Wow. This post really made me think. Jen explores the question of why visual art is often rejected more than poetry following a traumatic event. She states that the image of the young Syrian refugee who was washed ashore “sparked a conversation that no one wanted to talk about so much before”. I think that phrase opens up why visual art is so much more controversial. No one enjoys being told what to think and visual art has a way of doing that, such as the falling man image that circulated the world following the attacks of 9/11. However, poetry allows for interpretation, giving people the freedom to alter meanings that better suit them, rather than having to simply accept something as it appears. Do I believe this is right? Not necessarily. I understand that trauma brings forth a multitude of emotions however, certain things have to be discussed in order for change to be made or mourning to move forward.

In Harnoor’s latest blog where she discusses our reading of Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, I found that Harnoor made fascinating connections between Spahr’s choice of voice and that of a news anchor. I remember this point being brought up briefly in class discussion, but Harnoor’s in depth comparison was quite eye opening. What specifically grabbed my attention was Harnoor’s analysis of the structure of Spahr’s poems and the resemblance they have to that of news media. Using the “variety of events” that Spahr addresses along with the speed in which she jumps around discussing each event. Harnoor took this relation even further by addressing how Spahr’s style in her book reflects our modern relationship with the media and how that gives Spahr an effective tool in her poetry when relaying her thoughts.

Hi everybody!

For the past few weeks, our ASTU class has been discussing the term trauma, with particular reference to 9/11. We started off this term by reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, depicting the traumas of a young boy after 9/11. Afterwards, we carried on to read articles written by Ilka Saal and Judith Butler, pushing us to further explore how we feel and perceive trauma.

One of the blogs that I found was very impactful was Mariana’s blog where she talks about how most people think about a traumatic event, one only remembers how the victims died; not many think of them as individual people and how they lived their last moments before the end. When I read her post, I thought of my uncle who was flying from Hong Kong to Vancouver on the day of 9/11, albeit on a completely different plane. He was still in the middle of his flight when the towers came down and while my entire family was worried sick, he had no clue as to what had happened. When he learned what had happened, he said (in rough translation) “Those who were lost, their every single memory will not”. I never truly understood what he meant by that until now.

Another blog that resonated with me was Micheal’s blog. Here he argues that people are who they are based on others who have a “similar identity” and that as humans, we can show our togetherness through understanding of all lives. Micheal then talks about the Pan Am games theme song that Doctor Luger played for us during our class. At first glance, this song is about how everybody is being united into a signal entity but some classmates funneled our attention to how some parts of the song talked about being united against something, in other words even in a song about the unity of everybody, there is violence which I find is ironic. If everybody was united. why would there be violence? This made me think of the phrase “we fight for peace” which is ironic in the same sense that even if you are fighting for peace, you are still fighting which disrupts peace.

Let me what you guys think!

-Fiona Tse

Hey readers!

These past few weeks in our ASTU class have been heavy…your blogs definitely reflect that. We started the second term by reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, a novel discussing the traumas surrounding 9/11. We then carried on to read articles by Saal and Butler, forcing us to delve into deeper emotions surrounding how we perceive traumatic events and what we even label as ‘trauma’.

Matthew’s blog intrigued me through his response to Butler’s ideas of narrative framing and how they can be detrimental. However, Matthew responds by saying “I have stopped trying to get rid of my frames, in favour of identifying them.” I was very moved by this statement. Our perspectives are inevitable; they are not going away. Rather than trying to abolish our personal narratives we should work towards the ability to acknowledge our perspectives simply as what they are: our own perspective. The ability to understand that our perspectives are not shared by everyone is a very powerful tool.

Mariana’s blog also introduced me to something I haven’t really thought much into , she pondered what it must have been like to be the individual that knew their life was coming to an end and “how they lived their last minutes”. That’s a very loaded proposition. Some people must have known that this was it while others must have been unaware as to what exactly was happening. Fiona shares that on September 11th, 2001, her uncle was flying from Hong Kong to Vancouver. After hearing of the attacks, her entire family was beside themselves wondering if her uncle was safe. Meanwhile, her uncle was completely unaware of the trauma that was being created. I believe that many of the victims that lost their lives that day were oblivious to what was actually happening. The confusion they must have experienced is unfathomable.

Reading all of the blogs this week was quite a privilege, trauma can be a very personal topic so it was very interesting to have an intimate view on your experiences and thoughts.

I’m looking forward to more discussions!

Devon Coady

Welcome back readers!

I was amazed by the number of great blogs that we had this week. I think that we all reflected on the topic of trauma in one way or another, so I just want to share with you some of the brilliant perspectives that I got to read.

