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.