In The World is Moving Around Me, Dany Lafarriere often makes reference to Port-au-Prince as an artistic capital of the world. He refers to how when everything else falls apart, culture remains. Throughout the book Haitian art is placed within the context of a history of hardships, and in a sense growing out of this history. In the chapter “A City of Art,” he argues for turning “Port-au-Prince into a city of art” within the process of rebuilding (122). Here he sees the an opportunity not to re-write history, but to change the landscape to visually represent what he – as part (or at least he used to be) of the Port-au-Prince artistic circle – sees as such a vital part of Haitian culture. He says “Despite our troubles, our culture is joyful; we need to show it off” (123). The way I see it here, Haitian art is not only about resilience, but also pride in a world that often projects a very one-sided perspective of the country (something he attempts to dispel throughout the text). Frankétienne represents this attempt “to turn this disaster into a work of art” (113), the symbol of the resilient Haiti that continues to grow and does not let itself be shaped by the disaster, but rather use the disaster to shape his own vision. This is cultural creation as agency.

This made me think of the great Haitian surrealist painter Frantz Zepherin, who has made beautiful paintings of Haiti after the earthquake. Here is a good article on his art and a US exhibit in 2010 called “Art and Resilience.” You can find all the paintings from that exhibit online here. One of his paintings was featured on the cover over the New Yorker in 2010, which greatly differs from the Demers’ photograph we saw in TIME. In an article for the Smithsonian, he describes the exigence to paint he felt right after the earthquake hit: “That night, I decided I had to paint…So I took my candle and went to my studio on the beach. I saw a lot of death on the way. I stayed up drinking beer and painting all night. I wanted to paint something for the next generation, so they can know just what I had seen.” The entire article is really worth reading because I think it does a good job at avoiding the disaster clichés of a post-Earthquake journalism by focusing specifically on a couple of painters, their personal stories in their own words, and how they are dealing with the disaster in their own terms. We might want to think of how a more narrow lens (perhaps “more specific” is a better way of explaining it) relates to Lafarriere’s balance of personal narratives within a public event. 

Earthquake Timer

 Humanitarians and Soldiers

Ground Zero

Interpellation of the Great Spirits for the Saviour of the Country

New Yorker Cover

“The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn’t be any writing: the specific weight an image or phrase needs to get across to the reader can only come from things remembered – not from yesterday but from a long time ago.” W.G Sebald, interview in The Guardian December 20^th, 2001.

I was very interested in Saul Friedlander’s concepts as described in Young’s article “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past,” especially the concept of collective and deep memory, deep memory being defined as “that which remains essentially inarticulable and unrepresentable, that which continues to exist as unresolved trauma just beyond the reach of meaning” (Young, 667). In order to adequately express an event that combines collective and deep memory Young argues that Friedlander’s hope is for a “uncanny history” that “makes event coherent, even as it gestures toward the incoherence at the heart of the victim’s memory” (668).

Reading Maus – this unconventional Holocaust narrative – made me think of other unconventional tellings of the events surrounding the Holocaust. The one that comes most vividly to mind for me is German author W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, a unique, meditative, and deeply moving (one of the more flooring books I have ever read) work that is less about a historical narrative of the Holocaust as an event, and more about the act of remembrance and the act of retelling. The story follows an unnamed narrator – a historian – who recounts his meetings with a man named Austerlitz, who tells the narrator the story of him discovering the story of his Jewish origins, and of his family; which includes him being sent as a young child by his parents to Wales before the war (you can look into the history of the Kindertransport here which sent over 10,000 children to the UK), and the discovery of his family’s death in concentration camps. Laud’s concept of witnessing is everywhere in this book. We hear of Austerlitz’s obsessive research into his family origins, and interviews with people his parents might have known, including his own nanny, all told by the unnamed narrator (who also speaks of his own act of transcribing what he has heard from Austerlitz). Here we are witness to the witness to the witness. At every step of re-discovering his history, Austerlitz is overwhelmed with deep memories that resurface, including remembering long-lost Czech phrases and visiulazing images of his mother’s face. It is interesting to think of deep memory this way, of something that was hidden so deep in trauma (the trauma not of the camp survivor but of complete displacement) that it has been completely forgotten it. For Austerlitz the act of witnessing (and retelling them to our narrator) the stories of his own life, and that of his relatives, allows him to discover himself on a profoundly personal psychological level.

Sebald also uses similar techniques than Spiegelman, specifically regarding the visualizing of “received history” (669). Sebald incorporates pictures in all his novels; in Austerlitz the narrator uses historical pictures and drawings to illustrate Austerlitz’s research, which highlights the “narrative hybridity” of the text (ibid).

Another way Sebald deals with trauma and deep memory, and what I personally find the most fascinating about his work, is his oblique way of talking about the Holocaust. Mark O’Connell provides excellent examples of this technique in this article. Sebald himself often spoke of his interest in using analogy to describe what he called un-describable events like the Holocaust, and what he terms “the traces of destruction [that reach] far back into the past” (I see similarities to Laub’s theory of trauma here). Throughout the book Austerlitz tells our narrator of episodes in his life that are profound analogies for the Holocaust – but which he is not even aware of himself since we as readers are the only one’s with the whole picture. This makes me wonder if this oblique analogical technique is an effective way of witnessing and dealing with deep memory.

