The mice drawn so beguilingly in Maus II are actually representations of Art Spiegelman’s parents who were captured and  incarcerated in Auschwitz in 1944. All the Jewish people are graphically depicted as mice, the Polish as pigs, and the Germans as cats. It IS a graphic novel after all.

Mauschwitz is the title of  chapter one, showing a picture of a tattooed mouse inside a barbed wire fence  with a gun tower behind him. The tower has an armed guard on top with a gun meant to discourage any escape attempts. Inside Mauschwitz, Vladek sees evidence of violence or hears about it from a victim: CRAk marks the sound of prisoner struck with a wooden shoe after asking for a pair of shoes to fit him(26); Mandelbaum reports being beaten for asking for more soup (29); a Kapo, a Polish supervisor, hits another prisoner with a stick for being too slow at obeying his commands (30) ; Vladek is beaten when he is caught carrying food to Anja (57); and Anja is kicked by a bad Kapo (63). Some frames Spiegelman draws are scenes Vladek thinks might have happened: an old guy is pushed down by a guard and then is stepped on to break his neck (5o); Mandelbaum, in the act of pursuing his cap, which was knocked off his head by the guard, is shot for trying to escape (35).

But it’s the foreshadowing of violence, one scene being repeatedly shown to elicit a horrified anticipation of the violence against the helpless prisoners, because it is all so carefully planned- on a massive scale. About the time Abraham disappears near the beginning of chapter one, there is the “sweetish” smell of burning fat and rubber, and then smoke is seen coming out of the chimney (27). The picture at the beginning of chapter two shows the wide-open mouths of mice screaming in pain with lightning bolts around them, and then at the bottom of the next page, a large heap of mouse skeletons (41). The smoking chimney is shown again in frames on pages 55 and 58, and then on page 69, there is the waiting chimney without smoke. When Vladek goes as a workman to Crematorium II, he sees the undergound undressing room, the underground gas chamber, and the ovens where the bodies were burned, and he says “To SUCH a place finished my father, my sisters, by brothers, so many” (71). But some Hungarians were not lucky enough to go to the gas chambers and ovens, but were simply pushed into open graves, Vladek is told. Other prisoners poured gasoline over them, “and the fat from the burning bodies they scooped and poured again so everyone could burn better” (72). The mice with open mouths  screaming in pain were those Hungarian victims and the lightning around them was the flames. The skeletons remain.

In Wally Oppal’s “Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry,” it is stated very clearly that the investigators intend “to enquire into and make finding of fact” respecting the police force investigations into the women missing from the Downtown Eastside from January 23, 1997 to Feb. 5, 2002, and in particular the decision made not to proceed with charges of assault, confinement, and attempted murder against Robert Pickton on January 27, 1998 (4). They are then prepared to recommend changes in the way  investigations should be done and coordinated between different police jurisdictions, Although they did seem to achieve their stated objectives, Ammilan quotes sources who were very disappointed with the results. Do you think this reaction is justified? Was it a failure as a quasi-judicial inquiry or not?  Chelsey mentions that “39% of the missing women were identified as having some form of indigenous heritage,” and alludes to an informative blog by Martin Lukacs mentioning that although the aboriginal population of Canada is about 4.3 % of the total population, the indigenous population in the Downtown Eastside is about 10 %.  Why would they congregate there? In his book, “The Inconvenient Indian,” Thomas King argues that “when we look at Native-non-Native relations, there is no great difference between the past and the present. While we have dispensed with guns and bugles, and while North America’s sense of its own superiority is better hidden, its disdain muted, twenty-first-century attitudes towards Native people are remarkably similar to those of previous centuries” (xv). Ashley’s description of how Kristin Gilchrist’s article compares the news coverage of Native and Non-Native women supports Kings’s view. The three Native women are mentioned in the stories 1/6 as often with fewer words and details and smaller pictures. They are less named. Do you think that “Missing Sarah,” Jiwani and Young’s report and Wally Oppal’s “Forsaken” will have some impact on Thomas King’s assessment of the contemporary attitude towards Natives? (How would the reader from GoodReads that Emily Anctil refers to assess the overall impact on the reading public of the book “Missing Sarah?) Ashley suggest other ways of influencing people for the betterment of society. And A.J. refers to “Missing Sarah” as a Memoir of Failure- a failure of systems and a failure of people. Alyssa G has an assessment of the family’s failure in Sarah’s tragedy and an excellent pictorial representation of her assessment. What do YOU think?

