'Persepolis' by Marjane Satrapi

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Print

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Return. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Print.

I remember seeing the hostages from the US Embassy in Tehran released from captivity on television.  I was five years old.  For years my perspective of Iran, and Iranians in general, was colored by the version of Iran I saw on the nightly news: the image of a monolithic block of hundreds of Iranians chanting, "Death to Satan!" while burning American flags.  I imagine this is true for many other people.  It was an image that motivated Marjane Satrapi to write -- and draw -- a memoir of the Iran in which she grew up, left, returned, and ultimately left once again.

Cover image of Story of a
Childhood

Persepolis begins with the first volume, The Story of a Childhood.  In it, we meet a 10 year old Satrapi as she's handed a hijab as she walks through the gates of her school, with a command to wear it.  Satrapi wryly observes of herself and her classmates, "We didn't really like to wear the veil, especially since we didn't understand why we had to" (Childhood 3).  The image accompanying her statement shows a playground full of little girls doing everything with their veils, except actually wearing them.  From there, Satrapi takes the reader on a journey through a brief, but informative, history of Iran, ending up in the late 1970s when the Iranian people began to protest against the Shah, who eventually left his role as the ruler of Iran.  Satrapi then shows how little by little Islamic extremists appropriated the revolution itself.  The rest of the book covers how Satrapi and her family struggled against the restrictions placed on them in the Islamic Republic, the restrictions that governed how and what Satrapi was taught in school, what she wore in public, and even the type of music she was allowed to openly purchase.  After witnessing their daughter chafe under the restrictive society, Satrapi's parents make the decision to send her to school in Austria.

Cover image of Story of a
Return

The memoir picks up in the second volume, The Story of a Return, when Satrapi lands in Vienna.  There, she wrestles with the initial language barrier, and then the cultural barrier that drives Satrapi back to Iran once she graduates from the school in Vienna.  The solace she sought in Iran was short-lived.  The restrictions are even tighter than they were when Satrapi went to Austria.  In order to be admitted to a university, she must submit to a religious exam.  She meets a young man, but the restrictions of society mean they are unable to really spend a great deal of unchaperoned time with one another, and their eventual marriage is a disaster from the word go.  Her parents, once more, seeing Satrapi's options in Iran are severely limited, encourage her to leave Iran, but this time for good.

The dual nature of Satrapi and many
other Iranians after the revolution.

One of the overarching themes of the memoir is the ultimate futility of pinning labels on people.  Satrapi and her family are proud of their Persian heritage, and only nominally Muslim.  Yet as Iranians, people outside of Iran often won't look past the hijab on Satrapi, her mother, or gradmother's head, labelling them as devout Muslims, even when they are not.  A beloved family member is viewed as an enemy of the state by the government.  The mullah who administers Satrapi's religious ideology exam for university admittance turns out to be a fair and thoughtful individual, quite at odds with the image of a dour, suppressive religious leader seen on Western television screens.  Satrapi even goes so far as to call him a "true religious man" (Return 130).  Neighbors who hadn't been devout Muslims before the revolution were now publicly even more devout than the Ayatollah Khomeini.  It serves to demonstrate that perception is everything, and our perceptions are often at odds with reality.

Satrapi as a child,
on the right, on the
way to a protest.

The people Satrapi encounters in Vienna are supposedly more enlightened, free from the repressiveness of a religious regime, and yet while Satrapi lives in Vienna, neo-Nazi groups are on the rise.  Markus, Satrapi's boyfriend at the time attempts to placate her by claiming, "culture and education are the lethal weapons against all kinds of fundamentalism" (Return 75).  This statement is particularly distasteful to Satrapi, who came from an educated family and culturally-rich background, and still watched helplessly as fundamentalists took over her country.  Incidents such as this one during Satrapi's time in Vienna only widen the gap between Satrapi and her peers in Vienna.

When she's set adrift in Vienna, Satrapi comments that she's essentially stateless: in Iran she's too Western, but in the West she's too Iranian (Return 118).  Satrapi's identity crisis is a frequent issue of personal contention.  She can't relate to her peers in Vienna, because they have lived an extremely sheltered existence in comparison to Satrapi, who has seen neighbors killed in the Iran-Iraq War and lives in Vienna completely alone, with no support system.  When Satrapi returns to Tehran, her experiences in Vienna have made her foreign to her friends there.  The repressive regime has made her girlfriends' tiny acts of rebellion -- wearing makeup and emulating Western fashions -- into a veritable lifeline.  To Satrapi, coming home after more than four years of isolation, bad relationships, and still worse choices,  even those small acts of rebellion are too exhausting.  Nor can she speak of the worst of her time in Vienna, which pales in comparison to what her friends and family have had to endure in Tehran.

