Hey guys!

So the last few weeks have been really busy for all of us. Papers due, final exams stress and lots of works but we have also gotten the chance to experience different activities like the planned field trip for our ATU class.
The feeling I got from some of my classmates and myself included is that a field trip to the University Archives probably does not sound like a lot of fun, at least it didn’t to me. But the general feeling after the visit was completely different judging from the content posted on our blogs last week.

I personally think that getting an insight if the archives from the Rare Books and Special Collections in the Irving K. Barber Library was unexpectedly interesting and fun. Kennedy mentions that for him it was like “stepping into a time capsule…an organized time capsule” and for Olivea looking at one of the files on Kogawa’s fond was “filled with beautiful hand written letters from the 1980’s.”
To see so many original documents, letters of rejection, newspapers, personal notes, drawings and pictures sent to Joy Kogawa was really interesting. Exploring the contents of the fond was surprising to me and many others. One of the most unexpected articles found in the fond was a letter sent by an elementary school student to Kogawa saying ““Dear Mrs. Kogawa, I did not realy like the book because nothing realy happend in it.  Your friend Joel.” which included  drawing of a house, what seems to be the flag of the UK and a girl floating around. Go check out the drawing at Ryan’s blog.

The fact that our visit was guided by librarian Chelsea Shriver I think made my experience as interesting as it was. She made the whole thing so interesting explaining how the documents are collected and how they are organized to be kept at UBC.
Being able to access all of the primary sources like several drafts to Kogawa’s novel Obasan was like being witness to the process of the making of Kogawa’s work. She even included a title page, as mentioned in Magda’s blog, where she gave her novel the title “If I must Remember”.
Inneke says in her blog that going to the archives and exploring all of the content used in the writing of Obasan had her like “Wow.. this is what the book that I read supposed to be like..” That was exactly how I felt, the overall experience of visiting that section of the library was surprising and very intriguing.

Hey everyone! Last week, my ASTU class ventured over to the UBC archives to explore Joy Kogawa’s fond, so this week everyone blogged about their fieldtrip experiences. It was really interesting to see what people got out of this experience, especially because a lot of the documents people wrote about I didn’t get a chance to see myself and I thoroughly enjoyed reading many of your blogs!

While looking through the blogs, I noticed that many people brought up how interesting it was to see many of Kogawa’s drafts. Sandra, for example, stated “seeing a writer’s progress is always a rather engaging experience, as one can trace a writer’s initial piece to the final product”. I thought this was very well put. When I was reading Obasan, I was not thinking about Kogawa’s first drafts, as it’s not often that we get the opportunity to see the author’s entire writing process. Ryan was also intrigued by Kogawa’s drafts. He talked about having a feeling of satisfaction and authenticity while having pages of the author’s handwriting in front of him. Ryan also brings up the fact that the Internet has the tendency of decreasing the value of different pieces of art, and the case is the same for Obasan as millions of people are reading the same published version. Isaiah also brought up the negative aspect of the Internet saying, “in the age where everything is accessible by media we often forget the beauty and complexities behind a piece of writing. I was really glad that Ryan and Isaiah brought this up in their blogs because although it may sound silly, we’re very lucky to have access to Kogawa’s original documents in today’s world, which is increasingly being controlled by the Internet.

Moving on, I really liked how Magda talked about “hidden treasures” in her blog. As the librarian told us, all of the folders had labels on the side of them, describing what kind of documents were inside, but sometimes things completely unrelated were found. While flipping through the folders, I remember finding an unlabelled envelope that had a picture of a man, but there was no indication of who it was. It was really interesting to see items like that, and it left me wanting to know how he was part of Joy Kogawa’s process of writing Obasan!

Overall, I found this experience extremely interesting and showed me how long and difficult the process is to write a book. It was awesome having the chance to read everyone’s blogs; it’s been a great first semester!

See everyone soon,

-Kate

Hello Everyone!

As expected, everybody blogged about their field trip experience. Since I wasn’t there, reading the blog posts helped me picture what it was like exlporing the Kogawa fond. The archives described were composted of letters by readers and editors, newspaper articles, and drafts.

