How people remember things varies – not just because they experience different things, but even common memories such as the war or gender inequality often get intertwined with one’s personal backgrounds and emotions, which change how they convey their memories. Indeed, being a class blogger is tougher than I thought, since everyone has different but amazing ideas while we all took the same class and read the same texts. Unfortunately, I don’t have the ability to incorporate everyone’s ideas, so I strongly recommend you to read through everyone’s blogs!

For the past few weeks, we have read Art Spiegelman’s comic book “Maus” and the Helen Weinzweig’s novel “Basic Black with Pearls”, and explored different genres of representing memories, experiences, and their identities. “Maus” depicts Jewish people’s struggle during the WWII and through the author’s father’s experience. One of the remarkable features of this comic book is that Spiegelman uses “mice” and “cats” to represent Jews and Germans (and “pigs” for Poles). Diego and Etana argues that this use of animals plays an intermediate role to remove the discomfort of conveying the harsh story from the holocaust. Many students also argued the purpose of using “cats” and “mice” as to indicate the predator-prey relationship (Cherisse, Etana, Suvi, and Tessa), to link how the Nazi’s propaganda depicted Jews as rats during WWII (Diego, Etana, and Tessa), and to emphasize the impression of cats as adorable, worthy pets (Etana, Suvi). Tessa also points out this clear racial distinction in the comic as a representation of how Jews were eradicated in the real life. Furthermore, Etana argues that the way Jews were depicted as rats during the war shows how they were judged only by their race, which resulted in people’s lack of interests and humanity towards them during WWII.

“Basic Black with Pearls”, on the other hand, is about a middle-aged, middle-class woman Shirley (or Lola as she identified for travelling) trying to find her lover Coenraad just by the secret code he sends to her through the journal National Geographic. As Kriveena mentions in her blog, Shirley’s life is “revolved around Coenraad”, while she starts to recall her memories and traumas of her life by visiting her own hometown Toronto. In our class, we are trying to find what Weinzweig is trying to describe through Shirley by considering her gender, class, and personal experiences.

Interestingly, I noticed that these two different books both talk about a woman’s life and struggle. “Basic black with pearls” shows how the society determines women as a belonging of men who support their husband in their house. Jodie argues that Shirley is “financially and emotionally dependent on Coenraad”, and that Coenraad is strictly determining her life by the rules, while Shirley herself doesn’t realize that she is in a toxic relationship. Mirella also argues that this book challenges the boundaries of old women’s life and love, while also depicts the societal and personal constrains on women’s liberation. Moha similarly points out how Shirley’s character is introduced only in relation with Coenraad, which shows how the society’s message says women are determined by men.

In “Maus”, everything is about the author’s father (Vladek), while Spiegelman (Artie) in the comic seems to be strongly interested in his mothers’ (Anja’s) story. However, Suvi points out the possibility of Vladek’s memory being inaccurate, and that he could have hidden what he wanted to since he had that control over his story. William also mentions about Vladek abandoning Anja’s diary, which shows Vladek’s guilt and inability to deal with the experience of her suicide. Overall, we cannot measure how much this book was able represent Anja’s memory. This made me think about how Shirley’s life in “Basic Black with Pearls” is determined by Coenraad’s life. Also, how she went between reality and imagination in her first-person text can question her agency on her story too. Both of these women’s lack of agency in their story seems to reflect how women lack agency in their own life.

However, Meghan’s blog post also stood out to me when I was thinking about how Anja’s story is represented in the book. Meghan argues that Spiegelman portrays his guilt explicitly through the storytelling process in order to reverse his guilt towards his mother. She highlights how guilt can have a long-time effect, and how it influences one’s way of expressing stories. I personally agree with this, and think that Spiegelman decided to trace and write about his parents’ story not only because he wanted to keep the memory of the holocaust alive, but because he wanted to know about his mother. I feel like he would have done the same thing even if there was no such a holocaust nor war in Anja’s history. I believe that his wish to recall her mother’s story made him write about the whole process of how he heard about Anja’s experience through Vladek, how Vladek met Anja, and how Spiegelman himself went through Anja’s suicide.

In summary, “Basic Black and Pearls” and “Maus” takes different strategies to convey stories. Use of comic, spy genre, the animals, a woman in an affair, and a mother’s suicide reflects how the author wanted to represent their stories. Also, who gets to talk their story is remarkably important to consider as we have been talking about it through the year. It seems to be the same for blogs as well. Indeed, writing these blogs is part of our assignments, while what attracted each of us and how we expressed them differs according to our interests, experiences and stream of thoughts. The agency we have over our blog is larger than scholarly writings, and that’s what I find interesting about blogs. I am looking forward to reading everyone’s last blog posts!!