We’re constantly told we live in a time of unprecedented change. The term is used everywhere from manufacturing to climate change painting an overall picture of a world developing faster than it ever has done before. One area definitely not exempt from this change is human social behaviour, and here the pace of development is just as fast as anywhere else. What was once socially acceptable and commonplace may be completely improper and outlawed just a decade later. I would argue that these changes are pretty unanimously for the better, driving us into a new era where misogyny, racism and homophobia are rightfully called out and providing those historically marginalized opportunity to live happier and healthier lives. However, I am also barely twenty and so I’ve grown up being educated into what is largely the status quo today. In another twenty, thirty years will I be lurking on the next equivalent of Twitter and Facebook, commenting that the world has gone crazy and that we need to go back to the ‘good old days’ when people lived by the rules I’m most comfortable with?

This generational struggle to adapt to change is a central theme of Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, the novel we are currently analyzing in ASTU. Disgrace is set in post-apartheid South Africa and is centred around David Laurie, a white, 52 year old, South African professor as he navigates a country that has changed, at least on the surface, profoundly over a short space of time. The first half of the novel is highly representative of this struggle that those in older generations can have in coming to terms with a new social environment. David begins in a rut in many aspects of his life. He’s frustrated about what he’s being forced to teach at the university and his sex life, although logically taken care of through a prostitute, lacks any passion. This changes when he meets Melanie, a student in one of his classes, and engages in a highly inappropriate sexual relationship which includes non-consensual sex. David feels bad after the event but after being reported to the university and facing disciplinary hearings he refuses to engage in any self reflection, rather just repeating that he accepts the accusations laid against him. It isn’t until his own daughter faces similar circumstances in the second half of the novel that David is forced to undergo some reflection of his moral compass.

However, David’s response to being disciplined for his actions with Melanie is highly reflective of the way many white South Africans responded to the end of the Apartheid. They acknowledge that the system was racist and therefore bad, but do it often through sense of necessity rather than a deeper reflection of why their actions were morally wrong. The situation in South Africa is made harder by the fact that the country is trying to undergo a processes of reconciliation (emphasis on the re) without a base model to work from. The term reconciliation makes it seem like there was a pre-existing positive set of relations between black and white South Africans that could be returned to and so masks that in fact the two groups needed to find a way to coexist peacefully for the first time in the country’s history whilst also acknowledging the trauma that non-white South Africans faced during system of apartheid and previously under British rule. An unprecedented change. So, whilst in certain contexts of reconciliation, after civil wars for instance, the older generation can be incredibly advantageous sources of knowledge to how they have previously lived harmoniously, in this context the older, white generation of South Africans find themselves post-apartheid in a context they have never previously known. Changing your ways after 50+ plus years of reinforcement is not at all an easy feat even if, like David, you have a degree of awareness that certain actions you have done are morally wrong.

There is no easy answer to how to respond when older generation’s struggle to or cannot respond to modern progressions in social attitudes. Certainly, we cannot excuse the actions of people like David Laurie on the basis that they couldn’t have known better having grown up in a different era. However, novels such as Disgrace remind us that processes of reconciliation are never going to be as easy as just changing the law and surface level social attitudes without addressing the underlying roots of intolerance that was embedded into past generations and cannot just be shaken off superficially and without real personal reflection. For me it also emphasises the need for younger generations to not grow complacent as we get older. What is the case now is never going to be the best things can ever possibly be and we should always be open to positive societal changes and meaningful self reflection.

