Hello and welcome back from a much needed reading break! With the end of yet another semester approaching deadlines are quickly catching up and first on the list is my ASTU research essay. My chosen topic focuses on War journalism and western media’s often superficial portrayal of war, in order to support this I explored Joe Sacco’s graphic narrative Safe Area Gorazde which is set in Eastern Bosnia. In the narrative Sacco gives a personal account of his time in Gorazde while reflecting on his own flawed approach to war journalism.

The book itself is packed with prime examples of this personal reflection and critique by Sacco himself but one particular scene caught my eye on pages 26-28, the introduction to another journalist, Serif. Although Serif and Sacco have the same profession you immediately are exposed to how different they are, Serif is a Turkish national who has risked her safety and wellbeing multiple times for the sake of her work which is a stark contrast to most American/western journalists who all arrive to their destinations with army escorts and total safety in mind.  The experience of American journalists is one of fantasy as their trips are fogged with a false sense of reality because of their 5 star treatment in order to keep them safe. Sarif’s tales of witnessing friends die in combat and her efforts to evacuate children to Turkey mesmerize the other Journalists as they reflect on their own cushiony experience in Gorazde. Sarif is an example of a Journalist that didn’t just visit the torn down city for a week then write a superficial article on the war, but actually became involved in the people’s suffering during the time of war itself and made sure to do something about it, immersing herself into the experience of the local people and the tragedies they endured.

I would also like to note that I do not believe every journalist now needs to become directly involved in battle and risk their lives everyday, but exposing the complete contrast between national and western journalists really helps to show just how disconnected people can become from such tragedies if their entire experience is one of comfort just for the sake of their own safety, Sarif now has a much more in depth and personal account of the tragedies of Western Bosnia and can now more accurately educate the rest of the world on the peoples awful and terrifying experiences in war.

Hello everyone, this week in ASTU 100 we connected our recent studies to an excerpt from Judith Butler’s, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Particularly, we focused on her first chapter Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect, which highlights the precariousness of life and which lives we see as precarious. I found this incredibly relevant to today’s new drama in Trump’s America where a travel ban has been placed on several different countries of people which are seen to be dangerous to Americans.

This ridiculous ban included nationals of these countries as well as valid green card holders, because of the ban many people were refused entry into the USA which obviously caused a large stir due to outrage on the fact that they are banning people from returning to their own home. This reflects people’s views on which lives are precarious and which aren’t to them, one particular quote from Butler really connects to todays very controversial “war on terror”, “[if] certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense” (1). I believe this quote actually helps people like me (who are against the travel ban) to understand why some people would be for it. Because of the war on terror which started along with George W. Bush’s “Us vs. Them” speech the American people have been made to think the people in countries such as Iran, Iraq and so on are “Them” and want to hurt the American people and must be stopped. This has caused devastation and absolute destruction in these area’s where thousands have been killed, so why don’t the American people see this as wrong? Because, as Butler would say, they do not see these people’s lives as precarious so it’s not that they don’t care about people dying but simply don’t see their lives as lives at all!

News and Media have shaped the way many people see the middle east and that has caused a large cycle of violence due to many’s inability to connect with the people being effected. The American people (some) support this ban and the war on terror simply because they have been made to think the lives of those in these “terror” countries aren’t really lives at all, they are unable to put themselves into these people’s position. I believe Judith Butlers point on precarious life is important and it helps to put everyone on the same page, instead of me seeing people supporting the travel ban as “evil” I can understand their perspective which helps in talking to such people without being so divided in ideas.

Welcome back!

Term two has begun and so far we have finished our second graphic novel in ASTU 100, The first being Persepolis based on the Iraq war and the newest being Safe Area Gorazde based on the war in Eastern Bosnia. While both are similar in genre they vary in a number of ways, from drawing style to tone and audience. Persepolis was a more simple story, which highlighted the adolescent life of narrator Marji and her experiences living through the Iraq War. This Graphic novel has a very simplistic drawing style as author, Satrapi, felt graphic violence would distract from the child-like innocence and tone. Safe Area Gorazde on the other hand has quite a different drawing style which is very graphic and detailed while also keeping a monochromatic colour scheme. This may be because writer and journalist, Sacco, intended the book to be an exposure to something thats not talked about enough, the war in Eastern Bosnia.

The audience intended for Safe Area Gorazde is much different from Persepolis as it is written from the perspective of a Journalist, living in a war refuge in Bosnia, who finds himself distracted with drinking and women while also keeping up with a very gruesome, under-reported war. This very honest representation of his time in Bosnia is used as a tool to expose our media industry which is being bashed in recent years because of constant dramatization and occasional lying for ratings and views.

I don’t believe theres a right or wrong way to create a graphic novel and instead I think each novel, while similar in genre had their own reasons for choosing such different drawing styles. I agree with Satrapi’s choice to use simplistic drawings since graphic violence would take away from her intensions of the book. But I also see why Sacco chose to draw in such graphic detail, his audience is more adult and the intention for the book was to be an exposure, of both the media and of a war which almost seemed forgotten.

