I have been focusing on the 2014 film American Sniper in several recent assignments in ASTU because I think that it discusses several themes and concepts relevant to the class in a unique and interesting way. While I have significant gripes with the political goals of the film, I see the merit it has in being used to analyze the “American worldview” and the connection to war that is inevitably connected to that. The Iraq War was long and countless lives were destroyed by it, for seemingly little purpose. However, as time moves on, each additional life lost means less and less, leaving us at a point where “enemy” deaths often mean next to nothing.

This film, potentially unintentionally, covers several concepts relevant to our class, such as the normalization of violence in modern society. The world is different than it used to be, and this is highlighted by the idealization of a man like Chris Kyle who earned endless praise for being the deadliest sniper of all time, a title that in my opinion should be a stain on one’s record, not an achievement.

A connection can be made between the film and one of our early articles from first term, “Youth, trauma and memorialisation: The selfie as witnessing” by Kate Douglas. Douglas discusses the rising trend of “dark selfies” and how that concept connects to ideas of memorialization and collective memory. The notion that our society has gotten so detached and postmodern that young people feel completely comfortable to take and post a selfie at Pearl Harbor or Ground Zero can be tied together to the normalization of violence in today’s world. This connects to the ideas brought up from watching American Sniper, in that our society is collectively becoming desensitized to large-scale death, as well as the emergence of violence as a “cool” thing that deserved to be admired.

Connections could also be made to other texts on our syllabus, one of these being the graphic narrative “Persepolis”. This book gives an alternative perspective on times of war, from the viewpoint of a young girl living in Iran throughout the Islamic Revolution. “Persepolis” displays collective trauma of Iranian society and normalizes life in the Middle East to an audience with likely preconceived notions on Iran in their minds. As Marji grows up in a world surrounded by war, it becomes the only thing she knows. Close family friends are taken prisoners of war and violence takes over the streets. Regardless of the terrible things happening in her country, Marji continues to live her life surrounded by the chaos. I see this as a counter perspective to that of Chris Kyle. The human side of war is highlighted and allows the reader to see what life in a unstable country is truly like.

Throughout this year in ASTU and CAP, we have learned so much about what is “global citizenship.” In my opinion, I see the concept as meaning that we, as a society, must work towards taking responsibility for others across all borders. As the world becomes increasingly globalized, borders will become more and more meaningless. I see the mindset in all these texts of war being just a normal part of life as being highly problematic, as it demonstrates a lack of care for other people that should be instinctive in our societal nature. The idea that a human being’s death, let alone that of hundreds of thousands of people, can be seen as an inevitable consequence of a conflict in modern times is fundamentally wrong. If we want to become a truly global world, people must stop seeing the other as Chris Kyle saw them– through the scope of a gun–and see them as normal people in different circumstances.

If I’m being quite honest, I have never cared much for poetry. Every year in school growing up, there came a time in english class when the teacher would introduce the poetry unit to the dismay of myself and many others. I saw it as monotonous and confusing, as well as highly unrelatable. Topics were often those related to love and sadness, and I struggled to connect to these ideas as a suburban prepubescent boy without a fairytale romance in my life.

Recently in ASTU, we have begun reading poetry centered around the attacks on September 11 and its aftermath in the US and abroad. This experience has been different for me than prior exposures to poetry, particularly because I feel like the subject material is more relatable to my life than a boring love story. While I was a young child in 2001 and did not have a direct connection to the attacks, I grew up in America throughout the aftermath and felt the effects quite heavily. The Iraq War was ongoing throughout my years in elementary and middle school, and I heard a lot about it living right near Washington, DC. Every year in school we would have a large memorial service on the anniversary of the attacks, with survivors and military officials in attendance. I vividly remember how strict airport security got in the early 2000s–one time my mom forgot a camera at a chair while in the bathroom, and the airport security destroyed it due to its potential to be explosive. While I do not have strong memories of a pre-9/11 world, I do remember all of the changes that came from it.

