Hello Again!

On Monday my geography teaching assistant began our discussion by asking everyone to state the colour they were feeling most like that day.   I was pleasantly surprised to hear that many of my fellow classmates felt they resembled bright or warm colours. I felt a bright yellow as it was quite warm and very sunny, which for Vancouver is a rare sight.

I hope you are also feeling similar to bright and warm colours this week!

If you are wondering when I’m getting to the point, it’s now. So this week I will be talking about a chapter of Judith Butler’s book “Frames of War”. The chapter we read is titled Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect, which discusses the ways in which we consider who we are and exactly how we define ourselves and what it represents. She stresses the ideas and ways in which we as humans are precarious and vulnerable to one another. Near the end of the chapter Butler writes about some of the poems from prisoners of Guantanamo Bay, and some of the situations and moral regards surrounding it.

As I began to read the first sentence, I immediately thought that I was not going to like this chapter because just from that first sentence I knew it was going to make my brain hurt… and was I ever right. But as I continued reading it began to grow on me and eventually made my mind explode.  Her writing forces the reader to rethink many of their decisions, and why exactly we decided to make those decisions.  On the third page of the chapter, Butler discusses the idea of responsibility; how exactly we define it and to whom we are responsible for. She then goes a step further and asks the questions:

“Could it be that when I assume responsibility what becomes clear is that who “I” am is bound up with others in necessary ways? Am I even thinkable without the world of others? In effect, could it be that through the process of assuming responsibility the “I” shows itself to be, at least partially, a “we”? But who is included in the “we” that I seem to be, or to be part of? And for which “we” am I finally responsible?”

This was something I had never even bothered to consider before reading this part of her book. I had always thought of “I” as me, and “we” as whoever happened to be with me at the current time. Butler forced me to reconsider that, and to me, proved that there is so much more to the simple “I” and “we” then it may appear. As she continues she goes into looking specifically the “we” in times of war.

“Who “we” are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable… Those we kill are not quite human, and not quite alive, which means that we do not feel the same horror and outrage over the loss of their lives as we do over the loss of those lives that bear… similarity to our own”.

Butler encourages her readers to rethink how exactly we define who we are and why we define them the way we do. This sentence opens my eyes to the unfortunate world we all live in, we consider some lives ungrievable simply because they are less important to us than others. It makes me wonder what the world would look like if everyone’s lives were considered equally important.

The final part of Butler’s chapter that I cannot come to terms with, has to do with the poems that the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay had written. Their words were written on Styrofoam cups as they were not allowed to have pen and paper at first. In this passage, Butler questions the connection between poems and vulnerability and survivability, and how exactly they provide “evidence”.

“The words are carved in cups, written on paper, recorded onto a surface, in an effort to leave a mark, a trace, of a living being – a sign formed by a body, a sign that carries the life of the body. And even when what happens to the body isn’t survivable, the words survive to say as much”.

This idea of a person having to “leave a mark” in order for their life to be consider real, is completely bewildering to me. Why is it that every life is not valued the same? I understand that when people commit crimes, it is the general conclusion that they should not be treated or valued the same way, but who decided that it should come to the extent that these people feel they have to write something down in order for their life to even be considered a life? No matter what the crime, I feel it is wrong to deny a person the right that they are a living, breathing body, which is part of what I feel consists as a life.

Why is it that these prisoner’s words must survive because their bodies could not?

Butler, Judith. “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect.” Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. 33-62. Print.

Happy New Year Everyone!

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season. I had a much needed break which involved travelling back to Ontario, where I spent all my time with friends and family.

I am going to start the New Year off with talking about this amazing novel that I read for my ASTU class. The novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is about a boy named Oskar who suffers from the death of his father in 9/11. Oskar finds a key that he assumes to have belonged to his late father. Oskar travels all five boroughs of New York trying to uncover the lock that this key would open. To him this key represents a final way to connect with his father.  This is a novel that I cannot get off my mind.  I am reminded of the main character Oskar at least once a day, he seems to just pop into my mind whenever I find myself day dreaming.

While reading this novel I often find myself forgetting that Oskar is only nine years old. He manages to travel the city of New York almost seamlessly (he has a better sense of direction than me… and I’m almost twenty).

In class on Tuesday we talked about the memorial of 9/11 and how it was actually created to sit in the ground.

http://blog.archpaper.com/2011/08/911-memorial-plaza-how-it-works/

After seeing this picture I could not help but remember how at the beginning of the novel Oskar talks about how there one day will be no room left on this earth to bury the dead.   He says:

“So, what about skyscrapers for dead people that are built down? They could be underneath the skyscrapers for living people that are built up. You could bury people 100 floors down, and a whole dead world could be underneath the living one.” Pg3

This in a sense is the 9/11 memorial as they have designed it so that you feel you are looking down into the ground. I couldn’t help but imagine Oskar’s view that in the middle of the memorial where the tower was that there is an elevator that takes you down to world of dead underneath the living. It resembles his idea even more knowing that there were in fact skyscrapers there before and now it is considered ‘Ground Zero’.

It seems so realistic to me… maybe I’m just able to live in Oskar’s world for just a moment.

While reading this novel and discussing the events around 9/11 and how is classified as a ‘terrorist attack’, I cannot help but consider the events in Paris, France at the current moment. The attacks in Paris have had a similar reaction from its citizens as the events of 9/11. Once people come to terms with what has happened, they have come together as a country to stand together and support the police, first responders, and Special Forces as they have continually protected them as citizens. The citizens have not let the attacks or invasions change their love for their country and the people that belong to it.

More Information on the People of Paris Coming Together.