Most of the bloggers didn’t think about the process and energy that writers put into their book before seeing the archives. According to Martin, this is because we are caught up with the book itself and tend to overlook the process and experiences of the author in creating the novel. Seeing the drafts however “makes authors seem less like machines producing well crafted sentences, and more like people writing and labouring over a story” (Isaiah). On one hand, Ryan felt that seeing the author’s handwriting on the page made it more authentic and satisfying especially now that the internet has decreased the value of artworks. Isaiah touched on this idea as well. He claimed that we don’t think about the beauty and complexities behind a piece  of work because everything is accessible with media.

Other than appreciating the work that writers put into their work, a number of bloggers talked about the effects of Obasan into the lives of people. Erin for one described the appreciation of Japanese-Canadians to Kogawa, “Kogawa encourages the remembrance of history as a means to improve on the past, rather than forget events that are seemingly too painful for the people to remember”. Maria agreed with Erin on the importance of not forgetting. She stated, “no matter what year Obasan is read by a person affected by a social event, they are able to connect the novel with the importance to never forget events that caused casualties in their own societies.”

I also want to focus on two blogs that were thought-provoking. One is by Joseph who attempted to understand a letter from one of Kogawa’s readers in a form of a poem. The poem questioned why there are divisions in society and why we insist on having them. The sun was used as a metaphor for togetherness and how it was unreachable. As Joseph put it, “There was an air of desperation, of waiting, of hope in clinging to the warmth of fleeting fire and light on earth.”

The second blog I found interesting was Paolina’s. She came up with the conclusion that Naomi’s story didn’t start at the beginning of the book rather it began with Kogawa’s research, the notes she took, and the letters she received. For Paolina, the end of World War 2 and the Japanese-Canadian misery did not mark the end of the story. The story is still continuing through professors, scholars, and even us, students who analyze its meaning.

Reading everyone’s blogs made me realize that this is what memory is about. We, university students, are part of it by addressing what happened and by exploring the truth.

– Therese

Hello readers,

It’s been a long time since we did not write blogs for our ASTU class. This week’s blogs mentioned the different works we touched during class, for example: class presentations, literary reviews, Safe Area Goražde by Joe Sacco and Obasan by Joy Kogawa. As it is my time to be the class blogger, before I start to mention the different themes discussed this week, I want to let you bloggers know that it was a pleasure to read all of your blogs and it is amazing to realize that ASTU is helping us developing more of our critical thinking skills.

First I would like to start with Safe Area Goražde by Joe Sacco. This graphic journal takes place in the war in eastern Bosnia from 1992-1995. Many bloggers emphasized the difference between Persepolis and Safe Area Goražde. Therese mentioned how Sacco’s information in his graphic journal “was gathered and came from individuals who experienced the historic event firsthand.” This differs from Persepolis since Satrapi was one of the main characters on the graphic novel and we are able to know how the Islamic Revolution had an impact on her life since she is the one who is telling us her own experience. Sandra on the other hand mentioned how the drawing style in Safe Area Goražde was realistic and how the style actually suits Sacco’s narrative because he draws the victims of the war “as real people, and not just statistics or interviewees. They are the people within Gorazde, all with their own emotions and stories.” The realistic technique of Sacco in his way of sharing people’s stories was also supported by Mia’s blog when she mentioned that “it’s been said many times that a picture is worth a thousand words; in the case of Gorazde that could not be more true.”

Another novel we touched during class is Obasan by Joy Kogawa. This novel focuses on Japanese-Canadian families who were victims of internment during World War II. It was interesting to read how Obasan is an object that created cultural memory as seen in Paolina’s blog when she mentioned how a piece of this book was even read during a ceremony of the Redress Settlement Agreement in 1988. From a cultural memory point of view, “remembering is the active engagement with the past.” The action of remembering from this point of view makes me think about Inneke’s position about the keyword: forgetting. It contradicts the point of remembering since she asserts  that “we can equate the term “forgetting” with “delete” which means selecting what to delete and what to keep.” This position is supported by Kate, when she reported that “some scholars deem forgetting as a necessary act in order to move on from traumatic and painful experiences”.  The idea of forgetting presented in Kate’s blog argues the idea of cultural memory because Paolina reveals that “ Trauma is seen as an essential part of cultural memory.” During Obasan we can identify how cultural memory is produced through traumatic events.

