an incredible story, it’s one that very few readers can relate to, especially when Satrapi herself write about the alienation and stereotyping that the people of Iran have had to undergo as a result of the political extremism that takes place in the country. The comic book illustrations bring so much more life and personality to the story, and I don’t know if Satrapi’s words alone would be able to accomplish the same thing in conveying her innocence and of humor when discussing such a difficult time. In my opinion, the illustrations are what really give us a look into Satrapi’s feelings and emotions, as we are witnessing the world through her young eyes.

The points in the reading where I think that this was exemplified the best were the panels where God was illustrated. While Satrapi explicitly tells us at the beginning of the memoir that she was born a very religious person, the ways in which God is illustrated and the way he interacts with Satrapi visually offers much more than Satrapi’s words alone. Specifically, the last panel on page 53 and and the panels on pages 70 and 71 really demonstrate Satrapi’s internal struggles with her faith as she comes to terms with how dangerous the revolution is becoming. On page 53, she is completely enveloped in God, showing how strong her convictions were and that she was finding security in her faith. However, upon learning that her uncle had been executed, Satrapi and God are distant from one another, and the chapter ends with her floating in space, completely lost. Here, we really get the feeling of how alone she feels as the war begins. We feel this emotional weight thanks to the illustrations of the graphic novel.

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