Recently in our ASTU class we have been reading lots of poetry. The last book we read was This Connection of Everyone with Lungs by Juliana Spahr. It is a book of two poems written after 9/11 up to the United States invading Iraq. In her first poem, A poem written after September 11/2001, Spahr hypnotizes the reader in a repetitive form that mimics the rhythm of breathing as

“everyone with lungs breathes the space in and out as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands in and out as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands in and out.” (4)

She focuses on each individual’s connection to the world and our connection to those other individuals around us. A connection of everyone that is both “lovely” and “doomed”. The poem articulates the idea of radical interconnectedness upon which the rest of the book depends. It preforms this through a slow zoom-out, starting from the microscopic level of “cells, the movement of cells and the division of cells” to the global scope of “the space of the cities and the space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space of the continents and islands”.

The second section, Poems written from November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003, is a collection of poems divided by separate yet connected dated sections. It focuses more on the day to day news and the ordinary way it’s displayed. This poem does the work of dealing with the consequences from the first poem. That is, if “everyone with lungs” is connected in a “lovely” and “doomed” global form, what does this mean? If we can successfully think of the whole earth as a system, what does it mean when part of that system is attempting to kill a different part of that system? Is it possible to love all of humanity when some of the humans that we’re connected to behave in such terrible ways? Is a person killed by the IDF in Gaza important? What about someone killed in the Bureij refgee camps? What about Jay-Z? If you make your own bed a place of “connected loving” what relevance does this have to the world? How can you seriously consider these questions in a world at war? Although Spahr’s book does not answer these questions, I believe they are the right ones to be asking.

Spahr, Juliana. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Print.

After a well needed Christmas break, we started off our first week of ASTU by reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The novel follows a nine-year old boy named Oskar, and his struggle to make sense of his father’s death in the September 11^th attacks on the World Trade Center. I saw the movie when it came out a few years ago, and ever since then the book has been on my “to read” list so I was glad that I could finally get the chance to! Although I knew the basic plotline of the book, I enjoyed reading all the details and other important parts that were left out of the movie.

Last week before we finished the novel, we discussed the events of September 11^th and our individual experiences of being taught the history and pre history of 9/11 in school. Every year on the anniversary of 9/11 we would have a special chapel to commemorate the alumni who perished in the attacks. Other than the basic facts, I realized I wasn’t formally taught the history leading up to 9/11, the details of the event, or its military aftermath.

A couple days ago, I stumbled upon this image on the Internet. It’s a clip from the documentary Bowling For Columbine that briefly overviews events leading up to 9/11. I don’t know how accurate it is, but either way it certainly brings to light a different perspective of the history of 9/11. From my experience, whenever the topic of 9/11 was discussed, the focus was always on the horrendous nature of the event and its aftermath. Many people didn’t often talk about the long build up of issues that brought us to 9/11. I think there are several reasons why this happens, one being the assumption that everyone already knows about 9/11. Since our generation and those before lived through the actual events, it’s assumed that we know all there is to know about it.

I think that 9/11 should be taught and incorporated into the school curriculum so people understand the broader conflict and the overall history that encompasses the events. This is especially important now when younger generations that weren’t around/were to young to understand, are now older and mature enough to be taught about the events of September 11^th. I’d want to connect this to something Dr. Luger spoke about in class, Judith Butler’s article, Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect and specifically her idea of “changing the way that we understand what happened in the first place”. I’m not going to do that though because I haven’t actually read the article, but maybe it’ll be on a future blog post.

This week after finishing our discussion on Obasan, we visited the rare books library at Irving to look at the Joy Kogawa Fonds. The fonds consist of material written by, about, or to Joy Kogawa and the librarian informed us that all documents were kept in the order Joy Kogawa sent them. There were drafts of Obasan and other books written by Kogawa, letters from publishers and students, newspaper clippings, and other unpublished writings. Most of the material I looked through wasn’t focused on Obasan. It was nice to see Kogawa and her writing from different perspectives other than Obasan.

I looked through a different box and found a file full of miscellaneous poems Joy Kogawa had written. It was really interesting going through everything in the file I ended up looking at it for most of the time period. I enjoyed reading something that was more casual; nothing was really organized or formatted. Some of the poems were written out on a typewriter, but others were hand written on stationary or scribbled on the back of scrap paper. I felt as though I got to see a different side of Kogawa through her writing. In class we’ve only focused on Kogawa through Obasan and her experiences during WWII, which were the only things I related her with. After reading her other poems, I was reminded that there is more to Joy Kogawa than her and her family’s experience of internment in Canada. It was obviously a huge, significant aspect of her life, but not the only one.

