Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader

I. The Search for “Me” in Nylon Road

Parsua Bashi is well-positioned to narrate her story. Born into a middle-class family with three children in 1966, over a decade before the Revolution, she refused her parents’ urging that she migrate—unlike most of her family and friends—after the establishment of the Islamic Republic. Instead, she studied art at the University of Tehran when it reopened in 1983 and became a successful, award-winning graphic designer. Bashi encountered difficulties in her personal life, however, after marrying at 23 to escape the pressures the Republic exerted on unmarried women fraternizing with men in public, for which she was sentenced to a severe whipping. She and her husband had a daughter, but she soon found him oppressively dominating and sought a divorce. When the punitive divorce court assigned custody of her daughter to the father, she grieved but eventually was “struck by Cupid’s arrow” in 2002 and left Iran in April 2004 for German-speaking Switzerland, although she did not know German, to live in Zürich with Nathanael Su, a well-known jazz musician of Swiss and Cameroonian parentage, whom she married (6, top right).[7] Nylon Road originated as a comic whose struggling protagonist has discovered the difficulty of remaking herself abroad, in her thirties, and resuming her artistic career. There she began work on a book of comic drawings.

Parsua Bashi wrote me that her idea of making the comic arose when she experienced “a Vacuum space between my past in Iran and my new life in Zürich” that spurred her to begin “a kind of daily sessions to write about my past, and draw some little pictures only to show to some friends” (Personal Correspondence, 28 Nov. 2015, subsequently referred to as PC). Nylon Road thus originated as a form of self-therapy with sketches that Bashi developed into a graphic memoir in collaboration with a translator and editor from Kein & Aber Publishing Company in Zürich. It was awarded the “Cultural Worlds in Switzerland” prize by Pro Helvetica, the Arts Council of Switzerland. Bashi’s journey was, however, no one-way trajectory. In 2009, three years after the memoir’s publication, she left Zürich and returned to Tehran, where she continues to live, working as a successful graphic designer. She has written other books in Farsi that have been translated into German and published.[8] Her return and reintegration are remarkable in light of the focus of Nylon Road on the protagonist’s discontent with—and sharp criticism of—life in Iran after the Revolution, although speculation on this two-way transit is beyond my inquiry.

As noted above, Nylon Road conducts its coming-of-age story as a conversation among versions or avatars of Parsua at various ages that, she says, “came from a real emotional/psychological situation that I was in at the time of writing this book. I had not any model in my mind. In fact I did not even have a concrete plan to write and draw a comic book” (PC).[9] This dialogical set-up of conversations enables her to interrogate notions of identity coherence for subjects caught in conflicting concepts of home, history, and memory amid the ideological perspectives of fundamentalist post-revolutionary Iran, the capitalist Global North, and—less frequently mentioned in Iranian diasporic memoir—the socialism associated with the former Soviet Union. The memoir thus serves as an act of transnational witnessing to Bashi’s own experience of double displacement, and resists any final resolution other than the artistic satisfaction of visually and verbally representing her condition.

Both Bashi’s creation of an autographic, Nylon Road, and her return to Iran three years later, prompt us to read her comic through a doubly “binocular” lens, in Marianne Hirsch’s term. That is, its shifts across the gutters of the page suggest Parsua’s ambivalence at different historical moments about her location and position (1213). Nylon Road serves simultaneously as a dissident history of the Revolution and the Islamic Republic, and a critique of Western consumerism and commodity capitalism that the narrator finds definitive of Swiss and, more generally, Western values; and Parsua, its protagonist, finds no border space, other than on the page of her memoir of double loss. Yet Nylon Road’s weighing of the difficulties and costs of migration and resettlement against the experience of repression, violence, and misogyny it identifies as realities of post-revolutionary Iran finds no full resolution. In its treatment of the individual and collective trauma occasioned differently by the Republic and by migration, it belongs to the genre of life writing that Sidonie Smith has termed “crisis comics,”[10] although, unlike most such comics, Nylon Road does not include an appeal for readers to bear witness to suffering or contribute to an agency aiding the artist. Rather, its tough yet funny interrogation of the complicity of the world’s nations—including Iran and the Islamic Middle East, Europe and the Americas, and the former Soviet socialist bloc—critiques how all of them in different ways conform their citizens to repressive ideologies that discourage independent thinking.

II. The Varied Reception of Nylon Road

Nylon Road has had little success in gaining traction in North America, in contrast to its reception in the German-speaking world,[11] where it has attracted a substantial, appreciative readership. With translation into Spanish, it also won readers in Spain. But despite its rapid translation into English (2007), Nylon Road is a graphic memoir that, even in this age of comics’ popularity, remains almost unknown even among life-writing scholars. The varied reception of Nylon Road might be attributed to both the contrasting publishing strategies of its Swiss and American publishers and its differential reception by critics in Europe and North America. The original German edition of the comic was marketed as a kind of double-edged sword—a memoir simultaneously critical of the Islamic Republic and Western neoliberalism that was welcomed in European reviews as a witty and probing intervention into cultural politics. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a leading German newspaper, Simon Poelchau characterized Nylon Road as a thoughtful dialogue among several different embodiments of Parsua about the excesses of both Iran and the West, noting, for example, her sharp quip that in Zürich she enjoys gourmet dining while Iranians are starving under Western-imposed sanctions.[12] In the online journal Migrazine, Olivera Stajić observed Nylon Road’s substantive interrogation of Islamic fundamentalism and Western feminists’ easy rejection of its critique of the limits of their positions.[13] Clearly Nylon Road was heralded as a serious contribution to debates about both the place of post-Revolution Iran in global politics and a comic sharply aware of discrepancies between Western humanist ideology and its economic and cultural practices.[14]

In English-language journalism and scholarship, however, Nylon Road received little critical attention. An anonymous review in the Toronto Globe and Mail—one of the few newspapers to cover it—was, in my view, a cranky misreading: “There’s a lot of anger here, not only that of the mullahs and their minions, but that of Bashi, appalled at how more than 2,000 years of Persian history and culture had been lost in the dark backward abyss of religious fanaticism.” Online, Jonathan Liu’s review in Wired was less than informative: “What [Nylon Road] really reveals is how little the two cultures really know about each other, let alone being able to understand and sympathize with each other.” These reviews offer little insight into the complexity of Nylon Road; there are to date, no critical essays on it in English, to my knowledge.[15]

A comparison of the two versions of the cover of Nylon Road suggests a possible reason for its lack of impact in North America. The original illustration used for the German and Spanish covers, which does not appear elsewhere in the comic, captures Bashi’s dilemma as a diasporic subject caught between conflicting national and political identities (Figure 1). On it, Parsua, the narrating “I”, sits in a full-frontal, cross-legged position, gazing at the viewer as she draws on a sketchpad. Each of her stocking-clad legs is inscribed, one with Persian characters, the other with Roman-alphabet letters and numerals.[16] The nylon stockings serve as both a signifier of feminine fashion and a marker of Bashi’s uneasy location between opposed cultural and linguistic worlds along, not the silk road of ancient discovery, but the “nylon road” of women’s contemporary transnational transmission of image, fashion, and sexuality. As an adult migrant to Switzerland, Parsua is literally situated at a crossroads of conflicting ideological, religious, and social views between the two worlds, Iranian-Muslim and Western-secular, that she inhabits. The iconic image captures her dilemma—how to make this gendered, cultural, religious, and linguistic transition without losing all that she has been and known—and expresses it through the binocular optic of a fashion statement embodying that tension.

In contrast, the cover of the English-language edition chosen by the British-American publisher, St. Martin’s Press, reproduces a frame in the comic depicting a child-woman emerging from a line of shadowy, veiled female figures who are submerged in dark shrouds (Figure 2).