Over the past month in ASTU two of the texts that have particularly stuck out to me are Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a graphic novel about his father’s experiences as a Jew during the Holocaust and Helen Weinzweig’s Basic Black with Pearls, an almost spy-type novel about a women’s journey through Toronto to find her elusive lover. Despite their differences in plot there are a number of common themes that connect the texts. Memory and trauma, naturally being the key themes of our ASTU class, are central to both Mausand Basic Black with Pearls, though each author navigates them in different ways. However, a commonality I am particularly interested in exploring is how both novels explore the concept of coming home and the home itself. I think this is a particularly pertinent question to me, being first year international student here at UBC, as for the first time in my life I’m having to grapple with the notion that I have no real sense of “home” anymore. I haven’t been back to London, where I grew up and would have traditionally considered home, since August and my childhood room has now been changed beyond recognition. Living in dorms here in Vancouver, this doesn’t feel like any notion of home I’ve seen before either. So, with summer and my return to London fast approaching, I’ve found myself increasingly questioning the meaning of home to me. Both Spiegelman and Weinzweig’s work take non-traditional approaches on the notion of home particularly challenging the idea that everyone has a perfect one.

Spiegelman tackles the notion of home on two fronts in Maus. Most strikingly is his father’s understanding of home in Poland under Nazi occupation. The tension between Vladek, his Jewish father, and his fellow Polish countrymen is spelled out plainly in the controversial drawing of the Poles as pigs. The connotations behind this lie in his Vladek’s belief that the Polish people, his neighbours, could have done more to help the Jews during the Holocaust. I find this portrayal interesting as there are several instances in the book where Vladek is actually helped by his Jewish countrymen, such as getting him back home on the train (62) and letting him stay in their barn (139), however despite this Vladek and, in turn, Spiegelman make clear throughout the novel that Vladek was a Polish-Jew, which was a very separate category to a normal Polish citizen. Ultimately, this meant that despite Poland being Vladek’s home, it didn’t actually feel like a welcoming place to him, certainly during his time of greatest need, and so whilst technically it was his address on a very practical level Poland wasn’t really a home for him at all.

However, the challenges of finding a place to call home did not end for Vladek when he leaves Poland. His house in New York plays a defining role in the novel as the place where Vladek tells his story to Art and such is its importance that its location is displayed prominently on the back cover of the book. Yet, this house was also the place in which Vladek’s wife and Art’s mother committed suicide and where Vladek’s current relationship with Mala is fraught with difficulty, Mala describing her nerves as “completely shot” (99) living with Vladek. It shows that home can be more than one thing at the same time, it can be simultaneously a place of great sadness and of career defining significance. It’s all of the emotion that connects you to it that makes it a home, not just happiness all of the time.

Weinzweig’s Basic Black with Pearlssimilarly challenges the traditional notion of the home. For Shirley, at the start of the novel, Toronto is home, but it is also one of, if not the, last places in the world that she wants to go, even for Coenraad. However, through her attempts to find Coenraad in Toronto, Shirly discovers a side of the city that she has never fully appreciated before and by the end of the novel she has returns home, giving up her trademark black dress and pearls. She notes she will miss travelling to be with Coenraad but also seems to have found a new appreciation for her home through her time away. The reassuring message this sends to me is that even your home may seem like the last place you want to be, the more you explore a city that you have a very set position on, the more it may surprise you and change those perceptions.

To sum up, Maus and Basic Black with Pearls paint different pictures of the notion of home but both challenge the traditional notion of home as perfect environment where you will always fit in. Maus takes a somewhat more pessimistic view showing that even if you call a place home it may never be the welcoming place you would expect, but it can still become an important place in your life. Basic Black with Pearls shows that even if you become totally disillusioned with the place you call home, you may find yourself eventually finding comfort in it as you get to know it better. Both then, provide food for thought as I navigate my own new journey of finding what home means to me.

In today’s world you cannot escape the term fake news. From internet forums to the Oval Office, the phrase has not crept but burst out into our everyday language, forcing dictionaries to define it and TV quiz shows to name themselves after it. The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines fake news as “false reports of events, written and read on websites”. That seems straightforward enough. Something is either true or it’s not and if it’s not, it’s a lie and therefore fake news. 

But how come I have a different opinion on what is fake news compared to my dad?

How can opinions even exist on something that is, at it’s core, about the truth? 

Surely there’s only one truth?    