Satrapi's friends... veiled...

... and unveiled.

Satrapi's art class at university
attempting to draw the human
form while hidden in a chador.

Given that the memoir is written by a woman, the veil becomes a source of contention between Satrapi's progressive upbringing and the regime that dictates she wear one upon leaving the house.  Satrapi doesn't delve into the history of the veil in Iran, but there is a long history of Persian women covering their heads (Jelodar, Yusof, and Mahmoodi 66).  The veil itself also became the object of a tug-of-war between the push to modernize Iran when Reza Shah had the Unveiling Act passed in 1936 and more traditional Iranians.  Jelodar, Yusof, and Mahmoodi 67).  The Veiling Act made the veil mandatory in 1983 (Jelodar, Yusof, and Mahmoodi 70).  The veil creates "a feeling of alienation from [Satrapi's] friends and opposite sex at schools... the veil, as a national symbol, separates her in copious ways, including body and mind" (Jelodar, Yusof, and Mahmoodi 71).  Satrapi uses depictions of veiled women to demonstrate the way "the veil became a benchmark with which women are measured.  Those who wear the veil are devoted believers and those who do not are traitors and westoxified" (Jelodar, Yusof, and Mahmoodi 72).  First, she uses a contrasting drawing of a "devout" woman versus a more modern woman.  The devout woman is dressed in full-length garment that covers everything but her face.  The modern woman wears a long-sleeved jacket and a scarf over her head that allows a few illicit strands of hair to peek out.  When Satrapi returns to Tehran from Vienna, she encounters girls who push the boundaries set by the Revolutionary Guards for their scarves and allow the hijab to slip a bit further back, exposing more of their hair.  The veil also acts as a means to keep women so busy questioning if their appearance meets the Revolutionary Guard standards that they are unable to question the loss of their freedoms (Satrapi, Return 148).

The panic experienced when the
Revolutionary Guard discovers
a party.

Satrapi herself has an admittedly mixed view of the hijab.  While she doesn't wish to wear one, she doesn't want to take the choice to wear one away from someone else.  In a op-ed piece in response to the 2004 French law banning hijabs in The Guardian, Satrapi writes, "Forcing women to put a piece of material on their head is an act of violence, and even if you get used to it after a while, the violence of insisting that women must cover their heads in public with a small piece of cloth does not diminish ("Veiled Threat").  She continues, "But I also think that to forbid girls from wearing the veil... is every bit as repressive... young women... should have the freedom to choose... a basic human right that someone can choose what she wears without interference from the state ("Veiled Threat").  To Satrapi it's an ironic situation because as much as she dislikes the veil, she finds herself defending the right to choose to wear one to Western audiences (Constantino 434).

Satrapi's beloved uncle
Anoosh, as he realizes
everything is not all right.

The artwork in Persepolis is expressive without being ornate.  Bold slashes and swirls of black bisect the panels, creating the upsweep of an eyebrow, the folds of a chador, or the silhouetted bodies of young men and boys killed on the front of the Iran-Iraq War.  In an interview with Mother Jones, Satrapi says, "Writing is not for me. I completely lose my sense of humor when I write... Images give me possibilities that I don't have with words" (Walt "Never Mind the Mullahs").  The images allow Satrapi to convey her younger self in a way that both adult and teenage audience can recognize. It's not difficult to see how precocious Satrapi was as a child when you see the expression on her ten year old face -- full of confidence and the absolute certainty she is right.  It allows her to show her uncle Anoosh's growing disillusionment with the revolution as he repeatedly says, "Everything will be all right." while his head droops and shoulders hunch in disappointment and defeat (Satrapi, Childhood 65-66).  A panel with no text is enough to demonstrate the urgency of seeking shelter from a bomb attack from Iraq.  You don't need it.  The sight of so many people frantically rushing down flights of stairs says everything (Satrapi, Childhood 103).  A series of panels showing how Satrapi's university art class struggled to draw the human body while swathed in a volumuous chador is at the same time wryly comical, but the waves of frustration emanate from the page (Satrapi, Return).  Two group images of women first show the women in hijabs, then unveiled, and their individuality can be truly appreciated (Satrapi, Return 151).  The former image shows only the faces of the women in Satrapi's circle of female friends, but without much to differentiate them.  The latter image shows them in all their individual glory, different hair colors and styles, sleeveless tops, trousers, skirts, and even -- gasp! -- cleavage.  A three page series of drawings depict the night a private (and furtive) party was discovered by the Revolutionary Guard and a friend died trying to flee pursuit (Satrapi, Return153-155).  There are no words, but again, there is no need.  Satrapi's drawings efficiently and emotionally offer the panic, fear, and misery of the situation.

An instance where Satrapi
breaks the fourth wall.