As seen above the keywords we touched in class during our presentations had a big impact in how we are analyzing the pieces we are reading. Gabo mentioned it was interesting to analyze how “the emergence of new technologies changed the dialog that was formed by scholars talking about technologies of memory.” The idea of scholarly articles bringing in new sides on different fields makes me think about Ryan’s blog since he highlights that under arts “there are many theories on certain subjects, which are all similar but usually with different names.” This leads to the question of “How do you know who is right?” This is a tought question to answer on the field of arts since there are multiple theories and scholars backed their points of view by other scholars.

Thank you for your time!

Maria Jose Zegarra

Hello fellow bloggers!

After reading all of the great blogs from this week I was quite surprised not to see an overwhelming response to one book or topic, all of the blogs were more or less about different things.  This was good because it gave me an opportunity to read about lots of different and interesting topics!  Some of the common themes I found when reading were that a few people focused on the recent literature review and group presentation we did in class, and others focused on the graphic narrative Safe Area Gorazde written by Joe Sacco, and his illustration style.

Some of the blogs that focused on the recent literature review and group presentation were Paolina’s blog, Kate’s blog, Erin,s blog, Gabo’s blog, and Inneke’s blog .  I found all of these blogs shared to be similar in that each blogger introduced their key word that they were given to research and told us a little bit about the scholarly conversation on that key word.  Both Inneke and Kate wrote about ‘forgetting’ as their key word and Gabo focused on his key word that was ‘Technologies of memory’.  When Paolina wrote about ‘cultural memory,’ she provides us with definitions of how other scholars define it and how it ties into the novel we have just finished in class which is titled Obasan by Joy Kogawa.  Paolina explains that Obasan is a good example of cultural memory and how it is produced through a traumatic event.  Another blogger who talked about their keyword was Erin.  Erin focused on ‘national memory’ and came at it from more of her own perspective.  She introduces the term ‘selective remembering’ which Sturgeon defines as the act of “strategically forgetting painful events that may be too dangerous to keep in active memory” (Sturken 7).   In her blog Erin argues that the events of the transatlantic slave trade were are not an act of selective remembering, and are taught often in schools in America.  Rather the bombs dropped in 1945 by the Americans in  Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would be a more appropriate example of selective remembering from an American point of view.

There were three blogs that addressed Sacco’s drawing style in Safe Area Gorazde (Alex, Sandra, and Mia).  If I had not been the class blogger this week, I would have chosen to analyze further the illustration style of Joe Sacco.  Both Sandra and Alex compare Sacco’s drawing style to the style used in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.  The drawings in Persepolis are much more simplistic and a lot less detailed, it almost appears that they could have been drawn by a child.  In contrast Sacco illustrates in such detail, he uses an immense amount if expression in every persons face.  The amount of detail he uses really helps to understand the harshness and the trauma that all the people of Gorazde are faced with.  Alex brings up a good point in his blog about Persepolis being a first hand account and Safe Area Gorazde being written form the eyes of a journalist.  Does this have anything to do I wonder with the way that each author chooses to illustrate?  Sandra picks up on the fact that Sacco’s drawings don’t look like drawings in a regular comic book, and that may seem unappealing and/ or peculiar when one first starts to read it.  Mia also  contributes by focusing primarily on the faces of the people in Gorazde.  Sacco creates what seems like a real person coming out of the book, he adds every detail such as wrinkles, and shading around the eyes.  Mia observes that maybe the words on the page can not fully describe how powerful the image actually is, and that often an image speaks louder than words.  I agree with her on that, I think that with the images being so detailed it is easy to get an accurate representation of what is going on by just the drawing alone.

I hope that my blog gave everyone a bit more insight on what infamous ASTU class was blogging about this week!

Until next time,

Magda Adkins 🙂

Hey bloggers!