She is barefoot, slumped in dejection, and wears only a slip of a dress as she stands on the round surface of the globe against a vaguely Zoroastrian planetary background.[17] While this pose characterizes an initial moment of abjection after the narrating “I”’s migration to Zürich, her helpless appearance is untypical. And the difference in affect between the two covers is striking: The original Swiss cover suggests the ironic self-representation of an acknowledged transnational artist, while the English-language one depicts a dislocated refugee as global victim, which was not Bashi’s situation; rather, she left Iran voluntarily for a romantic interest.

Additionally, each version of Nylon Road has a different subtitle. For the original text in German it is simply eine graphische Novelle, “A Graphic Novel.” The English version, however, is subtitled A Graphic Memoir of Coming of Age in Iran, affixed next to Parsua’s feet on the “road of life.” This subtitle places Bashi’s comic within the Bildungsroman tradition of education as accommodation to Western norms and values, which counter the history of Parsua’s transits that complicates and even subverts that tradition. Paratextually, the cover of the English version makes a bid for readers’ sympathy with an apparently hapless victim, while the German original invites the viewer’s engagement with a savvy and elegant bicultural artist. The English cover thus stylizes the comic as a “soft weapon,” to use Whitlock’s phrase, in the American “war on terror,” a representation of Bashi’s position at odds with both the comic’s original cover and the narrative that unfolds in it.

Interestingly, Bashi expressed to me her concern about the different covers used to market her graphic memoir: “[T]he German version of my book is entirely my work from a to z. The cover design and the layout of the book is [sic] mine as well. My publisher Mr. Haag trusted me totally and . . . having worked as a graphic designer for a long time helped me to make the book have a proper look . . . [But] for the English version the publisher wanted to change the cover design with one of the panels of the book. Honestly talking, I do not like either their choice of the drawing nor the layout. . . . I did not have any authorization in the publisher’s visual or literal preference” (PC).[18] That is, Bashi’s artistic agency was undermined in the English-language publisher’s design and cover of the book. While these differences in cover choice may seem slight, they are linked to larger distinctions about the circulation of Bashi’s graphic memoir and the receptivity of Western and diasporic audiences to what I call its dialogical conversations.[19] What is going on between the covers of Nylon Road that its American publisher modified and that Western readers in North America missed?[20]

III. Reading and Viewing the Dialogics of Nylon Road

In working out a graphic mode to represent her psychic and political struggles, Bashi uses a fluid line reminiscent of contemporary magazine illustration and visual techniques drawn from portraiture to create a style of self-representation that I term a visual dialogic (and discuss in more detail in this essay’s last section). Her drawings represent encounters between her narrating and embodied past “I”s as confrontations, often by shifting the positions of the I’s within the frame to signal which of the opposed points of view is being defended. Bashi described her process of composing the comic as it moved from what Hillary L. Chute calls hand-drawn “marks” to final form, writing me: “First I draw quick pencil sketches on paper, then draw them again in a final form by ink on paper, scanned the in outlined versions, and colored them in computer by a drawing software. For each panel 3 versions. The bubbles with the text was the last layer” (PC). That is, the “I” who appears in each chapter as both narrator (in rectangular boxes above the frames) and speaker (in text bubbles of dialogue) is embodied in a kind of visual “language” that organizes multiple, fragmented moments of remembered experience. While Nylon Road’s graphics have a different, more cartoon-like “look” than the boldly beautiful images of Persepolis, they conduct innovative experimentations. Within the limits that Bashi set for herself of outlined figures and a two-color scheme (terracotta, gray, black, and white), the comic frames and pages explore a gamut of visual self-representation that also serves as a collage of witnessing to four decades of history.

It is challenging, but rewarding, to closely map the contrapuntal narrative shuttles that Nylon Road navigates between Parsua’s life in Tehran from the early 1970s till 2004 and her life thereafter as an Iranian migrant in Zürich. The comic consists of twelve unnumbered chapters, each separated by an untitled page with a small cartoon pulled from a detail in the text. Each chapter returns to the frame story, in which Parsua is situated in her present location, Zürich, and engages with a self from her past life in Tehran. Readers thus shift continuously between the dramatically different contexts of past upheavals and the apparent serenity and stability of Switzerland. Bashi’s narrative logic presents her selves, at different ages, as eyewitnesses to their historical moments. And each past self conducts an increasingly contentious dialogue with the narrating “I”, demanding an account of who she has become in her present life.

The eleven avatars confronting Parsua in various chapters are distinguished by their ages, clothing, and hairstyles, as well as the hijab or headscarf worn by adult Parsuas in Iran. This visible evidence strengthens our sense of Nylon Road’s “binocular” view of the Iranian Islamic Republic as the narrator’s dialogue with her increasingly adversarial former I’s—presented associatively rather than in chronological sequence—brings competing truth claims into view along with their divergent appearances. Teenaged Parsua is ideologically invested in Marxism: her young adult self is stunned by changes that are introduced with the Khomeini regime; a later one becomes an active resister, first against the post-Revolutionary fundamentalist government and then, in Europe, against the excesses of neoliberalism and the ubiquity of racial prejudice. Both a verbal and a visual dialogic, these conversations juxtapose various Parsuas’ earlier dissident views on the Iranian Revolution and the subsequent Islamic Republic to the narrating “I”s as a montage for the experience of historical flux. Although Nylon Road does not draw on intergenerational memory (unlike Satrapi’s memoir and many others), its assemblage of decades of remembered experience during and after the Revolution enables Parsua’s selves to perform a novel kind of “eyewitnessing” to events after many Iranians had emigrated. Thus Bashi’s strategy of giving voice to her distinct former selves, rather than simply recalling memories, situates her narrating “I” as engaging with the gap between her former embodied positions and her new migrant consciousness.

The way that Bashi strategically lays out her contending “I”s on the page confers an authority on her past selves that, because of the dominance of the image in graphic memoir, makes the effect of Nylon Road unlike the linear thrust of written autobiography, with its privileging of the authority of the present-tense narrator and, thereby, the Bildungsroman’s teleological view of life. The past selves of Parsua, varied with the age and position of the avatar and responding to one another’s assertions and styles as they narrate moments of growing up in Iran, are contrapuntal figures rather than the evolutionary self characteristic of the Bildungsroman; as such, they position the narrating “I” as a fractured and provisional, rather than consolidated, identity. The comic’s reworking of the traditional Bildungsroman format allows Bashi to present a persona who is a mature and accomplished woman at home but an innocent abroad, insufficiently prepared for the cosmopolitan world of Zürich, even as she sees beyond its complacent materialism.

In sum, unlike the quest for integration of past and present selves that transforms a social outsider into an enfranchised citizen in the Bildungsroman, Bashi’s narrative undercuts that plot in two ways. Recollection is depicted as an involuntary, experiential process summoned by embodiments who are radically different from the present-time narrating “I” at the same time that they “know” her. And memory shifts from being a merely personal function as it focuses on public events that foreground the differing customs and values of the Islamic Republic from the secular West, represented in Zürich. Nylon Road thus wages an ideological debate through the power of images as much as the presentation of contending political positions, even as it deconstructs the binaristic stereotype of “Islam versus the West” as an inadequate framework for the complexity of women’s lives in the shifting gender politics of both post-Revolutionary Iran and Western Europe. In what follows, I deal with Nylon Road’s dense, rich chapters at length.

The frame story that begins Chapter One introduces the narrating “I” in a half-page panel depicting her in a blouse and pants, with uncovered long hair and folded arms, gazing calmly at the viewer as she presents herself as a 37-year-old woman who left Tehran in April 2004, two years earlier, after falling in love (a story she omits).

Parsua begins by disclosing her expectation that, after emigration, she would become not just another immigrant, but someone able to engage in “real life” in her “new society” (8). Subsequent frames detail her struggle to learn both German and Swiss-German dialect, find a job appropriate to her graphic-design skills, and develop a social circle. But the difficult process of cultural and linguistic assimilation leaves her feeling discouraged and displaced. Parsua sums up her dilemma: “I started to feel like a useless asshole” (Figure 3).