As a memoir, the graphic novels do their job.  Satrapi takes you on an emotional ride, punctuated by moments of horror, terror, and unbelievable sadness.  As a narrator, she often breaks the "fourth wall" of the graphic novel, sharing a knowing look, a comment, or other aside with the reader.  It's a wink and a nod to the fact that Satrapi is "speaking" to an audience, and includes them on her own feelings and opinions of certain events, even if she isn't directly involved.  The love her family feels for one another is palpable and seeing her grandmother makes me miss my late grandmother more than ever. (They had similar attitudes about patriarchy and personal lives.)  While the novel itself is accessible to a general audience, there are a few concepts, such as dialectic materialism (the foundation of Marxism-Leninism), totalitarianism, communism, socialism, etc. that might be a bit beyond some readers.  That being said, even I had to look up a few things.  For the most part, Satrapi tries very hard not to leave her audience behind.  As someone whose childhood was peppered with images of the Ayatollah Khomeini, which were the stuff of nightmares to a small child, I greatly appreciated the opportunity to learn more about Iran and Iranians beyond the frenzied protests against the Great Satan.

Running to the
basement shelter
during a bomb
attack

Persepolis has recently come under fire in Chicago Public Schools for a handful of scenes, specifically the single scene showing how the government tortured a friend of Satrapi's parents ("ALA Questions" 8).  The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom pointed out the irony of censoring a book that "reflects the totalitarian society [the] book is all about" ("ALA Questions" 8).  In response, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) started a feature column "designed to allay confusion around the content of banned books and to help parents and teachers raise readers" (Jaffe "Using Graphic Novels").  Their column on Persepolis offers different discussion points of the novel; history and civics connections; applications in literature classes; visual literacy; and pairings with other novels and memoirs.  There are links to recommended teacher resources and, for those who need them, relevant Common Core State Standards.

Satrapi's version of people fleeing
Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War.

An updated version called Persepolis 2.0 was published online by two anonymous Iranian artists, that took the disputed 2009 elections into account.  Using Satrapi's artwork, they added new text and a few original drawings to supplement Satrapi's artwork.  They did this with Satrapi's full permission.

Persepolis was also made into an animated film in 2007, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

All images were photographed from Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis: The Story of a Return.

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Works Cited

"ALA Questions Removal of Graphic Novel in Chicago." American Libraries 44.5 (2013): 8-. Education Source. Web. 25 July 2014.

Costantino, Manuela. "Marji: Popular Commix Heroine Breathing Life into the Writing of History." Canadian Review of American Studies 38.3 (2008): 429-47. Academic Search Complete. Web. 25 July 2015.

Jaffe, Meryl. "Using Graphic Novels in Education: Persepolis." CBDLF. 27 June 2013.Web. <http://cbldf.org/2013/06/using-graphic-novels-in-education-persepolis/>.

Jelodar, Esmaeil Zeiny, Noraini MD Yusof, and Khalil Mahmoodi. "Bearers of Culture: Images of Veiling in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis." Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies 19.2 (2013): 65-74. Education Source. Web. 25 July 2014.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Return. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Print.

---. Persepolis: They Story of a Childhood. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Print.

---. "Veiled Threat." The Guardian. 12 December 2003.Web. <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/12/gender.uk>.

Walt, Vivienne. "Never Mind the Mullahs." Mother Jones 33.1 (2008): 74-5. Academic Search Complete. Web. 25 July 2014.

Steampunk Display

'The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope' by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

Kamkwamba, William and Bryan Mealer. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of  Electricity and Hope. New York: William Morrow, 2009.  Print.

Cover Image:
HarperCollins.com

Go have a look in your trash or recycling bin.  Or maybe you drive by a junkyard or have a neighbor with a junky car they haven’t fixed in the last ten years. I’ll wait.  What did you see there?  Do you think you could make anything out those things?  Do you see trash or do you see potential?  While growing up in a remote Malawi village, William Kamkwamba saw the potential.  As a young teenager, he designed and built a windmill using materials he found in the trash and junkyard.  William’s windmill not only brought electricity to his family’s home, it also helped them access a supply of clean drinking water and water to irrigate their crops.  What was even more remarkable about this situation is that William was entirely self-taught.

Before we can understand what drove William to design and build a windmill for his family, we have to understand the environment in which he and his family lived.  The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind begins with a brief history of Malawi, and the area in which William lives in particular.  This also serves to explain how the people of Malawi ended up in a situation where their lives are dependent on the capriciousness of weather and the moods of their government.  Many people are undereducated, including William’s parents, neither of whom finished primary school and were barely literate (Kamkwamba and Mealer 105).  Attending secondary school, much less a university is a pipe dream to many in Malawi, as William and many of his friends are to discover.  Placement in secondary schools is determined by the scores a student earns in exams given at the end of primary school.  Students must be able to pay the tuition and fees for secondary school and obtain the proper uniform to attend secondary school.  For many students, these requirements place advanced schooling out of reach.  Just before William was to begin secondary school, drought hit Malawi hard and without corn and tobacco crops to sell, Williams’s father was unable to scrape together the twelve hundred kwacha (about eighty US dollars) to pay for William’s school fees. 

