Continuing on the topic of poetry that we have been talking about in the last couple of classes in ASTU I think that an interesting connection I found was the way a poem written in the past could be interpreted in a different way and fit perfectly in another situation. That is the case of the poem September 1, 1939 written on the date that the title says. This poem gained public attention when sixty-two years later it reappeared after the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center in New York. The original poem was written at the start of the German invasion of Poland at the beginning of WWII. The poem has a powerful message and the way it interprets the events of that day make it suitable for the terrorist attacks. At the beginning of the poem the author, W.H. Auden writes:

Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Interviews from people experiencing the events on September 11, 2001 often talk about the smell and the toxicity there was in the air after both the towers of the World Trade Center came down. I think the language used in the poem gives the reader the opportunity to interpret it in different ways and adapt it to different events.
One important difference that stands out from the original poem is that the last line of the eighth stanza was changed from:There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another and die.

to

We must love one another or die.

Why do you think that line was changed and how does the message make a different impact with that modification?

Till next time,

~Gabriel

Hola Bloggers!

This time I want to talk to you guys about a new interest that I found these last few weeks when we started to look at poetry in our ASTU class. I used to think poetry was not something interesting that I could reflect on but after looking at several poems that were written after 9/11 and one at the outbreak of WWII I found that there are special connections and emotions expressed through poetry that stand out from other forms of literature.
When I was reading Wisława Szymborska’s poem Photograph from September 11, I thought of the way that the author was gentle in interpreting the horrendous scenes from the terrorist attacks on 9/11. She used a certain style that made me think of the falling people from the World Trade Center. When I first saw the videos I was shocked. I was left with a disturbing image of that event and and when I started reading Szymborska’s poem I was surprised that somebody would refer to those atrocious and shocking moments, I wanted to know how she portrayed what happened and put it into words. I was delighted because I feel like the poem contains the right words to express the grief but also gives the reader the opportunity to reflect on the details that make the scene seem as another kind of event. Szymborska made me feel like these people were there in a different situation, when she writes:

Hola readers!

I’m glad to be back at this after the short winter break. Its now a new semester and with it come different material that we will be focusing on in our ASTU class.
This term in ASTU we will focus our attention and learning on the War on Terror. And so we will have the opportunity to look at texts that reflect different aspects of it like the origins of  memories in different events like the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, better known as 9/11 for example, the transformation they undergo when these memories and stories are seen from different human perspectives, the way we all portray and represent those memories individually and collectively and how events such as 9/11 connect to other in different places through globalization.

So far in our class we have read Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and to me the story was very touching and given that the main character Oskar’s story reflects one of thousands of stories that originate after 9/11 I put it into perspective and thought of the incredible contrast there is in the lives of those who were in New York that day from before the attacks and how drastically things changed after.
One of the most important and interesting things I have learned so far and I believe is central in our CAP Global Citizens concentration of Arts is to understand the link of these events and how we as students with different backgrounds and diverse nationalities look at important events like 9/11. As it happened to most of us who remember when it happened it was very shocking and even though I didn’t fully understand what was going on it did have a very traumatizing effect on me as a 6-year-old boy repeating the CNN clips over and over again thinking about all of those who were inside the Twin Towers.
In class I was intrigued by how much more attention 9/11 has been given in Canada compared to Mexico, given that both countries are the main trading partners of the USA and I hope that the way we analyze these events though the texts we read this term can help me understand many of these phenomena better.

Till Next Time,

Gabo.

Sources:

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/highlights/top/top1312yr.html

Hola Bloggers!

I want to make this blog post more personal because I think that the things I’ve learned so far are really interesting to me and I want to share this.
The past few weeks at our ASTU course have been loaded with different contents that have become more and more interesting and I feel really happy that my writing has improved so much during the course of this semester.

Now that we have looked at different works and diverse genre we can discuss and even ‘orchestrate voices’ of different authors talking about the same subject.
We have learned now through different tasks like our literature review and our group oral presentation to gather all the information from different perspectives and find the scholarly conversation that is going on about a certain theme.

In the case of my group presentation, we highlighted the distinct outlook on technologies of memory from authors like Jan Assman, Hillary Chute, Sarah Elwood, Alison Landsberg and Marita Sturken and organize them into groups of ideas. But what was different and important to me was that I was able to see the evolution of thought in academia when it comes to works posted in the 1990’s and how radically different they are in the later works of Alison Landsberg and Sturken for example.
To see the way the emergence of new technologies changed the dialog that was formed by scholars talking about technologies of memory was really interesting and tracking all of the drastic changes that happened in just 15 years is impressive.

Being able to put the thoughts of different authors and show how different they are is something I had never done before and I think that the process of learning how to put those ideas together has been the greatest challenge for me but the chances we have had in the literature review for example have made me see the progress that the class has had.
This process of academic writing has so far been a lot more than I expected and I hope that I can expand my knowledge on these topics we have learned.

HOLA Bloggers!

As we continue to analyze in more detail the content in Satrapi’s Persepolis, we have recently looked at Hillary Chute’s The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis in our ASTU class. Chute talks, among other things, about the elements that have made Persepolis have an important impact on readers like recognized American journalist Gloria Steinem who says about the book: “You’ve never seen anything like Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi may have given us a new genre.”
The graphic style that Satrapi uses in her memoir is unique and has called the attention of scholars like Chute because it is an essential part of why it has caused such a great impact. As Chute segments the genre in which the book is written, she points out the simple illustrations that are used in Persepolis and the “child’s-eye rendition of trauma”(Chute, 98) which contribute to the reader’s understanding of how memory works.

