Many previous blogs by my classmates have discussed truth, versions of the truth and “authenticity” so I figured it was my turn to do so.

After having watched Stories We Tell, the documentary by Sarah Polley about her family’s story, I began to question which scenes were real historical footage as opposed to re-enactments within the film. The narrative is told through several characters where it mixes old with faux-old footage and towards the end, the audience is somewhat enlightened as to which is historical versus re-enacted. To this effect, the film undermines the question of “authenticity” to the point where the mimicked past blurs into the “real” past.

This question of authenticity reminded me of art forgeries and their worth. While being a curious crime, forging great works of art has sometimes lead to famous cases like Michelangelo’s Cupid or the Etruscan terracotta warriors. If art, including biographies and autobiographies within literature, are considered based on their aesthetic composure alone, then forgery in the sense of “inauthenticity,” should not be considered blasphemous. Similarly, “faked” memory or narrative that fools audiences should be celebrated and revered in its ability to mimic reality – just as the Viennese Museum for Art Fakes posits.

With regards to artfully “faking” or embellishing the truth, I looked at how Art Spiegelman draws/writes his father’s accent in the graphic novel Maus for my term paper. When reading Vladek’s Eastern European voice in Spiegelman’s graphic memoir, the accent stood out to me. After doing some research, I found that a scholar that compared the writing of Vladek’s way of speaking to the actual tape recordings of him that Art Spiegelman used to compose Maus. It appears as though Spiegelman had deliberately curated the speech bubbles of Vladek to sound specifically more Eastern European in terms of syntax but not phonetically. Here, I concluded that this fragmentation of Vladek’s voice is reflective of the trauma of the Holocaust, the incompetence of language (English) to recount the Holocaust as well as a way in which the author adds to the “authenticity” of the voice. Although not depicted exactly as Vladek sounded, Spiegelman mimics the Eastern European accent, and adds his own intonations.

Over the past week, the class has explored the complicated nature of representation and specifically, the relationship between James Young’s “received history” in comparison with inherited memory. The use of comics, genre and the inherent shortcomings of re-presentation came up in many of the blogs with regards to Art Spiegelman’s Maus I & II.

James blog returns to questions around the exigencies of life narrative and points out how the mundane and banal life stories are often deemed insufficient to be incorporated into the literary canon. Similar to how Fred Wah negotiates the categorization of Diamond Grill from life narrative into “biotext,” Spiegelman’s MetaMaus rejects comics as a genre and argues that it is a mere medium instead. James suggests that both these texts reject genre not as a way of going against the grain but as an attention-seeking marketing ploy.

While an unconventional way of telling a Holocaust narrative, comics illustrate (quite literally) the show-and-tell nature of Art’s Maus. Vivian’s blog post explores comics as a mode of mediation whereby the author “interprets his interviews with his father and makes the decision to represent characters as animals.” Through this mediation, Art attempts to reach a form of authenticity by weaving real photographs into his text in order to fix the shortcomings of re-presentation. The function of these photographs within the “received history” is “a testament to the lives of those who are no longer alive.” Stephen similarly points to this feature and compares it with Ari Folman’s cartoon Waltz with Bashir about the Sabra & Shatila massacre, which in its final scene, cuts to “real documentary footage of women wailing at the site of the massacre, decrying the horror that has just been committed.” Stephen explains how Spiegelman’s use of animals in combination of real photographs is perhaps “a way of expressing his own incapacity to represent the events of the Holocaust.”

However, it is this very combination and integration of words and art that Leona So argues to be a better depiction of Vladek’s Holocaust story. Unlike other Holocaust texts, the comics allowed So to “visualize and connect with the story” better. Here, Leona was comparing Maus with Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, whereas Raffaella brought the comic in conversation with the film adaptation of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. The disturbing depictions within Maus of the concentration camps, the struggles of daily life and cruelty experienced by Vladek “enhances his humility as a survivor.” On the other hand, the film lacks the broader depictions of Anne’s life during the Holocaust and thus fails to present us an effective understanding of the individual’s life narrative.

It is perhaps the flexibility and inclusivity of comics which Matias points out as a “vehicle for the perceptual reorientation of certain historical events and periods.” Here, he recounts how Mafalda, a comic strip in Argentina between 1964 and 1973, came to re-present the Argentinean experience during those years. Kendall’s post similarly advocates how comics act as a subversive text and an arena for social commentary or critique. In turn, comics transcend the sacredness and sensitivity of Auschwitz and portray Vladek as a flawed and real person instead of the sentimentalized and tragic Holocaust victim.

With these thoughts in mind, I would add that the work of Art Spiegelman, especially Maus II, is extremely self-reflexive in its writing and invites the readers to consider the medium/genre of comics. The character Artie announces, “I feel so inadequate trying to reconstruct a reality that was worse than my darkest dreams” (II, 16). Adding unto the Holocaust narrative, Art’s tapestry of real photographs, visuals and text presents the readers with this dilemma: how do we go about witnessing witnessing, what are the appropriate methods for re-presentation, how does “received history” affect the narrative and how comics function within literature.

Works Cited:

Spiegelman, Art. Maus I: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973. Print.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Print.

Young, James E. “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of History.”  Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, Issue No. 3 (Spring, 1998): 679. Web. Oct. 26, 2014.

“She named names” is a memorable line from the Seinfeld episode “The Race” where Elaine gets her boyfriend blacklisted by a Chinese delivery restaurant; a comedic scene that reinterprets the often damaging and volatile political act of disclosure. The naming of individuals whether they are spies or criminals is a tactic used by governments to create a curated frame of reference for the public perception – the United States government, for example, recently named five Chinese army officers that it charged with cyber espionage. However, there has been a strong focus on naming the Other and providing a counter frame for conventional public discourse whether it be serial killers, war or epidemics.

