The term is coming to an end, and I feel… relieved. Challenged. Nervous. Excited. Like my head is going to explode with the amount of information that professors somehow managed to pack in.

Seriously though, I’m pretty sure I’ve learned more this term at UBC than I did during my last two years of high school combined. That’s all well and good, but now I find myself with a massive load of information inside my head, and therein lies the problem. The information is inside my head. Eventually, like most other information, it will start to leak out after final examinations.

This time though, I’m not sure if I want it to.

Personally, the best way to retain information is for me to apply it in my life. In all of our ASTU papers, we have been asked to identify the “so what” of our topics. Why is what we’re writing about important? How does it matter to knowledge? I want to draw out the “so what” in some of the topics we have been covering in ASTU this term.

In September, we talked about the TRC happening here in Canada with the Aboriginal people. Witnessing is important, but I don’t think I meet people everyday who have gone through trauma and are telling the world their stories. However, if there is one thing I learned while observing the art pieces in the Belkin Gallery, it is that there are countless numbers of people who did not/could not witness. Over and over, I saw descriptions by the artists dedicated their art pieces to the people who had repressed terrible memories so far down that silence had become their only option. How many people around me are keeping silent about traumatic personal events? I want to create and to be a safe environment in which they can witness and remember their past.

In October, my group and I did a presentation on PostSecret. The genre of confession has been around for a long time, most likely having started in the church. Frank Warren’s PostSecret has been extremely successful, with almost 650 million visitors to date! The appeal of PostSecret supposedly lies in the anonymity… So how am I supposed to create anonymity with the people that I see and talk to everyday? Well, I think it goes beyond just anonymity. One of the PostSecrets that my group chose to analyze in preparation for our presentation went like this: “Why is it so easy to share our most private feelings with complete strangers and so hard to tell those we love the most?” The answer to this is that you’ve got something to lose with people you love. This is where I can make a difference. If I can build relationships to the point where others know that there is no judgment or fear of losing me, anonymity doesn’t matter anymore.

I know that class is generally supposed to be within academia, but I think that moral “so whats” are just as important, if not more. These “so whats” are the ones I’m going to be taking with me for many years to come, even if my academic knowledge fades.

Term one, it’s been a real pleasure. Term two, here we go.

I’m sure that a lot of us have heard this timeless philosophical question before.

“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it still make a sound?“

While largely debated, the most frequent interpretation of this question is summed up by a commenter on this question’s post on the Guardian: “you could say that the definition of a sound is its detection, rather than the physical phenomenon.” It might be a far stretch, but this quote is pretty applicable to life narratives and their effects. Do life narratives matter if no one is around to hear them?

In class, we have been talking a lot about the concept of witnessing, and how a lot of autobiography, especially traumatic, authors’ write to share their stories and spark discussion in areas such as human rights, like Schaffer and Smith talk about in their article Conjunctions: Life Narratives in the Field of Human Rights. Marjane Satrapi’s purpose in writing her graphic narrative Persepolis as stated in her introduction was to tell people the truth about Iran by showing that the extremists were not the only Iranians in the world. In Achak Deng’s and Dave Egger’s What is the What, Achak clearly addresses an audience in his introduction, by saying, “As you read this book…”.

What if there was no “you”? What if there was no audience? What if life narratives like Satrapi’s and Deng’s just collected dust on a shelf, untouched by human hands forever? Do they matter? Do telling stories matter if there is no one to hear them? Well, in relation to purposes like education or storytelling, life narratives do not matter if there is no audience. If no one is aware of the existence of such life narratives, then the life narratives have not impacted anyone’s lives.

HOWEVER, there may be hope yet. Audiences and their responses may seem like everything in determining the success or value of a life narrative, but I want to point out that something happens when an author writes their life story. Regardless of who may or may not be watching these authors write, and whether or not people are lining up for the release of their stories, it is so crucial to acknowledge that the author wrote the story! In terms of trauma and witnessing, it takes a great deal of courage to use permanent ink and express that yes, my father did abuse me, or yes, I lost my best friend because the police did not like the way she dressed.