In the panel four images depicting her as idle and disgruntled occupy a single visual plane, a style that Bashi develops further in subsequent chapters. This moment of self-recognition in frustration becomes the spur to her self-reflection.

While the narrator stands brushing her teeth, “a happy-go-lucky little girl” of 6 appears in shorts and sandals holding flowers and toys. Recognizing this grinning apparition by her birthmark, the narrator, stunned, asks, “How could I have forgotten me?” (15). Parsua-6 responds, “The only reason I’m here is because you called.” She goes on to tell Parsua that the adult woman is out of touch with herself—“I was the one who had lost contact”—and informs her that there are “more of us waiting to see you,” establishing the narrative convention of visits by past selves that anchors Nylon Road’s plot. When Parsua responds, “I simply could not deny my past. I had to remember the days I had spent with them—with myself,” what might seem a Western cliché of getting in touch with “the child within” inaugurates an urgent autobiographical quest (18, bottom half). The encounters that ensue trace the narrator’s engagements with the eleven former selves who appear, in non-chronological order, at ages 6, 13, 16, 18, 19, 21, 23, 29, 33, 35, and 36. Disclosing her unhappiness as a dislocated migrant, Parsua identifies the moment as a turning point and awakening: “I was alone, hopeless, desperate, and apparently unable to deal with the situation. . . . They were here to remind me that what I am now is the result of their lives” (18). Parsua’s quest then moves toward increasingly tense encounters with the historical moments that her former selves experienced and the extreme ideological points of view, from the perspective of her newly Westernized persona, that they espoused.

Unlike the search for unequivocal rescue from the Islamic Republic that many Iranian diasporic memoirs recount, as Chapter One goes on, Parsua begins to regard her migration to Zürich as producing a traumatic gap in her life that becomes visible on reflection. The revelation—“I saw my entire life in a flash”—is drawn as “MY LIFE!”, a jagged-topped building of concrete blocks that have broken apart the edifice of a formerly coherent self (19, top left). But in a close-up portrait, the next frame reveals the other side of that moment, a simultaneous “ENLIGHTENMENT” or “Aha” awareness, with literal light bulbs in Parsua’s eyes. She is awakened to the kind of double consciousness that stirs a desire to examine her past—and inaugurate her story (19, top right).

Bashi wrote to me about this moment: “The Idea of having conversation with myself came from a real emotional/psychological situation that I was in at the time of writing this book . . . I really had these conversations with myself, since I was mainly alone and had time,” in the “Vacuum space” that she experienced between her Iranian past and new life in Switzerland (PC). The felt space, depicted as a gap between parts of the building, is echoed in the gutter between the two frames that juxtapose “The interruption” and “ENLIGHTENMENT,” which both occur as Parsua feels that her life became “absurd and meaningless” (19 top left). As Hillary L. Chute observes, “the gutter [is] . . . the figuration of a psychic order outside of the realm of symbolization, a space that refuses to resolve the interplay of elements of absence and presence” (Disaster, 35). This unresolved, traumatic space marks the narrator’s awakening to autobiographical consciousness as a difference that produces rupture rather than consolidating an edifice of the self.

In this crisis of self-reflection, while Parsua listens to the radio, the second avatar appears in her 16-year-old self from 1982, situated during the Iran-Iraq war and in the wake of the Cultural Revolutionary Council’s installation of a rigidly fundamentalist Islamic system. Parsua-16, steeped in that milieu, voices a critique of the “relaxed” European view of the world reflected in feel-good broadcasts, while in Iran “other people are dealing with shit” such as mandatory prayer in school and the conscription of all 18-year-old men for the war (24). In Bashi’s depiction this moment is a collision of two versions of herself, differently embodied in Parsua’s long hair and blouse and the veiled garment of the patriotic teenager sternly admonishing her. As they stroll together in Zürich, they glimpse a hippie Western woman who has appropriated a prayer shawl to wear as a skirt. She appalls Parsua-16 because she has no idea that the shawl is traditionally used as a head-covering by a range of Middle Eastern people, from Palestinians to militant fundamentalists, and would disregard her as a “foreigner” (25). In the ensuing argument between Parsua’s two selves, each makes points about perceptions of Islam, dramatized on the page by their shifting body language, gestures, and dominant or subordinate placement in the visual dialogic.

During Parsua’s reflection in Chapter Three on whether she is “homesick” for her “hometown” or has just forgotten the violence of Iran’s past in nostalgia, her 18-year-old self of 1984, the fourth year of the Iran-Iraq war, appears in pants and a ponytail to narrate the painful personal realities of those years (28). It is a litany of losses: the brother she felt close to was smuggled to Turkey to avoid the army, and many of her family and friends left for Europe or North America, trips that turned into a kind of permanent emigration that was “seriously tearing families apart, some forever” (30). Eventually “none of our family or friends were left,” except for her parents, yet Parsua-18 seeks to remain true to her ideal of what the nation, which once was Persia, could again be (33). As narrator, Parsua sums up the conflicted feelings expressed in debates with her friends and family, asking whether it was worse to abandon her native land—“I was young [but] strictly against emigration” (32, middle) and leave it to “a bunch of mediocre midgets” (32, bottom), or to feel “abandoned” in not leaving a place that, in the view of many, had betrayed its Persian history (33, top right). Despite the urging of even her parents, Parsua-18 remains staunch in her determination to study fine arts at Tehran University. Responding to her avatar’s question about the most difficult part of migration, Parsua acknowledges that she felt more in exile at home—“most homesick in my own hometown” (35). At the same time in her adopted new land she is virtually speechless without her mother tongue, as she confronts the difficulty of successfully integrating into the complexity of Swiss-German society (34, bottom). The experience of crisis in Iran has “vaccinated [her] against” homesickness; after a life of it in Tehran, she is without a “home” anywhere (35, bottom).

Parsua’s notion of her self-sufficiency is next challenged by her 23-year-old self (in 1989) who calls on her to recall a moment when the revolutionary guards were busily rounding up what she calls “THE USUAL SUSPECTS”—political activists, boys and girls together, journalists and artists, writers and intellectuals, monarchists, dealers of music cassettes and alcohol, “bad hejabs”—for alleged crimes in appearance, ideas, or expression (Figure 4).

In Tehran, Parsua-23, lonely without her friends, develops an inexplicable crush on a male artist colleague who is drawn as portly and invasive, enveloping her in a sea of words (45, panel, second row). When she is caught walking on the street with a male classmate by a Pasdar (member of the Revolutionary Guard) who challenges them for associating in public, she defiantly responds that such acts are not prohibited by Sharia law. For this retort she is sent to the Islamic Court and sentenced to a whipping of seventy lashes (44). Summing up her response to this painful moment, the narrating “I” recognizes that her sense of citizenship was violated in Iran: “I felt enormously ashamed to be part of such a society” (44).

Depressed and humiliated, she turns to her boyfriend, despite their differences. When he asserts that he will “protect her”—“I’ll make a PERFECT woman out of you”—she agrees to be married and, three months later, discovers she is pregnant (45). Although Parsua now regrets her “stupid decision” to wed this tyrant and the impact it had on the daughter she gave birth to, she consoles her younger self for the bitter experience. As narrator, she goes on to observe how the limiting laws of religious fundamentalism lead young people into bad marriages in Iran; conversely, in Europe, people can get to know each other before marriage (47). Finally, both Parsuas resolve their quarrel by admitting that young people can make mistakes anywhere, as both Middle Eastern and Western European nations exert forms of domination over their citizens. And yet, the details that emerge of her sheltered life despite supportive parents, the brutal punishment she received in the Islamic court, and her subsequent coercion into marriage, stand as an indictment of how the Republic’s excesses caused damage to her personal life.