When people talk to us about 9/11 and what we remember about that day, our response is almost always: “I was about three or four years old, so I don’t remember much about it”. This is the point that Devon brings about in her blog; she says that even though she does not remember September 11, she does remember September 12. Devon explains that her mother is a flight attendant, and after the World Trade Center was attacked, she felt the atmosphere around her change due to fear culture. She recalls how she thought that her mom’s occupation was really cool, and how by this one event, her perspective on her mom’s job changed drastically to the point where her mom’s safety was no longer a given. As a result, Devon expresses her rooted dislike of fear culture, and what it has done to society in terms of segregation and safety. Personally, I agree with Devon in her stand on fear culture because it only manages to put barriers between people based on their looks and their ethnicities. We’ve gotten to the point where we put labels on fear, because as Devon explained “it teaches us that flying in planes is risky and that Islamic people are bad”.

Furthermore, through Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” we witness trauma and fear culture through the eyes of a child, which is what Ramon talks about in his blog. But he talks about a different child, a child who lived the trauma in the flesh for several years, and offered a live account of everything that happened to her, that child is Anne Frank. One of Ramon’s most interesting points brings about the difference of trauma seen by an adult and a child, and how trauma is not really unspeakable, since Anne Frank delivered a day-to-day testimony of her life as a Jew in World War II. When we talked about trauma in class, we took into consideration Oskar’s perspective on “The Worst Day” and how he never mentioned the actual event because it was unbearable to do so. But here we have a child, whose innocence was not stolen by the trauma of the war, but kept fresh in her diary by the real account of the small beauties of her daily life. Because as Ramon puts it “through her words we see conflict that extends far beyond the closeminded focus on trauma, we see love, conflict, family, friends…”. Trauma is not something we can avoid by not talking about it, trauma is present within the very soul of the person who experiences it, it is only held captive until we decide to let it scream.

Holding on to the topic of the innocence within trauma from a child’s point of view, we encounter Robert’s blog on the different perceptions of trauma between Canada and Europe. Robert brings a fresh and honest portrayal of Canada’s stand on trauma and how it never compares two different events based on how many people died. According to Robert, “the fact that here we can agree that everyone suffered who has experienced trauma on any scale is a testament to how young and innocent Canada is”. Canadians express their empathy towards everyone in the world without judging who is suffering and by how much, in the same way a child would. Whereas, as Robert further explains, Europeans compare each tragic event to the ones they suffered from in the past, such as the Holocaust or the Russian Civil War. European trauma deals with numbers, ethnicities, and dislike towards different cultures and nations. Their view has become clouded by their previous experiences, and that has managed to let them perceive trauma with an inhumane perspective where everyone deserves a different sentiment depending on where they are from.

I would like to finish this post by looking into Lauren’s blog on “What is our Common Interest?” Putting trauma on the spotlight, Lauren takes some time to examine Butler’s argument on the “framing narrative” of trauma and on who is allowed to become a victim of an event. Lauren explains that after the events of 9/11, the tragedy became extremely Americanized, to the point where  “Non-American nationals and illegal workers who were among the victims, were sidelined or excluded all together from this public grievance”. It has become evident that victims are carefully selected when it comes to remembering them, because if the media chooses not to recognize them, then they do not deserve to be mourned. Lauren further challenges Butler’s believe that once we all realize that we are vulnerable, then we will become interdependent on one another. I agree with Lauren in her comment on how “utopian” Butler’s believe is, because our world will never stop to be divided due to the rising conflict that poses a threat to society every day. It might be awful to think about the world in this way, but it is only the truth, and the only way it can start to change is when we realize that all the hatred and the destructiveness is within our own selves.

All of your blogs were outstanding, guys! Keep up the amazing work!

-Mariana

Hello everyone,

I hope you all had a good weekend and are now ready for this new week!

In the  lecture last week, we had an amazing discussion about Judith Butler’s article. We focused on  her argument that our lives are precarious, therefore we depend on other people’s actions in order for us to stay alive. We then entered into the argument of, who’s life is worth saving and whose is not?  This, specifically, made me think of the death penalty and if it should be considered just, since is still legal in some countries.

Micheal‘s blog touches on really good points about Butler’s article. His argument is that we are who we are because of the people that surround us, therefore we should be able to understand each other and not fight one another. He also brings up the song about the Pan Am games that Dr. Luger made us listen to during her lecture. This song talked about humanity being united as one entity, however some fellow classmates made us all notice how this song included sections where violence was considered part of being “united” but against something.

