Author: carolina basso

Throughout the year, we learned many concepts that relate to different readings and subjects from our CAP stream at UBC. Recently, we watched the movie American Sniper; a film that although controversial, touches on important topics. The first thing that comes to mind when I think of our ASTU course is the theory of memory that is discussed in the Introduction of Tangled Memories by Marita Sturken. She was one of the scholars that influenced my understanding of many analysis that I had to do, including American Sniper.

The movie and Sturken’s article go together because Chris Kyle’s memory of war influenced him on such a deep level that it affected his personal life in irreversible ways. When Sturken sheds light on the way “Memory forms the fabric of human life, affecting everything from the ability to perform simple, everyday tasks to the recognition of the self”; Bradley Cooper’s character very well could be an example of that as his memory of war does not allow his life to continue normally because, as Sturken argues, “each moment is constituted by the past”.

Nevertheless, American Sniper is not the only text that touches on individual impacts after times of war or tense conflicts. The novel Obasan, by portraying Obasan as someone that dealt with the suppression of Japanese Canadians quietly – and very differently from Emily- demonstrates that everyone has a distinct way of handling their emotions in or after difficult times. Similarly, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by showing how Changez’s choices deeply changed after the attack on the Twin Towers, conveys the idea that the context in which he was inserted made him feel emotions that he never felt, come to realizations that he would not have otherwise had and think things that were very different from the general American view of the attack (i.e., him smiling when everyone else was devastated).

It is even more interesting to look at how The Reluctant Fundamentalist and American Sniper intersect because they both show the impacts of 9/11 on the individual and the on collective. Changez being judged on the street by his appearance is not far from Chris Kyle’s generalization of the “other” as “savages”. These generalizations and the “us vs. them” dichotomy creates a collective culture of racism and violence.

This culture allows for daily attacks on certain groups of people, making it so that some lives become more grievable than others. That is an idea very well explored in Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? first chapter ( Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect) by Judith Butler, a scholar that introduces essential terms of war and new understandings of politics after 9/11. Another concept that Butler touches on and that is extremely relevant in the book Persepolis is heroism. The scene where young kids who get the key are perceived as heroes by some and victims by others, exemplifies what Butler means as valuing selective deaths. In the movie, the American marines and SEALS do not seem to be at all affected by the number of lives that they had taken and seem only to be emotionally moved when one of their “brothers” dies.

It is easy for us then to see how all the pieces in our syllabus are connected, but let us analyse how it also connects to other courses in our program. Through POLI 100, we were able to understand that there are always politics behind governmental actions and that fundamentalist or extremist groups have intentions and goals of their own. This was important when we learned about 9/11 because it sets the stage for us to comprehend what happened with a more critical lens. Geography further amplifies this lens by mentioning the separation of First and Third World countries and the advances of technological warcraft that developed countries with military interests (such as the US) have that make their attacks have an impersonal characteristic. Finally, Sociology touches on the family institution and how our desires to establish a family are directly influenced by economic stability and the comfortableness in which we live; including the feeling of safeness – people that live in war zones are less likely to have kids – and trust in government. 

We can thus conclude that our first-year studies have been instrumental for us to think critically about well-known texts and films and notice things that are outside of common sense. That is definitely going to come in handy when we are established scholars because as we have learned from ASTU, we are looking to insert ourselves in the map and argue for something that was not previously written by other scholars.

After attending the Amazonia exposition at MOA, I had the opportunity to reflect on several objects and facts that stood out to me and that, as I have come to realize, represent a lot to South Americans, myself included.

The object that stood out to me the most was the hammock, or as I call it, rede. The hammocks there were beautiful, colorful, comfortable and complex in their own way but if we stop to reflect on what the purpose of that object is and what is the equivalent of it today, we start to notice that, with modernization and the ever crescent technology, we tend to distance ourselves from the simplicity of objects like these to search for more luxurious, technological and “extra” comfortable ways to do things, even the simple act of sleeping. I am not saying that we should all leave our comfy beds and start sleeping in hammocks every day, but when did simple objects start to incorporate such technological designs and become complex things that we sometimes, do not even need? That’s right, after the contact with settlers.  