This critique of personal life is extended, in Chapter Five, to a critique of political conservatism in both the Middle East and Euro-American nations. In Zürich Parsua’s encounter with a passionately pro-Persian Iranian-migrant woman forms a pedagogical moment in the comic that is aimed as much at expatriates as Western readers. When this other woman speaks as “we PERSIANS” and denounces Arabs as “CAMEL RIDERS,” the four-page spread juxtaposes icons of Persian culture, displaying the splendors of the empire before the Arabs arrived that she enumerates, with an ever-closer focus on her screaming mouth. But Parsua’s response, as a cosmopolitan subject, is pained: “I was so embarrassed” (54), she confesses, as she denounces the woman as “a chauvinist racist” (55), uneasy with the nostalgia of the pro-Persia diasporic woman, reminiscent of the “Iranians of the imagination” to whom Naghibi refers.[21]

In response, “one of my most patriotic selves” appears, the 35-year-old woman of 2001, a few years before Bashi migrated. Initially the two Parsuas argue about their justifications of the Islamic Republic and the “West,” their upper and lower positions within the frame alternating as each makes her argument. “Patriotic” Parsua-35, committed to the relative freedom of pre-Revolutionary Iran, denounces Islamic fundamentalism and proclaims, in angry profiles, the excesses of Muslim leaders as “terrorists” who subject their own citizens to cruelty. In response Parsua challenges her former self’s view as “poisoned by rage” for claiming that the Islamic Republic’s imposition of religion is at fault for all Iran’s woes, not least because Islam has been merged with Iranian culture for 1,400 years (56–7). Their dispute, captured in a montage of close-up profiles of the two women sparring, induces Parsua to regard fundamentalisms as “simply for political purposes,” “propaganda . . . based on those false clichés” that use avowals of a “sacred mission” to hide their “dictatorial regime” (58). The narrating “I” acerbically retorts to her avatar, that, while the fundamentalist Islamic Republic makes laws mandating the veiling of women and prohibiting alcohol, the West deports Middle Easterners as terrorists and, in France, condemns head-scarf-wearing as a religious symbol at the same time that it condones right-wing Aryan-nation protests and starting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The so-called “holy war” of fundamentalism thus links right-wing conservatives in East and West like “a double-sided blade” in which they use mutual hatred to impose undemocratic limitations on their citizens’ rights, a point on which her two selves, despite their different dress and locations, ultimately concur in the chapter’s last frame, a moment of shared insight (Figure 5).

The chapter’s process, then, does not suggest that Parsua “reconverts” from her Westernized tastes to Iran-nostalgia; rather it produces a recognition of repressive practices that underlie the ideologies of both the Islamic Republic and Western neoliberalism. As the final frame concludes, conservative propaganda in Iran, by shoring up the theocentric Iranian regime’s claim of a “holy war,” masks real issues of poverty, hunger, unemployment, and censorship of speech, enabling the dictatorship to mystify its power as religion (57). In parallel fashion, the West resists acknowledging how its own media reports can fuel attacks by immigration police and right-wing groups directed at Muslims (59–61). Thus Parsua’s response, in her dialogue with “patriotic” Parsua-35, structurally links Islamic fundamentalism with its seeming opposite, the West’s claim of liberatory humanism.

Chapter Six takes up narrating Parsua’s encounter with her divorced 29-year-old “mother-self,” who lost custody of her daughter because she asked for a divorce from her jealous and possessive husband (65). Yet when weeping Parsua-29 recounts her sad story, Parsua rebukes her for refusing to recognize that she had a need to survive, despite her pain about the personal loss of her daughter and the political loss of her homeland (66). Parsua the narrator talks back to her newly divorced self about how the bitter loss of her child to her husband fueled not only her grief, but her critique of Iranian custody laws favoring the husband as a “religious” policy. And she draws a political conclusion that her younger self couldn’t see, namely how “religion” masks the Islamic Republic’s underlying “political purposes,” in frames of the prejudicial court process that caricature the judge and lawyer. The narrative rehearses Parsua-29’s testimony to the judge as a set of drawn memory-moments about her “paranoid” husband’s jealousy as he forbids her to see others, including her own mother, slaps her for “flirting,” and takes the television away from their child (70). While her testimony is useless because, as a housebound woman she had no witnesses, the drawings form a powerful indictment of a sexist and corrupt judicial process. A meta-drawing of objects incorporated in each frame for three pages represents Justice as a blindfolded woman in floor-length coat and veil holding a sword and balance scales in increasingly precarious fashion. When the judge assigns the child to her father, saying “True Muslim women live their lives with husbands even if they get beaten every day,” the scales topple (69).

Parsua-29 summarizes the social and professional rejection she experienced in a “JUST DIVORCED” composite drawing that itemizes aspects of her pariah status in Iran, including the many men who offer help privately in exchange for sex. Parsua urges her former self to let go of her victimage as “a poisonous habit of begging for sympathy,” drawn as the coat of pain and sorrow that she can only flush down the toilet at the chapter’s end. She then reminds her 29-year-old self of the leap she took to become independent and considers her question about whether more progressive societies exist (72). Their conversation becomes an occasion for a feminist critique of the treatment of women, as Parsua notes that, on the one hand, Iranian women had the vote earlier than their Swiss counterparts (enfranchised in 1972); yet, on the other, in Iran women earn 30% less for the same jobs (72). Ultimately, “women all over the world are struggling for their rights. Some more, some less . . .” (72). Thus the narrating “I”s personal encounter with Parsua-29’s beliefs and position serves as an act of consciousness-raising that exposes socio-political contradictions globally. Her younger self’s dejected reaction, understandable and brave at one moment, is modified by the end of their dialogue to enable change and growth as she moves beyond it. That is, in this passionate dialogue one self’s point of view does not negate the other’s, but, in dialogical fashion, can lead to self-forgiveness and insight, if not the end of personal pain about loss (74). In confronting each other’s different values as they debate the cost of fidelity to one’s native land versus the experience of a more tolerant society at the cost of losing a homeland, the drawn narrated and narrating “I”s reconcile—though the memory of losing her child is drawn as a knife that still stabs Parsua to the heart (74).

The next former self to confront Parsua is her most recent, the 36-year-old who owned a graphic design studio in Tehran. Europeanized Parsua introduces her as an embarrassing, “almost arrogant” and “loud” feminist (76). But Parsua-36 provocatively extends the comic’s critique of the West, pointing out how even the figures of accomplished Western writers and artists are used as a “consumer product” in advertising campaigns, “selling the female body in public” (Figures 6.1 and 6.2).

Her sweeping condemnation further asserts that, at the same time in Iran, brave women defending human rights were imprisoned and even killed, events that Western media sensationalized by representing them as victims in burqa (which are not worn in Iran), among the many ways in which the Western designers of book covers display gross ignorance of Middle Eastern cultures. Yet the narrator’s encounter with “loud” feminist Parsua-36 not only exposes excesses in both Western and Eastern worlds; it also reminds the narrator of the ignorance of citizens of both the global North and South about each other’s cultures: “I learned that not knowing is not a sin. Not knowing and yet being prejudiced is where the problem starts” (79). Although a didactic “lesson,” her point seems apropos, not least for the English version and reception of Nylon Road itself.

