Hello everyone and welcome back to what will unfortunately be my last blog post for this class.

Very sad I know, and I feel as though I should talk about something very meaningful in these last few moments I have with you, so where to begin? Well, I think I’ll start with the start of my new university life, because why not? Looking back to when I first arrived here, I can safely say I’ve never felt more disconnected with my past self than now. I’ve really learnt a lot these last months, which is surprising to say the least seeing as how it’s barely been seven months since I first arrived at Vancouver. Yet I’ve come to really appreciate many things I hadn’t before, including obvious things like my home, my family, and my friends. Not only that, I’ve also reflected on how much more aware I am the world around me and how we both interact with each other. What it means to be a global citizen has changed so many times for me that I’ve lost count. Even now I’m not sure I know exactly what it is; what I do know is what it means to different people. In this class of ASTU, I’ve seen and read very, very depressing things. Ranging from great tragedies such as genocide, to the simple heart breaking moment of finding out that a hero didn’t necessarily remain one (looking at you Zeitoun). But I’ve gained valuable knowledge from others. Some see being a member of a global community as an obligation, a duty to be fulfilled. Others, such as Satrapi and Sacco believe themselves to be connected to the world by sharing their experiences with it. A few simply see it as being aware of what’s around them and to visualize the experience of everyone in this global community. Not all paint the same picture, but none of them are wrong, for they all offer the same thing: a better understanding of the Earth in which we live in; and for that, I’m grateful to them.

That’s it from me; hopefully you’ve all liked my posts this far, and just the like the people I’ve mentioned, I hope my thoughts will help you grow as a knowledgeable person.

Have a great time everyone!

Hey there everyone, welcome back to today’s blog post!

For this week, I’d like to talk about a book we’re going to begin reading called Zeitoun. Written by author Dave Eggers, it tells that story of a Syrian-American man called Abdulrahman Zeitoun who was arrested after being accused of looting during Hurricane Katrina, and subsequently, terrorism. The War on Terror has always been a very controversial topic in American politics, with an affluent amount of support shortly after the 9/11 attacks to a disapproval of US domestic and international affairs. This change of opinions can be seen in the annual Gallop polls: http://www.gallup.com/poll/5257/war-terrorism.aspx. Has the War on Terror truly being a success so far? I’m not sure I’m one to give my opinion, being an outsider and never having lived in the US; but I think it’s important to have a foreigner’s perspective on this, particularly one whose country isn’t truly involved in said affairs. If you don’t very well know what the War on Terror exactly is, it can be classified as an international military campaign against any manner of terrorism against the US, be it overseas or in the country; you can also check the Wikipedia page for more information, it’s a pretty good starting point for this topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Terror. With that being said, I’ll attempt to give an outsider’s view on this issue. One of the many effects of the War on Terror that truly affects me is in the traveling aspect. Many times, I need to pass through the US during flights and the environment found in their airports is very different from those in Canada or Mexico. It gets very, comparatively, tense in the security lines and one feels scrutinized by the TSA, who just look like they’re waiting for a problem to arrive. It is not a very pleasant experience and I hate traveling through the US because of it. Apart from that, I also find it unbelievable that people, like Zeitoun, can be arrested for no particular reason; in my opinion, all that does is foster anger and create racism, I truly don’t see how that is very beneficial. However, I never experienced the tragedy that was 9/11; I never felt scared or insecure in my home. But, all I see is the foundation for a police state, an idea that goes against the very values on which I’ve been taught the USA was founded on, and that something that really frightens me. However, it seems this time of fear and insecurity is coming to an end, with American people starting to become tired of all the “security” being put in place for their “protection”, even the government itself has stopped acknowledging this war, with the Obama administration now calling it Overseas Contingency Operation. Was this decade just a simple spike in paranoia, or will the US, and other nations, keep on walking down this path of “fear” and “security”? Only time will tell I guess.

That’s all from me today, I hope you enjoyed reading and I wish you all a good weekend!

Hello everyone! Welcome to this week’s blog post.

Today I wish to expand on the last post’s previous topic. Hopefully, you all remember that I talked about the post 9/11 world and how it has shaped our history for better or for worse. Well, now I wish to talk about the wars it produced or better yet, the reactions of the American people on them. The reason as to why I want to talk about this is due to a reading I had in my class some days ago, Judith Butler’s Frames of War. Now normally I would go ahead and recommend this for you guys to read, but not this time. Frames of War a very abstract book and requires complete focus in order to comprehend it. However, it does present some interesting points, and if you can handle having to question your own morality and sanity after reading it, then by all means knock yourselves out; but you have been warned.

