In Dany Laferrière’s The World is Moving around Me, his memoir of his experiences during the Haiti earthquake of 2010, Laferrière refers to his “black notebook” a number of times.  This is a small book, bound in black, which he always carries.  Laferrière states that it enables him to “write down everything that crosses… [his] field of vision or… [his] mind” (Laferrière 15).  As a writer, Laferrière has adopted the habit of carrying this notebook, perhaps as a means of circumventing the necessity of having to rely on memory alone.  His notebook enables him the ability to record immediate impressions and responses in any given situation.

Because of the modern connotations of the “little black book” as a record of past or potential amorous contacts I decided to do some research on the history of the term.  On the website World Wide Words, an entry on October 15 of 2005, in response to a question about “the little black book,” cite author Michael Quinion, British etymologist and writer provides the following information:

“There were several literal black books in English history, such as the Black Book of the Exchequer of about 1175, which recorded the royal revenues, and the Black Book of the Admiralty, a code of rules for the government of the navy, possibly from the fourteenth century. The most famous one recorded monastic abuses uncovered by official visitors and provided the evidence for the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s by Henry VIII. Generally, black book was used for any official book bound in black. It was also used for the Bible, commonly so bound.”

Laferrière’s black notebook could represent a combination of all of these references.  It is a record of Laferrière’s “truth”, truth which could be associated with the black-bound bible and the swearing in of a witness at a trail.   It could also be considered a record of abuses, like the monastic abuses above, that the earthquake inflicted on the Haitian people.  Laferrière is compelled to record the events as they unfold, a record of his first impressions and responses to the earthquake’s aftermath.   Laferrière  refers to the earthquake as “a new god… [that] already has a name in popular culture: “‘Goudougoudou,’ the sound the earth made when it trembled” (153).    In its personification, the earthquake has become responsible for the abuses and deaths that it has inflicted.  Here the black notebook becomes like the Exchequer record of royal revenues: Laferrière’s “black book” records the “tally” of losses.

Laferrière’s black book contains the record of his “official” report of his experiences in and after the Haitian earthquake.  His commitment to record the events as they unfold is his natural response in his writing practice, a self-imposed “rule” of writing.  In his book Laferrière states: “I understand now that a minute can hold the entire life of a city” it is clear that this rule has great merit in light of the recording the events of the Haitian earthquake that created his memoir The World is Moving around Me. (62).  Laferrière’s awareness of the importance or recording events as they unfold or impact him in the moment allow him to capture “minutes” that may have otherwise have been lost or forgotten.

Works Cited:

Laferrière, Dany. The World is Moving around Me. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013. Print.

“Reading” Art Spiegelman’s Maus

After spending time in class discussing Art Spiegelman auto/biographic series Maus I and Maus II, a new understanding of their complexity was uncovered. As students of literature we are trained to analyze text and find and interpret different levels of meaning within a written work.  This task becomes even more complex when reading the graphic novel format of Maus because it is also requires the reader to “read” and analyze the drawings as well. This interpretation of the combined text and corresponding images in Maus done in class made this necessity apparent.

In a journal article by Jeanne C. Ewert, Reading Visual Narrative: Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” she discusses this multi-level reading of the graphic novel. Spiegelman’s artistic license, the insertion of his own pictorial interpretation of events results in her observation that this:

“[R]aises larger issues of narrative control and authority, and prefigures one of the other principle themes of Maus: its status as memoir ― a pictorial record of Vladek’s experience” because, [w]hile Vladek’s own voice speaks every word, Spiegelman’s drawings tell the son’s version of his father’s story. The spoken word is immediate, the drawings, at one remove” (88).

For me it is the very complexity of having to read the words and pictures together that I find so fascinating.  Here the subjective account of Vladek’s life is depicted in the subjective way in which Spiegelman draws them.  It becomes a kind of double memory because although Spiegelman has taken note of or has recorded the events and experiences his father Vladek has shared with him, Spiegelman is working on memory (and/or artistic license) to depict the actual environment in which they took place.

In The book Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, they provide an appendix called “Fifty-two Genres of Life Narratives” (183).  Here they provide the different definitions of these life narratives, one of which is Memoir.  They include a quote by Nancy K Miller from the memoir she wrote, Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death.  Smith and Watson say that in writing her memoir Miller considers “the etymological root of the word” (198). The root is from “Middle French memoire … written account, description (from c1190 in Old French)” (OED online).  Miller points out that memoir is “the double act of recalling and recording… to call up from the heart [and what] resides in the province of the heart is also what is exhibited in the public space of the world” (198).  This is very evident in the “memoir” Maus where Art Spiegelman includes his ambivalence about writing his father’s accounts along with his troubled relationship with his father.  It also occurs as Spiegelman’s and his father’s accounts are “described” in Spiegelman’s veiled and sometimes subversive drawings of events.  Spiegelman’s craft as an “illustrator” of stories in the genre of “comics” allows him to use the strength of his “visual” voice to tell his father’s story while “revealing” his own.

Works Cited:

Ewert, Jeanne C. “Reading Visual Narrative: Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’ ”. Narrative. 8.1 (2000): 88. Print.