Why do some people spend time tracing their ancestry and contemplating their ethnicity? It would seem that there is a certain fascination in laying out a strand of the European, Asian, or African diaspora, especially as it is related to their own families. Drawing a Family Tree requires a certain objective focus, combined with the thrill of hunting down and finding a famous or infamous progenitor. Change the Family Tree focus to immediate family, though, and there is a significantly larger problem with authenticity. Will family members balk at being named and portrayed? Is it possible to be completely objective about loved ones, especially about loved ones who have been incarcerated and unfairly treated because of their ethnicity? In Fred Wah’s DIAMOND GRILL, he tells stories about the rich ethnic mix of his parents and grandparents, who migrated to Saskatchewan and British Columbia and had families. One grandfather was Chinese, a member of a group of immigrants who were badly treated by the Canadian government. This ill-treatment becomes interwoven with the stories about his family. And many of Fred’s stories are about his half-Chinese  father and his bravura performances, in which he sometimes manages to turn ethnic stereotyping into a joke, a matter of shared laughter and small consequence. (Ethnic comedians do this all the time, making human connections through embarrassing situations and mistakes.) His father is able to move back and forth between the culture and concerns of the Chinese immigrants and the dominant and domineering white culture of the day. Fred’s quandary is embedded in his appearance. He is only a quarter Chinese and looks white, and he is often drawn into the white culture because of his appearance, ambition and English language capabilities, “camouflaged by the safety net of class and colorlessness”(138). A little deke for the sake of comfort, convenience, and in deference to the fact that his wife is Caucasian, as is his mother and both his grandmothers. But what about his Chinese father and Chinese relatives who were incarcerated and discriminated against by the Canadian government and people? (Carrie Dawson says this is still happening to refugee claimants who are jailed as “criminals, queue jumpers, and frauds.”) Wah would feel compelled to make a declaration of Chinese identity and solidarity; “(a)nother chip on my shoulder is the appropriation of the immigrant identity” (125). A deke in the other direction. And in writing this book about his Chinese background, Wah becomes for the second time, “not the target but the gun,” and this time the gun is aimed at the past performance of a prejudiced Canadian government and a prejudiced white population. A double deke?

According to Eli Pariser, all internet users should be aware of “filter bubbles” In the form of algorithims. These bubbles are apparently designed to monitor your attraction to a specific behavior or attitude within a communication, and then, without prior consultation with you, to send you similar offerings for your increased pleasure and approval. (Less “agreeable” postings are eventually crowded out or sent away.) The idea seems to be that the enormous weight of all these similar offerings will end up creating a new standard of correctness for the user. Complete validation by frequent repetition. If Facebook, Google, Netflicks, Six Word Memoirs, Post-Secrets, and other social networking sites all seem to be shaping themselves  to attract followers by giving their followers more of what they seemed to like in the first place, what will be in the future for online users? A family gathering, on an occasion such as a Thanksgiving Dinner, will probably not offer them the same validation. People around the table might possibly disagree. The one who disagrees with you is called a second turkey on Six Word Memoir. Was the feast not enough to give pleasure? It worked in the off-line past.There are also Wild Turkey and Xanax to take away the pain of the Thanksgiving. Are face-to-face social interactions so difficult that alcohol or drugs must be taken to make them bearable? Visible pleasure does appear in the end from the creation of the Six Work Memoirs about Thanksgiving in a Comedy Central fashion. I hope their postings were anonymous. They might otherwise be in trouble.

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