Month: October 2018

In Japan, where I am from, the experience of the World War Ⅱ has been tried to be conveyed to keep the catastrophic memory alive and to never repeat the bloodiness history again. The story people suffering from aerial attack and trying to hide the light inside their houses to prevent being bombed. People being trained to act and dress in a certain way to maintain the boundary toward the war. People believing that dying in the war for the county is an honoring thing. All these stories were carried on to my generation though education, TV shows, movies, comic books or other various means, even after 73 years has pasted since the war ended. Reading “Persepolis” in the ASTU class, made me remind all these stories and surprised me how the description of the war in Iran is identical to what I had learned about Japan. “Persepolis” is a comic book written by Marjane Satrapi, describing her own childhood memory in Iran in the time of the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war occurred. Although the background is completely different, the sad fact that Marji (the main character of Persepolis who also represents Satrapi’s childhood) suffered similar situations to Japan during the war, in spite of those effort of conveying the war experience to prevent the history to be repeated, made me wonder if conveying one’s memory or public story is a meaningless thing. Then, what does “Persepolis” tell us about what happened in Iran? What can a popular culture do to convey what happened in the past?

Japan has a huge popular culture, and I am also familiar with war descriptions such as “Barefoot Gen” (a series of comic books written by Keiji Nakazawa, about the nuclear bomb attack in Hiroshima) or “Grave of the Fireflies” (an animation film directed by Isao Takahata, about two siblings suffering the last few months of the World War Ⅱ in Kobe city). Both these stories and “Persepolis” is somewhat based on the true experience, while some fictional factors are also added, which means it’s not aiming at just retrieving the whole complete experience. Especially, we talked in class that the frequent use of black for the background in “Persepolis”, allowed Satrapi to avoid telling the whole experience, while it rather provided the strong dark and heavy impression. Also, I thought she drew it simply with less motions compared to most of the Japanese comic books, which left the space of imagination to readers. I felt she made readers to consider what was it like, and fosters them to find the left pieces of the experience that Satrapi didn’t include in her book by themselves. Maybe engaging with readers’ heart is the true meaning of telling a story rather than replicating the experience, and popular culture allows us to do this.

Another role that popular culture can play is to convey the author’s message. Satrapi states the purpose of writing “Persepolis” in the introduction, as to debunk the stereotype about Islam. Specifically, she writes in the book about how she thought about the veil, which women were forced to wear after the Islamic revolution. It reminded me what I learned in my anthropology class, which is out of the CAP course, about Elizabeth Fernea’s ethnographic work about women who wear the veil in Iraq. She argued women’s social life is actually very enriched, although the veil looks as restricting their freedom. While this approach also debunks the stereotype of the veil, it is interesting that Satrapi doesn’t state a clear view about the veil like Fernea, and rather disperses Marji’s unstable thought toward the veil and God. This also makes readers not just understand the information that is given but reconsider about the concept of Islam, through popular culture that is relatively casual and approachable way compared to a formal scholar writing or journals.

Overall, the popular culture nevertheless seems to be a powerful source to convey what happened or a certain message. Although we can’t just completely copy and retrieve what happened, describing memory can implant the strong feeling or impression about what happened, and sometimes change people’s mind. However, I personally think that this popular culture has not being able to maximize its power, due to the use or regulation of media by the government or other groups. As we learned in our POLI class, some states also try to control the information to restrict its population’s freedom, and depends on the mass communication to spread their thoughts to their citizen. In fact, “Persepolis” has been banned in Iran too. I feel the interchange and the balance of how and who conveys what , might be the important aspect that forms the society nowadays.

Time passes and the number of people who can tell the story of the past directly declines, while stories that we must pass to the next generation also increases day by day. We can become both the receiver and the teller of the story. How we use popular culture and how we approach to the information that we receive, is a crucial issue that we have to think again. If everyone could work through the information and could measure what is important, we might be able to really stop the repetition of history.

There are some sleepless nights for anyone. Although the body is exhausted and craving for a nice peaceful sleep, somehow brain keeps working, playing back events from the day and keeps one awake until one is able to nail the messiness of the memory. It seems like muddy stream of memories and thoughts is flooding into the brain and being sluggish, being unable to process the memory. Well, I admit that a freshman at university, struggling to deal with so many things going on and being sleep deprived is a common experience and it is not a big deal. However, this drawing made me wonder what it is like for a child, to process the memory of her family killed.

The exhibit of “Arts of Resistance” was open from May 17^th to September 30^th in the Museum of Anthropology on the UBC Vancouver campus. As the homepage of the exhibit states, most of the objects express “contemporary political realities” by using “traditional or historical art forms” of Latin America. However, this picture drawn by Maribel Ayala in 1983 appeared slightly different from others to me. While the process of creating art works which include the intention of political resistance is somewhat retouching and editing the memory in order to express “neo-colonialism and racism”, a drawing of what a child saw seemed to be depicting the lurid reality and his or her own feeling straight forward.

Looking at the term, “editing”, this procedure can make the work concise and comprehensible, or can add and drop one’s purpose or bias. The movie we watched for our ASTU class, “Stories We Tell” by Sarah Polley, describes numerous perspectives to a story of a family by filming many people telling the “story” in front of the camera. In the movie, Michel Polley (Sarah’s foster father) points out that it is impossible for the movie to equally incorporate each perspective, since once she “edits” it, it will become Sarah’s perspective, which includes her thoughts or messages. Likewise, most of the artifacts at the exhibit can be said that it was edited in the meaning of adding Latin American people’s purpose, which facilitate them to convey the message of resistance. In contrast, the society’s purpose or others’ perspectives have not been added to Maribel’s drawing. It expresses only her subjective perspective, such as what she saw, felt, and remembered ― the story of her own memory. We can say that this drawing is edited by the exhibitor, added with a caption which includes the intention of letting know us the cruel story of genocide. However, the drawing itself shows how Maribel processed her memory of the murder of her family, regardless of the political issue.

Thinking about how Maribel didn’t include a political intention in the drawing as a being in a “group”, made me remind what we learned in our SOCI class, about how people connect oneself with the society. For instance, sociological imagination is the ability to consider the interconnections between the social history and individual biography. Being able to name a personal issue, such as “gender discrimination” or “racism”, sometimes becomes a source of liberation, by acknowledging the limitation of one’s control on one’s life. While the story is still catastrophic and painful, one can also gain solidarity with others who have the same experience. Yet, as I consider, as a child, Maribel must have not been able to understand what is happening for the whole society by using her sociological imagination. This must have made it harder to process the memory of her family killed for her than for an adult. Maribel must have suffered not only from the fact that her family was killed, but also from the isolated feeling of being unable to connect her incident to other’s experiences.

Including sociology or political issues, the world seemingly focuses primarily on the social issues, and this seems to be reasonable. However, what would happen for those who don’t know how to raise their voice to the world? What would happen for those who can’t use their sociological imagination to connect oneself to the society? Presumably, the big flow of memory will have to swirl forever.