Esther's Blog

Watching ‘American Sniper’ by Clint Eastwood, to me, is a testament of how movies and other forms of media can obscure as much as it reveals. As we have talked in class, when we focus overtly on the effects of war on a single victim – in this case, Chris Kyle and his experience in the war – we efface the effects on the other victims of war like the Iraqi veterans and civilians. Yet, ‘American Sniper’ not only ignores the effects on war on other victims, but it also does not enable audiences to ask themselves more pressing questions about why the Iraq war and the “War on Terror” occurred. Thus, though the film efforts to raise awareness about war’s effects on veterans is admirable and sincere, it obscures the truth of why the war occurred – why those veterans had to go to war in the first place.

Equally important as thinking about a single man’s personal struggles with the war is considering the broader historical forces that have created, and are perpetuating, conditions for war. The framework for thinking about the underlying forces that have created the environment and structures people live in is conceptualised in a reading that we read in our Sociology 100 class with Professor Kerry Greer – a reading titled “The Sociological Imagination” by sociologist C. Wright Mills. In it, Mills puts forth the concept of “the sociological imagination” – that is, the ability to separate the struggles an individual faces in his day-to-day life (called “personal troubles”) from the structures beyond his control that create these very struggles (called “public issues”), thus enabling an individual to understand the historical and societal backdrop of daily life in terms of its consequences on his or her internal thoughts and external behaviour.

To me, the lack of the “sociological imagination” is extremely obvious in the film. The very film itself revolves around Chris Kyle’s “personal troubles”; it dramatises the story of a single character in what is supposed to be a transnational war, but is actually an inner conflict that is taking place in the form of internal disruptions in his mind and daily life. In ‘The Sociological Imagination’, Mills states that:

The personal problem of war, when it occurs, may be how to survive it or how to die in it with honour… to find a set of milieux and within it to survive the war or make one’s death in it meaningful. But the structural issues of war have to do with its causes; with what types of men it throws up into command; with its effects upon economic and political, family and religious institutions, with the unorganised irresponsibility of a world of nation-states.

In other words, viewing war with the sociological imagination involves looking at not only the struggles of a civilian or combatant, but at the overarching network of cause and effect that generate conditions for war. On the other hand, because ‘American Sniper’ centres so strongly on Chris Kyle’s experience, it completely ignores why the war occurred in the first place – the social, economic and political forces driving the American and Iraqi sides respectively, the type of political climate and leadership that is prevalent in the war, and so on. Presenting the actual conditions that created the war is not one of the purposes of ‘American Sniper’, and this is extremely obvious in how the rationale for the war is a broad, oversimplified generalisation of ‘evil’.

The reasons for the war that ‘American Sniper’ puts forth is that Iraqi combatants are unreasonably ‘evil’, while the American combatants are the bearers of justice to mete this evil. This could be seen in the presentation of specific individuals like the fictional ‘butcher’ and Kyle’s arch-nemesis ‘Mustafa’, which are the few faces that audiences see of the Iraqi’s side of the war, from which audiences form an understanding of Iraqi combatants in general. The ‘butcher’ and ‘Mustafa’ are the 2 most prominent Iraqi characters who are combatants, and while the film does make an effort to present several Iraqi characters in a sympathetic light (the children in the film, for instance, or the family that shared information to the soldiers), the ‘butcher’ and ‘Mustafa’ are indisputably bloodthirsty and unjustifiably violent. Since these 2 characters form the basis from which audiences view Iraqi combatants, audiences are likely to believe their motives to be a generalised ‘evil’ – that is, a cruel ignorance of others’ suffering in the pursuit of their (unexplained) goals. This rationalises the entire ‘War on Terror’, and Chris Kyle’s actions in the film. Thus, the film creates what I feel is an incomplete understanding of the Iraq war, for it ignores the effect of war on other victims and the structures that created the war in the first place.

Last week during ASTU, we had a lightning round in class about what comes to our mind whenever we think of poetry. As I was waiting for my turn to come, the only thing I could think of was that poetry is basically just words on a page. But the question made me think, later, about what I really think poetry and other forms of written writing is.