The ability of poems to depict collective trauma and shared memory, such as that seen in Juliana Spahr’s short book “This connection of everyone with lungs,” has given me a new perspective on the value of poetry. I strongly relate to the feelings she expresses throughout her poems–the anger of ever increasing senseless military operations throughout 2002/2003, the sadness at the rising xenophobia in the US, and much more. These feelings are a part of the collective memory of many Americans, and sadly still persist to this day. Her poetry isn’t in the form of a sonnet, or a form of repetitive drawn out rhyme (her first poem is actually quite repetitive in all fairness). She writes in a way that I feel like I can understand, and I can see the pain she feels watching the direction the world is heading. The feeling of defeat, knowing that so much harm is being done by the country you call home, is quite disheartening. In writing about topics like this, it could easily come across quite sulky and hopeless, however in Spahr’s poems I feel a sense of hope through the darkness that is really inspiring.

I don’t understand why poetry is taught in high school with sonnets and love poems. It seems as if students are being trained to dislike it from a young age. I know it sounds cliche, but the poetry we’ve read in this class has actually made me rethink my opinions on the genre and want to give it a second chance.

As one enters the Amazonia exhibit in the UBC Museum of Anthropology, they read of the balanced relationship between the rainforest and the humans that live within it. The lifestyle of the Indigenous peoples is based upon the ideas of respecting nature and maintaining a deep connection to it. These values serve as a backdrop to the entire exhibit, providing insight into the rainforest’s current status and the issues it faces.

Throughout my time spent at exhibit, I was able to observe many beautiful artifacts from the world’s largest rainforest, as well as learn a great deal about the region’s ancient cultures. As described on the MOA website, there are “unsuspected relationships between Vancouver and Amazonian peoples [and] ideas,” and I found this indeed to be quite accurate.

The object I have chosen to focus on is a headdress from the Kayapo (Mebengokre) people. This dazzling display features hundreds of dark blue feathers, woven together into one traditional garb. Aside from its aesthetically pleasing nature, the headdress represents much more about the people of Kayapo and the connection with Vancouver.

As noted below the artifact, Vancouver residents travelled to Brazil together with a leader from the tribe to help in the fight against the future construction of a hydroelectric dam in their territory. This struggle to save the rainforest and protect native peoples’ lands is an issue that people from Vancouver can relate to, as we face similar ones. The process of reparations is an ongoing one in BC, however the struggles in places such as Brazil appear to be much more urgent with far-reaching repercussions. It is invaluable to have Vancouver residents helping out to try and ensure that injustices do not continue to occur like they have here. This headdress represents this relationship, and thus this is why I chose to focus on it.

I found the large white wall focusing on the industrial side of the Amazon rather interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, I was quite shocked at many of the statistics I was reading, such as the fact that “84% of the Peruvian Amazon’s surface area is dedicated to oil production,” and that “80% of cases of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon are found within 30 km from paved roads.”

While I found these facts distressing, I was also considering Canadians’ perspectives when critiquing these issues. The deforestation in British Columbia due to logging is expansive and only continuing to grow. While I understand that facts regarding the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon are accurate and alarming, it comes across as somewhat hypocritical to be critiquing countries in South America for very similar practices that the forestry industry engages in here. In some sense, this adds to the relationship between the two areas, making it nuanced and more complicated.

One quote that struck me from the pamphlet I collected at the entrance to the exhibit reads as follows: “Everyone had the right to a healthy, protected and balanced environment.” (Constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia). This statement embodies the mindset that the people of the Amazon rainforest hold dear: maintaining a prosperous natural world is as fundamental as any other human right. Maybe if more people thought like this, the world would be a better place.

Most people put little to no thought into how the goods/services they utilize on a day to day basis come to be. Whether that is the labor of food service workers who make our meals, or the washing of public bathrooms by building management employees, there are many people working hard every day so that we can enjoy the small luxuries in our lives. While we all are subconsciously aware that this work is being done, it’s essentially invisible labor most of the time.

Similarly, the process of writing, especially extended pieces such as novels, is often seen as invisible labor by the average reader. When you pick up a book in a library, you don’t think of the potential years the author spent to get their stories and thoughts into a compact, sellable product. I recently got the chance to take a peek into this process through my university literature class.