William’s father wasn’t always a farmer.  He worked as a trader in the village market, but a brother talked him into joining his tobacco farm when William was a year old.  From that moment onward, the family fortunes rested on the rainy season arriving at the right time and lasting for the proper amount of time.  And all was well for a while.  Things began to unravel when William was nine years old, and his uncle died, leaving the tobacco farm to his oldest son, who promptly mismanaged the farm into unproductivity.  Soon after that, drought and famine arrived in Malawi, which not only destroyed the tobacco crop the family sold for money, but also their maize crop they used as their primary food source.  Even though the next year brought the right weather needed to grow maize and tobacco once more, the damage was done.  William’s family was deeply in debt, and William was forced to repeatedly drop out of school when his family was unable to afford the fees.  William is unwilling to become just another undereducated young man with limited or no prospects, so he haunts the small library in his village in an attempt to keep up with his studies.  He felt “reading could help keep my brain from getting soft while being a dropout” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 161).  One day, he finds an American science textbook that explains windmills and a dream is born.

The region of Malawi where William’s family lives has one abundant natural resource: wind.  When William discovers that wind can create electricity, he begins to plan to build one in order to benefit his family.  It’s soon after the recent drought, and William is driven by a desire to make sure his family doesn’t lose their tobacco crop or go hungry.  With a windmill, his family can pump water from their well to irrigate their tobacco and maize crops and enable his mother to plant a garden to grow other vegetables for his family to eat, like potatoes, cabbages, and beans.

Seeing the windmill wasn’t William’s first exposure to the concept of moving creating energy.  He had seen bicycle lights that were powered by the rider’s pedaling, which sparked his interest in figuring out how to create that kind of power without needing a human or animal to be the source of the motion.  William, along with his cousin Geoffrey, was always a tinkerer.  Together, they learned how radios worked through much trial and error.  In the process “a great many radios were sacrificed for [their] knowledge” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 69).  Eventually they had a small business repairing radios for other people in their village.  This dedication to learning from failure would help William when it came to building his windmill.

William’s windmill was made from a collection of materials salvaged from around the village and an “abandoned garage and scrapyard” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 176).  He describes his first trip to the scrapyard with a windmill design in mind this way: “Now that I had an actual purpose and a plan, I realized how much bounty lay before me.  There were so many things: old water pumps, tractor rims half the size of my body, filters, hoses, piles, and plows” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 176).  What follows is a description of the junk he found in the scrapyard and how he repurposed it to construct his windmill. 

Much to William’s relief, the windmill works according to plan.  He’s able to wire the house for electricity and build a water pump for his family’s well.  The windmill gives his family a much more reliable source of electricity than people in the village, who rely on the government service, which is subject to frequent blackouts.  People can bring their mobile phones to his home and charge them using the windmill’s power.  His sisters can study for school after sundown, and his parents are able to work on tasks that need light after dark, making his family much more productive.  A couple of years later, when William and his windmill came to global attention, he was able to finally install a pump and spigot on his family’s well, and opened it for other women in the village to use.  His mother reports she “saved two hours each day” by not having to carry water from the public drinking water well back to their home (Kamkwamba and Mealer 275).  One can only surmise how much time other women were able to save by having a nearby source of clean drinking water. 

Government education officials later discovered William’s windmill, who in turn, brought journalists to see it.  They were so impressed that they managed to help William continue his interrupted education, reasoning the way to help Malawi was to help innovative young men and women like William continue with higher education.  He was then invited to a TED conference in 2007 in Tanzania where he presented the story of his windmill.  This led to additional publicity and funding, which helped William continue his education at a better school, help pay for his sisters’ school fees, and help make improvements to his village.  William also started a fund, the Moving Windmills Project, to help make improvements in rural Malawi.  After the terrible experience of the drought and famine, William wanted to make sure people never had to depend on the whims of government assistance, if they could avoid it.   

William fits the definition of an innovator.  He didn’t need to reinvent the wheel, or in this case, the windmill.  He saw a situation that could be better and found a way to make it so.  Even as an adolescent, he saw that his village needed someone to quickly repair radios, their entertainment and news source.  William brings to his community what what J.P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight would term a “unique combination of assets” (4).  Even more importantly, he “represents an image of Africa and Africans that rejects the pity and guilt commonly invoked by most news stories out of the continent.  In fact he represents the opposite -- and may simultaneously be offering solutions to poverty, degradations, starvation, aid dependency, and corruption” (Gallis “Sustainable Entrepreneurship”).  Instead of aid groups swooping into Malawi and other countries and imposing their “help”, William represents what happens when local talents are identified and cultivated for the betterment of their community.

