An important connection I found between Maus and Diamond Grill was that they both look at the notion of interstitial or liminal identity.

When Art is tasked with drawing his girlfriend, the comic shows us that he cannot decide whether to draw her as a mouse to denote a Jewish person, or a frog to denote a French person, of which she is both. Similarly, one of the men in Auschwitz came forward pleading to the guards that he was German and he was one of them, so he should not be persecuted. Art draws him as both a mouse and a shadow of a cat to signify this assertion of identity versus how the guards perceived him.

These examples force the reader to examine the notion of identity and its supposed exclusionary properties. When we reconcile these identities, the very notion of identity seems to melt into ambiguous meaninglessness. Fred Wah approaches this concept as well when he tries to navigate identifications of Chinese and Canadian. How doe we conciliate “disparate” identity entities?

Comedian Marga Gomez similarly discusses this in her skit entitled “Long Island Latina” as a Latina that can’t speak Spanish. The Spanish speaking people in her community called her “boba” which roughly translates to “idiot,” thus shaming her for not being “true” to her identity.

What results from these purported “transgressions” of identity is a boundless liminality that makes us hyperaware of the socially constructive nature of identity. Professor José Esteban Muñoz talks about undergoing a period of disidentification after breaking down the social categorizations and barriers of being. In this way we can resist interpellation to become fixed subjects within a social context. He posits that to find one’s self, we must deny self. We must deny what we have been told are ourselves with ideological restraints.

PostSecret is a compelling project for many reasons. PostSecret gives a voice to the unspoken human experience, a world outside of the dubious logic of sitcoms and movies. It allows senders to give their feelings validation and room to breathe their truth. What I found interesting was the page entitled “Are all these secrets true?”

What is the nature of truth? Can a story we tell ever be true in an objective sense? This is a key component of our course. To tell a secret, one takes on the task of defining and sculpting a “truth” for themselves. Frank points out that some people have read one of the secrets and realized “sometimes a secret we keep from ourselves only becomes true after we read it on a stranger’s postcard,” which harks back to his catalyzing mantra of “you will find your answers in the secrets of others.”

He also states that “as art, secrets can have different layers of truth, some can be both true or false.” Not only does this break down the dichotomy of “real” versus “unreal” but it hints at the notion that if it’s not true for you, it might be true for someone else, thus extracting truth from the confines of personal experience. A truth about humanity that others relate to can still be deemed as a truth, even if you don’t identify with it.

This also harks to the function of art, and why Frank distinguishes it as “art.” The function of art in Frank’s eyes is similar to Pablo Picasso’s “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” However, some of these people would probably not distinguish their secrets as art, and would deem them as “true” therefore, not a “lie.” Can these secrets be both at the same time? Either way, they function to facilitate truth in that they represent a personal reality for others to recognize or dismiss. Thus we become artistic curators of truth.