We recently took a small field trip to the Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC) section of the Irving K. Barber Library to learn about the process Joy Kogawa went through while writing her novel Obasan. While at this extremely unique exhibit, we were given access to countless documents Kogawa used throughout her creative process, including some of her original storyboard notes, alternative drafts of chapters, and free writing from when she had writer’s block.

From studying these documents, my perspective on Kogawa and her book was fundamentally changed–I had gained a much deeper understanding as to how much labor went into the book. My partner and I were assigned several pages that were filled entirely with tiny, hard to read notes she wrote, attempting to create an outline for the basic storyline. We could see where she crossed things out and how her overall thought process went. It was far from simple and I struggled a lot to follow her train of thought.

Throughout my schooling experience, I have been assigned countless books to read, and they often feel like a major burden. The last thing I want to do is spend countless hours of my life reading something I am not particularly interested in. However, reading through Kogawa’s notes helped me truly appreciate all the work and effort that goes into writing a book, and it made me feel a bit bad for always resenting my teachers. It was especially touching, as this was a very personal matter to Kogawa. In one of her free writes which we also received, she described how intensely painful it was for her to go through this process of repeated remembering of trauma. Even though she still fully had all the memories, she had to work with them repeatedly and constantly be reminded of the hardships of her life. This really spoke to me and made me appreciate her process on a deeper level.

Social media has created new cultural norms of requiring photographic evidence of life events to “prove” you experienced them. The common phrase “pics or it didn’t happen” is a strong indicator of this. The constant need for validation from others has consumed us and is depriving us of our uniqueness. In her article for Psychology Today, Beverly Flaxington writes “pressure to be socially accepted and celebrated can be too much to handle, and can adversely affect the self-esteem of many social media users.” This diminished self-esteem causes many people to overshare on social media, losing sight of what is appropriate to post and what isn’t. I believe that the phenomenon of dark selfies is just one small example of larger issue. Our relationship with our phones has gone too far, moving from an occasional flirtatious fling to a reliance that puts the importance of the superficial individual first.

I would like to share a personal anecdote to relate to this topic.

The day was March 10, 2017. I remember this day very clearly in my mind. It was one day before my 19th birthday, and I was spending the week in Poland as a part of my gap year program. At this point in the trip, our group was staying in a hotel in Krakow, a city in southern Poland, and had awakened at 5 am in order to drive for several hours to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the labor camp division of Auschwitz concentration camp. We stood in the blistering cold for hours as a tour guide described the horrific atrocities committed against human beings in this place. It was a surreal experience that I believe that I will never forget.
Following this, we had time to explore the premises away from the group for the remainder of the morning. I spent time walking through the gas chambers and felt an emptiness inside. It is truly an experience that is difficult to write about, as I do not know how to put such strong feelings into words.

As I was finishing up the time I spent in the chambers, I witnessed something that caught me extremely off guard. A teenage girl who was at the camp with an Israeli tour group and likely 16 or 17 years old, stood outside the entrance to the chambers taking a selfie. She was making a “duck face”–a common pouty and silly expression one makes while taking a selfie–while holding up an Israeli flag in the photo. My first reaction was shock at how someone could think that was an acceptable action, but I then began to feel sadness about the depths to which our society has sunk.

Since the first day of ASTU, when Professor Luger mentioned that we would be reading about selfies at sites of trauma, I have thought back over this moment repeatedly. While reading Kate Douglas’s essay “Youth, trauma, and memorialism: The Selfie as Witnessing”, I struggled to relate to the concept in a way that wasn’t directly connected to this experience. I believe the ideas brought up in the essay regarding selfies becoming a form of second hand witnessing are very interesting and are worth a healthy conversation. However, due to my personal experience with this, I find it difficult to see dark selfies as an appropriate act, or even a legitimate form of witnessing.

This ties back to my original point that from our phones, we have become too self-obsessed as a society. The fact that people feel comfortable to stand at a site where hundreds of thousands of people’s lives were ripped away from them and put up a duck face is in my mind, disgraceful. I don’t want to come across as overly harsh, as I am not immune to making dumb mistakes on the internet. However, I fear that if we normalize dark selfies we may begin to lose an understanding of how to pay respects to sites of trauma such as Auschwitz.

Article referenced:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/understand-other-people/201602/seeking-validation-online-doesn-t-bring-real-happiness