Parsua’s avatars can be harshly critical of the narrator’s seemingly “free” and comfortable status in Zürich, none more so than the 21-year-old Parsua of 1987 in Chapter Eight who appears on the scene to narrate her years of privation during the Iraq-Iran war. The urgent voice of Parsua’s younger self compels the narrating “I” to reflect on the greedy myopia of the Swiss gourmet dinners she now enjoys and her new friends’ preoccupation with vacations and consumer luxuries—like the truffle oil that she tries for the first time in Zürich (84, 88). Parsua reflects on the limits of her past self’s memory, which could not know that in the nineties some things got better in Iran under its fifth president, Khatami (1997–2005)—although repression and human rights abuses intensified thereafter. This lack of perspective, she implies, is shared by both emigrants and Westerners (Figure 7).[22]

At the same time Parsua-21 recalls contradictory aspects of wartime life in Iran. On the one hand, food was rationed and oil poured into plastic bags, while in Europe even chocolate is elaborately packaged; there were ration coupons and long waiting lines in markets; and the lack of cosmetics made hygiene a struggle. On the other hand, there was the solidarity of family life for the middle-class families like hers who sewed their own clothes modeled on pre-revolutionary catalogs; took photos to document both war and propaganda; held “exhibitions” of their paintings and photos, watched banned movies, and made live music inside the walls of their homes; and had endless private conversations about the harsh realities of life that generated a kind of everyday intimacy that Parsua finds rare in the commodity-obsessed Swiss world (86–92). To Parsua-21, Europeans are “sissies” (92), unlike the leftists who stayed in Iran and “dealt with the hardship” of everyday life (93). There are of course exceptions in both settings, people who crawl out of what Bashi depicts as European cocoon pods to help others struggling in the developing world (93). As the ongoing dialogue with her former selves makes clear, the claim that either the Islamic Republic or a Western nation is the superior one can be challenged by countervailing evidence. By the chapter’s end Swiss Parsua comes to acknowledge that she survives in her new social world, as in the old, by acts of forgetting and normalizing the burden of accumulated memories.

Reminded repeatedly by her former selves of repressive realities that marked post-revolutionary life in Iran, Parsua remains aware that nostalgia for the past is a form of false consciousness—in what is perhaps a textual barb directed at earlier emigrants. This is also borne out in Chapter Nine, which charts how young Parsua-19’s study of graphic design at Tehran University in 1985, after the universities reopened, was hindered by “conditions where nothing was allowed to be seen or heard” in the aftermath of the revolution’s “explosion of light” depicted on a propaganda poster to ironic effect next to a sign proclaiming “OUR UNIVERSITIES ARE MAN-MAKING FACTORIES,” both of which evoke scorn in Parsua-19 (98). She goes on to narrate the widespread censorship that fine-arts librarians exercised on viewing books about Western artists—such as Egon Schiele, with his provocative naked bodies—that are lined up in her office, and Western design journals. Equally obnoxious were the severe punishments that violating rules on fraternizing with male students or bringing in materials from other countries could occasion. But as Parsua-19 narrates this tale of the universities’ repressive stifling as the “new normal,” she also details the innovative kinds of resistance that it spurred. The chapter’s drawings of posters, books, magazines, and videos, as well as the caricature of the library’s monstrously “fat, spinsterly, old virgin” (97) and malevolent director, texture its narrated memories as both vivid and tough, driven by the students’ shared determination to learn about a wider world of arts and cultures in the West and subvert their supervisors, often at personal cost.

As Nylon Road expands its critique toward broader political and ideological targets, the narrating “I”’s harshest critic emerges in the pigtailed teenaged self of Chapter Ten. Parsua-13 speaks from the position of the heady moment in 1979, just after the Iranian Revolution began, when she chose, among the available versions of leftist theory, to identify as a Marxist-Leninist and immersed herself in its prescribed reading of Marxist classics (103–05). But Parsua, as narrator, ironically mocks the teenager’s study of party tenets, texts, and mandated practices of group “self-criticizing” (106) and body-building as “A teenage fashion just like any other,” comparable to the fad—and pain—of getting a tattoo (109). From Parsua-13’s perspective, however, Europeans are superficial. They can be split into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the latter with no access to agency, their personal styles reflecting gendered and classed forms of oppression. As a rejoinder Bashi’s full-page drawing suggests that the teenager’s study of “dialectical materialism” was useful in getting her own way in the family—in the name of “rights,” in a family scene where competing viewpoints were tolerated as her father listens to the BBC World Service on the radio (108). But while Parsua-13 rejects seeing the martyred youth of Iran in 1981 as following a “fad,” Parsua the narrator defends her view in a startling way: she compares the fate of the youth in Iran to the ways that capitalism conforms young women to styles of dress and behavior that also repress individual expression, a form of what Marcuse termed “repressive tolerance.”[23] In the narrator’s view political positions are inevitably compromised because they are embedded in the ideologies of specific regimes and political moments.

Parsua-13 also offers a novel defense of her point of view in this debate, visualizing a fantasy of young women costumed in different garb to display capitalist, religious-fundamentalist, and socialist modes of conforming girls to three kinds of ideological “cults” (Figure 8). Each kind of costuming produces consumers who suffer the disciplinary effects of their interpellation in the unquestioning adherence that governments demand. Parsua sums up this critique of “the power of wealth” to shape political belief in her contrast of three kinds of regimes, as embodied in their leaders: “fashionista” capitalism crowns designer Karl Lagerfeld; the Islamic Republic honors the Ayatollah; and Soviet-style socialism heralds Stalin—all with wads of money in their hands (112). While Parsua-13’s Marxist self cannot be reconciled to the narrator’s critique by an offer of ice cream, Parsua concludes the chapter with a powerful insight: despite her selves’ bickering about positions, a “lost childhood” was the price of her early fervor during the Revolution (112). Interestingly, Chapter Ten suggests how deeply Bashi, as a teenager, was steeped in dialectical materialism, training that surely contributed to Nylon Road’s dialogical structuring and use of visual counterpoint.

The most provocative avatar of all steps up in Chapter Eleven: Parsua’s 33-year-old self, now a graphic designer who has been awarded her first prize (117). She is interested in Western fashion but becomes angry when the narrating “I” shows her a spread in Vogue entitled “Colonial Girl,” featuring “Calcutta Cat” and “Delhi Doll,” derived from women’s garb in colonial India (116). While contemporary Parsua defends free expression, tolerance, and the celebration of difference as practices enshrined in the West, Parsua-33, a tough and self-assured urbanite, searingly critiques the cynicism of the global fashion industry sustained by colonial and racist practices that emerged with the Enlightenment and the modern nation-state. Fashion magazines, Parsua-33 alleges, “make a profit from their own crimes of history by pretending that colonialism was just an aesthetic phenomenon” (116). Disgusted at the fascination the narrating “I” exhibits for Western consumerist fashion, however, this younger self alleges that the narrating “I” is blind to how cynically the West levels and commodifies history as a fashion statement.

When the narrating “I” contrasts the freedom of artists to criticize politicians in Europe with the fundamentalism that constrains artists in Iran, Parsua-33 begins to taunt her about the manipulative tactics of Western advertising. À la layouts in the fashion pages of Vogue or Elle, this younger self visualizes a fantasy depicting fashion lines of “Sweet Slaves,” complete with manacles and chains (121); “Hot 9/11" with models wearing Twin-Towers-explosion T-shirts; and models with shaved heads and Holocaust-camp shirts. As the two Parsuas’ heated debate about the conundrum of “free” speech continues, Parsua-33 argues that the Eurocentric West ignores taboos on trivializing genocidal acts that are Indian-, African-, or Asian-related even as it valorizes Eurocentric events (123).

Their debate, located at what Spiegelman called the “intersection of personal and world-historical events,” focuses the narrator on the blind spots of belief systems, all of which construct an “other” and set limits to the critique of their own histories (Spiegelman, In the Shadow, unpaged). But at the end of their dialogue Parsua remains stymied, like the narrating “I” at the crossroads depicted on Nylon Road’s original cover, between the clashing systems of different cultures and traditions. Finally, reconciliation with her last self is impossible. When Parsua as narrator poses the irresolvable conundrum of freedom and censorship that—for her—constrains the exercise of democratic freedom in societies in various ways, Parsua-33 responds, “Why bother writing a book? Why not just shut up? . . . your theories are BULLSHIT!” (124). In a witty graphic metalepsis, Bashi captures the chapter’s lack of closure with the narrating “I” jumping out of the comic page on which she is drawn jumping out of the page, chided by finger-pointing Parsua-33 (124). Completing the spectrum of attitudes of her former selves, some of them echoed more widely in their social milieu, Bashi represents Parsua as at an impasse—and yet, her narrative of the challenges that both post-revolutionary Iran and the “civilized” West pose has unfolded in specific and compelling detail.