It is finally my turn to write a class blog and the pleasure reading and enjoying your blogs far more exceeds my expectation. It’s been a long time since the last time we wrote our blogs. We went through a lot recently including Safe Area Gorazde and Obasan. To keep things simple, I choose to focus on Obasan and memory in this blog.

Elizabeth and Clara connect Obasan, a fiction written by Joy Kogawa basically depicts the life of a Japanese-Canadian child in a period when Japanese-Canadian are suffered from racialism due to WW2, with their personal experience. Clara comes up with a very interesting point which is “force versus control”. “Force and control”, initially used to depict the motion of push and pull in crafting boat, actually symbolizes and epitomizes the difference between Japanese and western culture. Obasan, to me, is typical to Japanese culture. When faced with impoundment in camp and confiscation of her possession, what she do is to be obedient and accepting the discrimination imposed by Canadian government. So to the question brought up by Clara “Will there be a dominant culture?”, in my perspective, on one hand, the silence remained by this woman is another way of being “strong”(brings up by Melissa), on the other hand, this immense endurance advocated and rooted in Japanese is not a way of evade culture conflict but a better way to bend those two cultures, protect memory and avoid forgetting.

Obasan triggers the thinking of forgetting and remembering, which is talked about in the blogs of Clara, Elizabeth, Therese, Erin. As Clara mentions in her blog, as a Canadian citizen she barely knows about this tragic event. This gives me a sense that this history is selected to be forgotten purposely. But is it a right thing to do so?

Elizabeth acclaims that the impression people hold on Canada as a multicultural, friendly country is actually the result of remembering certain things and filtering out those traumas. Thus it is unfair, both to those innocent people suffer from it and people receive this collected information. And this remind me of Erin’s blog in which she states that in her high school the information she received on transatlantic slave trade and American booming was all taught in high school courses, which means that the education system is doing the remediation of memory. The school system is also mentioned in our politics class when we came to the concept “political culture” indicating the configuration of particular people’s political orientation. To form this “political culture”, people are socialized in agency such as family and school where they receive indoctrination at the will of states. This is very similar to the way memory are passed on. Then continue as Erin thinks it results in nation memory.

To remember this event, as Paolina points out, Obasan serves as narratives that is the first books tackles with Japanese-Canadian internment, and plays a huge role in conveying and creating memory.

Thank you for reading!

-Grace

Hey there readers!

This week instead of writing a personal blog post about a specific topic, it’s my job to read through my classmate’s blogs and give you a bit of a recap. It has been several weeks since we last posted, so there was quite a bit of material covered, meaning the blogs this week covered a lot of ground. I’ll try to cover a few different topics that came up.

We read two very heart wrenching books in the last two weeks revolving around war. The first was a book called Obasan by Joy Kogawa a novel about a woman recounting her experiences as a young Japanese girl living in British Columbia during World War II, a time of Japanese-Canadian Internment.

This week Paolina wrote her blog about Obasan but focused on how it relates to the idea of cultural and collective. She wrote towards the end of her blog “It reached a great importance even if the characters in it are fictional and became part of Canada’s cultural memory”. She explains that even though it is not a true account the Kogawa’s story has become part of the way we remember and understand these events. She reached farther by asking the important question “But how reliable is cultural memory if it is based on constant remediation of previous memories?”. Clara also wrote her blog this week on Obasan, however, she took a different approach and tied the story into her own life experiences. She tell us about a family friend’s grandfather. He was a Japanese- Canadian man attending UBC at the time of the war. She explains to us that he was expelled from the university at the time, but has recently been given an honorary degree along with the other survivors who attended UBC at the time. This is something I found incredibly interesting because I had no idea that this happened, and I hadn’t considered what must have happened to Japanese students attending university in Canada at the time of the war.

The other book we read was Safe Area Gorazde by journalist Joe Sacco. Safe Are Gorazde is a graphic “journal” about the Bosnian war in the 1990’s. Sacco was an American visiting Gorazde and taking interviews from the locals and survivors in order to recount the war. Isaiah explains that as an American Sacco represented many things to the Bosnian people, but most of all he represents the idea of “escape”. He explains that while they have no choice to leave Joe sacco can come and go as he pleases. This is something that all of the citizens of Gorazde long for. In class we talked a lot about the idea that the locals are trapped and isolated while Sacco has the freedom to just flash his blue card and he can leave immediately and go wherever he pleases. He had mobility.