All forms of writing, including poetry, are just forms of communication from the writer to the reader. Unlike other forms of communication, I suppose, the primary physical mechanism of written language is its ink on a page, which can extend to the sounds it creates when spoken aloud. But what is most important about poetry in the current era, I think, is the vastness of meaning that it can convey. This is because as a genre, it is unbound by reasoning or logic, or strictness of form. In this way, poetry is a realm of freedom. I say this because the meanings of words in poetry, I think, are stretched beyond the meanings you can find for them in a dictionary. When used in a poem, words take on different meanings than they would have taken in other forms of written language, for readers of poetry are encouraged to look beyond grammatical and vocabulary rules and instead for their own personal interpretation of the words.

This freedom, of course, can be manipulated or misunderstood. Poems like “Photograph from September 11” and “In Flanders Fields” can be used as nationalist propaganda that makes it difficult for people to understand the precarity Judith Butler describes. Like any form of media, they can be used by a few to further an agenda. The poem “An Arundel Tomb” was misunderstood by many friends I know as a testament to perpetual romantic love, when its meaning was the exact opposite.

What is most important and interesting about poetry to me is how deeply it can evoke a certain emotion or thought, which can render a poem dear to us or memorable for the rest of our lives. Neil Gaiman wrote in his introduction to Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” that the book, or all stories in general, “is about what you find between its pages”; and I find this quote quite fitting in the realm of poetry.

Obasan, often categorized as a work of historical fiction, is a book that is rooted in a specific, pressing matter that is important to Kogawa and her community. While literature students are no stranger to books that revolve around serious themes relevant to reality – like “The Great Gatsby” and “1984” that serve as social commentaries and critiques of human nature – Obasan is unique because it is linked to the specific political action of addressing past and present racism in Canada. This can be seen in the very last part of the book, which is an excerpt from a 1946 letter written by the Co-operative Committee on Japanese Canadians. The entire book voices out against racism in the system and in the community, and seeks to incite action to address this issue, which was unlike any book I know.

When I was reading the book, I could not fully grasp how pressing and relevant the book’s themes were to Canadian society at that point in time. As engaging as it was, there was an imaginative distance between the issues raised in the book and what I understood. It was only during the trip to the Kogawa Fonds that I began to better understand how much gravity the book held as a reflection of society and personal trauma. My group was assigned to a folder containing letters from readers of Obasan, so I was able to read several readers’ direct responses. The writers of a few of these letters expressed how the novel evoked deep introspection and emotional response while they were reading it. Another group read a series of newspaper clippings written in response to the book. The amount of responses generated by the book is a testament to its relevance and weight in the community at that time. The letters to the people in power in the political arena at that time,  including the then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau, gave further political weight to the book, for we can see how Kogawa was actively trying to address systemic racism and allow Canada to face its own history. Overall, the field trip made me view the book as part of a larger movement for acceptance of diversity, instead of a singular novel.

Seeing these fan letters, rejection letters from publishers and letters to people of political standing helped me better understand Kogawa beyond her position as an author – she was also a determined activist with initiative, and much more. I believe that books are means of communication, with authors wording their message on paper and ink and the recipients of these messages free to interpret the message for ourselves. However, readers do not often imagine who the author is behind the veil of the book – we do not have much to get to know the author by. Seeing the Fonds – the writing drafts, the letters to people of political importance and so on – really helped me better construct an image of Kogawa as the person behind the novel.

Ultimately, the books and the impact they generate influence the author as well, and sometimes in painful ways. Seeing Kogawa receive responses to her book and take action in her community reminded me of Iris Chang, the writer of “The Rape of Nanking”, a non-fiction book about the Nanking massacre of 1937. Iris Chang, whose grandparents were directly affected by the massacre, committed suicide at the age of 37. Her suicide is suspected to be connected to the traumatic effect the historical accounts of the massacre had on her, as well as a growing paranoia that politicians ordered constant surveillance on her. An article written by a close friend of Chang’s, Paula Kamen, states:

“In her last call to Kamen, Chang had alluded to highly placed people who didn’t like her once again digging into Japanese atrocities during World War II.”