This last week of class has been an absolute blur but all the deadlines and exams were pleasantly interrupted with a little field trip to UBC’s rare books and special collections library in IKB which is a library containing many special collections connecting to Joy Kogawa’s, Obasan. Because we’ve been studying the novel in ASTU 100 we appropriately were shown many different artifacts that the library contains which are connected to when the novel was being published and what the public had to say. Each of us were put in groups and given a different folder that all contained different Obasan artifacts, I was given newspaper articles which came out right around the time the book was being published. The articles were from both Canadian and American newspapers and all had a very similar subject which was to teach people about Japanese Internment in order to get a better back story when reading.

This particular article shown above caught my attention as it was released by The Ubyssey, UBC’s Newspaper. It was fascinating to see how people were initially reacting to Kogawa’s Novel and especially interesting to see UBC’s own newspaper writing about it in that time, this just shows how important Obasan is to Canadian history and remembering Japanese Internment in BC.

What was also very interesting was how different the tones were in the Canadian and US articles, one of the US articles was almost in denial of America’s involvement in Japanese internment during WWII claiming what they did was nothing compared to what Canada did to the Japanese which I believe misses the point of the novel completely. In class we’ve been learning about memory and this novel works to shape the Japanese’s national memory within Canada and the US article further proves we live in a culture of forgetting.

Recently in ASTU 100 we’ve been focusing on a new topic which is all about academic culture and scholarly writing. Just to be honest, this probably wont be my favourite topic as it’s just a basic (kind of boring) introduction for us first year students to be able to understand this new culture we’re now in, academic culture. However, I am grateful our professor, Dr. Lugar has made the content much more interesting than just simply reading off of a textbook. I’ve realized this new culture of academic writing has almost an entirely new language, of course it’s all English, but just uses different meanings or interpretations for words I used to use differently.

One chapter in our textbook, “Academic Writing an Introduction”, that surprisingly caught my attention was chapter 6 which is all about orchestrating voices in writing. I find it pretty fascinating that writers have put so much thought into simply quoting other works, the fact that they connect the different people they’re quoting in their own writing is really interesting to me. This act of creating a relationship between other writers was definitely never something I really thought about, you assume what you’re writing wouldn’t require for you to also show relationships of other peoples writing as well, but the concept makes so much sense! For example, what’s talked about in section 6C in chapter 6 “The challenges of Non-Scholarly voices” (p.120), it makes so much sense to connect the two works cited because you can’t give the same credit to people who are writing in non-scholarly voices. This is simply because it makes it harder to know if that source is as reliable as a scholarly, peer reviewed one.

Another section that caught my attention was 6D which is about “Orchestrating Academic Textbooks and Popular writing” (p123). This section was almost like reading a textbook inception, I was reading a textbook, which was analyzing and defining textbooks, which are used to define, confusing right? This section really helped me see the bigger picture of the purpose of this topic in class, it was defining things for me that before were assumed to already be understood. For example, I was being given a definition of a textbook which is not usual as you assume students know what a textbook is. All these explanations are helping us to understand WHY we’re being told to write these essays or read these textbooks and WHAT their true purposes are. This helped put everything in perspective for me and almost makes me more confident for the future as I don’t seem so lost in this new “strange” world I’m in now going from high school to university level academics.

Sources:

Giltrow, Janet, Richard Gooding, Daniel Burgoyne, and Marlene Sawatsky. Academic Writing: An Introduction. 3rd ed. Toronto: Broadview, 2014. Print.

 The first two weeks of ASTU 100 at University of British Colombia consisted of going through our first text, a graphic narrative written by Marjane Satrapi titled Persepolis. This comic styled narrative contains Satrapis memories of living in Iran as a child during difficult times to show the new western world she lives in a new perspective on her home country. One specific aspect of Persepolis that I noticed immediately (because it’s in the beginning of the book) is the first chapter, “The Veil”. This introduction to the comic immediately changed my perspective on the idea of the Hijab and what I thought I knew about it. Satrapi explains basically that it wasn’t her choice to start wearing the Hijab at her school and that many of the children were confused by it and her images immediately made the whole idea of a Hijab more “human” to me, in other words made me see it as more innocent and simple as I saw the image of the children playing with it on page 1.

This first chapter especially reminded me of events occurring today such as all the drama in France surrounded around the “birkini”. This particular event reported here, (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/24/french-police-make-woman-remove-burkini-on-nice-beach) shows french policemen making a women remove her clothing that resembled the “birkini” which of course sparked outrage throughout the internet and social medias. Basically, France has a ban on the “birkini” on public beaches as it’s seen as a danger in public, France also has a ban on any sort of veil or muslim dress/covering in public schools. Comparing these two instances, one where a young girl is forced to wear a veil and another where a women is forced to not wear that same veil or “covering” is actually quite confusing. I find myself at a cross roads when trying to assert my opinion because when it comes to the situation in Persepolis I do not want Marji to be forced to such extreme values created by islamic radicals but in the case of the women in France I am outraged that wearing the same veil is illegal, shouldn’t everyone be able to express their own values freely? This caused me to think of the idea of a Hijab from different angles and wonder what my real opinion of it was.