Nylon Road’s brief final Chapter Twelve consists of facing pages that juxtapose alternate views of Parsua the narrator. On the left side, in nine close-up portraits, Parsua is visualized full-face, smoking and pondering how to conclude her story in a way that is funny and provides closure but is not “paranoid,” “two-faced,” or “simply crazy” (126). The rejoinder on the witty right page is a self-portrait in which seven of her collective younger selves, led by the six-year-old, orchestrate an end to her process of self-reflection by holding aloft a banner reading “The End.” A picture within the picture, this group of little figures surrounds a self-portrait of Parsua the narrator that is clipped onto the bookshelf in her study. Below it her drawing hand appears in profile, at rest and holding the pencil for Bashi’s comics drawings (Figure 9).

A metaleptic gesture familiar in autographics and other forms of self-portraiture, from Dürer and Parmigianino through Van Gogh and Kollwitz, this last panel emphasizes the recursive nature of graphic storytelling. (See further discussion of the graphic in the “Toolbox” below.) That is, Bashi represents herself as an artist-maker performatively. In this binocular structure, the narrating “I” of the comic is revealed as a projection of the agent who has drawn, written, organized, and edited her memoir, as the hand drawn by her invisible hand signifies. Further, as the drawing suggests, Parsua is as much an effect of her former selves as she is a speaking subject—and thus still a subject in transit. In true dialogical fashion this visual and narrative self-examination cannot be resolved into the coherent, consolidated self as public citizen of the Western Bildungsroman. Rather she remains an open possibility at the nexus of memory and narration. Far from serving as an authoritative visual and textual life story about either belonging in, or migrancy from, Iran, Nylon Road presents an “I” who both asserts her role in directing the narrative and is unmasked as a constructed fiction by her past. Assembled at the expense of acknowledging and incorporating—but struggling in creative tension with—past “forgotten” versions of herself, she remains a locus of competing claims about the “truth” of her experience.

In sum, throughout Nylon Road, Bashi uses conversations with her former selves to set up and intensify a dialogical structure of interrogation that is both personal and political. Neither her present-time “I”, nor any of her past selves, emerges as “right,” the victor in this clash of views. But through the lens of graphic memoir the succession of encounters serves to problematize questions of identity and belonging for the narrating “I” as a migrant subject in Zürich. Both the roles of leftist Iranian resister in the Islamic Republic and liberated Euro-migrant trouble her. In that sense Nylon Road is a story of the narrator’s inadequacy to construct a coherent identity either at home or in Europe; both versions are inadequate, inauthentic from the other’s point of view. Yet, as in many transnational narratives, Nylon Road’s confession of unease with residing in either past or present social identities bares an in-between space that is generative of its graphic dialogism. Parsua’s determination to be neither nostalgic nor in denial about her past experience in Iran sets up a colloquy of selves in a debate about whether to invest in any prevailing political ideology—even as one is inescapably interpellated by those informing the location one inhabits.

Thus Nylon Road poses issues for both readers of the Iranian diaspora and those in the West. At the same time that Nylon Road acknowledges—in often funny and sometimes harrowing detail—the post-revolutionary excesses and blind spots of the Islamic Republic, it also suggests that neither Western market capitalism nor Soviet-style socialism can adequately redress forms of prejudice toward outsiders and violence toward women. And it resists, through its dialogical structure, the binary logic of much testimonial memoir in which the West serves as the locus of rescue for Middle Eastern emigrants. In Bashi’s dynamic and ever-incomplete project of self-invention, Parsua’s multiple, unresolved selves signal that the consolidation of a transnational identification occurs at the cost of letting go of memory in order to belong. Particularly in light of Bashi’s 2009 return to Iran, her ironic rendering of violent repression in the Islamic Republic of Iran, compulsory conformity under Soviet socialism, and materialist excess in the name of tolerance in the West, leaves readers with provocative questions about whether any “elsewhere” can serve as a locus of adequate rescue for democratic values. Forming a moving target of self-representation, the dialogical narrative organization of Nylon Road offers a view of self-construction that, in the act of reconstructing memory through situated witnesses embodying particular standpoints, links the personal inextricably to the shifting global currents and contexts that texture it.

IV: A Toolbox for Reading the Drawn Autographic Witness

Autographics offers unique resources for representing the contradictions of multiply inflected subjectivity as a mosaic of self-reflection in ways that verbal narration cannot fully capture. Because Bashi was primarily a graphic designer rather than a comics artist, she had to devise a set of visual codes for representing the psychological complexity of her process of engaging memory as an unhappy diasporic subject caught between dramatically different worlds. In my view she sought visual means that would both stylize the appearances and attitudes of her past selves at significant ages and correspond to key moments in pre-and post-revolutionary Iranian history. These embodied former selves, necessarily repressed in her post-migration life, cumulatively pressure Parsua’s recognition of contradictions of her experience. Bashi’s efforts to visually encode autobiographical reflection about her conflicted position as a remarried Iranian woman artist in Zürich are worth further consideration. What is her vocabulary of visual tactics and tropes, and is this repertoire shared with other autobiographical comics?

By asking this, I am implying that the question of how comics represent the autobiographical is a complex one. Drawing pictures that resemble the artist making the comic is not a display of self-reflexivity, nor is simply including fragments from memory archives such as letters, diaries, or photographs. Rather, depicting an autobiographical act of self-reflexivity requires an artist-author to devise a narrative “mirror” that she can turn back on herself. After Parsua’s initial question, “How could I have forgotten me?” (15), the eleven selves that appear enable her to stage encounters in which neither the narrating “I” nor her many past selves can claim to be the authoritative version of her own, or Iran’s, past. Instead, the encounters staged between present and past versions of herself as they discuss, and often dispute, the meaning of experience, produce a dialogical narrative that proceeds by recursive twists and turns.[24] The dialogue that Nylon Road conducts among Parsuas is both interior—about the shifting meaning of the past depending on one’s location—and public, linked to Iran’s history. It presents the narrating “I”, a Europeanized cosmopolite in Zürich but also a migrant, as both insider and outsider making a critique of women’s experience that is ideologically charged in ways not adequately reflected by global media.

The set of terms I propose parses the autographic strategies Bashi employs in drawing Parsua in relation to her embodied past selves in Nylon Road. This vocabulary of visual distinctions can be seen as a kind of “toolbox” for autographic representation, and may offer rubrics for thinking about visual tropes in graphic memoir more generally.

The processual “I” shows the narrating “I” as a developmental aggregate, the culmination of a series of past selves at different moments that are lined up behind her, for example, on the bottom of page 18, which is also used as the cover of the English edition of Nylon Road (see Figure 2). This stylization depicts identity as a chronological process that proceeds in a linear, organically developmental fashion toward consolidating a present I.

The conflictual “I”, by contrast, represents the narrating “I” as a product of disparate and competing identifications—as on the cover of the original German edition and its Spanish translation (see Figure 1). There, each of Parsua’s crossed legs is clad in a nylon stocking covered with characters and word fragments in a different alphabet, and the contrast of Persian and Roman scripts locates her at a crossroads between her Iranian legacy and the Greco-Roman heritage of democracy and capitalism. So clad, she embodies the conflict of ideologies and cultures that she has experienced—in the humorous form of pantyhose.

The indexical “I” signals meta-level reflexivity in embedding one or more visual replications of the narrated "I" in a particular box or panel. Thus, a photograph or drawing of a past “I” can serve as a mirror-avatar for the narrating “I”, but also heighten the contrast between past and present I’s. For example, Bashi incorporates a portrait of her younger self from a photo album, “Tehran Autumn, 1989,” as a sweet-faced girl in a hijab who was not allowed to show affection to her boyfriend in public under the laws of the Islamic Republic, in contrast to the free expression of couples the narrating “I” observes in Zürich (38). Satrapi similarly uses many portraits of her younger self as visual icons in photographs, paintings, or mirrors within the frame, particularly in Persepolis I.

