Embroideries
Marjane Satrapi Jonathan Cape, 144pp, £12.99
ISBN 0224076086
It is afternoon. The men have gone off to sleep. The parliament of women is in session. Once the meal is cleared away, they sit around the tea table, discussing the same things women have discussed since Eve left Eden - love, sex, and the intricate politics of love and sex. "To speak behind others' backs," declares Grandma, "is the ventilator of the heart." By the end of this elegant little book, I felt as if I had been eavesdropping. Embroideries is neither a cartoon nor a graphic novel, but a cross between the two - an intimate and vivid look into the (thoroughly ventilated) heart of a group of Iranian women.
The author and artist Marjane Satrapi was brought up in middle-class Tehran and now lives in Paris. She has already produced Persepolis, two volumes of autobiography that established her as a kind of Iranian Posy Simmonds. Like Simmonds, she has a wonderful eye for the revealing detail, and a talent for both observing a particular slice of society and participating in that group. Satrapi's bold, even crude, black-and-white drawings are snapshots that can reveal more than thousands of words.
The "embroideries" of the women gathered around Grandma Satrapi's table are sometimes of the symbolic sort - stories refined and embellished in the telling. But embroidery can also mean fancy stitching in the surgical sense. Some of these women have bought themselves new noses and breasts. And some talk gleefully about the vaginal stitches that can restore a girl's virginity, or tighten the windsock effect of childbirth. There is ribald discussion of penises, both Iranian and European, which puzzles one woman who has never seen a penis, even though she is a mother-of-four (her lord and master does it with the light off, and all her children are girls). There are many tales of male perfidy and the ultimate disappointments of roman-tic love. This is a society in which being female is no picnic, and the women swap ingenious survival strategies.
They argue about the importance of marriage, about ways of getting and keeping a man without mislaying honour. Grandma Satrapi claims that when she was younger, she would take a little opium before parties. "It made my eyelids heavy. It gave me a languorous look." She tells Marjane that she should learn to close her eyes a little, because "you'll find lovers more easily". Marjane writes: "Thanks to her half-closed eyes, my grandma got married three times."
Young Marjane, eyes and ears of the rising generation, notes the less attract- ive aspects of her grandmother's opium addiction. "She was often in a very very bad mood, but it never lasted for long. She had only to dissolve a small bit of burnt opium in her tea to regain her sense of humour and her natural kindness."
Without the speech bubbles and the cartoons, the essential details of these lives could look grim. The women gathered around the samovar all have tales of broken hearts, tyrannical parents and oppressive husbands. Satrapi, however, knows how to bring out the comedy, and the howls of pagan laughter that erupt whenever women get together.
There is a delightful, shaggy-dog story of a girl whose lover refuses to marry her because his mother won't let him. She visits an old bag who claims to do white magic - and I must admit, I was curious to know what she'd said. Was I about to read some jewel of ancient Persian wisdom? The girl is advised to take a magic key, which is placed in the vagina after sex. "You count to seven. Then you remove the key and put it into a cup. You pour the tea on top . . . this should be drunk by your heart's chosen one in the 77 seconds that follow ejaculation." Did it work? Not exactly. The story ends with the gross intrusion of reality, and the women all scream with laughter.
Their tea-table covens are filled with laughter, sympathy, good-fellowship and mutual support, yet this book is emphatically not politically correct drivel about how women empower and help one another. These are authentic bitches and gossips who argue and backbite. Satrapi turns her readers into invisible members of the group, and invites us to enjoy the world of her childhood by putting universal truths about the eternal battle of the sexes into Iranian clothes.
Kate Saunders's Bachelor Boys is published in paperback by Arrow
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