Stories We Tell is described as a cine-memoir of Sarah Polley’s family life. The funny thing about this memoir is that one can never pinpoint whose story is really being told and who to focus on, because of the interwoven narratives in the film. In today’s class discussion, someone brought to attention something that Harry Gulkin mentioned in the film, which ran along the lines of: “There is one event, and different versions of remembering it and different ways of telling it. It doesn’t mean that there are different truths. Just different versions of one truth.” Sarah started this project mainly as a way to try and explore what memory is and how it can be expressed. I feel like Harry Gulkin’s words answer Sarah’s questions—that memory and truth are subjective and fragmented.

In an interview with the Guardian, Polley talks about how “her film reveals that everyone has a subtly different story to tell. Memory is not a convenient barn in which truth can be stored through successive winters. It is permeable, unreliable and personal. And it is complicated because, in a family, as Polley points out, everyone is “committed” to their own version of the truth.” I start to think about how apt the film (and the way it was shot and the way it was so layered with different narratives) is as a reflection of the kind of elusiveness and fragmentation of memory.

The film is a combination of different voices—siblings, lovers, husband and friends and they all have different versions, based on what they remember, about Diane Polley, and about the situations that were happening at that time. Though everyone remembers Diane in a similar way–warm, energetic and effusive, there are still parts of her that other people interpreted differently based on their moments with her. (i.e. One of the interviewers felt like she was secretive). After those fragments are filmed, Sarah chooses which to use and curates them almost into a montage for the film. Aside from the fact that there are different people who speak throughout the film, the editing of the film itself is also quite fragmented. There were real and faux super-8 reels, there were interviews, recordings of Michael reading the script, and recreations of past scenes by actors. It’s hard to pinpoint whose memory is the “real” truth and whose is a blurred version. Ultimately, everyone has their own version to tell, which really echoes with what memory is.

As I’m thinking of it now, I do believe that the film itself is quite fragmented and thus, shares the quality of fragmentation that memory has. In that regard, it’s quite the perfect fit in terms of choice of media to represent this experiment on defining memory.

In our last class, we did some close textual reading on Dany Laferriere’s The World is Moving Around Me, a story of one journalist’s perspective about the Haitian earthquake in 2010.

In one passage we read, I noticed the tone of surprise conveyed through the diction of discovery that Laferriere uses, with regards to the Haitian people. He says that we “discovered a proud, yet modest people”, amidst the rubble and clouds of dust. He mentions their resilience and their ability to “stand up to misfortune” (27). By using the word “discovered”, which means to find something unexpectedly, the text ends up conveying a tone of surprise at having found out the kind of resilience the Haitians show. We, the readers get a sense that their reaction to the calamity was something that surprised him and many other people who were watching from around the world. Why is that?

As someone who was born and lived in the Philippines for 18 years, this kind of resilience is something I’ve seen in my own country, especially last year, when Typhoon Haiyan devastated the many lives of the Filipinos. Through it all, the Filipinos were still resilient. They had attitudes that could not be blown away by the storm, and I was, and am still amazed by their ability to cope with something that catastrophic. It got me asking myself: What kind of narratives do I have in mind that have led me to be so surprised to “discover” that they are indeed a strong people?

Is it the way media shows these places as weak, third world countries that need our help? Have these narratives been so ingrained in us that we can’t see these people as anything else than that single story of weakness and charity we have been told?

In this TED talk, Chimamanda Adichie talks about the danger of a single story through a story about their houseboy named Fide, who was described by her mother only as “poor”. She grew up characterizing him only in that category. So much so, that when they visited Fide’s home and saw the beautiful basket his brother had made, she was shocked: “It had not occurred to me that anybody in their family could make anything. All that I knew was that they were poor. It had become impossible for me to see them as anything but poor. Their poverty became my single story of them.”

Though my aim here is not to boil this feat of resilience down to something so simplistic, I think that a reason why we don’t expect too much from both these countries: Haiti and Philippines is because of the story of them as third world countries that we are familiar with. It is why when we witness their strength and resilience as a strong nation, a strong people, we are amazed, stunned and just in wonder at having “discovered” that they are more that what we were led to believe.

As readers and as global citizens, we have the responsibility to test the narratives that we are being fed, there is an exigence to go out and educate ourselves so that our behaviour can better reflect that depth of knowledge and the respect that different cultures, religions, genders warrant.

What kind of narratives have you grown up with and how can you challenge those? What will happen when we do?

For this week in English 474, we have been reading Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels, Maus and Maus II, which depict the story of the Holocaust as told by Art’s father, Vladek and span the years 1930’s (pre-Holocaust) until 1945, when the Holocaust ends.The difference lies mainly in that Maus breaks a fourth wall.

Compared to other Holocaust stories I have read, such as Weisel’s Night and Frank’s Diary of Anne Frank, this book I found quite different. It is a story both of Vladek and also of Art’s story of writing that story. As a reader, my attention was split between reading about Vladek and the Holocaust, and also paying attention to the nuances of Art’s process of getting the book done and his own struggles and guilt with that.

I believe that while Art is the witness or rather, the person who recognizes Vladek’s trauma, we are called to be the witnesses of Art’s own struggle with transcribing that trauma. We, by reading Maus, are witnesses to Art’s guilt at betraying his father (who didn’t want certain parts of the story shared). We are witnesses to his obsessive research to get the historical detail right, which he talks about an interview entitled:The Holocaust Through the Eyes of the Maus with Marcia Alvar where he was able to find drawings by survivors, and his numerous trips to Auschwitz and Poland and with his responsibility to himself as well, as an artist and as a son.