“[The book] had been denounced by the Japanese ambassador to the U.S., and caricatures of Chang appeared in right-wing Japanese newspapers.”

Both Iris Chang and Kogawa sought to address less well-known atrocities committed in the past. Unfortunately, sometimes the act of unearthing traumatic moments in the past can prove detrimental to those determined to speak about it, especially if the people in power wish for that past to remain buried. Kogawa’s and Chang’s actions are admirable to me because they require no small amount of bravery and grit in the name of exhuming a traumatic past that others wish to be silenced.

Last week, part of our ASTU groupwork involved reading an article by Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian-born French artist, in which Satrapi condemns the proposed French ban of conspicuous religious symbols, including the hijab, in schools. Much of my understanding of Islam comes from the Muslims I interact with back home in Malaysia and Singapore, so this topic made me reflect about attitudes towards Muslim standards of clothing in a modern society.

Many modern Muslim women have stated that they “freely chose to wear the hijab”, but what does it truly mean to have freedom of choice anyway? As we learnt in Sociology class, our actions are not entirely made autonomously, but influenced by society and its institutions – our family, religion, class and nation. How apt is the word “freely” when women say they “freely chose” to wear the veil?

In an article published by Huffington Post, writer Kayla Greaves allows 7 Muslim women living modern lifestyles to voice their personal beliefs on the topic of “Faith, fashion and modesty”. Amongst them is Asma Karimi, a fashion business student, who states:

By wearing the hijab I am not conforming to the societal beauty standards that are set for me to follow as a young woman. Rather, it is my way of resisting the negative social and political backlash as well as the societal expectations of how I should look or dress as a woman. In fact, wearing the hijab makes me feel beautiful, confident and resilient.

Fahmida Kahmali, who works at the Ontario government, says that:

Both within and outside my community, there are those who think a Muslim woman should dress a certain way — that is, not be interested in looking good. But that’s unfair to both the religion of Islam and Muslim women. There is a saying, hadith, from the Prophet Muhammad, ‘God is beautiful and He loves beauty.’ When the Prophet was asked, ‘What if someone likes that his clothing and his shoes are beautiful?’ the Prophet replied, ‘Allah loves to see the effects of His grace upon His servant.’

Also quoted in the article is Fatma Othman, who says:

There are so many pressures to being a hijabi — as if how you dress is directly indicative of how religious you might be. That’s not really the case, my relationship with God is exactly that, my relationship with God. I know my hijab makes me visibly Muslim — and I’m proud of that. It makes me even stronger in my faith. But just because I wear the hijab doesn’t mean I make more trips to the mosque than the girl who doesn’t wear one.

The women mentioned above (and many other Muslim women I know personally) wear the hijab for various reasons. An underlying feature under the surface of these various reasons is the desire to show that their religion can co-exist with their personal desires, whether it is showing their identity as a Muslim while signifying a certain level of defiance in her individuality, or allowing their personal desire for style to supersede the traditional, possibly misinterpreted standards of Muslim wear. They seem to have, interestingly, found freedom of expression in a garment that many believe is representative of oppression and restriction.

The aforementioned Muslim women are lucky enough to have a degree of freedom in being able to create a personal interpretation of their religion by themselves, instead of having someone else try to forcefully impose a certain perspective onto them. And although their decisions may be subconsciously influenced by social institutions, perhaps the freedom from societal influences here is slightly oversubscribed. I personally think it is hard for people to separate themselves from the way they were brought up – to distance themselves from a social institution that has influenced their actions and beliefs all their life, and I personally do not expect everyone to be able to.

For now, I can only hope that the day will come when Muslim women in more conservative societies will be able to express themselves through fashion without fear of persecution or death.

The first article my Arts Studies class had to read this term was titled “Youths, trauma and memorialization: The selfie as witnessing” by Kate Douglas. In it, Douglas describes how many people, especially the general media audience, vilify selfies taken at memorials of traumatic events, like smiling selfies taken at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. However, Douglas provides an alternative point of view to look at such “Selfies at serious places”; she posits that selfies are a new form of witnessing memorials of traumatic events that “[deserve] a more nuanced treatment” and do not necessarily indicate youths’ narcissism and ignorance.