In Butler’s book, on page 46, there is a sentence which really stood out for me:

“If guilt is linked to fears about survivability, then this suggests that, as a moral response, guilt references a premoral set of fears and impulsiveness tied up with destructiveness and its consequences.”

So what exactly does this mean, and how does it relate to war? Well, as you can probably tell, this quote talks about guilt; that gut-wrenching emotion we get when we act in a morally questionable way. Or is it? According to Butler, what we experience as guilt is in fact a response to a threat to our survivability; in other words, we feel guilty when we do something which may lead to our deaths (A bit dramatic but you get my point). So for example, if you cause a friend or family member to have an accident, you’ll probably feel bad and guilty about it; but not for the reason you think it’s for. You feel guilty because you just lowered your chances of survival; now you have to take care of this person and have a burden on your back until they recover. This is certainly a cynical way to view things, but it makes sense doesn’t it? Why is it that in war, many people are able to let go of their guilt? Why did the American public accept going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan? Because they felt they were necessary for their survival. In order to better protect themselves against another attack like 9/11, they had to strike fast and hard. No reason to feel guilty about declaring wars on other nations and innocent people because it’s us or them. This theory on guilt also helps explain torture; while a terrible thing, is just starting to get backlash from the American people. Places like Guantanamo Bay were known of, and while there was resistance to acts committed inside, people weren’t necessarily feeling guilty about their actions there as a whole: because it was necessary to their survival. Still, it’s hard to feel guilty about people we’ve never met before, because they don’t necessarily affect us is any way.

Now, I would like this issue of guilt with another topic I learned about from a different book, Juliana Spahr’s This connection of everyone with lungs. This book simply has two poems in it, but the message it carries is one I found important. As the name implies, it talks about the connection that is found amongst people after tragedy strikes, Spahr writes these poems shortly after 9/11. She reveals to the reader her desire to “connect” to the rest of the world after realizing how aloof she was to events occurring around her. This revelation came after she feared that the USA would go to war with Afghanistan. As she puts it in page 13:

“I felt I had to think about what I was connected with, and what I was complicit with…I had to think about my intimacy with things I would rather not be intimate with as…”

Herein lies how I wish to connect this with guilt; I believe we fear being connected with our world due to all the grief that occurs in it and feeling remorse for things that are out of our control. But as Spahr puts it after that quote, she felt happy with this connected with those she loved and the world from afar, even calling it useful. She sought a middle ground for this idea, one in which she could be conscious of the world around her without its burdens weighing down on her; and it seems she found this balance.

Sorry if this was a pretty heavy concept for you guys; but it’s one that really left me thinking for a while. Could guilt really just be linked to survival? Does morality play no role in it? Should we truly strive to connect to the world around us, or will the remorse be too much for one person to handle? I’ll leave you guys with these questions in mind so thanks for reading and I hope you all have a great weekend!

Sources:

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Print.

Spahr, Juliana. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems. Berkeley: U of California, 2005.    Print.

Hey everyone, hope you had a good break!

The topic for this week’s blog will be 9/11, or more specifically, its effects on the US. The reason I’ve chosen to talk about this due to the book I just finished reading, which is Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely loud & incredibly close. The main plot of this novel follows Oskar Schell, a 9-year-old boy who lost his father in the Twin Towers’ terrorist attack, trying to find the lock of a key he found in his father’s closet. Throughout his “adventure”, Oskar meets many people who have experience loss in some certain way, as well as coming to terms with his own father’s death. Very interesting book, although it may be a bit hard to follow at first.

Due to my young age when these attacks occurred, I never was able to experience the tragedy of this event personally; but I have seen its consequences.  The war against terror, the TSA, an overall high level of suspicion, these are all the aftermath of those fateful attacks. I’ve always found it these effects very interesting; how symbolic and traumatizing these attacks were on the USA. Nearly 3,000 people died when the towers collapsed, so its classification as a tragedy is no mistake. Yet when compared to other tragedies, like the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima (which the book talks about), it seems a lot smaller in scale and scope; yet it wasn’t. Since the war of 1812, nearly 200 hundred years before 9/11, the US had never been attacked by an outside force. Add to that the fact that there wasn’t a clear cut enemy to blame, no war to justify these attacks, the American people were left bewildered and broken, their pride shattered; like Oskar says in the book, it didn’t make sense. However, this pride did resurface, in the form of nationalism, or “patriotism”. In retrospect, this may have not been the healthiest way to heal from this wound. Wars, paranoia, (in)security, these became staples of US policy for the beginning of the 21^st century, and they still are to this day. The fact that many refer to today as a “post 9/11 world” speaks volumes about its effects on, not just the USA, but the entire world. The planes crashing into the towers could be considered an equivalent to the phrase: “the shot heard round the world”.