In reading Maus, Young and watching his interviews, I realized that he has undergone a lot of mental struggle to get this work published, and in his own right, these mental struggles can be considered forms of trauma as well that we must recognize as readers. 

Works Cited:

“The Holocaust Through the Eyes of a Maus.” Interview by Marcia Alvar. Youtube. Washington, 1991. Television. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLVG3GNvHkU

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Print.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus Ii: A Survivor’s Tale : and Here My Troubles Began. New York: PantheonBooks, 1991. Print.

Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. London: Routledge, 1992. Web. 23 October 2014.

This week, we were tasked to write a paratextual analysis about a life narrative of our choosing. I chose Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal, which is a memoir based on a semi-autobiographical novel Jeanette Winterson had written prior to Why Be Happy.

In writing that analysis, I engaged with Whitlock’s book, Soft Weapons and in it she mentions something that really got my mind working over the week: “Young (1997) is inclined to downplay the usefulness of symmetry—putting oneself in the place of others—in favor of working toward moral respect through asymmetrical relations, which recognize differences of history, social position, and experience that cannot be transcended.”

Before having read this argument, I always tried to understand an autobiography by finding myself in the work. I wanted to understand what place the author was coming from and the only way I knew how to do that was to find similarities between the character and I. Did she go through something I had gone through? Was her social situation one I am currently in? I tried to understand her through the lens of my own experiences. In other words, I relied on symmetrical patterns to identify with the author and her story better.

Young’s argument suggests an entirely different perspective in that it asks the readers not to focus on the similarities but to focus rather on the differences. It talks about accepting that the author and the reader (us) come from different places—historically, socially, and experientially, and allowing that acceptance to be the source of understanding. If we learn to acknowledge those differences, we are then allowing their truths to simply be, without our own truths superimposed onto theirs. In doing this, we start actually respecting the authors’s stories.

This argument sets us up to think more critically about the kinds of readers we could be. Reading is not a passive thing; it is an active engagement with the words written on the page. We as readers have the agency to decide how to understand a life narrative.   How will we choose to interpret and understand? What kind of readers are we going to be?

Works Cited: Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006. Chicago Scholarship Online. Web. 7 Oct 2014.

In Diamond Grill, Fred Wah explains that names come attached with associations. He talks about how his Aunt Ethel tells him not to use “certain words that might bring bad luck” and that there are “dynamics of naming and desire” in the names of the Chinese cafes in his family’s history (Wah 26). Names are not just placeholders for people, actions, and other objects; they come packed with associations that influence people’s perceptions of what is being named.

I will use the example of Chinese names and the negative associations that were attached with those in the 1950’s. Fred Wah explains that though he physically looks more like a Caucasian: fairly blonde and fair skinned, because of the name “Wah”, he is marked out as a Chinese and therefore judged harshly by the Caucasians around him. For example, the father of his first serious girl dismisses him based on his last name: “I’ve got nothing against you or your family but I don’t want my daughter marrying a Chinaman. It just can’t work… I don’t want you seeing my daughter any more so don’t let me catch you here again and no more phone calls either.” Even though Fred doesn’t look Chinese, has many friends, and plays hockey (as Canadian as you can get, eh?), he is assumed to be a certain type of person based on his Chinese last name, “Wah”. (Wah 39)

He continues to list  different kinds of assumptions made on the Chinese people at that point in history: “I’m not going to work in a restaurant all my life but I’m going to go to University and I’m going to be a great fucking white success as you asshole and my name’s still going to be Wah…” (Wah 39). This example emphasizes the power of a name in shaping how one is perceived and treated.

As a thinking exercise, if you heard a Chinese last name now, what associations come to mind? Good at Math, perhaps? What if you heard a Caucasian last name, or another last name from a different ethnicity? Most likely all the different names would have various associations that would lend to the lens with which we see them. There is importance in acknowledging the power and association of names, so that we can catch ourselves in the act of hasty, unconscious judging.

Thoughts?

Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill. 10^th Anniversary Edition. Alberta: Ne West Press, 2006. Print.

Facebook’s mission, according to its company page, is to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected…”

As humans, we are creatures of need, specifically the need to belong, to feel loved and to be connected. Facebook makes us feel like we belong through our increasing Friends lists, our newsfeed that runneth over and likes and comments getting tossed back and forth, mimicking a great conversation. It is a platform that conveniently gathers people into one area—making it a one stop shop for us to feel connected.

However, Facebook friends aren’t really so much friends as they are social commodities. The more you collect, the more popular you are and the higher your worth is. Is this real connection? When people are on the bus or in transit, instead of talking to the passengers beside them and actually making a face-to face connection, they choose to be on Facebook, scrolling through their newsfeed, watching for their friends’ activities.

Real connection fosters sharing of life narratives, experiences and opinions. I believe there is some value to being reminded and cognizant of the fact that the connection Facebook espouses is only a pale imitation of the real connection we can have, sans the screen. We have to understand that real connection isn’t made through social media sites. Real connection is made through shared experiences–personally greeting someone a happy birthday or a get well, getting out of our own comfort zones and saying the first hello, not hiding behind screens at awkward situations, talking about important issues  instead of sending it out as a status. Turkle mentions in her TED talk: “We are lonely, but fearful of intimacy. Connectivity offers, for many of us, the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.”

Real friends may have demands that our Facebook friends (aka virtual strangers) may not. But that’s what REAL connection is. It is the giving of each other and the taking and the learning. This is the process that forms and gives birth to life narratives. Do you think social media sites can create life narratives as well? How?  Is there a difference between the life narratives that an online and a personal connection may create? 

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