Andrea Holck's List: Censorship of Persepolis

• censorship of artistic expression
• Satrapi’s novel is itself a product of, and reaction to, this censorship.
• Persepolis has been denounced by Iran’s religious leaders and banned in the country that it depicts.
• The Shah was replaced by a religious regime that sought to institute Sharia, or Islamic rule, as supreme law. This rule meant that all Western education, culture, and art was banned throughout the entire country. Early in the regime’s leadership, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed that expressions of Westernization “rape the youth of our country and stifle in them the spirit of virtue and bravery.” This meant that artistic expressions and endeavors were strictly regulated and, in many cases, banned from public consumption.

  • Western education teaches that knowledge is power. To deprive students of artistic expression from a repressed regime is to "stifle them in the spirit of creative expression and interpretation." To prevent this, artistic expressions and endeavors should not be strictly regulated or banned from public (school) consumption
• In order for a work of art to be displayed, an album to be released for public consumption, a film to be viewed, or a photograph to be used for journalistic or artistic purposes, permission must first be obtained from the Ministry of Culture and Information Guidance. Permission is difficult, if not impossible, to attain for most artistic expression, especially any that comes from a Westernized point of view. According to some critics, this has led the Iranian people to often self-censor themselves and their work for fear of imprisonment or even execution.

  • Just like Myanmar...

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• Persepolis is a great story that could be taught in any secondary setting. There are many attributes of this story that would draw almost all students into it's grips.
• Like almost all good literature there are some factors of this book that could be construed as explicit or inappropriate.
• Persepolis has scenes of torture that are pretty intense and violent, yet unlike other graphic novels which have extremely detailed gruesome depictions of these scenes, Persepolis's intentionally basic drawing style alleviates allot of the possible gore.

  • History is violent. That doesn't mean we cover it up.
• The language of Persepolis is easily understood by any secondary level student

  • And thus lends itself well to mixed-ability classrooms, ESL, etc. Graphic novels are a leveling sort of text--high-level readers and low-level readers can explore them together on the same plane of expectations.
• this book does contain the F-bomb, Sh, and damn - all of which could cause trouble.

  • By avoiding literature containing hackneyed 4-letter words, we are not protecting our students from anything. Personally, I have, as long as I can remember, wondered how a 4 letter combo can create such offense, but even so, I don't think any harm comes from reading texts that use this word in context.

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• I've been justifying why it isn't negative to be Iranian for almost twenty years. How strange when it isn't something I did or chose to be?

  • Persepolis can be a gateway to the continuing conversation about prejudice and diversity.
• I'm a pacifist. I believe there are ways to solve the world's problems. Instead of putting all this money to create arms, I think countries should invest in scholarships for kids to study abroad. Perhaps they could become good and knowledgeable professors in their own countries. You need time for that kind of change though.

  • Dealing with difficult global issues through words starts in school--studying texts like this one are a step.
• If people are given the chance to experience life in more than one country, they will hate a little less.
• That is why I wanted people in other countries to read Persepolis, to see that I grew up just like other children.

  • Kids can see similarities between themselves and other kids who grow up in climates of fear and repression.

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• “The Fourteenth Amendment, as now applied to the States, protects the citizen against the State itself and all of its creatures—Boards of Education not excepted. These have, of course, important, delicate, and highly discretionary functions, but none that they may not perform within the limits of the Bill of Rights. That they are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.” — Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson,  West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)

  • Exactly. We should model and respect students' constitutional rights to information.

• Intellectual freedom is the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access to all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause or movement may be explored.

  • If this doesn't apply to schools, where does it?
• Intellectual freedom is the basis for our democratic system.
• Censorship is the suppression of ideas and information that certain persons—individuals, groups or government officials—find objectionable or dangerous. It is no more complicated than someone saying, “Don’t let anyone read this book, or buy that magazine, or view that film, because I object to it! ” Censors try to use the power of the state to impose their view of what is truthful and appropriate, or offensive and objectionable, on everyone else. Censors pressure public institutions, like libraries, to suppress and remove from public access information they judge inappropriate or dangerous, so that no one else has the chance to read or view the material and make up their own minds about it. The censor wants to prejudge materials for everyone

  • Schools should not be a place where suppression of ideas and information take place. Schools should be a place where we guide young people to consider all information, and to judge its merit for themselves. Or else, where will they learn to handle "questionable" material?
• But under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, each of us has the right to read, view, listen to, and disseminate constitutionally protected ideas, even if a censor finds those ideas offensive.

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• But many contemporary novels for adolescents focus on the real world of young people--drugs, premarital sex, alcoholism, divorce, high school gangs, school dropouts, racism, violence, and sensuality. English teachers willing to defend the classics and modern literature must be prepared to give equally spirited defense to serious and worthwhile adolescent novels.

  • All of these topics are important to students, even here in Burma. Schools should be a safe place to discuss all of these things--and literature is a safe gateway into these discussions.
• National Geographic: "Nudity and sensationalism, especially in stories on barbaric foreign people."

  • Dear God. Are we to pretend that we live in a world where everyone is the same? where we pretend that nakedness is a sordid myth?

• Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect. . . . A problem can no longer be pursued with impunity to its edges. Fear stalks the classroom. The teacher is no longer a stimulant to adventurous thinking; she becomes instead a pipe line for safe and sound information. A deadening dogma takes the place of free inquiry. Instruction tends to become sterile; pursuit of knowledge is discouraged; discussion often leaves off where it should begin.

  Justice William O. Douglas, United States Supreme Court: Adler v. Board of Education, 1951.
• In many ways, education is an effort to improve the quality of choices open to all students. But to deny the freedom of choice in fear that it may be unwisely used is to destroy the freedom itself. For this reason, we respect the right of individuals to be selective in their own reading. But for the same reason, we oppose efforts of individuals or groups to limit the freedom of choice of others or to impose their own standards or tastes upon the community at large.
• In selecting books for reading by young people, English teachers consider the contribution which each work may make to the education of the reader, its aesthetic value, its honesty, its readability for a particular group of students, and its appeal to adolescents. English teachers, however, may use different works for different purposes.
• Wallace Stevens once wrote, "Literature is the better part of life. To this it seems inevitably necessary to add, provided life is the better part of literature." Students and parents have the right to demand that education today keep students in touch with the reality of the world outside the classroom. Much of classic literature asks questions as valid and significant today as when the literature first appeared, questions like "What is the nature of humanity?" "Why do people praise individuality and practice conformity?" "What do people need for a good life?" and "What is the nature of the good person?" But youth is the age of revolt. To pretend otherwise is to ignore a reality made clear to young people and adults alike on television and radio, in newspapers and magazines. English teachers must be free to employ books, classic or contemporary, which do not lie to the young about the perilous but wondrous times we live in, books which talk of the fears, hopes, joys, and frustrations people experience, books about people not only as they are but as they can be. English teachers forced through the pressures of censorship to use only safe or antiseptic works are placed in the morally and intellectually untenable position of lying to their students about the nature and condition of mankind.

  • THIS IS IT. THIS IS EXACTLY THE ISSUE. We need to be real in order to have any credibility with young people. We need to respect the difficulties they face and not ignore them. And to engage them, we need to address them as they are.
• Censorship leaves students with an inadequate and distorted picture of the ideals, values, and problems of their culture.

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