In 1990 when I was 10 years old, I remember a lot of talk about a very dangerous man and an invasion of a tiny country. I remember yellow ribbons and signs to support our troops. I remember that it was only a little while before we welcomed the troops home, and some of us kept the ribbons wrapped around our trees until they unraveled. In 1991, less than seven months after it began, my first war was over.
In 1979 when Marjane Satrapi was 10 years old, the Islamic Revolution in Iran overthrew the Shah, and then her life continued through war inside wars.
In 1982 by the time she was 13, her country was at war with Iraq and with itself. Her dearest uncle was executed for the charge of being a Russian spy. Her friends’ parents were imprisoned. She saw war machines flying over her city. Her neighbors were crushed underneath the rubble of their building. She was a witness to the pain. And her parents sent her away to finish growing up where she did not have to remain a witness.
On September 11, 2001, I was awakened by my roommate yelling on our answering machine that the country had been attacked. I remember the pain and anguish of that day, and the fear that spread through the nation when the planes hit the Towers, and the Pentagon, and crashed in Pennsylvania. I remember the President’s decisions over the next few days.
I am 42 years old, and my country has spent more than half my life at war, and my son at 15 has never known anything else. We know people who know people who were harmed, who have lost loved ones. We have sympathy and sorrow in our collective pain.
And yet.
We cannot see the effect of these events on our lives directly. We live almost 1500 miles away from those attack sites, and our family members who work in and near New York City were physically unharmed. For twenty years this country was in one, perpetual war, and the only rockets or jet fighters or tanks I ever saw were parked on bases or on trucks headed to be parked.
Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir is visceral. The comic book format allows to feel as though we are next to her, the child, then the adolescent, as she experiences trauma after trauma of an unsafe childhood.
At the same time that I am grateful to live far from conflict, far from the daily, disastrous consequences of other people’s decisions, I am frightened by what that has meant for the U.S. and our citizens. The world today is watching another very bad man in charge of an army encroaching upon another country’s borders. As this latest conflict progresses, among my biggest fears is that the daily lives of our non-military citizens will once again remain largely unchanged while we know that Satrapi’s childhood is replaying again, all over the world. Our distance shields us, but at what cost?
This is Meagan Zampieri-Lillpopp in Kansas for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club.