Alex wrote about the book from a different point of view. He chose to write about the way Sacco illustrate his story. He compares Sacco’s very detailed depictions of events and people against Marjane Satrapi’s simple and stark drawings in Persepolis. He writes “as soon as I saw the first illustration in Safe Area Gorazde I knew the two graphic novels were about as different as they could possibly be”.  Alex explains that he sees Satrapi’s style as a way to represent the “conformity” she saw during the war, while Sacco “encompasses graphic detail in to his illustration in order to further emphasize the dramatic violence that occurred during the Bosnian genocide that occurred in the 1990s”.

This week Ryan decided to write about something aside from the books we’ve been reading. His blog post was about all of the academic article we have been reading in class and how new they are to him. He explains that in this field the ideas are very abstract and it can be hard to determine whose ideas are “right” or “wrong” because unlike hard sciences there are no formulas or hard evidence to back them up. He quotes Dr. Erikson “’when one states they are just, they are immediately unjust’” and explains that he thinks this idea could also be relevant in this context. He expands on it asking the question “Can this be used in the context of when one states they are right, they are wrong?”.

Thanks for reading!

Love,

Olivea

Hey there bloggers!

It’s finally my turn to recap on everything that has been said throughout this week’s blogs! I have to admit, the blogs only keep getting better and better each time!

To get things rolling,

It wasn’t a doubt that many of the bloggers would be talking about Persepolis and Hillary Chute’s Article, The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. However, there were a few blogs which stuck out that brought their own personal ideas.

Starting with one that really stuck out to me was Clara’s blog. This blog post focused on how she came from two different backgrounds which spoke strongly to me especially being Eurasian myself. The whole concept of culture differences is exactly what I have to go through everyday as well. In comparison to the novel, she addressed the “clash between the Islamic’s states values and Marji’s values” including how the state doesn’t compromise with it’s citizens which I found really clever.

Moving forward, Joseph’s blog was quite the interesting piece, if I do say so myself.  If I could compare his thought process to political science, I’d say it is very similar to the whole root thinking process (which I found really confusing in class, so if you understand it; please help a girl out). With his critical thinking, he centered his focus on the big theme of the graphics being black and white. He also compared the theme to good and bad, discussing about perfectionism and how we’d all be hopeless if we constantly strive for a perfect answer. Other bloggers (Magda, Maria, Martin, Olivea, Paolina and Sandra) also focused on how valuable Satrapi’s monochromatic graphics visualized her story to them as readers. All three girls (Magda, Olivea, and Sandra) brought the word “thickness” (98) which portrayed power and depth. On the other hand, Martin and Paolina questioned the whole idea of not having color and how effective it was being black and white. In addition, many of those who focused on the black-ness in the comic related it to emptiness and how it’s connected to the process of remembering.

A line that really jumped at me while reading the blogs came from Paolina’s which was “She prepares the stage but still leaves enough space for the readers own thoughts and interpretation.” Similar to Kennedy’s, they both found themselves “seeing comics in a whole new light”. They also both noticed that Satrapi took advantage of the genre which added a new dimension to graphic narratives. One reoccurring image that many of the bloggers (Magda, Therese, Kennedy, Kate, Peter) included was from Persepolis found on page 52. Each of them took the photo as evidence to prove the fact that the story was seen through a naïve child’s perspective. The body which was so precisely cut into equal pieces with no blood in sight showed how unrealistic the narrative was. However, they all agreed that it spoke to Marjane’s creativity and how the words ended up becoming more horrific than the images themselves.

On a different aspect, three bloggers (Martin, Therese and Gabriel) focused on how violence is now escalating to become a “normal” thing. Martin claims that “these events happen so often we become quick to look past them” which I find very true with today’s society. Similarly, Therese explained how movies make violence a common thing and how Satrapi pictures violence in a minimalist style to create a bigger effect. Digging deeper into Therese’s concept of how violence is gradually becoming desensitized. My big questions are; Why are people so intrigued by watching violent films? Why do we find ourselves so easy to accept violence shown in the media? What made us so desensitized in the first place? Now these are some questions to ask because in my opinion I find it quite horrific.