I was really struck by the discussions of media portrayals of missing and murdered women in the Jiwany and Young article. They highlight many of the ways the media fails to represent these women as diverse, three-dimensional members of society. The authors refer to the media’s focus on key frames in describing these women (aboriginal, sex worker, drug addicted), reducing complex individuals – with complex histories and motivations for their actions – to specific terms that pigeonhole. But more nefarious still, these reductions are often complicit with ignoring and reproducing the deep-seated structural and social causes that often enable these kinds of crimes by reverted to moralizing and “othering.” As they say: “racialized status, such as Aboriginality, interlocks with prostitution to position these women in the lower echelon of the moral order” (Jiwany and Young, 902).

This made me think of the social media movement #iftheygunnedmedown, which started as a reaction to the media portrayal of Michael Brown after he was murdered by Ferguson police. It was a response to the US media’s overwhelming use of a picture of Brown in a tank top flashing a peace sign, which allowed mainstream and conservative media to portray him as a “thug” “bad seed” and generally a kid with a violent temperament. What this failed to address was the fact that he had graduated high school and expecting to start college that year. Where were those pictures? This is exactly like what the portrayal of Trayvon Martin was. The pictures circulated were always the same two: the famous picture of him with his hoodie, and one where he is giving the finger to a webcam. Combining innocuous photos with a constant dialogue of him being a “bully,” or having tattoos, or having shoplifted, and the discourse develops an undercurrent of Trayvon in some way “asking for it.” If you want a good example of this racist discussion (and lose a bit more of your faith in humanity) you can read an article here called “Trayvon Martin was apparently a 17 year old undisciplined punk thug, drug dealing, thief and wannabe gangsta.” Like the Jiwany and Young quote cited above, these uneven portrayals paint these racialized victims as part of “the lower echelon of the moral order” (902), thereby justifying the actions done against them as being partly their fault.

I just want to conclude with a link to an interview with director Ryan Coogler (the interview starts at 2:35), talking about his film Fruitvale Station (which is on Netflix if anyone is interested it is a fantastic film), which was based on the police murder of Oscar Grant, a 22-year old black man who was handcuffed and shot on New Year’s Eve at a subway station in Oakland. The film follows Oscar’s last day, his relationships to his family, his struggles, his hopes. Coogler says he wanted to offer a fuller portrayal of this individual, to move away from the sensationalization of media portrayals. He says in the interview: “His character was pushed and pulled in all different directions. Some people wanted to make him a saint, someone that never did anything wrong. Others demonized him and highlighted all the mistakes he had made, as if that was justification of what happened to him. That he was a thug, a felon, not a human being.” Both portrayals, in their different ways, are reductive and problematic.

Works Cited:

Jiwani, Yasmin & Mary Lynn Young. “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31 (2006): 895-217.

One of the things that interested me the most about Miller’s reading and the discussion in class was the idea of rhetorical situations and exigence. If genres respond and construct a rhetorical situation, than what does it say about a historical/social moment when a specific text or genre becomes wildly popular, and what were the conditions that gave rise to it in the first place? The quote I found in Miller that summed it up best for me was when she states: “studying the typical uses of rhetoric, and the forms that it takes in those uses, tells us less about the art of individual rhetors or the excellence of particular texts than it does about the character of a culture or a historical period” (Miller, 158).

I like examples. I couldn’t help but think of the controversial anthropologist-turned cult leader Carlos Castaneda and his curious series of books recounting his apprenticeship with a Yaqui shaman during the 1960’s and 70’s. The books are written as a first person account of his doctoral thesis in anthropology at UCLA. They discuss shamanic practices, philosophy and cosmology, and the uses of psychotropic plants. Castaneda got his PhD, the books were universally praised, sold millions, and in many ways gave rise to the popular “New Age” genre in North America. They are also likely completely fake (here’s a good article discussing on Castaneda and his twisted cult of personality)

What is so fascinating about the books (I have only read the first 4) is how they blur the lines between genres; in this case academic anthropological study and autobiographical diary. Castaneda the academic recounts how he meets the subject of his study and struggles to record his beliefs. The first couple of books Castaneda speaks to us as a university student constantly doubting the worth and validity of his work. The first text even includes a structured analysis at the end of the first book, similar to what one would see in academic work. As the books progress we follow him as he immerses in the teachings, it becomes more and more difficult to differentiate between the so-called “true teachings” of the original anthropological subject of study, and Castaneda’s own beliefs. It was not until about ten years after the first book was published in 1968 that people started to question the validity of the accounts, citing confusing timelines in his narrative and other inconsistencies.

What was the rhetorical situation that led to such wide acclaim and seemingly lack of critical doubt, even in the publishing and academic world? For one thing the works fed into the 1960s counterculture’s exoticized fascination with Indigenous cultures, alternative spiritual discovery, and drug experimentation. In a sense the books were exactly what people wanted to hear. As for authorial motivation in the context of “interested texts,” I’d argue Castaneda saw an opportunity to become a literary sensation through the use of what was seen as a legitimate genre – in this case the autobiographical anthropological log – and jumped on it. Sociologist Richard De Mille unpacks the myth of Castaneda in rhetorical and cultural context in his excellent book Castaneda’s Journey: The Power and the Allegory. If these texts “work as a source of meaning” then they illuminate a desire by a certain part of society (I would venture to say mainly upper-middle-class white folks) who had become disenchanted with mainstream North American society and were searching for meaning through new and alternative belief structures. Its success lay in rhetoric “connecting the private with the public” (Miller, 163) in the sense of a deeply personal almost indescribable – and in the end fictional – spiritual journey within a larger public discourse. Increased fact-checking abilities through the Internet and our general suspicion of so-called “New Age” texts would definitely change our reception regarding a work like this were it published today.. I wonder what kind of texts would have the same kind of effect today as Castaneda’s did in the 60s.