If you guys are interested in finding out more about “post 9/11” USA, I recommend you check out these links: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/11/coming-of-age-in-post-911-world/15474695/ and http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/10-seismic-changes-since-911/2013/09/10/4499cf18-19b4-11e3-82ef-a059e54c49d0_gallery.html. Both offer pretty interesting insight on how the US has changed from these events and how their consequences are still having effects on our world today. I’ve always found it interesting how, barely a year in the new century, we have already experienced an event which will resonate across history for a very long time.

That’s it for me today, hope you all have a good week and I’ll see you guys later!

Hello everyone, I hope the last week treated you all well.

Today’s blog will be focused on the lovely Joy Kogawa (Picture here: http://www.joykogawa.ca/uploads/1/0/1/1/10119078/7069_orig.jpg). Kogawa is a Canadian author and poet and she is mostly known due to her novel, Obasan. This book can be considered a semi-autobiography, because although the story and its characters are fictional, the events which transpire in throughout the novel are heavily inspired by Joy Kogawa’s own experiences. What experiences would these be, you ask? Those based on the Japanese internment in Canada. No doubt you’ve all heard of the American one during World War II, the one where American citizens of Japanese descent were forced to leave their homes and enter what can basically be called a work camp in order to “protect” the West Coast from invasion. Well, the same event occurred in Canada, but perhaps they had it worse. For while the Japanese-Americans were allowed to return to their homes, their Canadian counterparts received no such compensation and instead were forced to move East, leaving their homes and possessions behind. Kogawa wrote Obasan as an attempt to bring to light these crimes committed by the Canadian government against its own people and through hard work and dedication, the message came across.

There was overwhelming support for Kogawa when she published her book, a feat in and of itself, and many found themselves thanking her for the courage in putting this story out to the people. While in the UBC archives, I found many letters from people around the world thanking her for what she did, and expressing their admiration for her. These letters came in all shapes and sizes: Postcards, letters, poems, etc. Some even had students asking for her help in writing papers about her! It truly was touching seeing such happiness and appreciation in these letters (Although some were a bit hard to read). My favorite one came from a 5^th grader who, in broken English, expressed sadness over the fact that Kogawa had to leave her home stating that: “Some people should be punched in the nose.” The really had me laughing for a long time! And the cherry on top was a drawing of himself, I assume, shouting: “Kill those turkeys!” It’ll be a long time before I forget that 5^th grader from Ontario.

That’s all I got for the day, thank you so much for reading and today I recommend reading Obasan! It can get a bit slow, especially near the end, but it is a very important book and will leave you truly feeling the plight of these people. I leave its Wikipedia page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obasan. Have a great week everyone!

Hello everyone, hope you all have had a great week! For this week’s blog, I’ll be talking about Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde. Like Persepolis, this book is in the style of a comic book, or graphic novel. It talks about a United Nations enclave during the Bosnian War, which lasted from 1992-1995, in the city of Goražde. This city had experienced some horrendous crimes against it (even horrendous isn’t a strong enough adjective) and investigative reporter Joe Sacco took it upon himself to learn about the lives of these people, spend time interacting them, and get to know them better in order to tell their tale.

However, despite sharing the same genre as Satrapi’s book, Sacco’s book pulls no punches when retelling the gruesome story of these people. While Persepolis used imagery and certain symbols to represent death and violence, such as imagining a cut up person like this: http://satrapism.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/kic0000013.jpg.

Gorazde presents violence without holding back, like this: http://www.giraffedays.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Gorazde-panel1-751×1024.jpg.

Very clear difference in the two. I aim to compare the two and analyze their strengths and weaknesses.