As a writer, William has an engaging voice.  It’s the memoir’s greatest strength.  He’s funny, friendly, and has a conversational style.  When describing the importance of a doughy bread made from maize -- nsima -- that’s a staple in Malawian diets he confides, “Everyone from the fat politicians to the dogs and cats depend on nsima to live.  Each night after our supper, Khamba (his dog) would be waiting by his food bowl to get his delicious helping.  Most of the time he didn’t even chew his portion, just inhaled it whole.  ‘How can you even enjoy it?’ I’d ask” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 72).  Anecdotes such as this present a moment of commonality to readers in the Western world.  We’ve all fed our dog or cat a yummy treat only to see them swallow it without even a cursory chew and ask the exact same thing.  In Robin Vidimos’ review of the book, she describes his voice as “without guile, laying out the realities of a farming life” (E-12).  He doesn’t make farming romantic, nor does he make his poverty noble.  It’s backbreaking work, and William often mentions the capriciousness of nature that makes their situation as subsistence farmers so precarious.  He often treats the reader as a confidante, confessing things he hadn’t revealed until he wrote the memoir, like leaving his beloved dog Khamba to die out in a grove of blue gum trees at the height of the famine when everyone was starving.  William says, with evident sadness, “We filled the hole with soil and left no marker, even concealed the patch with grass and branches.  When Charity and I got home, we told no one about what we’d done.  Even after all these years, it’s remained a secret, until now” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 148).  William even has a self-deprecating sense of humor, especially when he describes his first brushes with modern technology.  At the TED conference in Tanzania, William sees the Internet for the first time.  He remarks how “funny to me now -- at this conference in East Africa, with some of the world’s greatest minds in science and technology just outside the door, there I was in this room seeing the Internet for the first time.  They could have put a blinking sign over my head and charged admission” (Kamkwamba and Mealer 266).  It’s a testament to his sense of humor that he can gently poke fun at himself in such a situation. He also evokes such strong emotion in the reader, that you become invested in his story. The memoir is also an inspiring tale of a young man who overcame adversity and misfortune by his sheer will and determination.  Who doesn’t like a story like that?

The book moves a nicely meandering pace, much as a storyteller would use to draw in their audience.  There is a section, especially when William starts describing how he made his windmill that honestly made my eyes glaze over.  It’s a bit tedious and technical and is a place where a little editing to tighten up the prose or make it less technical could have helped.  On the other hand, my boredom could also rested on my ignorance of more than basic physics and lack of interest in the subject overall.  It’s understandably meant to convey William’s persistence, but it moves the focus of the narrative from perseverance to technical details that perhaps aren’t completely necessary in the overall arc of the narrative.  William has also provided line drawings of his windmill and a few of the other things that are meant to offer a visual aid to the narrative.  The drawings are almost too simplistic to accomplish the task.  They lack a level of detail to make them comprehensible to a non-science person and are often more puzzling than enlightening.  They’re a bit distracting. 

One of the lessons that I’m afraid will get lost under the clarion call of perseverance is that failure is indeed a great teacher.  I spent many years teaching underprivileged children and this is exactly the kind of book that an administrator would suggest we read in order to inspire us for the coming school year.  Like I said, who can resist such an inspiring story?  It is important to remember that this is one person’s experience.  Before we turn to underprivileged schools with this book and say, “See?  If this kid could succeed, so should yours!”, we need to ask ourselves the following questions: 1) What about William’s family structure made it possible for him to succeed?; 2) How much of his success was motivated by an internal desire to succeed?; and 3) What about William’s personal story is specific to his circumstances and upbringing?  What can we take from this memoir and make it scalable?  For me, it’s the much smaller message about failure.  William mentions the times he tried to do something, failed the first time, then analyzed what went wrong, and then tried it again, applying what he’d learned.  That is the message I’d want my students to take away from this memoir.  Sometimes in order to learn something, we have to learn from the mistakes we make along the way.  The other thing that I think gets lost in the rest of the memoir is that William didn’t operate alone.  He had help from other members of his family -- his father who left him alone to build the windmill and his cousin Geoffrey who helped him acquire tools and hardware William was unable to salvage or make.  No man is an island and no innovator works in a vacuum. 

William has a blog where you can find photos and videos of William and his windmill.  There are also links to his TED presentations in 2007 and 2009.  The blog also has a link where you can donate to his NGO Moving Windmills. 