In a way, writing your life narrative is like a confession, and confession, I think, is best captured in Frank Warren’s PostSecret site. When people send in their confessions on postcards, they are writing to everyone and to no one. Judging from the massive success of PostSecret, we can assume that there is a purpose fulfilled in just writing. Whether it’s writing to yourself or writing to the air, PostSecret shows that an audience is not needed for life narratives to matter. The fact that authors write life narratives at all makes a difference in the lives of the authors themselves.

After all, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, the grass around it still gets squished.

Facebook is a wonderful, terrible thing.

Yes, I do realize that this post is a bit late in regards to when we were supposed to have watched Eli Pariser’s TED talk Beware Online “Filter Bubbles”. However, Facebook is such a phenomenon, and I realize how big of a role it plays in my life. It’s quite concerning, really. (Do we realize how much of our lives we waste just scrolling down a News Feed?)

Pariser’s TED talk shines a harsh, unforgiving light on Facebook’s most intimate algorithms, exposing its secret of how it shows you just what you want to see. He goes on to explain how he is a liberal-progressive, but he has both liberal and conservative friends on Facebook. One day, he realized that none of his conservative friends’ posts were appearing on his News Feed, and set out to figure out what was going on.

It turns out that a lot of internet sites, such as Yahoo, Google, and Netflix, start showing you only what they think you want to see or things that relate to you, based on things like where you’re sitting, what device you’re using, and your history of sites visited.

If we only think about our time on the Internet with the purpose of pleasure or relaxation, then this algorithm is brilliant. We only see what we want to see (flying cats or the new Hunger Games trailer) and not necessarily what we need to see (the Arab Spring or Malala Yousafzai’s ordeal).

Let’s be real here. As human beings, we like to be right. We don’t like people disagreeing with us. So when we go on Facebook and Google and all those other search engines, we click on links and people’s profiles that interest us because they agree with us. This is significant because of the how Facebook’s News Feed algorithm really works. This blog post gives us the breakdown of how posts get ranked in the News Feed. One of the three parts of the algorithm is affinity, which is how much we interact with the people who post. So the amount we click on links and people’s profiles that interest us because they agree with us has a lot to do with what our News Feed is comprised of, and that’s why we love Facebook so much.

Why does this matter? Our CAP stream is Global Citizens, but that doesn’t mean for a second that we’re global citizens and nobody else is. As the world gets smaller through increasing interconnectedness on the web, our status as global citizens gets more important. We need to be informed about what’s going on with typhoon relief aid in the Philippines or the Iran nuclear program negotiations. Where do we find out about these events? And where are we spending increasing amounts of our time? The answer to both of these questions is the Internet.

Here’s the challenge that I’ve been giving myself lately: spend time on the Internet intentionally. When I log onto Facebook, I want to scroll through my News Feed not just for entertainment, but with a purpose of absorbing information and views that I don’t necessarily agree with. This is part of my role as a global citizen. Eli Pariser was right when he said that it’s not about what we want to see, it’s about what we need to see.

If the world were to be taken over one day, it wouldn’t be by some evil mastermind sitting in his lair somewhere in the mountains. It also wouldn’t be by a species of aliens shooting lasers from outer space. No, if the world were to be taken over, it would be by none other than Hollywood.

In fact, it can be argued that Hollywood is already well on its way to world domination.

How so? Well, let’s start by defining Hollywood as the American film industry. It started off as films made by Western producers for a Western audience, and to be honest, it still is. The world domination part comes in because Hollywood has figured out the “perfect” storyline that appeals to human emotion, and other countries have adapted the formula, or in many cases, invited Hollywood into their homes and cinemas. In other instances, we see Hollywood stretching out its claws to try and buy the rights to stories they want to tell their way. For example, Hillary Chute, in her article The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis“, notes that “Hollywood money came calling” (105) for the right to adapt Satrapi’s story for the cinema.  

In instances where Hollywood is successful in obtaining the rights to tell someone else’s story, we see the tremendous “Westernized” effects. In class, we watched the film God Grew Tired of Us, an inspirational documentary about the lives of some of the Lost Boys of Sudan and their journeys through Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, and then the United States. Keep in mind that this film is meant to relay the stories of the Lost Boys; in some senses, its intention as a film was autobiography/biography.