You only need to scratch the surface of fake news to reveal the murky pit of confusion that lies at the heart of it. Dense, nuanced stuff that some of histories’ greatest minds, from Plato to Descartes, Hume to Kant, have tried to tackle. The pit is so big it has an entire branch of philosophy devoted to it: epistemology, the study of human knowledge which includes asking whether we can even have any knowledge at all. In this blog (spoiler alert!) I’m not going to give you a definitive answer. Instead I’m going to examine a couple instances of facts, falsehoods and fictions to illustrate how complex the topic is, how it’s not going away anytime soon and how it can be, very literally, the difference between a life and a death.

Let’s start from a place of comfort. The truth is a thing that exists, we should all aim for it and those that fail to be faithful to the truth should be penalized. In many situations this is an obvious statement and not least when there are lives resting on it. Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico as a category 4 hurricane on September 20th 2017. The island was visibly devastated, power was out in some areas for 11 months, roads were cut off and there was a severe food shortage. A month after the hurricane the official government death toll was 62. The majority of the American people accepted that to be the truth, at least to the extent that there were no significant protests. The media, though they raised concerns early on, moved on quickly, they had other things to cover. But the local people affected by the storm could not just move on. In reality the death toll was far higher and for 11 months thousands of families had to deal with the loss of a relative as a result of the storm that the US Government refused to recognize. Ultimately almost a year later the official death toll was revised to 2,975, still a conservative estimate and by then the damage was already done. “The Truth” had turned out not to be so true and a very large number of people suffered greatly because of it.

Not unconnected from the situation in Puerto Rico, you can’t talk about fake news without talking about Donald Trump. He’s the man brought the phrase into popular discussion over the course of 174 tweets and counting. According to the Washington Post tracker, Donald Trump made 1,950 false or misleading claims from his inauguration in 2017 to the end of that year. These claims ranged from proclaiming his inauguration was the most watched in history, a provably false statement, to telling people to “look what happened last night in Sweden” in the context of migration issues when nothing, as a matter of fact, occurred concerning migrants in Sweden the night before. This was off the back of a campaign where he claimed the country was being taken over by 30 million undocumented immigrants (US Homeland Security estimates it’s around 11 million), Hillary Clinton had lost $6 billion dollars as Secretary of State (provably false) and the unemployment rate was as high as 42% (when it was, in fact, 5%). Honestly is a central pillar of a healthy democracy. If voters don’t know the facts or can’t trust the information being presented to them then how can anyone make the choice that they actually want to make and were not deceived into making? No matter what side of the political spectrum you fall on, the case for being honest when it comes to politics, and even more so when it comes to human lives, is clear. 

So Donald Trump has a history, both before and during his presidency, of lying. Spreading fake news if you wish to follow the definition of the term closely. However, even with all the examples of lying above being widely publicized by US media during the campaign trail, coming into the 2016 Presidential Election Donald Trump was still viewed as being more trustworthy than his opponent Hillary Clinton. There is, admittedly, a big conversation surrounding the perception of gender within this debate but it also begs another question. Does it matter if what Trump’s saying is inaccurate, if people think he’s being honest and relate to the emotions he’s sharing anyway? The unemployment rate may not be 42% but, if people look around their community and see what seems like a lot of people out of work, can that claim become true to them whether or not it supported by evidence? This question of sentiment falls not just on Donald Trump. I was given the inspiration to write this blog from a tweet I saw this week by former Obama and Hilary Clinton digital communications staffer Nicholas Kitchel. He tweeted a picture showing Republican members of congress outside the White House after successfully passing a repeal of the Affordable Health Care Act last winter. Over the picture he put a red cross on all the member members who had “been voted out of Congress” in the recent midterms. With almost all of the congressmen in the picture covered by a cross it was certainly a powerful picture in support of the popularity of the Affordable Care Act and was retweeted almost 30 thousand times with close to 70 thousand likes. However, many of the replies to the tweet pointed out that a large number of the congressmen in the photo had not been voted out but had just retired and were subsequently replaced with equally as conservative members. Therefore was the tweet misleading? Certainly opinion polls show that the ACA is widely popular and that healthcare played a big role in Democrats retaking control of the House. But does the fact that the statement of the tweet is factually inaccurate undermine any truth of the sentiment behind it? If it doesn’t undermine it, can Donald Trump get away with his problematic claims as opinion polls before the 2016 election showed that Americans were widely concerned about the economy and terrorism? 

