Amir is plain-spoken when he talks about the place called Behesht-e Zahra – the Paradise of Zahra – but a quiet awe sets in quickly.
“It’s a massive cemetery on the outskirts of Tehran, on the way to the city of Qum,” he says. “It’s just been growing and growing and growing at an extraordinary rate.”
The almost impossible spectrum of Iranians who rest there tell the country’s story. Ayatollah Khomeini lies in the Paradise of Zahra, along with victims of the Iran-Iraq war, martyrs of the 1979 revolution, clerics, dissidents, soldiers and laymen. After a beautiful young protester named Neda Agha-Soltan was killed in 2009 – a death that would be seen by hundreds of millions – she, too, was interred there.
So when two U.S.-based expatriates, Amir and Khalil (who remain anonymous to protect their families in Iran), launched a graphic novel in an ambitious attempt to dramatize the Iranian protest, Zahra’s Paradise didn’t just give the project a name, but an emotional core.
“So many Iranians lie buried there,” Amir says. “So much youth, so much life that’s been wasted there.”
Set at the height of last year’s bloody “Green revolution,” Zahra’s Paradise tells the story of a young Tehrani blogger and his mother (also named Zahra), who are searching for his vanished brother, Mehdi. The story is drawn in spare, flowing lines, stepping readers through a bleak vision of Tehran after the protests, emptied of life and littered with the wounded.
But what sets Zahra’s Paradise apart is that, unusually for a printed graphic novel, it is first being serialized online, one page at a time (each page containing about four panels), and in no fewer than six concurrent languages. When the story reaches its projected run of 160 pages (though it could expand further), in 2011, it will be released as a book.
Produced through New York-based First Second Books, an imprint of Macmillan, Zahra’s Paradise takes a tradition of politically oriented graphic novels – a tradition with roots in works such as Palestine, Joe Sacco’s 1992 retrospective about his experiences in the West Bank, and Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust parable Maus – and applies it to a situation that’s still very much unfolding.
A page from Zahra's Paradise
“The Iranian story is very interesting, because it’s not following a pattern we know from before,” says Mark Siegel, the book’s editor and the editorial director of First Second. “I hope, in a way, that Zahra’s Paradise is part of this unique pattern, that it’s a player here instead of commenting from the sidelines.”
Siegel says he’s still scrambling in the aftermath of the strip’s launch: The logistics of organizing simultaneous translations of a thrice-weekly strip into Persian, Arabic, Dutch, French, Spanish and Italian were formidable. Translating a comic strip on the fly can bring some unexpected headaches. Some languages, like Arabic, read from right to left; this means that the art needs to be flipped too. But since some visual elements can’t simply be reversed – writing in the background, for instance – certain drawings need to be redone too.
“Comics take a long time to draw,” says Peter Birkemoe, owner of The Beguiling, one of Canada’s top comic-book retailers. Birkemoe notes that while topical, quickly produced comics are commonplace and graphic novels have a long political tradition, the two are seldom combined – especially as part of a book deal.
“Political cartoons can be very topical,” he says. “But a graphic narrative takes a lot longer to produce.”
Whatever it is that’s separating Iranians, there’s no question that they’re dying together — Amir