On a side note, good luck with midterms everyone!

See you around,

Mel

Hey everyone! This week I write to you as a class blogger. I truly enjoyed reading my classmate’s interpretations of our discussion this week, and have some input I would like to add myself. This week’s main focus was on the avant-garde, black and white style of Satrapi’s Persepolis, and an article by Hillary Chute: The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Both pieces of work inspired a wide range of interpretations and responses from my classmates, however the one I would like to draw attention to- and extend upon- is the normalization of violence through media in our modern world. 

Erin began the body of her blog by addressing the alarming speed at which the character Marji in Satrapi’s graphic narrative Persepolis was forced to grow up, “She is exposed to harsh political realties and violence by the age of ten, thus compromising the childhood innocence many of us took for granted.”, Erin writes. Violence is a regrettably frequent theme in Marji’s life; a truth evidently expressed through the combination of traumatic experiences and everyday occurrences in a single panel of visuals. Erin stresses the abnormality of such violence by drawing on her own experience of growing up in California. She writes, “The North American reader of Persepolis cannot fathom the intensity and frequency of violence in a young girl’s life”. The combination of violence and normalcy contrast almost as well as Satrapi’s chosen style: black and white children’s drawings.

Through the, as Peter stated in his blog, “juxtaposition that comic books enable”, Satrapi was able to convey horrific violence through the unwilling scope of a child’s imagination. These unrealistic and simplistic (black and white) depictions of brutality-such as the image from Persepolis of a man who has been cut into perfectly clean pieces- help to prevent the further promotion of violence as normal. Peter’s blog argues that Satrapi uses this child’s point of view as a tool so as not to desensitize the “horrific violence we would see in an actual photo”. I agree with his claim that in Western society the MIddle East has become synonymous with violence; with almost all media coverage on the Middle East relating to war or a heinous act of terrorism. I also believe that these horrible occurrences have become so common to the public eye that we have become horridly desensitized to the violence that wracks our world and threatens to strip us of our humanity.

Therese’s blog adds a new perspective to my argument of desensitization by citing a couple of popular movies from her childhood, the first being Rambo(2008). She describes Rambo as being one of the most violent movies she’s ever seen, and emphasizes the traumatizing nature of its realistic violence, “Lives weren’t valued. Nobody  mourned. Killing became ordinary.”. I found these words to be incredibly thought provoking, driving me to recall some of the more violent movies i’ve seen, and realize that the realistic acts of violence they portrayed were never followed by an adequate level of mourning or terror by the actors. There is even an entire genre of movies dedicated to turning violence into comedy ( ie. Tropic Thunder, Kick Ass, The Dictator, Scary Movie..).I realized that the movies we watch are normalizing violence to the point of replacing our tears with laughter.

Thankfully Satrapi realized the same thing while writing Persepolis, and allowed her style of writing and drawing to evolve away from the normal portrayal of trauma. Kate uses the same picture of a man cut into pieces to argue that “by drawing this image from a child’s perspective, it almost shows the trauma more effectively and horrifically than simply describing it with words or a more realistic image.”. Kate elaborates her claim by explaining how seeing the drawing from a child’s perspective helped her to process the trauma being shown. Through her use of simple black and white contrasts, Satrapi allows us to understand the violence without glorifying it-a tactic that is far too under valued in our society. My class’s discussions of Persepolis and Satrapi’s use of non traumatizing portraits of violence have left me with some questions: Have we as a society become desensitized to violence past the point of return? And based on the amount of power that the media has in our society, will things ever change?

To recap this weeks blogging, Erin emphasized the amount of violence that polluted Marji’s childhood by comparing it to her childhood in California, while Peter focused on the violently skewed view that the West has of the Middle East. Kate and Peter both talked about how they found Satrapi’s style to soften the blow of the violent images, and Therese brought in violent movies from her childhood to help portray how incredibly desensitized we as a society have become to violence.

Thanks for reading guys!

Mia