This contact is something that I would like to explore as it is a topic that is very prevailing and relates to all classes in our CAP program.

I have to start by saying that being Brazilian, I cannot help but talk about my own relationship to this. Brazil, as the exhibition mentions, is a country that has 64.3% of jurisdiction over the Amazon Forest, so it is a very important country to the reality that I am going to expose. There are thousands of Brazilian indigenous communities that currently live in the Amazon Forest and are in danger, as is the fauna and flora of the forest. They are at risk because of the over exploration of goods and mostly because a lot of its surface is being given to mining concessions and industrial conversion.

I actually own a rede and when I go to the beach, I lay there comfortably and look around. It is almost like it was designed to make you contemplate your surroundings, look at the sky, look at the high trees, look at the birds flying by… I love my rede but I never gave a special meaning to it, I never stopped to think about why it was there and perhaps most importantly, I never thought about who made it.

In that sense, with pain in my stomach and at the most of my vulnerability, I have to say, I am a settler. I am a settler not because part of my ancestors came to Brazil and followed the footsteps of other Europeans (diminishing, exploring and not caring for indigenous societies). I am settler because every day, I conform to the situation that those communities, those native individuals live. Every day I make the decision to put my life above theirs and not do anything about it. I used to learn in school that each day, indigenous are targeted and assassinated in order for big corporations to have another piece of land to grow cattle. I know this, my teacher knows this, all of my class knows this and in fact, most Brazilians know this, and yet, we don’t do much about it.

But I am also indigenous. Again, not because part of my ancestors were (and they also suffered in the hands of Europeans) but because part of my Brazilian identity is central to the beauty and exotic characteristic of the landscapes and that includes the enchanting and diverse Amazonia. I want to preserve and exalt that part of my identity and I want to do something about the current situation there. I chose to be vegetarian because of that but I know that this small action does not make that much of an impactful difference in such a big site as Amazonia and yet again, I accept that.

In many ways, as I have come to learn in this last semester at UBC, the settler-native relationship in Brazil is similar to that of first nations in Canada. However, Brazil has two very distinct features: first, we have a much more complicated relationship with the native populace as the majority of our population has an indigenous background; secondly, Brazil’s motive for the exclusion of native minorities is much more economical than was the Canadian one.

In Brazil, the sole purpose of killing and excluding these people from society is driven by the capitalist need for further expansion of agriculture and other commodities and our government very explicitly puts this indigenous in detriment, not caring for their rights and making a point to show them that a piece of land is more important than their w-h-o-l-e e-n-t-i-r-e c-o-m-m-u-n-i-t-y. I will not cite legal and court examples because I do not wish to dwell on this too much and because there are simply way too many.

Moreover, we have a more complicated relationship than the extreme distinction between white and indigenous people that Canada has due to most of the Brazilian population being a mix of European immigrants with Indigenous people. I am an example of that. That is why we say that Brazilians “don’t have a face”. We are all different and we all have different mixed backgrounds and so you could not look at someone and say “He/She looks Brazilian”. Different people can look more or less “European” or “Native” and have more or less of a relationship with indigenous people.

Nevertheless, as I have mentioned, we all tend to adopt settlers attitudes by choosing to forget that the Amazonia, something so important to us, is being devastated and indigenous societies eradicated every day. That becomes even more problematic when we learn it in school because we are presented with facts, not solutions or ways to prevent/ intervene in this problem. By putting questions about “how much Amazonia is being explored?”, “what is the percentage of the Amazonia that was given to cattle companies?” and “how many species are extinct?” in national exams, schools are not producing thinking minds; they are normalizing those facts to our eyes.

In that sense, I have to give Canada credit. The Canadian government and institutions, despite the atrocities made previously in history, nowadays make a constant effort to recognize those communities and their lands and demonstrate that they have in fact invaded their territories and still use them for their own benefit. Canadians are more evolved and apologetic in that sense.

