Book Review: Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi

Book Review: Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi

Quote: I asked him what his work was. He answered that he devoted all his time to his political activities... He was undoubtedly busy with the diplomatic relations between his testicles and women's breast.

In an elegant room, there is a gathering of women who after lunch have put their husbands to siesta, Marjane Satrapi then in her twenties is witnessing gossip unfold while she serves tea to her grandmother's friends. Soon she learns of stories of sex, love, betrayal and jokes. Her grandmother a woman I fell in love with in Persepolis, is admirable and scary, and fierce. A woman who has no place for weak-willed, opium addict and thrice-married.

An entire book is an act of retelling, now minus the sombre part of their lives. Grandmother recalls how she tried to help a friend fake her virginity on the wedding night and how it turned into a horribly-funny story. Another woman tells how her parents married her off at thirteen to a sixty-nine-year-old man because he was a rich aristocrat what she did to escape! While another woman who has four daughters has never seen the penis because her husband always switched off the lights.

Each story revolves around the sacrifices women make at times for love and get betrayed. It is funny how Marjane's famous quote about humans of different nations are same resonates here. The families are obsessed with finding a 'Good Groom' for their daughters and Iranian men who work abroad come back to marry 'Good Pure Iranian Young Girls' because women in West are so sexualized and Iranian men are delicate! A thought process that is so common in India.

Marjane's own cousin gets married off to a middle-aged man because he is rich. Soon the truth comes out of him being a gay man, and the mother though devastated is happy her daughter's virginity is intact. Like Marji's mother, I too wanted to hit the mother of that cousin.

The book is a lamentation of collective female experience. The more the woman gives the more she left hollow. I enjoyed the part where the woman learns her husband of thirty years is lusting after young girls and is on verge of having an affair, and she decides to take the matter in her own hands by going under the knife. Shouldn't a man who is ageing to go under the knife to please his old wife?

The story of the girl whose handsome, educated, modern, charming and abroad staying husband that runs away with her dowry after the night of consummation. Is a universal story, where a woman is left with the feeling of being robbed, humiliated and at times financially unstable.

The art is much simpler and more lucid compared to Persepolis. Yet the number of stories it incorporates in it is amazing. I loved the simple line expressions and flaky lettering. There is no panelling or borders, the dialogues move according to the whim of the characters and their movements.

These are stories of survivors, who have learned to negotiate love, hope, marriage, independence with men that come with ingrained disappointment. Like the meme that has been making hue and cry: Men as a concept is great but the execution is a failure. Each woman here has chosen their own battles to execute while they are under the watch of the strictest of religious hoodlums and a society that does not want to go back to being oppressed by the religious doctrines but happily uses them for short term goals and to oppress its fierce women in name of almighty.

The best part of the book is when the title makes sense after layers of conversations and experiences that start mocking the concept of virginity.