I highly recommend that you take a look at my friend Therese Barrozo’s blog. I believe that she brings up really interesting points in relation to what Chute mentions in her work but also adds to the conversation with the question “Does mainstream media normalize violence?”. 
Therese tells us that her experience of seeing violence in the mainstream media like movies, has really impacted her and that the way in which violence is portrayed is normal to the point of “being part of their lifestyle” as she refers to the characters in some movies.
Analyzing the content Therese has exposed on the normalizing of violence I want to relate this issue to my own experience.

As I wrote in my first blog post, my country has recently been going through a devastating period of violence where thousands of people have been killed and the media reporting all of the violent acts have no censorship when it comes to showing extreme acts of brutality. In some cases we, as Mexican society have been exposed to images of mutilated body parts like heads, hanging bodies, and other ways of torture that relate to what Satrpi depicts on page 51 on the first part of Persepolis.
It is indeed sad to think that we are used to the display of shocking images like those and that even though it has a strong emotional impact on anyone who is exposed to that kind of imagery, it is “normal” for people living in the conflict areas.
Being able to relate in some way to the violence present in Persepolis has made me realize how hard it must be for Satrapi to represent everything that she went through. She explains: “I write a lot about the Middle East, so I write about violence. Violence today has become so normal, so banal – that is to say everybody thinks its normal. But its not not normal.” (Satrapi cited in Chute, 99)

~Gabo

Sources:

Chute, Hillary. “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Women’s studies Quarterly 36.1&2 (Spring/Summer 2008): 92-110.

HOLA! Readers, welcome back. 

In these last days I finished reading the first part of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. In this graphic memoir Satrapi uses the character of Marji to represent herself from ages six to fourteen and recounts the story of what she lived during the Islamic Revolution in her home country of Iran.               Reading Persepolis made me see how little I knew about Iran. I had a completely different idea of what life in Iran looked like. I learned several cultural and social aspects that made me value her country and the story she tells more than I could have expected. I feel like I can even relate some of the events she narrates to what has been going on in my country, Mexico.

I really enjoyed reading Satrapi’s work and I think it was the particular graphic aspect of the book that made me understand the story in a more personal way. I felt more connected to the story and to the character she uses because of the comic strips in her book.                                                                                                   I like how she intends to use this genre to give the story a more informal and personal touch but without making it fictitious. I found the contrast between the harsh story and the graphic representation very important so that I could better understand what she was telling.

After I had read the book I thought of how this story was being a “technology of memory” (Wertsch, 2002) for me and how everything I thought about Iran was being replaced by the new content I had learned from reading Persepolis. This was interesting to me and it made me think about the way that we learn or the way that we create memories from what we read . Something I had earlier discussed in my ASTU class when I read “The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning” by Farhat Shahzad.                         Because the graphic style of Persepolis was important to my understanding of the book I wondered.. How different would Persepolis’ impact be if it were written in a formal way with no graphics? How important is the format when you want to make a significant impact on your audience?

Those questions made me think of something that happened to me a couple of months ago, when I read about recent political situations on newspapers and how my understanding of what was happening was different when I found supporting materials that gave me another perspective.                                             I recall this time in recent internal elections in Mexico when I read some stories about politicians. After a while I found some political cartoons that, just like in Persepolis, helped me have a better understanding of the situation and how the person who makes them thinks of that certain subject. The cartoons in Satrapi’s book and the political cartoons I saw on newspapers had a specific point of view and I think they are an important piece of evidence that show how some people feel and what they think.                                                                 It would be very interesting to see what a similar book would look like told from the point of view of Marji’s school principal. 

My experience with this genre for the first time, when reading Persepolis, was surprising. It was very entertaining and the format in which Marjane Satrapi chose to tell her story really made a difference to me. It was also interesting to see how she could take advantage of the graphics to show more in detail what she had in mind and what she thought. The contrast between the dramatic story and the humor that she uses in the book makes it a unique and intriguing story.

~Gabriel

P.D. Sorry if the paragraphs move. I’ve spent 40 minutes trying to fix this but..

Wertsch, J.V. (2002). Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge University Press.

HOLA! readers, welcome to my blog!

In this first post I’d like to share some interesting connections I’ve found between my experiences in daily life and my ASTU 100A Course here at UBC.

During the last weeks we have analyzed Farhat Shahzad’s work, The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning, where she explains how “interpretative communities” like our social groups, family, religious communities, etc. have an important role on how we learn and remember things. The way she conducts her study shows us how influential technologies of memory and “human agents” can be (Wertsch, 2002). In this work she specifically focuses on how ninety-nine Canadian students remember The War on Terror.
I was surprised to see how much the background of each student played a role on how they saw that specific event and what they though about it. I feel like I became aware on how my opinion on certain things is affected by what I have been exposed to all my life.

After analyzing Shahzad’s study I thought of how news in media from my country, Mexico, reflect many aspects of our lives and how things can be different from one place to another.
The interesting part of this was searching for headlines from the most important news sites in Mexico and then compare them to the ones in Canada.
I came up with this idea when I saw the news on Hailey Dunbar-Blanchette. This story was particularly interesting to me since it was everywhere, including signs on the buses, social media, the radio and on TV. The sad thing here is that I would probably never hear something like that on the news in my country since cases like Hailey’s are very common.
The kind of news I was used to before coming here were highly negative. Things like the movie-like escape of the world’s most wanted drug lord, corruption-filled government, the kidnapping and killing of businessmen in areas of my country.

Photo: Reuters

Although I can say that I felt safe in the place where I lived in Mexico, and that my quality of life there was good, I do feel that being surrounded by situations like those reflected in the media affected the way I saw things and my emotional state.

What I found really interesting is how I could relate Shahzad’s work to a previous personal experience in one way or another. It really made me think how the news and the environment we are exposed to has a positive or negative impact in our daily lives.

~Gabriel

Sources

Wertsch, J.V. (2002). Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge University Press.