That is one of the reasons that I decided to come to Canada. I wanted to be able to take an outsider’s look at my country and through classes like Sociology, Political Science, Geography and ASTU, learn what I can do for Brazil. Learn what, in the course of history, made the Canadian society pause and say “No more. Let’s start recognizing indigenous people and their struggle for rights and land”.

As I looked at a hammock at MOA, I thought: this is a symbol of an object that is so simple and perfect and yet we felt the need to construct something entirely different and much more elaborate and make THAT the “normal” and the model for the rest of the world. Today, the hammock is just a piece of furniture in a settler’s balcony (outside) whereas the bed is undoubtedly placed in the bedroom (inside).

We have done the unthinkable, the improbable. We did the impossible. We integrated indigenous culture and objects into our own while excluding the indigenous themselves.

That is why we do not think about who made the objects we interact with every day.

That is why we think about a tree or a jaguar when we think of “Amazonia” rather than thinking about the communities that live there.

That is why we need expositions like this to remind us that what were are doing (or conforming to others doing it) is not ok.

On October 31, 2017, my ASTU class and I went to the UBC Library to explore the Rare Books and Special Collections section. We were first introduced to the concept of what is considered “rare” or “special”. I was surprised to learn that those can, from what we have seen, range from a simple fan’s letter to very important government documents. “It is anything that would not be easy to find otherwise”, we learned. We were informed by the librarian that to be in contact with those documents, there is no necessity for equipment such as gloves or magnifying glasses like we see in the Hollywood movies. There are certainly some rules and they are very strict about those, however, no special instruments were needed.

At first, I was almost disappointed, wishing we would get the “full experience” and then I realized – there is no full experience, this is it. This is as real as it gets.

It is in those moments that we realized how alienated we are from the media and the fanciful expectations that we create for certain everyday things that do not correlate to what actually happens in real life. One would imagine that something as important as those rare documents would require things like special lighting and could only be manipulated by certain people, professionals to say the least, and certainly not inexperienced freshman students that did not even know the concept of RBSC.

And it is precisely about this alienation that I want to talk about. Just like I was expecting for a certain scenario to occur at the library because of what I’ve seen in television shows, the Canadian government in the years that followed the war was also trying to manipulate people’s views and perceptions. They were basically buying the Japanese Community’s silence in return for minimal amounts of money that would assure their survival during a very short time period.  

What shocked me the most was the irony that rested in the contrast between obvious vs. hidden, forgotten vs. documented. What I mean is that although the government was pressuring this hot topic into oblivion, they were still doing a very good job in documenting everything. Even the smallest records like receipts and forms.

Me and my pair Tethba got to analyze some letters back and forth from the Co-Operative committee asking Japanese Canadians to sign a release form of their property in return for something like 5% of the property worth. In that same file, the whole court process was registred.

“How is it that they made an effort to create that much bureaucracy and still managed to make the rest of the Canadians at that time ignorant of was going on?” I thought to myself. That thought was evidenced when another group that got to analyze some fan mail, talked about some – probably caucasian – Canadians that wrote to Joy Kogawa saying that they feel very sorry and ashamed about what happened to her community and that, had they known ahead of time, they would have tried to take action, but they genuinely did not know that that had happened before Kogawa published her book.

From that, we observe the importance of people like Joy, that took the time – even being a single mother of two- to research and write such a novel that evidences all that has been made blind to the rest of the nation. The artifacts we analyzed definitely changed my understanding of the book’s place in Canadian history, as I now clearly see how that book worked as an eye opener and evidenced the horrors of that time and the contradictions in the Government’s actions.

There is so much to talk about all the realizations I had after that visit that I am just really glad that Dr. Luger made the choice to give us the space to get to know this amazing place so that we could see for ourselves the significance of what is behind memoirs and books that discuss topics of trauma and remembering. I will always remember this experience.

In an increasingly globalized world, somehow our society still maintains conservatives Western views on themes such as the use of hijabs. Many people support hijab repression and shaming as if they were censoring Islam as a religion in doing so. Most scholars (myself included), argue that those people do that not because they don’t agree with Muslim practices and vestments, but because they are scared of its extremists groups. We must acknowledge that those don’t correlate in the slightest and we shouldn’t associate the hijab as something bad.