History gives us an abundance of precedence in arguing that an apparent truth can hold even if there a facts contrary to it. I’m a big fan of the Netflix show Narcos which focused, in the first two seasons, on Pablo Escobar. Here was a man that, as far as the facts are concerned, ran the largest cocaine empire in the world and just one of his hitmen claims to have been involved in the killings of as many as 3000 people. A villain then. Yet, still to this day, Escobar is revered by some in his home town of Medellin as a hero to the community who provided jobs and brought development to very deprived areas. Who gets to dictate which view is “the truth”? Moreover, if you place indisputable fact at the the top of the pyramid in determining whether or not something is the “truth” or not them what does that say about works of fictional literature. We’re currently reading the Reluctant Fundamentalist by Pakistani author Moshin Hamid in my ASTU class. We spend our classes discussing what truths the book can reveal and how they can challenge master or dominant narratives in post 9/11 American society. But does the fact that the stories main character, Changez, never existed, and therefore everything that happens to him is not real, undermine the sentiment it’s trying to convey and therefore the “truth” behind it? In being a work of fiction is the Reluctant Fundamentalist actually fake news that has no place in a decision-making conversation? An English professor, and a world where fables are prevalent across cultures, would likely argue otherwise. Ultimately then, it would seem that throughout our cultures something does not have to be 100% accurate to the facts to be “the truth”. 

So what can we take away from this? Firstly, a confirmation that the fake news is not as simple as the definition may make it seem. Secondly, that truth is something that people on all sides of the political spectrum have to be concerned with, whether you have Trump representing your political party or not. When the facts support your point certainly defend it and, please, consider it a civic duty to call out Trump when he deliberately misleads people. But also be aware that the world isn’t as binary as we humans would like and sometimes people will see the same thing from a different perspective. Finally, there is no definitive answer to the title of this blog. It’s up to you to make up your own mind up on what level of true you require “the truth” to be. Just remember, your decision has real, far reaching implications.    

Nicholas Kitchel ultimately took his tweet down, citing that it was factually incorrect. 

Donald Trump has yet to take back anything he has said. 

Finding a topic to focus this blog on was difficult. The first couple months of university have been such a whirlwind that there are countless topics that I could just monologue or even rant about. But one thing that I’ve been particularly keen to discuss is the idea of culture and cultural understanding. In particular, trying to explore my direct experiences of culture to examine my wider study of different cultures that I’ve just begun at university.

One of the reasons I’m interested in talking about culture and cultural understanding is because it’s being a playing on my mind recently as someone who has just moved over 7000 km from London to Vancouver. This isn’t the first time that I’ve lived abroad. I lived in Rwanda for six months when I was eleven, but being there with my family meant that I was still able to feel “at home” even though I was far away from where I grew up. This illustrated to me how much culture is tied to the people you are with not the place you are in, as it’s most commonly portrayed.

On the face of it then, moving from Britain to Canada should have been a piece of cake compared to moving to east Africa. I should have no problem at all. Yet, for some reason, this transition to university in Canada has been by the biggest shock of my life. I think partly that has been because without my family it has been much harder to find that sense of home and my culture over here. Also, I think it’s because on the surface living here is just like being at home. The weather is similar, the people are similar (London is just as diverse in population as Vancouver), the education is similar to the extent that I have 50 minute lessons and a fair amount of free periods to organize myself. Yet, there are seemingly minor differences that go a long way. The age when you’re considered an adult being 19, for example, is something that is seemingly so superficial that it shouldn’t mean anything. Nevertheless, I’ve come from a place where from 18 I could do anything I wanted to do and now that I can’t, I had to get parental consent to even get a phone contract, it feels like I’ve almost lost independence at university, when everyone around me is telling me I’m gaining it. The point to this story is not at all which parts of different cultures are good and which are bad, I’m in no position to make that judgement and I think it’s a frankly difficult and even damaging judgement for anyone to make. The point is my realization, coming here to Vancouver, that even in cultures that I think I know, small changes can make a big difference and it’s had made me realize I actually know very little about the real lived experience of people within different cultures.