For younger readers, there is a picture book version of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. 

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Works Cited

Gallis, Helene. "Sustainable Entrepeneuship in Africa." World Watch 23.4 (2010): 12-7. Academic Search Complete. Web. 18 July 2014.

Kamkwamba, William, and Bryan Mealer. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope. New York: William Morrow, 2009. Print.

Kretzmann, John P., and John L. McKnight. "Introduction." Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets. Evanston: Institute for Policy Research, 1993. 1-6. Web. <http://www.abcdinstitute.org/docs/abcd/GreenBookIntro.pdf>

Vidimos, Robin. "African Boy's Triumph, Stunningly Told." The Denver Post, sec. E: 12. 15 November 2009. Business Insights: Essentials. Web. 18 July 2014.

'Between Shades of Gray' by Ruta Sepetys

Sepetys, Ruta. Between Shades of Gray. New York: Speak, 2011. Print

The publication of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl opened to door to countless narratives of the experiences of Jewish children and adolescents during World War II: The Upstairs Room by Johanna Reiss, Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne, Yossel by Joe Kubert, and Maus by Art Speigelman. (Maus isn’t strictly about an adolescent, but it’s too well known to leave off the list.)  Yoshiko Uchida’s Journey to Topaz and Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston explore the experiences of Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned by the United States government following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. 

Image from
www.penguin.com

There is another event, even more horrific, yet unknown to the larger world because of the intense secrecy of life behind the Iron Curtain -- the deportation of thousands upon thousands of Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians to Siberian gulags in 1941 after the Soviet Union invaded the Baltic states in 1940.  Esther Hautzig’s The Endless Steppe (1968) describes the forced relocation of her Polish family to Siberia.  Ruta Sepetys’ Between Shades of Gray follows the Vilkas family from their home in Kaunaus, Lithuania to the gulag at Trofimovsk, well north of the Arctic Circle, on the Laptev Sea. 

Lina Vilkas is fifteen years old, living a comfortable middle-class life in Kaunaus.  Her father, Kostas, is the provost of a university.  Lina is a gifted artist, who has just won a coveted place in a summer program Vilnius.  Her life is brutally upended when the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB) arrive at their home late at night to arrest the family, giving them only twenty minutes to pack.  Lina’s mother, Elena and brother, Jonas are also arrested.  The whereabouts of Kostas are unknown, but later we discover he’s also been arrested.  Their crimes?  Nothing more than being an educated, middle-class family.  To the Soviets they were “anti-Soviet”, and their presence needed to be uprooted in order to create a new society, loyal to the Soviet Union.  Lina, Elena, and Jonas are sent to a labor camp in Altai Krai, and Kostas is sent to another prison.  Unable to communicate with Kostas, Lina begins to draw pictures that are carefully coded messages, hoping that she will be able to send them to Kostas and he will join them.  Less than a year after arriving at Altai Krai, Lina, Elena, and Jonas are sent to the gulag in Trofimovsk, along with many other Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Finns.  Forced to work in inhumane conditions, each day is a fight for survival that many ultimately lose.

The conditions are terrible.  The prisoners are given inadequate shelter or forced to make their own with primitive tools and few resources.  They are starved, crammed into cattle cars for the weeks-long journey to Siberia.  Once in the gulags, there are no medicines.  The prisoners do not have the clothes or shoes to endure the harsh Siberian winter.  The only food they have is what the guards deign to give them in exchange for their work, generally a small portion of bread that isn’t enough to keep a mouse alive.  They scrounge for food, but must hide it, lest the guards find out and punish them.  Disease runs rampant: scurvy, dysentery, and malnutrition kill indiscriminately.  The prisoners are covered with lice and other vermin, which also spreads typhus.  Near the end of the winter in Trofimovsk, a Dr. Samodurov comes to inspect the gulags, refusing to report that all is well, and demands that the guards properly feed the prisoners.  At this point, Elena has died and Kostas is reported to have been killed in prison.  Jonas is alive, but barely and Lina is hanging on by her fingernails.

