Parsua Bashi’s Nylon Road: Visual Witnessing and the Critique of Neoliberalism in Iranian Women’s Graphic Memoir

I offer the first critical reading in English of Parsua Bashi’s graphic memoir Nylon Road, which traces a narrative of place and belonging by a diasporan Iranian woman after the cataclysmic changes of previous decades. The narrative is a dialogical autobiographical process in which Parsua, the narrating I, conducts a self-interrogation with eleven of her former selves. Together they weigh the competing belief systems of Iranian fundamentalism; Western secular humanism in Switzerland, where Bashi was a migrant (her preferred term) from 2004-09; and Soviet-style socialism, influential for many middle-class intellectuals in 1970s Iran. This visually charged clash of political and cultural positions serves as a lens for thinking about social relations and the role of women in public life. Bashi organizes Nylon Road dialogically as a site for airing visual and voiced evidence about conflicting representations of what it meant to live in, leave, and return to, Iran over a quarter century. Nylon Road’s story of coming of age in revolution-era Iran presents Bashi as a daughter who, unlike Marjane Satrapi, participated in the new regime’s program for decades and critiqued those escaping into exile. When she finally does so, in her thirties, she is an uncomfortable migrant in Zürich, where her multiple past selves, drawn at different ages, confront her with versions of her childhood and adolescent experience that the present-time narrating I recalls quite differently in both visual and verbal terms. The differing political positions traced in these encounters with her multiple I’s, distinct in her representations, form a complex set of perspectives for both reflecting on and critiquing the Islamic Revolution within feminist, global, and postcolonial contexts.