On the other hand, AJ‘s blog touched on another section of Butler’s article, the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay and the poems that they wrote. I agree with his argument on how these poems made him look at the prisoners with a more human perspective. Many times our judgement of prisoners depends on what side they stand for. Therefore, if they are considered the enemy, we then have the tendency not to look at them as people just like us.

Another blog post that caught my attention was Andrea‘s. She connected our class discussion about the study conducted by Saal on Foer’s noel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. She compares two very important traumatic events, the 9/11 attack and the Holocaust. What I found really interesting about her argument is that Foer’s novel impacted her memory of this traumatic event and the feelings related to it. Through the use of feelings she was able to connect 9/11 and the Holocaust to the Syrian refugees and how peoples’ opinions have such a strong impact on how we perceive these refugees.

It was amazing reading all of your blogs; everyone had good arguments and very interesting  perspectives on viewing the material covered in class. Please keep up with this amazing work, and I will see you next time.

Benedetta Franzini.

In his most recent blog post, “The Frames I see the World Through” Matt Phillips talks about the inevitable presence of frames, or as Matt says “biases”, in our daily lives. He has decided rather than attempt to eliminate these biases from his life (as he sees it to be virtually impossible) he ought to just be more conscious of them and take them into account when looking at different issues and situations. Matt better appreciates the variances in frames throughout the world. I think that if more people, especially those in power, appreciated the fact that people from different areas of the world have different frames that they look at the world through, less conflict would occur. Or at least, I’d hope those in power in the West wouldn’t take such an arrogant tone towards other parts of the world. Just a thought, I really liked reading Matt’s blog… keep up the good work!

Ben Ross

Among many interesting things that A.J. discussed in his blog, he talked about the poems we read in class from the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. I liked what he said about the prisoners’ poems, and how the poetry made them seem more human in our eyes. I thought this was very true, because when you think of a prisoner in Guantanamo, you do not think about his feelings and his suffering, let alone him writing poetry. I think that through poetry, people are at their most fragile and vulnerable state, and the fact that the prisoners wrote about their suffering says a lot about their pain and desperation. Furthermore, A.J. raises the questions that we discussed in class about how the poems’ meaning could be lost in translation, through editing and censorship, etc. Then came the question of the poems that were never released and instead were destroyed, what was the purpose of that? What could be so dangerous about the poems that the U.S. felt the need to destroy them? These types of questions bring about the topic of the true reasons why the prisoners were in Guantanamo, and the realization that some of them might not be guilty of the crimes attributed to them. Overall, I liked A.J’s blog because it was very reflective and simple in its nature. It raised many different questions that we tend to overlook when we look at the topic of Guantanamo Bay; however, they arose  in our class discussion because we had access to the poems of the prisoners, which is probably one of the last things going on in a person’s mind when they think about Guantanamo’s criminals.

Hello,

I really enjoyed reading Ramon‘s blog, first of all because it has a really good title that caught my eye, but mostly because of its content. I found it interesting his comparison of the views of trauma by the two different perspectives that come from children, as narrators. He also adds a very important childlike point of view: Anne Frank’s. I believe that bringing such a famous story into consideration and comparing her unique perspective on trauma with Oskar’s, Naomi’s and Marji’s, gives a whole new way of thinking about traumatic events. I agree with Ramon’s argument about how Anne Frank’s does a really good job in summarizing her trauma, that it may be considered not as “unspeakable” as it is in the other novels.

This being said, I have a question that came to my mind while  reading your blog; what do you think the novel gains by having children as narrators of trauma?

Benedetta Franzini.

Reply to Amy’s “Moral Responsibility”

This week, Amy related Asad and Butler’s theories of how we react and respond in terms of other’s crisis to how Canadians are reacting to the current Syrian Refugee Crisis. Amy explains, like Asad, how Influential the media is on our reactions. Despite the amount of positive media surrounding the refugee crisis, Amy explains that there are many Canadians who look negatively towards the refugees, concerned that they are terrorists or will damage our economy. Amy asks, “Are we conditioned to not come to the aid of other human beings in fear of them impacting our economy?”

I think that the question Amy is asking very important. I also find it odd that despite the positive attention that these refugees are getting in the media, how so many are not welcoming towards them. Maybe it is not just the impact on the economy that is upsetting people, but this is just an excuse to speak negatively towards them. I wonder if these negative feelings have derived from this leftover notion of “us vs them” that was driven into the minds of Americans, and even Canadians after 9/11. I wonder if, as Butler is suggesting, it is because of the vulnerability that people feel that has them clinging onto this negative mentality. Maybe it is easier for these people to distance themselves from the people they refer to as “them,” rather than accept them into our “us.”  

Nice post Amy!

Jen Paxton