Now, taking this idea and applying it to my studies within the Global Citizen stream of CAP (Coordinated Arts Program) here at UBC, I arrive at a very similar question to one the suggested for this blog by Dr Luger. If the reality of Canadian culture has been a shock to me, to what extent can I understand, appreciate and attempt to analyze a culture that I am even more unfamiliar with, for instance Iranian culture as expressed in Persepolis or Latin American culture through the Arts of Resistance exhibit I wrote about in the last blog. 

For example, one of the parts of Persepolis we discussed in class was the book’s interpretation of Islam. Whilst you can make statements like “I think the book interprets Islam in a negative way because Marji’s family is always at odds with the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam in Iran”, in reality I can never fully understand Satrapi’s message on Islam because I haven’t lived her life or been part of a culture like that of Iran’s. Therefore, whilst the point might be valid on the surface level of reading her book, I must also accept there will be a fundamental gap between my understanding and Satrapi’s true position which will be so much more nuanced and refined by her experiences. The inexpressible nature of cultural and personal memory is made explicit within Persepolis in instances like the completely black and empty frame on page 142 after Marji realizes her friend Neda has died. It was a stark reminder to me that there is a limit to the phrase “put yourself in someone else’s shoes” and there are many instances where the cultural distance and lived experience is just too different from your own to understand it in any meaningful way. Similarly, the last blog I wrote was about the art of the Indigenous people of Ayacucho in Peru. I can try and empathize with their position and frame it in a global perspective, as I did, but in reality I have never experienced being a member of an indigenous community in a country and in a civil war that was imposed upon me without my consent. There are limitations to my understanding of the culture and that is something that must be accepted. 

But, I think is wrong to say that we can’t get anything from these art forms. There are similarities in experience across cultures that different people can relate to and I’m drawn towards the positivity of a common sense of humanity as proposed by philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre whereby there are human experiences that all humans can relate to. For instance, whilst we’ve discussed my separation both physically and psychologically from Marji in Persepolis, there are still extents to which I can connect with facets of her life and culture. For example, as I spoke about earlier, my time in Rwanda showed to me how much culture is determined by the people you are with rather than where you are and this can also be seen in Persepolis. Marji’s family culture, with their Thursday night parties and socialist beliefs are a stark contrast to the fundamental Islam that is, at least from the outside, seen as the defining culture of Iran. Though I can’t relate to the extreme secrecy her family had to practice their culture in, I can relate to wanting to maintain your own culture in a very different external environment. The important thing is to always recognize that these similarities have limits and never to try to claim insight on another person’s or culture’s story.  

In conclusion, I don’t think anyone should shy away from books like Persepolis just because the culture it comes from is so different from what they’re used to. Instead, what I think my move to Canada has really shown me is that I need to be aware that there will always be a gap between my outsider perception of what a culture is like and the true experience of living within a culture, even if I think I know a lot. This means that whilst it is possible to relate to certain parts of a book like Persepolis, that relation should always be acknowledged as having fundamental limitations and I should not force myself and my culture onto a narrative that doesn’t belong to me.

The Arts of Resistance  exhibit at the Museum of Anthropology was curated by Laura Osorio Sunnucks and, in a nutshell, designed to show “the political and social significance of (Latin American) artistic traditions”. As someone who has been fortunate to have worked in social justice and international development environments for almost six years now, the way that art can be used to express politics, particularly the politics of historically and currently marginalized groups, is of particular interest to me. I am Malala, by Malala Yousafzai was a book that changed the way I thought about the world by sharing an experience of girl’s education in Pakistan that I had never before considered. Heading to the museum, I was excited to see how these pieces of art would affect me and to learn about communities I hadn’t been aware of before.