Watson, Julia, and Sidonie Smith. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

The Power to Speak

The Speaking to Memory: Images and Voices from St. Michael’s Residential School exhibition at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology, is a space itself which speaks to memory.  Placed on Musquem land, MOA exists within a territory that is constantly negotiating a position of power with the Canadian government under the Authority of the Indian Act established in 1867.  Filled with First Nation artifacts, MOA bears testimony to the incredible ingenuity, intelligence and resourcefulness of these people and their respect and connection to the land.  The struggles of the First Nation people to have a “place” and “voice” within the colonization of Canada is part of what Speaking to Memory is about.

Speaking to Memory provides an opportunity for viewer’s to read firsthand some of the sobering testimonies, written on simple white rectangular cards displayed along the walls given by previous students of St Michael’s Residential School.  These testimonies are reflective of the agenda of the Canadian Government that established the Residential Schools system and serves to make these testimonies even more poignant.

The Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs, D. Duncan Campbell Scott is quoted as saying the schools were established “to get rid of the Indian problem… [and to ensure they were] absorbed into the body politic”.  His desire “that the country ought not to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone” becomes manifested by the very acts committed against the Residential School students as recorded in their testimonies.  The government nor those who stood in positions of authority within the Residential School system offered protection. In one testimony, Peggy Shannon recalls an incident where her sister was beaten so badly by a supervisor “she looked dead… [and that the] supervisor’s knew what was happening and [about the] sexual abuse and nobody did anything.”

These stories render the apologies by the Canadian Government and various church organizations ineffectual; platitudes made more important by the formal banner-style of presentation and their placement together within an alcove of the space shared by the testimonies and photographs of St Michael’s and its students.  The language in these banners is mostly formal and the apologies have a hierarchal presentation where what they are apologizing for often doesn’t even occur until midway through the entire text.  This type of formality in style and language contrasts greatly with the simplicity of the format and language of the student’s testimonies, reiterating position of power.

This power struggle is even evident within the enlarged photograph taken by Beverly Brown display on the wall opposite the student testimonies. Here the casual poses and body language of the children in the school ground photos adjacent the rigid poses of the March to Sunday Service and Sunday Uniforms for Girls reflects a contrast between the mediated and unmediated lives of the Residential School children.  Without Beverly’s photos what kind of visual record would have been available for presentation and whose voice would it reflect, student, school authorities or government?

Even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s mandate to provide a format for Residential School student’s to have an opportunity to share their experiences because of “the emerging and compelling desire to put the events of the past behind us” while admirable begs the question: who has the “emerging and compelling desire”?  Is it the residential school students who do not want to have to continually re-remember incidents that are traumatic and disturbing? Or, is the Canadian Government who doesn’t want to live with the shame that potentially threatens their worldwide image as world “peacemakers”?  What type of effect would there have been if the students’ testimonies were enlarged so they dominated the space and the official government and church apologies were minimized and placed flat on a table outside the exhibit space?

(My sister Kathaleen’s plate. She is the fifth oldest in my family)

Mapping and memory presented by Fred Wah in Diamond Grill relates directly to one of my 3^rd year Painting classes here at UBC.  Our class visited the Richmond Art Gallery to view an exhibition of work by Canadian artist Landon Mackenzie.  She is a painter interested in how maps are created: how historical, political and personal influences affect their outcome.

Landon MacKenzie’s,                                                                                                                                                                             Vancouver as the Centre of the World                                                                                                                                          Commissioned by VANOC for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

http://www.landonmackenzie.com/projects/project4.html

 

Mackenzie relates map making to writing fiction.  In an article by Alan Morantz in Canadian Geographic he writes:“Mackenzie approaches her painting in a way similar to how her friend, Canadian novelist Jane Urquhart, approaches her writing. Urquhart uses pieces of documented history and extrapolates a fantasy. Though maps do not have the same linear progression as a novel, they are still storytelling vehicles, so Mackenzie set out to create a different sort of historical fiction.”

MacKenzie paints Vancouver at the center of the world in her map and thus distorts the placement of other continents and cities of the world.  She also overlaps many different maps to reveal how historical and political views operate the representation of the world.

http://www.landonmackenzie.com/reviews/shadowingmapmakers.htm

In the Diamond Grill, Fred Wah’s repetitive return to places and spaces reveals the Grill in a slow process like that of navigating along a route of a map.  And, like most maps, our journeys often retraces and crosses-over sites repeatedly.  Wah’s memory mapping of the Grill is nonlinear.  Some places appear bigger and more commanding because of the descriptive detail given to them or because of the histories attached to them.  MacKenzie also observes that some maps magnify their capital cities where other maps place no hierarchy upon any one place.  When “mapping” the Grill in his novel, Wah use of repetition of certain spaces within the Grill also “capitalizes” them. The soda fountain and the swinging doors between the front of the café and the kitchen are two such spaces.  These represent places of transitional power for Fred junior. The doors from the kitchen, the land of the oriental, take Fred junior into the front of the house, the land of the occidental.  Like the hyphen of his Canadian-Chinese heritage, these doors allow or force Fred to identify as either Canadian or Chinese.

The soda fountain operates in a similar fashion.  Here Fred junior’s Canadian self has an opportunity to experience a sense of power, overriding any stigma attached to being Chinese.  All soda fountain orders must be given to Fred junior to fill.  Here he is allowed an opportunity to affect business itself.  He invents the “Grey Cup Special” and impresses his friends by serving them generous portions (41).  Here Fred junior can play the role of proprietor rather than that of the soda jerk.  He chooses to map the geography of this space, to “capitalize” it, and along with it, himself.

Works Cited:  Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill.  Edmonton, AB: NeWest Press., 2006

 

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