Hello readers. Recently, our ASTU class had time to watch movie American Sniper directed by Clint Eastwood. This film was portraying Iraq War through the perspective of American Sniper, Chris Kyle. Based on the real character, American Sniper generally glorify the character of Chris Kyle with patriotism and comradeship. Then again, American Sniper maintained its neutrality towards Iraq War. I would explore some of the scenes from American Sniper that I felt intriguing.

The character of Chris Kyle was portrayed as “hero” in the film. After 9/11 terror, Chris Kyle enlisted in American Navy Seal with burning anger towards enemy and patriotism towards one’s nation. This talented sniper soon became “legend” when he was sent as troops. In the film, there was the contrary role of Chris Kyle who was a sniper of Iraqi people called Mustafa. These two characters have the same role as a sniper on one’s side, but contradicting appraisals of “legend” and “evil” are following them on one’s side. In Iraqi’s side Chris is “evil” and in American’s side Chris is “legend.”

As the major role of the story focuses on the character of a sniper, Chris’s perspective towards war was projected through the scope of the gun. He was in the war but looking at a distance as the sniper. He watched enemies through the scope at the distance and killed them at the distance. When Chris Kyle hold rifle instead of a sniper rifle and went to the battlefields, he is drawn into a war. The scene that he saw, the noise that he heard from the battlefields were vicious and chaotic. What Chris experienced on the battlefield were contradictory to the battlefield that he saw through the scope where all emotions and noises remain silent.

His experiences were not only remained in the battlefields but also continued to harassing him even when he came back home. Suffering from PTSD, Chris was unable to entirely came back to his home but fighting on the battlefield in his mind. Chris choose to help war veterans and kept his role as “father,” “husband,” and “veteran” until he died by the gun of the war veteran who Chris tried to help. In the last scene, Chris’s wife Taya was gaze Chris and war veteran through a chink in the door. Two war veterans and heroes, who were seen in Taya’s perspective were projected differently: one as an attentive father and the other as the war veteran who lives in a reality that is the war to him.

Hello readers, this week we have read and explored the poetry especially the poem of Juliana Spahr’s “This Connection of Everyone with Lungs.” Juliana Spahr’s poem was the first poem that I read in this year, and it has been two years since I read my last poem. Throughout the history, the genre of poetry has the long history. People enjoyed reading of poetry as modern people read novels and fictions. Beowulf, the oldest surviving poem today, was an epic poem that people enjoyed heard or tell a story. Sonet 18 by William Shakespeare is well-known poem even in today that portrays one’s love towards the woman. Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri is still considered as one of the greatest works of world literature. Compare to poetry’s long history and influences in literature history, the modern world doesn’t enjoy reading as much as people did before. Nevertheless, people still write poem and school teaching poem, make us read the poem. If people don’t enjoy and don’t look for a poem as much as we did in the past, why do we still need poetry?

I believe we still need poetry because human’s emotion is full of complex fragments and we still need boundless imaginations to explore our emotion. In the modern world, people speak what they need to speak, people learn what they need to learn, people memorize what they need to memorize, but there are less and fewer people imagining things, thinking outside of the box. Imaginations are significant and unique work that only humans can do. People imagine new things, new world, then we think, we plan, and we perform: this is how we have survived from history. Imagination germinates from words, language. More words mean more knowledge. More words and more knowledge help people to imagine more and explore furthers. Imagination is a foundation to frame topic and story. Word is an essential component to express one’s story and emotions. Those two essential components – imagination and word – are not just significant in writing poem, but also in living in the modern world and survive from the world.

All human always carries emotion. Different situation, different ages evoke a different emotion. Emotion makes the person perfect, but also imperfect. We feel emotion, we want to express that whether in facial emotion, in behavior, or in words. We often share our emotions in words. However, sometimes too many words degenerate original emotions. Poetry, compare to novels, required fewer words. Both poem and novel convey one’s imaginations and emotions. The only difference is that poem is using fewer words and its words are containing implications. Through poetry, we can convey and share our emotion with implicative and symbolic words. These make poetry as pure and suitable to express one’s emotion.

In the modern world, poetry considers as a complicate genre to write and to read compared to other genres. However, poetry is authentic literature genre that requires skillful words, boundless imaginations and conveys one’s original emotions. Poetry is most suitable and necessary literature in this century where fastness and indifferences become more common.

This week, I went to explore the special exhibition at the Museum of Anthropology called Amazonia: The Rights of Nature. This special exhibition featured traditional and cultural inventories such as Amazonian basketry, textiles, carvings, featherworks, and ceramics which each individual represented Indigenous communities and cultural ceremonies.

Amazonia exhibition was extremely intriguing and interested enough to attract various audiences not just including UBC students, but also children or parents as an educational purpose. The entire exhibition contained and told gripping stories including their history and cultures, but one object attracted my attention. It was one of the first few exhibits that I saw when I first entered the exhibit. It was a wooden doll that looked like a toy for children. The only difference with other ordinary toys was the wooden doll was designed with body paints that the drawings were covered the entire body of this wooden doll including the face.

The explanation provided some background information about this doll that this wooden doll was designed to used as girls’ toys, but also for practice body paints on real skin.

As this doll grab my special attention among other exhibits, I wanted to know further about this doll, especially the body paints. Why Amazonian people had to practice body paints on the doll? What’s the meaning or symbolism of those designs?