I will admit before I went to the exhibit I had never even heard of the Indigenous people of Ayacucho, let alone had any awareness of the terrible struggle they went through in the 1980s simply for happening to live a region experiencing the very real consequences of a global ideological struggle between socialism and capitalism. It is this specific case of politics, trauma and the art that was created out of it that I have chosen to focus this blog on as it particularly caught my attention amongst the many pieces on display at the exhibition. To give a little more context to this piece, the Indigenous people of Ayacucho have lived in this specific region of southern Peru for thousands of years and through many different empires including the Incan and Spanish. Therefore, though a traditionally farming-based community, this is a society that had experienced its fair share of conflict and upheaval over the course of its history. However, the 1980s brought a scale of suffering to the region not seen since the Peruvian War of Independence in the early 19th century. It also disproportionately affected Indigenous people with 75% of the over 69,000 killed during the conflict speaking an indigenous language such Quechua, despite these groups making up only about 15% of the total Peruvian population. Taking personal memories of this scale of trauma and translating them into artwork is a highly thought-provoking process and one that fascinated me as I further considered the piece.

I think there were two reasons in particular why this specific artwork stood out. The first is the sheer scale of the trauma displayed by the work, and the contrast between that and the traditional, delicate way it has been painted onto the rectangular wooden boards. There’s a pair of very notable boards towards the end of the series that are covered in illustrations of kidnapping, murder and death with women and men tied up, bleeding from bullet wounds and even on fire at the hands of both the Shining Path guerrilla movement and the US-backed Peruvian Government army. Yet, the art form itself reminds me more of the Tintin comics I read as a child than the way I’ve been brought up to understood art created from trauma. It’s a world away from the World War One poetry I studied in high school for instance.  However, the art form does make more sense given its context in the local society. These drawings would have traditionally decorated the insides of people’s houses and so had to balance the importance of retelling the culture’s rich history, tragedy included, with, quite practically, ensuring the children of the house could still get to sleep at night. Nevertheless, I think that it is this contradiction of shocking imagery with an art form that has been so traditionally innocent to me that made the piece so striking and interesting to take in. 

The other reason why it stood out was the name of the piece, Piraq Causa, meaning “Who is to blame?” in the native Quechuan language. Interestingly, the artwork itself does little to attempt to answer this question, painting both the guerrilla movement and the government troops, by the end of the piece at least, in equally bad light and therefore suggesting that there is not one clear answer. Moreover, the description alongside the art explicitly acknowledges that the initial positive reception of the guerrillas by the locals is omitted in the artwork, replaced by an image that shows more skepticism of their arrival. This recognition of the cultural bias in the piece further muddies the water as to actual state of events and raises a multitude of interesting questions concerning the right of communities to control, and to a certain extent alter, their own histories and memories. But that is a whole nuanced conversation in and of itself and something to examine in another blog. What I want to focus on here is this examination of blame as one of the most meaningful points of the artwork. To me this artwork was making a strong case that by fixating over the question of who is to blame in a situation, as especially the mass media tend to do, we forget, or more cynically we actively avoid, devoting any attention to the actual victims of the tragedy. In this case it was the Ayacucho people but this idea rings true of almost all conflicts and is particularly apparent in our approach to the current war in Syria, where geopolitics takes centre stage over the suffering of the local people. There is no doubt that the attribution of the blame, and the hope for justice that comes with it, is important, but at what cost? When our obsession for finding the worst villain in a series of devastating events averts our attention from aiding the victims of the events then I believe that we, as humans, have got our priorities completely the wrong way around. I think part of the reason for the provocative name of this artwork is insinuating that very idea and it stuck out particularly in my mind. 

Ultimately, the more you consider all pieces of political art, the more questions are raised about the way society currently operates. The answers are rarely obvious and in certain cases there may never be a clear-cut answer to a situation which, for someone like me who is constantly wanting to make things better, is incredibly frustrating. But, just as I am Malala did, this exhibit brought my attention to something I had not considered before and at the end of the day, to me, that is always something valuable and worthwhile.  

You can find out more about the museum exhibit here and more about the Peruvian conflict from the UK-based Peru Support Group here.