On that note, fortunately, that are some magnificent and revolutionary news that alongside us changing our conceptions, may contribute to a definite turnaround on the wearing of the Hijab. The first example of that is model Halima Aden who was the first model to take the Hijab to international fashion. In one of her statements on the video linked below, she says “Like anything in life, if is not your choice- it’s oppressive”. We see how this is directly connected to what Marjane Satrapi thinks and expresses in her book “Persepolis” – where young Marji feels very distant from the reality of being forced to wear something over her head that she didn’t personally identify with – and on her article “Veiled Threat” on The Guardian – where she expresses that just like being forced to wear the veil, being forced not to wear it, is just as equality violent and oppressive.

Another example of progressive movement is the My Stealthy Freedom Group (MSF) that was created by a group of courageous woman in Iran to advocate for the hijab to a personal choice by walking on the streets without the veil and taking photos and videos of it and posting on their facebook group. This has caused multiple reactions of citizens of Iran, especially by elderly conservative women and as we see on the end of video linked below, some women end up actually being taken away by other women (possibly the Guardians of The Revolution, The Women’s Branch which Marji cites in her book on page 132 when she, herself almost got arrested) which could have severe consequences such as prison or execution. And people around her don’t really seem to be bothered by her cries for help, which makes me wonder: is it just our western views that problematize the hijab or is it also the glorification and normalization of the obligation of the hijab on societies that enforce those rules that make the topic of the hijab such a hot topic on human and civil rights?

Either way, the hijab should not be politicized, as it is just a form of expression of religion and culture and those concepts, according to human rights, which is applicable to all citizens of the world, should not be enforced upon anyone.

First Model to wear the Hijab:

https://www.facebook.com/PlayGroundMag/videos/1704246529615216/

Marjane Satrapi’s Article on the Hijab:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/12/gender.uk

Challenging act toward the hijab – MSF video:

https://www.facebook.com/PlayGroundBR/videos/447520882309562/

MSF website:

http://mystealthyfreedom.net/en/about

On my first class of the ASTU 100 course at the University of British Columbia, our class discussed the difference between “memory” and “history”. I thought that was a very unique theme for an “English” class and I was very surprised by how quickly interested I was.

Our professor introduced this topic with a fast exercise and then we discussed what are some similarities and contrasts between this two important concepts. When she was talking about how a memoir has a much greater personal connection because it is generally very subjective and first-hand (rather than historical texts that are broader and perhaps have more ‘authority’ due to being data/evidence based), I could not help but wonder: “What about memoirs that were written during historical events or that tell us about daily life of citizens in the last decades or centuries? Can’t they be used as historical? Would they have more authority then?”

Two very specific books came to mind.

Anne Frank’s diary, for example. She clearly and very explicitly describes what her family went through in the 1940’s and testifies what she saw during the Nazi’s occupation of her hometown. Although being very informal, bias and sometimes imaginative, that diary is still a narrative of that historical time. Yes, it is through the eyes of one particular person, more precisely a young lady who did not comprehend all that was happening, but it still addresses, with detail, how the Nazi’s acted towards dutch citizens.

Same happens with fictional but fact-based novels such as “A very long engagement” or “Dear John”. In both those books/movies, we can highlight the notion of an audience. Those novels are about militaries that went to war in other countries and wrote back to their girlfriends explaining how they were feeling or what they were going through. Those letters are records of what was currently happening at that exact moment or that had happened hours before. These have date, time, description and analysis – which is the core of historical evidence.

So then, would that be considered a memoir or a historical text? How can we differentiate those two in such situations?

Professor Luger noted that both memoirs and historical papers are biased. They both use a specific connotation and “perspectives” and we have to take this to account when reading such texts. She also explained that both of them have audiences or in those cases, people that the protagonists wrote to. 

Well, if that is the case, it just makes it more challenging to differentiate those genres. However, that distinction is possible and it is a practice that we, as first-year students, are going to learn. 

http://www.annefrank.org/en/Anne-Frank/

http://nicholassparks.com/stories/dear-john/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Long_Engagement