Many indigenous people performed body decoration as their rituals. Among many Amazonian people, Shipibo people are well-known for their body paints, especially on their face. The intriguing and curved designs of body paints cover Shipibo people’s faces, clothing, and ceramics. In Shipibo rituals, body paints are the primary way of representing their identities, and also represents their hope towards health and beauty. The wooden doll and ceramics usually wear body paint on their full body, but Shipibo people don’t paint their full bodies, but only faces necks or the tops of their hands and feet.

Sources

Agostino, Christopher. “Shipibo – Conibo – Stetebo: Patterns Cover the Universe .” The Story behind the Faces, thestorybehindthefaces.com/tag/shipibo-conibo-people/.

“Amazonia: The Rights of Nature.” Museum of Anthropology at UBC, moa.ubc.ca/portfolio_page/amazonia/.

The Second World War – most horrified catastrophe triggered by racism and prejudice in world history – resulted from millions of deaths, economic loss, and chaos. The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, not just altered the flow of the WW2 and the fate of Japanese Canadian and Japanese American.

The attack on Pearl Harbor created trepidation among North American society which ended with relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians. They were banished from their home and moved to internment camps. Those unfair situations and wounds have remained to people. Some people captivated by past memories, and some people wanted to forget and move on. Among those people, there were people who want to convey their message of not forgetting and speak out their resentment through the different genre.

Joy Nozomi Kogawa, a Japanese Canadian poet, and novelist were one of the people who experienced relocation during WW2. In Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan, Joy Kogawa portrayed her childhood during WW2 and two different perspectives towards past trauma – keeping silence and speaking out – through two different characters: Aunt Emily and Obasan. Joy Kogawa not just stop after her novel was published, but also continued to speak out for Japanese Canadians and their societies by sending various letters to government and prime minister. Several letters were contained request of welfare for Japanese Canadian and Joy Kogawa’s message of moving on from the trauma, but not forgetting the past. Joy Kogawa is using her ability and the genre of novel to help Japanese Canadian.

George Takei, an American actor, director, and author, also used his talent of acting and the genre of the musical to convey his message. The Broadway musical, “Allegiance” is contained the story of the internment of Japanese Americans by the attack on Pearl Harbor. George Takei was on the stage as the WW2 veteran looking back on his youth: moved to the internment camp with force. Similar to Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan, “Allegiance” was also inspired by the personal experiences of George Takei and portrayed two different perspectives – moving on and keep living with the past – through two different characters: Kei and Sam. By performing in this musical, George Takei also conveyed his message of moving on from the past trauma but not forgetting the past.

Joy Kogawa and George Takei, these two different people with different background and culture shared similar trauma: relocation of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians by Pearl Harbor Attack. They had overcome their past trauma from painful history and chose to speak out to convey their message of not forgetting as much as they could by using their ability and different genre.

Fear, the emotion that every people has been experiencing, is most primitive emotion that human has developed through several evolutions. Fear changes people. Fear makes people weak. Fear makes people emotional. Fear makes people agitational. People feel fear from different subjects. Numerous and various things trigger fear to people and every individual expresses their fear differently.

In ASTU 100 class, our class has been reading the comic book, Persepolis – The Story of a Childhood which contains author’s personal experience of her childhood during Iranian Revolution. Marji – the representation of author in the story – witnessing public issues, political regime, war, acts of violence from her childhood memory through her comic book. As the story situated in the revolution and war, the fear is the emotion that Marji and characters always carry with their everyday life.

Throughout the book, different aspects of fear can be observed: fear of death, fear of losing people, fear of losing a country. In the story, those fears exist around characters like the oxygen, and it seems unnatural to not observing the fear in the story. It was quite interesting to observe how different characters express fear differently and how they change.

Considering fear as one of the instinct that human has, feeling fear makes human to reveal their innate characteristics and makes human to protect one’s most precious things: whether is the object, family, or oneself. When a fire breaks out in the house, a fire makes people feel the fear of death. Therefore, people usually ran to protect something that they consider as most precious in the world. For people who ran out from the house: one’s life. For the mother who ran to her children: her children. For the husband who ran to her wife: his lover. For mistress who ran to her room: her jewels.

I could find how fear changes human by reading Persepolis. As it was based on author’s – Marjane Satrapi – the personal memoir of Iranian Revolution, the descriptions and illustrations came as the fact and truth from Marji’s perspective. When the bomb had hit Marji’s street during the war, the illustrations expressed the fear of losing family.

The fear of losing mother – for Marji – and daughter – for Marji’s mother – clearly illustrated in the frame. The black background of the frame – before Marji met her mother – showed the fear and frustration of Marji’s concern of losing her mother. The barefoot of Marji’s mother showed how desperately she escaped from bombing and looking for her daughter, Marji.

Contrasting to Marji and her mother’s situation, there was also the situation where the fear makes people reveal one’s innate characteristics. When the sirens started to wail during the celebration party of the newborn baby, Marji’s aunt was seized by the fear of death that overpowered “maternal instinct” and abandoned her own baby.

The illustrations expressed how fear manifest human’s innate characteristics. I couldn’t judge whether the character’s – Marji’s aunt – an action was selfish or not, it clearly showed her aunt was caring more about herself than her own baby and how influential the fear is to human that make someone abandon “maternal instinct.”

The fear is primary instinct of human to survive. It is existing everywhere and every second around people. Fear not just alert the critical danger to survive but it also disclose your innate personality whether is good or bad. Whether how influential and powerful the fear is, it’s one’s responsibility to evoke this fear or moreover overcome.

Sources:

              Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. Vol. 1, Pantheon, 2004.           

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