God Grew Tired of Us was definitely made for a Western audience by Western producers and directors. In fact, several big Hollywood names, such as Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman, were involved in the making of this film. Hollywood’s special formula of plotline is the basic exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. The Lost Boys’ difficult journey through several different countries did not necessarily follow the Hollywood storyline, but the film was structured to it, which was a little worrisome.

Honestly, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of Daniel, John, and Panther’s stories were cut out or rearranged in the movie’s editing stages. God Grew Tired of Us was clearly directed at Western audiences, especially when Panther looked at the camera and said, “I hope you can come and see our mother homeland [Sudan].” The film also spent much time on the culture shock that the Lost Boys experienced, from discovering refrigerators to going grocery shopping for the first time. While I understand that the producers wanted the Western audience to know how “sheltered” the Lost Boys were, I can’t help but think that they spent an unnecessarily large amount of screen time on the boys’ struggle with American culture. Yes, we see that they do not belong. I have been asking myself if this is a subtle way to flaunt self-crowned American cultural superiority.

The film went on to portray America as the savior, as the promised land at the end of the boys’ journeys, the ideal end destination of all their relatives still in Kakuma and Sudan. While the boys’ lives weren’t perfect in America, I don’t think God Grew Tired of Us communicated anything about how America could also be the oppressor. Though it was extremely subtle, the film presented the Lost Boys’ struggle in America as their own fault, because they were not used to the new American culture. It failed to mention the fact that American cultural superiority expects refugees and immigrants to adapt to the American way.

It’s true! Hollywood is the perfect medium for this concept of Westernization. By subtly spreading sugar-coated messages that promote American superiority, Hollywood is quickly and scarily successfully taking over the world. I think very soon we’ll reach the point where globalization won’t be globalization; it will be Westernization.

There is a very big problem when libraries, publishers, or academics classify autobiography as nonfiction.

The fact of the matter is, no autobiography is completely nonfiction. As Janina Bauman wrote in her article Memory and Imagination: Truth in Autobiography, “No autobiography can be written without such a touch of fiction” (33). Psychologically speaking, no human being remembers his/her whole life as a gapless movie-like memory. We have memories that capture certain events, bits and pieces of our lives. Bauman explains her statement by arguing that we must fill the gaps between our fragmented memories with imagination, and that is why there is always an aspect of fiction in autobiography.

Valentino Achak Deng explains his action of classifying his autobiography What is the What as a novel in a different way. Deng makes a disclaimer in the preface, saying, “I was very young when some of the events in the book took place, and as a result, we simply had to pronounce What is the What a novel.” His consideration for accuracy issues due to time corroding memories is very refreshing. Deng also alludes to authority, another “authenticity” issue that we talked about during class today. He says, “I told Dave what I knew and what I could remember, and from that material he created this work of art.” This raises the question of, “Who’s really telling this story?”

This is revolutionary for genres and the classification of literature, dramatic to say the least. Under many online library sites, especially for children’s books, autobiographies and biographies fall straight under the larger heading of nonfiction.

So what? Is this a problem? I don’t think so. Yes, it is important to note that autobiographies are not nonfiction, but that fictional aspect is also what makes autobiographies what they are. Schaffer and Smith, in their article Conjunctions: Life Narratives in the Field of Human Rights, emphasize the great impact of personal storytelling. Storytelling requires the imagination that fills gaps in a series of fragmented memories. Why is this important? Well, the purpose of many autobiographies, including Deng’s What is the What  and Satrapi’s Persepolis is to direct global attention to issues and struggles happening in countries like Sudan and Iran, respectively. If authors’ purposes are to create and raise awareness for these issues, then it would be in their best interest for the autobiographies to be engaging and “nice” to read. Without the aspect of imagination, authors’ stories would be a choppy, turbulent stream of incomplete memories, and it would be a hardship for readers to digest and enjoy. Imagination, the fictional aspect of memories, makes autobiographies easier to consume, and therefore, more effective in raising awareness and sparking action for events of trauma and suffering around the world.

So the problem is not that autobiographies are in large part fictional, but it is that autobiographies are classified as nonfiction. We must redefine these categories of fiction and nonfiction and what they encompass.