(Title translates to “These lines that trace my body”.)
Third page:
It’s so calming…
This has been a big hit in Francophone comics land this year, and has so far been translated into Dutch and Portuguese; English must surely follow. It’s the autobiographical story of Mansoureh Kamari, who was born in Iran, moved to France in 2011 and graduated from the Gobelins school of art in 2015, and is one of the up and coming screen animators in the French film scene.
Here she tells the story of her childhood in the brutal misogynist repression of the Islamic Republic, of continual sexual harassment, of relatives who were simply executed for their behaviour, of a society where women are under constant pressure. But she frames this in reminiscences from her sideline as a nude model who has agreed to participate in a video documentary; so we have Mansoureh, naked and comfortable in her body at last, reflecting on her upbringing. The nude scenes are intimate but not heavily erotic; the point isn’t to titillate, it’s to express her freedom.
The book is more polemical than the late great Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (vol 1, vol 2), but I guess the situation for women in Iran has got much worse since Satrapi first wrote about it from exile – Kamari would still have been a child then. But it’s not just about grim oppression; it’s telling a story of personal liberation, and ends with some joy. You can get Ces lignes qui tracent mon corps here.