As Ben L. Martin notes, “names can be more than tags; they can convey powerful imagery.” For example, Maggie De Vries’ book Missing Sarah as well as Wally Oppal’s Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry both provide a counter-narrative to the Robert Pickton story and intentionally highlight the names of the victims. Similarly, there have been resolute efforts to name those killed in Gaza during the 2014 Gaza-Israel conflict by featuring a large banner hung on the famous Pigeon Rock in Beirut, Lebanon.

At the same time, the act of naming can reveal much of our biases. A recent post by Mic has pointed out how the global media is unjustly reporting the Ebola outbreak: infected individuals outside of Africa are often named in news articles and headlines while victims in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia are reduced to numbers. A clear instance of this is the coverage of a case where an infected Spanish woman is named in the headlines whereas African patients remain a statistic. This perpetuates racialized discourse and reinforces the Euro-American-centric narrative. The critical nature with which naming has taken ground in recent years is a positive step towards providing a counter narrative to unsettle the complacency of conventional discourse.

I would like to preface this blog post with two notes: the fact that my legal name is Al-Hassan Al-Shaibani and that I am of a mixed background (Iraqi-Czech). 

Leading up to 2003, a decade-long dance of political and economical sanctions imposed on Iraq included a ban on all international flights. The resulting passageway between Iraq and the remaining world was a long stretch of barren highway stitched onto the northeastern corner of the Hejaz desert towards Jordan. Unlike many geopolitical borders whose map lines follow rivers, mountain ranges or other physical features, the Sykes-Picot tessellation of the Middle East in the early 20^th century carved unnaturally straight lines to define nationhood (it is often joked that they used a ruler to divide up a map of the Middle East after World War I). In addition to a political and geographical margin, the Iraqi-Jordanian border crossing has come to inhabit a cultural and identity hyphen of those born in Iraq under the sanctions.

Baptized the “Karamah” border crossing in Jordan, the Iraqi name for the arid corridor leading in and out of the country is “Trebil.” This word is an anglicized version of the Arabic name, which ironically is a bastardization of the English word “Trouble.” Back in the early 20th century, the colonial British presence in Iraq gave that location the nickname “Trouble” to signify the harrowing paths crossed by desert nomads and the difficulty of travelling to the emirate trans-Jordania. “Trouble” was Arabicized to Trebil and then re-translated to English as “Trebil.” Decades later, the history of the name came to announce the stringent travel limitations imposed on Iraqis and soon became part of the cultural memory.

In Diamond Grill, Fred Wah writes, “Maps don’t have beginnings, just edges.” I find this statement inapplicable to Trebil; here, the man-made borders and names do have a beginning which play a role in shaping, re-shaping and defining a populace. Soon enough, Trebil was a familiar inhabitant of Iraqi daily talk. The difficulty of successfully or easily passing through that border crossing is a tale too common amongst those living in Iraq during the sanctions of the 90s and early 2000s.

It appears that you cannot locate or describe Trebil without referring to an in betweenness or a hyphen. It is so entrenched in the identity of this location that it seems to embody the hyphen. Trebil was, and to some extent still is, a keystone of Iraqi identity and a bridge to everything outside.

Many of us are familiar with the concept of “frape” – the portmanteau used to describe the act of altering someone’s information or posting messages in a person’s profile on a social media platform without their consent. While this gag is often juvenile and inappropriate, it has led to some serious and damaging consequences – insofar as being declared a crime in Ireland!

Charly Irons, a student teacher at Sheffield Hallam University, has written a paper on this concept and calls it “(anti)social networking” where she delves into the anthropological exigence of “fraping”. However, what is interesting here is the underlying, and sometimes unconsidered, anthropomorphism of Facebook. Using such a charged word as “rape” and affiliating it with Facebook is problematic in many ways but also works to increase the treatment of this corporation as a person. Although it is another individual that  conducts the “frape”, it is enacted through Facebook and therefore, this nonhuman entity is attributed as performing this inhumane act.

The use of the word “frape” seeps beyond the colloquial usage and points to our perception of Facebook. The recent and heated issue of “corporate personhood” in the United States also applies to the mega social networking platform. Here, the idea that a corporation is legally viewed as an individual beckons both criticisms and praise; the business can be sued and prosecuted as an individual but can also claim freedom of speech to lobby and advertise. There have been several blogs, articles, papers and videos already made around this issue. Since corporations already enjoy an immense amount of power, their recognition as persons has led to a clever reinterpretation of the American flag here:

However, the question remains, what is the responsibility of Facebook to its users under this personification? Eli Pariser points to the masturbatory social media algorithms that encapsulate us into a heightened sense of self-importance by tailoring our newsfeeds to our viewpoints and predicted interests. Keeping this in mind, does Facebook have an obligation to be our quasi-therapist? Should Facebook detect negative moods or markers of depression in our posts to notify someone or change our newsfeed to a more positive one? The New York Times wrote about the difficulty of extracting mental health warning signs from melodramatic teenage posts but also noted how Facebook began to work with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in 2007. In this case, is Facebook responsible and liable for reporting disturbing posts?

As we post more photos, status updates, timeline events and our thoughts on Facebook, it is interesting to see our expressions co-produced with this corporation that is increasingly being viewed and treated as a person. The delineation between our rights and those of Facebook is continually being challenged and therefore, a new ethos ought to be established.

Al Shaibani