Between Shades of Gray examines a little-known event through “a personal miniature portrait of a teenage girl” (Janoskova 278).  It’s not intended to present a representative portrait of the Baltic deportations, but illuminate a hidden bit of history that remained shrouded in secrecy for more than fifty years until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.  A year after Stalin invaded the Baltic states, he ordered the systematic removal of their educated population: teachers, librarians, professors, lawyers, artists, other intellectuals, and even members of the military.  In an interview with School Library Journal, Sepetys stated, “Stalin considered… [them] as a threat, and he was essentially going to get rid of them” (Margolis 22).  Most of the Baltic prisoners stayed in the gulags for twelve years.  When Stalin died, they were released and allowed to return home.  Survivors were unable to speak openly of their experiences then, and “Even now, more than two decades after the end of Soviet occupation, [they] exhibited great fear in opening up to Sepetys” (Roper 20).  For years, to speak “about their experience meant immediate imprisonment or deportation back to Siberia.  As a result, the horrors they endured went dormant” (Sepetys 340).  In an author’s note at the end of the novel, Sepetys writes Stalin killed more than twenty million people through his purges and the Baltics lost “more than a third of their population” (341).  The Baltic deportations to Siberia have personal meaning to Sepetys.  Her paternal grandfather escaped Lithuania, but the other members of his family were sent to gulags in Siberia (Roper 20).  Many of the events depicted in the novel are real, taken from the many interviews she did in Lithuania with survivors (Hill, “Does It Matter” 332).  The people in the novel, with the exception of Dr. Lazar Samodurov, are fictional.  The doctor was a real person, and many Lithuanians credit him with saving their lives.

Sepetys writes the novel in first-person from Lina’s point-of-view.  This allows the reader to experience things as they happen and through Lina’s eyes.  This lends the text a great deal of immediacy.  Had Sepetys written this in a third-person voice, it might have thrown up a barrier between the narration and the reader, effectively distancing the reader from the action.  With Lina’s narration, the reader is placed in the same position of the unknown and uncertainty as Lina.  Lina was somewhat sheltered, so the cruelty she experiences at the hands of the NKVD is sharp and revolting.  When Sepetys begins the novel with the Vilkas’ arrests, the lack of background information and exposition -- the hows and whys of the arrest -- leave the reader, like Lina, unsettled and unsure of what is going to happen next.  This makes the story even more compelling, because we’re pulled into events that Lina herself doesn’t completely understand and learn about them at the same time as Lina.  Many times, there is more to a character than first meets Lina’s eyes (Schneider 103).  Sepetys illustrates this with several characters, but the two that are fleshed out the most are Andrius Arvydas, a fellow prisoner, and Nikolai Kretzsky, a Soviet guard. 

Andrius and his mother are passengers in the same cattle car as Lina and her family.  Once they arrive in Altai Krai, Andrius and his mother receive special treatment from the guards, much to Lina’s disgust.  Lina promptly labels them as traitors.  It’s only later that she learns Mrs. Arvydas “prostitutes herself with the officers in order to gain food for her son” that they also share with the other prisoners (Steinberg 170).  Andrius scathingly tells Lina, “they threatened to kill me unless she slept with them.  And if they get tired of her, they still might kill me.  So how would you feel, Lina, if your mother felt she had to prostitute herself to save your life?” (Sepetys 159).  He goes on to ask Lina, “How does my mother feel, lying with the men who murdered her husband?... You have no idea.  You have no idea how much I hate myself for putting my mother through this, how every day I think of ending my life so she can be free.  But instead, my mother and I are using our misfortune to keep others alive” (Sepetys 159).  

Kretzsky often shows kindness to the prisoners, but usually only when the others cannot see him.  When the other guards are present, he tries to mask his kindness behind cruelty.  He often looks the other way when he sees prisoners scavenging for firewood in the guards’ woodpile.  Kretzsky does not agree with the deportations and is just as much a prisoner in Altai Krai and Trofimovsk as the Lithuanians.  Kretzsky was caught in Altai Krai assisting prisoners, and his punishment was an effective exile to Trofimovsk. 

Without exposition to inform the reader of Lina’s life before her imprisonment, Sepetys uses flashbacks, scattered throughout the narrative.  The flashbacks themselves occur at irregular intervals, “Triggered like blasts of memory by random words and situations” (Janoskova 277).  The flashbacks not only establish Lina’s family as firmly middle-class, but exposes Kostas’ political leanings and how much they place the family in danger.  In one flashback, Lina recalls her father’s reaction to a satiric drawing she’s done of Stalin: “What if someone found it in the trash like I did?  A wind could have blown this to the foot of Stalin… You’ve drawn your father and his friends mocking the leader of the Soviet Union! Are there others?” (Sepetys 92).  It serves to contrast the way in which Lina currently carefully conceals messages in her drawings, and hides the actual drawings so they won’t attract unwanted attention against her previous carefree attitude that her actions have little or negligible consequences. 