The dialogical “I” can be visualized in various ways. Within a frame Bashi often creates a multifaceted self-portrait by juxtaposing several heads or bodies of the narrator to depict different-aged selves as in conversation with one another. For example, when Parsua, reflecting on her migrant status, describes herself as a “useless asshole,” Bashi places four free-floating drawings of herself at loose ends within a single box (12, bottom; see Figure 3). The drawing externalizes her self-critical interior monologue as a set of faces that are set alongside, but not literally “speaking” to, one another on the same visual plane. Rather than being developmental, these self-portraits of the unsettled, unresolved narrator represent her as a set of discontinuous, dissonant personae.

But dialogism can also be signaled in a succession of boxes that juxtapose past and present "I"’s in conversation, sometimes using filmic techniques of positioning one disputant at the top of the frame and switching her location to a bottom corner as the other responds. In some text-rich panels Bashi focuses on talking heads in profile or three-quarter view as they trade views on an issue such as artistic freedom.

The interpellated “I” is presented through a multi-panel box or page that embodies different belief systems in the appearances and attitudes of young women. For example, Bashi draws a girl wearing differing costumes to depict a contrast of global ideologies—Western neoliberalism, Islamic fundamentalism, and socialist utilitarianism (110; see Figure 8). Her costuming literally fashions the personae inhabiting them as a kind of interpellation conforming young woman to identities as, variously, “consumer,” “sheep,” and “comrade” whose performances are mandated by powerful interests that enforce membership in a national “cult” (she acknowledges Islamic fundamentalism as a particularly repressive one). For each figure, the instructions are the same: “Wear this . . . Read this . . . Be like this . . . Good, you fit”(110). Bashi turns this criticism on herself as well, stylizing Parsua-13 as trying on seven styles of radical resistance circulating in Iran in the seventies before she opts to become a “Marxist-Leninist” (103).

The recursive “I” can be presented by visual self-reference, and is a frequently-used convention of self-portraiture in both painting and cartooning. In it a portrait of the narrating “I” includes the maker’s hand, either in the act of drawing or in repose, as a reference to the artist’s body drawing the comic outside the frame. In suggesting that a self-image must be drawn by another invisible hand, a drawing of the artist’s hand is an example of what narrative theory terms “metalepsis”; such images create a mise-en-abîme or recursive circuit of self-representation. (Recall the famous M. C. Escher graphic of “Drawing Hands.”) Such cartoonists as Alison Bechdel and Art Spiegelman employ this trope as a visual signature. For example, a famous full-page box depicts Art, the artist drawing Maus, as he sits atop a heap of corpses in the shadow of a Holocaust watchtower (Maus II, 41). Bashi’s final full-page box similarly depicts the drawn narrating “I” in a picture surrounded by little drawings of seven earlier selves who, as an ensemble, surround the present-time narrator as if she is their creation. (127; see Figure 9 and related discussion in III). They present Bashi’s narrating “I” as recursive, a performative construct produced at the nexus of the disparate histories of her past selves. Yet the drawn hand of the artist, visible below this group self-portrait around Parsua, also unmasks Bashi as the maker of Nylon Road’s visual dialogics.

In sum, Bashi productively exploits the affordances of graphic memoir for self-presentation by employing visual tropes that represent self-relationship in encounters among her various selves across disparate times and places. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has asserted for written narrative, the depictions of a self in migration across locations, histories, and ideologies, cannot be “just a single story.”[25] Bashi’s multiple apparitions in the selves of memory require a repertoire of visual tropes, on dazzling display in Nylon Road.

V. Conclusion

Narratives structured as debates about the position of the autobiographical subject vis-à-vis her own and national history, whether written or in the visual-verbal form of graphic memoir, can be challenging to follow. Publishing in 2006, Bashi used an open-ended dialogical structure to depict her relationship to her homeland, Iran, and her post-migration life in Switzerland, ensuring that, while Nylon Road was written in the West, it is decidedly not “written for the West.” The comic provocatively suggests that, for transnational subjects, questions of audience and allegiance may be so fraught with ambivalence that the authority of any single version of an experiential history is troubled.

As a kind of feminist counter-comic, Nylon Road thus critiques not only the severe strictures that its narrating “I”, Parsua, experienced and that were imposed on women under the Islamic Republic, but also those implicit within the “repressive tolerance” of Western consumer capitalism that she encountered as an expatriate in Zürich. As a collective trope for the variation and embeddedness of memory, Bashi’s eleven avatars, in dialogue with her rather than static portraits frozen in memory, both innovatively juxtapose diverse ideological perspectives on the past and trouble nostalgic versions of it. Its intricate charting of how reawakening memory activates the narrating “I”’s questions about identity is a bracing tonic to a rose-colored glasses view of either home or adopted nation.

At a time when the publication of memoirs critical of the Islamic Republic is impossible in Iran, Nylon Road’s summoning of the past in the form of active narrators enables the airing of a range of controversial issues and a spectrum of standpoints on them. Bashi’s graphic representation of Parsua as a collection of ideologically diverse past selves probes stereotypes about the “looks” and beliefs of women, Iranian, European, and globally. As Nylon Road’s Chinese-box procession of encounters frame its protagonist at the crossroads of clashing past experiences, it redirects the Bildungroman’s conventional claim of new-made immigrant identity to a different self-recognition, “What I am now is the result of their lives” (18).

Bashi’s interrogative, non-omniscient stance toward her own past thus shapes a comic that, in its mix of humor and biting satire, is critical of both human rights abuses in Iran and commodity capitalism in the West. As Nylon Road invites reader-viewers to acknowledge divergent experiential histories by engaging its debates across religious fundamentalist, Soviet-style socialist, and neoliberal capitalist positions, its alternative story of belonging, diaspora, and the creation of transnational identity productively challenges other memoirs of Iran’s recent tumultuous history even as it demonstrates the stakes of self-representation.

Notes

With thanks to Carol DeBoer-Langworthy and Lifewriting Annual for encouraging this essay; to Lisa Mühlemann of Kein & Aber Press, Zürich, for facilitating the use of images from Nylon Road; and to Nathanael Su for helpful steering. I am, above all, grateful to Parsua Bashi for her generous responses to my queries and helpful information about several aspects of Nylon Road’s inception, process, and reception. Errors of fact or interpretation, no doubt inevitable for a Western scholar of life narrative of the Iranian diaspora, are entirely my own.

1. Touragi extends his critique to memoirs by writers remaining in Iran such as Iran Awakening: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Country by 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi.

2. Over a decade ago Satrapi insisted that her identity is as an Iranian woman. See the interview by the Asia Society http://asiasociety.org/marjane-satrapi-i-will-always-be-iranian.

3. See Smith and Watson, “Witness or False Witness?”, which traces the indeterminacy of claims to ethnic or ideological belonging in several contemporary life narratives, while observing the importance of testimonies for creating communities of affiliation.

4. I call this process a dialogical one, drawing on Bakhtin’s concept in The Dialogic Imagination for an ongoing process of exchange with no final resolution. The dialogic is unlike a Hegelian dialectic in which thesis and antithesis confront each other and, in tension, generate a new synthesis that moves toward closure. Parsua’s encounters with her former selves conduct a continuing dialogue as a chain of exchanges that remains unresolved at the comic’s end. (See Bahktin, especially 292–4).

5. While Iranian film is beyond the purview of this essay, several filmmakers such as Abbas Kiriostami, Jafar Panahi, Asghar Farhadi, and Samira Makhmalbaf have provocatively represented contradictions between fundamentalist tenets and everyday life in contemporary Iran, raising troubling questions from within the nation. In another register, the film, video, and photographic works of artist Shirin Neshat stunningly documents the contradictions of Iranian and other Middle Eastern women’s lives in transnational settings.

6. As Naghibi observes, “some narratives of the regime may languish in obscurity, unsuccessful in their attempts to claim willing witnesses” (155) if they fail to establish an “empathic engagement” (158) with readers.