For Goražde, by presenting a realistic and dark form of storytelling, it is better able to present the issues and problems the people there have faced. The reader isn’t fooled on the situation there, it’s horrible and the book makes a clear objective to point this out. Downplaying these people’s stories would be severely disrespecting them and for this reason, Sacco drew their stories as he heard them. Herein lays a key difference between the two: Persepolis was written by a survivor, Safe Area Goraždewas written about the survivors. Because Satrapi lived through these ordeals, she expresses how hard it is to draw or write about certain experiences. This is one of the reasons why she draws in her certain style. Sacco, however, isn’t plagued by these memories, thus allowing him to draw the more gruesome images without bringing up trauma. This realistic style can put off people. I personally know how difficult to read some of the pages are, and I know many people who would put the book away because of it. Persepolis doesn’t suffer that problem, because although the book’s style might seem childish and simple, it leaves the horror to the imagination of the reader; all while still being readable.

I highly recommend this book to you guys. But be warned, it is no Persepolis and in many pages you will lose faith in humanity (literally). But you’ll emerge a more knowledgeable person and will be aware of the worst humans can offer, but also the best. Safe Area Goraždeis a story about survival, and there is hope to be found in the book.

That’s all I have for today, thanks for reading and I hope you guys have a good week!

Hello everyone, hope you’ve all had a good week so far.

This week’s blog will focus itself of a trend that has existed in the western world for quite some time and one I find very interesting. It’s the “normalization of violence.” I first heard this term while we were discussing Persepolis: the Story of a Childhood, the story of an Iranian girl during the Islamic Revolution which I described on my previous class blog.

This is something that has always intrigued me about western culture. Violence is something so intricate in our lives that we barely react to it at times. This is something I myself experienced while reading Persepolis. The book described many horrible things and yet, it wasn’t until I reflected on it that I realized the many crimes that were committed against the Iranian people. Sure there were moments where I went: “Oh sweet Lord have mercy, that’s horrible!” (I didn’t actually say this) but it wasn’t until I further analyzed the book that the horrors were made very, very clear. An example of this is found on pages 51-52 of the book: http://comicsbeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/torture-in-Persepolis.jpg. Now obviously this is a pretty extreme example and a quite noticeable one too but I didn’t fully realize the atrocities committed to this man until I sat there for a second and really dug in into what Satrapi was describing. But there is another one that perhaps may have been overlooked by the readers of this book, I know I did, and that involves Marji and her friends. Throughout the book, Marji and company were really violent in what they did. Examples include dressing up as communist revolutionaries with guns and ammunition straps, shouting “Down with the Shah!”, and attempting to beat up a boy named Ramin with nails. Their reason? His father had been a member of the secret police. While their actions could be excused of that of a couple of kids not knowing what they’re doing, it should still be noted how quick they were to resort to violence, since it was something that was ingrained in their lives from the very beginning.

Herein lies my point. In the west, we have grown accustomed to seeing these violent acts against people, there even exists an entire genre around this which is horror. However, I have also seen how many other more natural subjects be scorned and censored in media, for example nudity. Why is it that we can see a violent incident on the news with no censoring but the moment a breast comes out, we have to blur it out? While this is no longer becoming the case, with sexuality being “normalized” too (At least in cinema), I still think this trend to be a very peculiar one and something I wish you guys to also think about today.

And that’s all I got to say for today, hope you guys have a great week and I’ll see you later!

Farhat Shahzad’s research paper, “The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning”, talks about how certain groups, encountered by an individual, will influence the way he or she consumes and grasp knowledge.

While reading said paper, I was intrigued by her remark that mentions that when a son or daughter talks to their parents, the engagement “does not involve the give and take of a dialogue with information.” (Shahzad 2010) As children, people will listen to what their parents say without question (most of the time). The mother’s or father’s opinion is extremely important in the way it influences a child’s mind. A parent instructs their child on social behavior, and they in turn, follow their guidance. It isn’t until that child grows up that they can begin discussing with their parents on more equal grounds.

However, not everyone is the same in that regard. While some children will let the opinions of their fathers and mothers become their own, others react against them. This is especially true when a child reaches adolescence. It is at this period in their lives that the growing offspring begin developing ideas and opinions on their own, and it is up to them whether they’ll let what was taught to them in childhood have an influence on such said things.

In this regard, I agree with Shazhad’s statement that families are “an influential interpretative community” and that it “plays an active role in the selection of sources of information and then interpretation of the information.” (Shazad 2010). What a child sees, hears, thinks, is a culmination on what their parents allow them to do. They block channels that can contain information they don’t what their children to see. They let them hear their opinions and discussions on a variety of topics. They influence the way their child thinks. Mothers and fathers experience one of the most difficult jobs in the world, raising a human being. It is up to them to shape their children into who they’ll become and guide them until they can act on their own. This is why I believe the family is one of, if not the, most important interpretative community, or group, people are exposed to during their lives.

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