While I am sincerely glad that there is an adult out there that believes that youths such as myself should not be characterized as having narcissism and ignorance as a defining trait, I think we cannot ignore the fact that there are indeed many young people, especially those who are frequent users of social media, who are pretty ignorant and narcissistic. Let’s consider the intention behind the selfies taken by young people at historical trauma sites – do the selfie-takers really think of the traumatic history at the point of the photograph? Is it likely that, at any point of their trip to such places of death, they fully considered the history that had occurred there?

For humanity’s sake, I hope the thought crossed their minds at least several times during their trip. But even so, does that emotion or thought last long in their memory? Do they actually think of the implications and causes of such gruesome crimes against humanity? And I also think it is quite probable that there are some who visit without even stopping to consider the bloody history that had taken place there.

The theme of trauma memorialization reminded of the university’s ritual of reciting and listening to how it was built on the “traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Musqueam people”, and is linked to Canada’s bloody history of conquest and colonization. No doubt there is a solemn air and a respectful silence when those words are said, but it is hard to prove that all or, at least, most students that actually fully try to comprehend this, or even think about it every now and then.

I do believe there is a lack of rumination about historical trauma in the current generation, and the selfie-taking incidents Douglas describes are a mere symptom of it. That brings us to the question of why this is the case.

A big part of it is attributable to the limitation of second-hand witnessing – that is, the difference between empathy and experience. Empathy definitely results in a less permanent impact, with people lacking the sensory and emotional experience of such trauma to effectively make them think deeply about it. Feeling and seeing do not often result in believing or understanding, and imagine as we may, we cannot ever simulate the actual horrifying experiences that firsthand witnesses do.

It is easy to display respect and act out behaviour that signifies respect on the outside, but we have to actually think of we’re doing such rituals. And the act of actually thinking about the dark parts of humanity’s history is arguably more important than the ritual we perform to memorialise it; the ritual is intended as a means for us to understand, but we must first allow ourselves to immerse ourselves in imagining it.

But is this phenomenon one that is specific to the young generation of the present? Would earlier generations of youth also perform similar behaviour? A more sinister hypothesis for the reason behind this behaviour occurred to me during my thinking process –  one that is specific to the current generation of youth in particular.

I was wondering if modern technology, particularly our cellphones, could partially be responsible for a lack of empathy in today’s youth. Upon conducting a simple Google search, I came upon an article by Katrina Schwartz that suggests that the growing incapability of young people to focus, caused by the advent of extremely advanced, grossly profitable and highly distracting cellphones, may be hindering our ability to empathise. The article quotes “Focus: the Hidden Driver of Excellence” by Daniel Goleman, renowned science journalist for the behavioural sciences and former lecturer at Harvard University. His views, which I mostly agree with, are better read in his voice than mine, and I quote:

“The circuitry for paying attention is identical for the circuits for managing distressing emotion,”

Schwarz then expounds this by stating:

“The area of the brain that governs focus and executive functioning is known as the pre-frontal cortex. This is also the part of the brain that allows people to control themselves, to keep emotions in check and to feel empathy for other people.”

Goleman also says that:

“Children I’m particularly worried about because the brain is the last organ of the body to become anatomically mature. It keeps growing until the mid-20s.”

Personally, I am ashamed to admit that sometimes I act this way too.

When we read that “youths are ignorant” and “youths are narcissistic”, it is sometimes hard to place ourselves in this libelled group of young people – people don’t like to think badly of themselves, I think, and sometimes they’re more busy overtly defending themselves than actually thinking about whether they’re at fault too. It may be hard to break out of the norms and habits that have been sowed in us simply by being born in this type of society in a particular technological age, especially if they are due to the physiology and biology of our brain, as stated by Goleman above, but the fight to do so would definitely be a noble one. It would take some seriously committed change in habits, one that will definitely be gradual, but it is one that I would like to undertake.