Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Babel series began in 2007.

It’s a comic, not a graphic novel.

I’ve finally come to the realization that the people who go to events such as Babel and another artsy affairs generally lean left politically. When tonight’s speaker—Iranian author/artist Marjane Satrapi—relayed that she had reached the point where she would usually spend ten minutes bashing George W. Bush, the crowd burst into uproarious laughter and unanimous applause.

That said, it’s surely the conservatives that Satrapi hoped to reach when writing down her life’s experiences in a tyrannical regime at home while trying to become a free European abroad. She talked about how the world shouldn’t contain culture clashes, but realize that there’s only one culture that belongs to everyone instead. Rather than harp on our differences, we should constantly be adding to our point of view so we can eventually all merge into one that’s held universally. Lofty ambitions for sure—especially coming from someone who grew up in a world where showing a strand of hair could put you in jail for public indecency.

Satrapi is possibly my favorite speaker to come through Asbury Hall yet. (Sadly also the last with the event moving to Kleinhans Music Hall). Her mixture of sarcasm, intellectual outlook, and life experience led to an enlightening speech about her work, life, and beliefs. Being that Persepolis is a graphic novel (Scratch that—she hates the term. It’s a comic.), reading excerpts like usual would be futile. Thankfully, she realized this fact and decided to just explain her reasoning and process behind the novel and film instead … as well as the nightmare of working with animation.

Her main impetus to write the story was for the world to ask itself what the value of life is. We as people are compelled to give evil a face, a name, and an address. Because once we can label that which harms us, we can then go after it and destroy every last trace. Satrapi sees this notion as the beginning stage of Fascism and the worst thing anyone can do. Yes, that first act of violence might be thought of as “right” in the minds of its participants. But the moment someone realizes the opposite and chooses to inflict the same act back on them in a bid for revenge, they become even worse than their oppressor.

What’s the value of a life? Is a Middle Easterner’s life worth less than a westerner? These are the questions she hopes to plant in our minds by giving Iranians a face—one that’s much like an American’s—to replace the labels we’ve been taught to place upon them. She believes we all must be humanists first and foremost because the only division that exists is the one separating fanatics from everyone else. Unfortunately, that small faction of fanatics gets so crazy that they become all we see or talk about.

Marjane Satrapi’s self-proclaimed cartoonist brought a little international flavor with her too. Whereas most of the foreign-born authors who have visited Buffalo previously became naturalized US citizens, she has not. After arriving in America for the first time in 1998, she was given a longer visa than her Swedish husband because “she was cuter.” When she returned years later, however, she was met with a brief detention to be grilled about WMDs by customs agents fully pivoted to racial profiling.

Despite it all, though, Satrapi found that what she heard about America and thought to be a land full of mean people was in fact a country of freedom and hope. Her love even extended to the point where she defended the US to the French during the “freedom fries” fiasco. An educated women who sees a person without laughter as being stupid, Satrapi converted everyone in the room into having hope for the future via her belief in “education and culture becoming weapons of mass construction.”

Before taking a cigarette break at the end of her discourse (an hour and a half of talking demanded a nicotine fix), she came back to posit that the next election should allow the entire world to vote. She said that the President of the United States is the de facto President of the world until China takes over as world power numero uno in 25-30 years. So, she wants a say in who wins and promises that we might never elect another republican if the world was given that voice. Yes, this was met with a wave of applause too.

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Announcements:

• The April 17th entry with Isabel Allende will now be held at Kleinhans Music Hall to allow for more seating. A new batch of tickets are now available for purchase as a result.
• The 2009-2010 season will see an increase in price, but you will be locked into this year’s prices as an early bird special if you order tickets before the 17th.
• The 2009-2010 season will include: A.S. Byatt and Possession on 10/9/09; Ha Jin and Waiting on 11/20/09; Azar Nafisi and Reading Lolita in Tehran on 3/5/10; and Salman Rushdie with Midnight’s Children on 4/16/10.

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Photo of Marjane Satrapi by Bruce Jackson.