Sepetys mostly uses straightforward language to describe the bleak situation of Lina and her family.  In the rare instance that she does elevate Lina’s words to something more poetic, it creates a verbal political cartoon, such as when they arrive at the train station outside Kaunaus and Lina describes their deportation as “a rug being lifted and a huge Soviet broom sweeping us under it” (Sepetys 23).  By keeping the prose forthright, and not soaring into flights of literary fancy, Sepetys allows the brutality and cruelty of the situation to speak for themselves: “The lice brought typhus.  The repeater fell ill… Four days later, I saw his naked body, eyes wide open, stacked in a heap of corpses.  His frostbitten hand was missing.  White foxes had eaten into his stomach, exposing his innards and staining the snow with blood” (309).  It almost feels that if Sepetys had used more poetic language it might have cheapened the experience by trying to take the edge off the conditions.  It’s a spare and unflinching depiction of the conditions of the gulags and embellishment is unnecessary. 

The book ends with an epilogue that reveals the fate of Lina and Jonas.  It feels tacked-on and “answers certain questions too neatly” (Janoskova 278).   It brings up far more questions than it answers, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if the questions were philosophical in nature, but they’re related to the plot.  How did Lina and Jonas get back to Lithuania?  How were they able to survive the conditions in the northern Siberian gulag?  Why were they released?  I wish Sepetys had addressed these questions in the epilogue, rather than this insufficient tying of loose ends.  Its brevity is extremely anti-climactic and disappointing.  It’s at odds with the rest of the novel that exposed the treatment of the Lithuanians so clearly.  That being said, the ending of the book would have been much more satisfying and effective if we’d been left in the dark about Lina and Jonas.  I was pushed into doing my own brief research into the Lithuanian deportations and gulags in general, and learning something new is always a good thing.  I also wonder, since art is such a huge part of the story, if it would have added to the book to illustrate it in the manner of Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, with drawings here and there that contribute to the overall tone of the novel without turning it into a full-fledged graphic novel. 

The book itself is somewhat emotionally difficult to read.  The ruthlessness of the gulags is unremitting and there is little respite in the novel.  Another thing that makes the book difficult to digest is the lack of background information.  I wouldn’t want to offer this book as an option in a class reading or whole-class reading without having information about the Lithuania deportations available to read either before or immediately after reading Between Shades of Gray.  The book also brings up questions of the culpability of the United States and Great Britain in the deportations.  The Soviet Union was able to effectively use the chaos of World War II and the United States’ isolationist tendencies to take over three independent countries and effectively get rid of a large portion of their populations.  Furthermore, the book also brings up questions of how the war made strange bedfellows of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. 

The book would make an excellent addition to a class reading list about World War II or genocides in general.  It’s a welcome voice in a field that’s dominated by the narrative of Nazi Germany and provides a different experience of World War II.  It would make an excellent companion novel to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, to put a human face on the totalitarian society portrayed in Orwell’s novel. 

As a piece of historical fiction, Between Shades of Gray is well-researched and it shows in the details Sepetys adds to the novel.  She not only interviewed her family members who had been in the gulags, but other gulag survivors and Lithuanian historians; participated in a re-enactment of the gulag; and visited many of the prisons in Siberia (Hill, “Authenticity” 445; Hill, “Does It Matter” 332; Margolis 22; Roper 20).   Many of the real-life details Sepetys heard in the interviews found their way into the novel (Hill, “Does It Matter” 332).  Sepetys has also said that she felt an immense responsibility to history and her ancestry to tell the story as accurately as possible (Roper 20).  It all comes together in an authentic story of a long-ignored period of history.

Did I enjoy the book?  Insomuch as the book served its purpose: to provide a window into a historical period, then yes, I did.  I’m not sure you could say a book about something so awful is “enjoyable”.  It is a compelling read?  Absolutely.  I had a hard time putting it down once I started reading.  It’s the kind of book that lingers with you long after you close the book, making you question yet again how a person can view another human being as something less than human. 

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Works Cited

Hill, Rebecca A. "The Color of Authenticity in Multicultural Children's Literature." Voice of Youth Advocates 34.5 (2011): 445-7. Education Source. Web. 14 July 2014.

Hill, Rebecca. "Does it Matter Where You Come from?" Voice of Youth Advocates 34.4 (2011): 332-3. Education Source. Web. 14 July 2014.

Janoskova, Eva. "Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys." Use of English 63.3 (2012): 277-8. Education Source. Web. 14 July 2014.

Margolis, Rick. "Super Sad Love Story." School Library Journal 57.3 (2011): 22-. Academic Search Complete. Web. 14 July 2014.

Roper, Ingrid. "YA Novel Unearths Lost Chapter in History." Publishers Weekly 258.9 (2011): 20-. Education Source. Web. 14 July 2014.

Schneider, Dean. "Between Shades of Gray." Horn Book Magazine 87.3 (2011): 103-. Academic Search Complete. Web. 14 July 2014.

Sepetys, Ruta. Between Shades of Gray. New York: Speak, 2011. Print.

Steinberg, Renee. "Between Shades of Gray." School Library Journal 57.3 (2011): 170-. Academic Search Complete. Web. 14 July 2014.