"Chicken with Plums" Marjane Satrapi

One of the things I like about graphic novels is reading them many times to look for something different each time.  I think I have read "Chicken with Plums" 4 or 5 times, the last time just yesterday.

Nassar Ali, one of Satrapi's great-uncles, died 11 years before Satrapi was born.  So she never knew Nassar Ali, and yet she heard stories about him and his life from her family.  I am envious of the oral tradition of her family.  My father is the only survivor of my parent's generation of my immediate family, and because we didn't record the stories we were told about others in our family, we are losing all those family stories.  There have been times when I have asked the family to write down those stories, but we haven't and now it is too late.

Chicken with plums is a dish that Nassar Ali loved for his mother to make, and it represents the pleasure one experiences through love.  He has known love, but in November 1958 he has an experience that leads him to believe he will never experience love ever again, and he decides to die.  

Bottom half of page 17, "Chicken with Plums" by Marjane Satrapi

Nassar Ali is a musician.  He plays the tar, which you see in the pictures on this page.  He is renown for his music, which others cherish because of the emotions they feel when listening.  But his beloved tar has been broken, and he can't find pleasure in making music with any other tar.

Of course, the tar and the music are just symbols for what he has really lost.  Through flashbacks and glimpses into the future, Satrapi tells us Nassar Ali's story, how he became a musician and how that kept him from marrying the woman he loved, what his relationship was like with his brother and mother, and now about his relationship with his wife and children.

Even while I mourn for Nassar Ali and his inability to accept the love that is offered to him, I still laugh when little Mozzafar asks for opium and Sophia Loren arises from the dish of chicken with plums.

The most startling image for me in the book is the day that Nassar Ali decides to die.  It is the day of my birth. That page takes my breath away every time I see it.