7. To reference citations from Nylon Road I use the page number, followed by the location of the image on the page when one is referenced.

8. Bashi’s more recent books include: Parsua Bashi with Martin Walker: Persische Kontraste (Persian Contrasts), Zürich: Walkwerk, 2008; and Parsua Bashi: Briefe aus Teheran (Letters from Tehran), Kein & Aber Verlag, 2010, translated from Farsi by Suzanne Baghestani.

9. Although the convention in life narrative is to use the first name of the author for the narrated I and the last name for the narrating “I”, in Nylon Road the complexity of having eleven former selves engage in dialogue with the narrator makes this impractical. I therefore use “Parsua” to refer to the narrating “I” and add, after the name of each former self, her age to make their differently situated positions and points of view clear. It is also crucial to distinguish both the narrated I’s and the narrating “I” from the flesh-and-blood author Bashi, who draws, writes, organizes and edits the comic, not least because she is referred to as the maker on its last page, with the drawn artist’s hand invoking the invisible hand that drew it.

10. Smith describes the crisis comic as a mode of “witness to radical injury and harm” that addresses readers variously as “those with the need to know their rights,” “individual agents of rights activism” who can “rescue themselves,” and “privileged readers to be enlightened about conditions elsewhere” (62–4). Bashi’s intended audience includes both privileged readers in the global North and those of the Iranian diaspora who are interested in the interplay of rescue and alienation in their own experience of migration.

11. As of early 2016 Kein & Aber has sold about 3,000 copies of Nylon Road, and the Spanish translation has sold about 1,000. Information from Lisa Mühlemann, Head, Rights and Licenses, Kein & Aber AG, Zürich.

12. Simon Poelchau in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, aptly observes: “Despite her criticism of the fundamentalist regime of the mullahs, Bashi resists damning Islam as such. In her opinion those in power use religion as an ideological weapon to legitimate their authoritarian politics.” (My translation of: “Bei aller Kritik an dem fundamentalistischen Regime der Mullahs unterlässt Bashi es aber, den Islam als solches zu verdammen. Ihrer Meinung nach benutzen die Machthaber im Iran die Religion als ideologische Waffe, um ihre autoritäre Politik zu legitimieren.”)

13. Stajić states, “In addition to the pure narrative [Bashi] also visually depicts some fundamental debates of modern society: How far should freedom of opinion go? Isn’t criticism of Islam at times counterproductive? And how fully do women in the West really lead independently empowered lives?” (My translation of: “Abseits des bloßen Narrativs bebildert sie auch einige Grundsatzdebatten der modernen Gesellschaft: Wie weit darf Meinungsfreiheit gehen? Ist Islamkritik manchmal nicht auch kontraproduktiv? Und inwieweit führen die Frauen im Westen tatsächlich ein selbstbestimmtes Leben?”) Olivera Stajić, “Dialog mit dem Ich.” 2010/2. http://www.migrazine.at/artikel/dialog-mit-dem-ich Accessed 8–24–2016.

14. Parsua Bashi wrote the following to me about the reception of Nylon Road in media for Iranian audiences: “There were three Persian press reviews, a couple of interviews and some more reviews in some Iranian Blogs: BBC Persian website, Radio Zamenh website, Radio Farda (VOA Persian radio branch in Prague) and some others that I have not recall (sic) now, and yes they were definitely have been read (sic) by Iranians inside Iran. But as you might know all the mentioned websites are filtered (blocked) by Iranian Gov., so we could say they were read by Iranians unofficially” (PC). Ordering books published elsewhere through websites is also impossible because online money transfer outside the country is not allowed.

15. The only scholarly attention Nylon Road has received in English in North America that I am aware of is in two conference papers that I presented at international conferences: “Graphic Memories of Revolution: Women on the Verge in the Middle East,” Session on Transnational Comics, Modern Language Association Convention, Jan. 10, 2014; and “Graphic Memoir as Visual How-To: Bashi’s Nylon Road,” International Auto/Biography Association Conference, Banff, Alberta, Canada, May 30, 2014.

16. Afsaneh Rezaei, a PhD Student in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University, advised me that the lettering on the right stocking leg “is likely Persian” (though the words she discerned could mean something in either Persian or Arabic), noting “There are a couple of instances where I think I can see the letter گ, which is only in the Persian alphabet. And the date and location printed right under her elbow say Zurich 1385/زوریخ ۱۳۸۵—the number referring to a year in the Persian calendar (1385, would be 2006/2007).” She added that another student thought it resembled “the Persian calligraphy practice ‘Siah Mashgh’/’/سیاه مشق—just writing the same words or letter over and over to perfect their calligraphic forms.”

17. The cover design is by Lisa Marie Pompilio under the St. Martin’s Griffin imprint in New York. The visual convention of self-representation as a processual figure emerging over time from past selves was memorably used in Charlotte Salomon’s brilliantly drawn-and-painted page of herself included as the last page of Life? or Theatre?, where she represents herself as emerging from her childhood and schoolgirl selves in over two-dozen figures in jumpers, culminating in her then-present self in a bathing suit on the French Mediterranean in 1941 as an “arrived” artist.

18. The Kein & Aber original text is on a heavy-stock paperback in an 8" by 11" format with generous margins. The English-language version from St. Martin’s Press is a smaller paperback, about 6" x 9" with a quarter-inch margin on each side. Otherwise the pagination and materials included are identical, with of course different front and back matter on publication.

19. Nylon Road’s translation into colloquial English is, in my view, well done, faithful to the original German yet fresh and funny.

20. Admittedly, Bashi articulated and published her comic at a moment in Zürich when she was free to air her discontent with both the intolerance of the Iranian regime and the consumerism of Switzerland, without danger to herself. But a careful reading of the comic’s critique of “repressive tolerance” undercuts any easy binary in which the West emerges as a “freer” or more liberated location able to integrate Parsua and remake her migrant self as a Western citizen.

21. Naghibi’s study focuses on exceptions to nostalgic memoir-writing but notes that it is typical of many memoirists: “Diasporic Iranian writers are in fact keenly aware of the object of their nostalgic longing: their homeland, Iran” (9).

22. See, for example, the op-ed by Maziar Bahari, “A Humane Voice for a Cruel Regime,” which tracks the jailing and torture of journalists and diplomats during the reign of supreme leader Khamenei.

23. “Repressive tolerance” is not Bashi’s term, but one coined by Herbert Marcuse for the paradoxical condition of modern neoliberal societies; I use it as a shorthand way to link Bashi’s critique of Western consumer capitalism to the longstanding Frankfurt School analysis of neoliberalism. Marcuse asserts, “Tolerance is extended to policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery. . . . Tolerance is turned from an active into a passive state, from practice to non-practice” (95).

24. Many graphic memoirists have depicted themselves at various ages by employing avatars, visual personae, to represent past experiences and inner conflicts on the page. For example, Spiegelman used drawn mouse attributes and different clothing to mark the various ages of his younger self, the child Art. Famously, in conversation with his therapist in Maus II, Art is drawn as a child-mouse, creating a reflexive narrative about himself at ages back to infancy. Similarly, Phoebe Glockner, in Diary of a Teenage Girl, and Lynda Barry, in One Hundred Demons, use visual juxtapositions of present and past selves at various ages as a structuring principle. The effect is to trouble notions of memory as chronological and coherent by introducing discordant elements of a personal past that undercut “official” stories about the coherence of the I’s identity. Similarly, the contending claims of narrated I’s at various ages saturate Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, particularly when the narrating “I” confronts the diary, photos, and other artifacts of her younger self. As in these examples, the encounters of Parsua with eleven past selves at different ages show how memory, in any given moment, is incomplete and fallible.

25. Nigerian novelist Chimamande Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk of October 7, 2009, “The Danger of a Single Story,” is an important and helpful statement about how the experience of multiple locations and cultures reshapes one’s notions of identity, making any single version of it a partial and inadequate account.

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