Weekly Response #11

Emily Schmitt

ENG 280

Natilie M. Phillips

11/9/12

Weekly Response #11

“Avoidance may take many forms, such as keeping away from reminders, ingesting drugs or alcoholin order to numb awareness of distressing emotional states, or utilizing dissociation to keep unpleaseant expirences from conscious awareness” (Kolk and McFarlane 494)

“Markus was proud of me. So Proud that he told the whole school that his girlfriend had contacts at the Café Camera. This is how, for love, I began my carear as a drug dealer. Hadn’t I followed my mother’s advice? To give the best of myself. I was no longer a simple junkie, but my schools official dealer” (Satrapi 222).

Q: Is Marjane’s involvement in drugs and dangerous behaiour a result of her tramautic past, or a resut of circumstance and peer pressure? How are we to make this distinction in the rest of the population as well?

A: You must excuse me if I am making a stretch here, the entire time I was reading this article all I could think about was its relevance to Batman. Getting that out of the way, I did come across the thought that while Marjane does do drugs and participate in dangerous activites, I do not think it is a direct result of the expirences she had as a child. I don’t think, that had her environment been different, and those circumstances been more favorable, that she would have had such a foryeah into drugs and alcohol. Her spiral towards these vices can be explained by the lack of social support and need to fit in with her new environment. So while she does do drugs, and she has had a tramatic past, I believe that they are mutually exclusive faucets of Marjane’s story.

Works Cited

Van der Kolk, Bessel A., Axlexander C. McFarlane. ‘ The Black Hole of Trauma. “Literary

Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rikvin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 1998. 4. Print.

Satrapi, Marjane. The Complete Persopolis. Pairs: L’Association, 2003. Print.