Hello! 🙂

Welcome back and Happy New Year! I hope you all had a lovely Christmas holiday and had time to catch up with your family and friends!

In our ASTU class, we have started off the year with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. This emotionally moving novel which is centered around a 9 year old boy named Oskar who is traumatized by the passing of his father during 9/11. Oskar seeks to find answers as to how his father passed and searches for the lock to the key which he found in his deceased father’s closet, and through his search he comes across others who have experienced trauma from loss of their loved ones. As a class, we have discussed the book through themes of absence and misconnection.

Some bloggers found reading and following along with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close somewhat difficult due to its “sporadic” layout. Kendall mentioned how Oskar’s dispersed viewpoints were similar to the thought process of a 9 year old. She also expressed how refreshing but annoying it was that Oskar’s would jump from one subject matter then become side tracked for a while before coming back to his first subject. Similarly to Kendall, Taylor also called the layout of the novel “sporadic,” and explains how this is significant in representing the traumatized characters. She argues that the “random order of the visuals and jumping around from one character’s thoughts and actions to another” demonstrates how when one is traumatized, things don’t make sense. I would like to add on to Taylor’s thought and mention that I think that when one is traumatized, so many thoughts and questions run through their head and sometimes it is hard to organize their thoughts or really know what they want to say or do. Sometimes some are so traumatized that their mind goes blank as they cannot accept or understand what has happened and therefore become speechless. This happened to Oskar’s grandpa, Thomas Jr.

As naïve as this sounds, I grew up without much news television and therefore I wasn’t fully aware of what exactly happened during 9/11 until this year. It was interesting but especially heavy to have learned about it through a personal story rather than reading it from a news article full of statistics and facts without an emotional tone. This brings me to Imaan’s post where she shares how her cousin was taking a subway to get off at the World Trade Centre the moment everyone started to evacuate. As her cousin was traumatized, she could not take the subway for a while. Which takes me to Kaveel’s blog where he talks about his experience of growing up learning about 9/11. Its interesting how much of an influential role media plays, as Kaveel claims in his blog post, that “it fascinates [him] [how] media was able to alter [his] thinking in such a way” as to be the cause of his xenophobia of Arabian people in the past; “even though [he is not] racist.”

On a different note, I was glad that in his blog post Ken brought up his belief that the ones who roared “revenge!” were most likely the ones who were not directly involved in the event. Those who were directly affected and had lost their loved ones were so traumatized that they were speechless and all they wanted was for their loved ones back, while the others only reacted to their shock.

In my opinion, no matter what terrible thing one has done, I would NEVER EVER wish a traumatic/horrible event upon them nor wish them to suffer. Especially knowing how much it hurts; why wish something bad upon someone else? By wishing something bad upon those in “the wrong” is not going to help bring back your loved ones nor turn back time nor undo what was done. Hatred, fighting, revenge, and war is not the answer. It will not get you anywhere but a step back and it will make you just as bad as the attacker. Some might say: Then what are we to do? I wonder so myself.

What are your thoughts?

I would like to close in agreement with Priya, that in order to live in “love, peace, and harmony”, we need to stand together and unite against the wrongdoings. Similarly, Mariana thought that through unity, people can try to understand each other better; much like how Oskar was “able to understand himself and the world around him better” by connecting other peoples stories.

Unity is important for a better chance at peace, love and understanding in order to see the larger picture.

Thank you for reading! Take care!

-Ina de Weerdt