On a different note, I want to share one of her poems I read that really stood out to me. It reminded me of Naomi and the silence she carries throughout Obasan.

“I face the wind

To shelter the flame

And never see the light.

A protected child

Is one

Who stands alone.”

This week in ASTU we finished reading the book Obasan by Joy Kogawa. Obasan tells the story of the internment of Japanese-Canadians during WWII as seen through the eyes of a young girl, Naomi Nakane. Although the novel starts out quite slow, the amount of detail Kogawa gives to each event allows the reader to visualize (to an extent) what it must have been like to live as a Japanese-Canadian at the time. Never having experienced such extreme racism before, after reading the novel, I was more capable of visualizing the racism Naomi and the Japanese-Canadians had felt during that time. Regardless as to whether they were first generation Canadian-born Japanese, second generation, or even immigrants, the Canadians at the time treated them all the same, turning their backs on their own people in the time of war. As one of the more repetitive aspects of the novel, racism against the Japanese-Canadians is seen in almost every chapter.

The characters in the book reacted to the racism and negative treatment differently.  Some took upon silence, such as Obasan (Naomi’s aunt) and Naomi herself. Naomi’s brother Stephen adopted a completely different strategy. It seemed as though he almost ‘internalized’ the racism and became ashamed of his own culture. This is hinted throughout the book by Stephen’s dislike and un-interest of anything having to do with Japanese culture. For instance, on the train when Obasan offers Stephen a rice ball, he scowls and says he doesn’t want “that kind of food” (Kogawa 136). Stephen truly dislikes the Japanese food made by Obasan. When Obasan sent homemade kakimochi (bit sized Japanese crackers) to Stephen in Montreal, he never sent anything back acknowledging that he received it. Naomi even states in the book that Stephen is “always uncomfortable when anything it ‘too Japanese’”(Kogawa 277). By rejecting all parts of Japanese culture, he alienates himself from his Japanese family and their values.

This rejection of the Japanese culture must’ve occurred with several Japanese-Canadians or Japanese-Americans. In elementary school I read Under The Blood Red Sun by Graham Salisbury, which you can read more about here. The novel is about a Japanese-American boy named Tomi and his family who were living in Hawai’i during WWII and the attack on Pearl Harbor. Tomi’s parents and grandparents having emigrated from Japan try to preserve their Japanese heritage, but Tomi does not let them. He insists that they are American, not Japanese and buries all of his family’s Japanese mementos.

If what both these novels hint at is true, and there were people who rejected or suppressed their Japanese culture, I wonder if that affected Japanese national memory in the US and Canada at all. Was the culture forgotten just during the period and the tension of war? Or was the Japanese culture forgotten by some and therefore not taught and brought down to the next generation?

Reference: Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. Print

This past week in our ASTU class, we finished reading the book Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. When I first learned we were going to be reading Persepolis, I really didn’t have any opinion on it whatsoever. While I never actually knew what the book was about, I recognized the cover from my mother’s bookshelf, and assumed it was just another dull and uninteresting foreign novel she had read. Not to my surprise, I was completely wrong. I found myself captivated by this intriguing story, not being able to put the book down once I started reading it. 

Persepolis tells the story of a young girl named Marji, growing up during the Iranian revolution. The book illustrates the hardships and changes Marji and her family had to endure, along with many others living in Iran. At first glance, if you were to quickly flip through the pages of Persepolis, it could be easily seen as a simple comic book; however, this is not the case. Satrapi’s drawing style gives the reader a different perspective to the story a normal book would not be able to portray. 

For example, Satrapi uses many visual techniques in her comics to show the concept of time throughout the book. On page 132 when Marji is buying illegal music tapes, Satrapi draws Marji and the street vendor appearing to have two faces in the panels, which seems to produce a feeling of motion over time.

Satrapi also uses changes in Marji’s appearances to give the reader a sense of time progression. As the story develops, Marji is given different hair lengths and clothing styles to show her physical changes as she grows up. In the beginning of the book, Marji has short hair and wears the typical clothing of a young girl. 

 (pg 7)

However, towards the end of the book, Marji has long hair and forms her own sense of style, differentiating herself from the proper/traditional way most other Iranian girls dress.

 (pg 131)

The use of the illustrations to show the progression of time is one of the many visual techniques Satrapi utilizes in Persepolis. By doing so, she creates a complex piece of literature with messages that would not be depicted the same if it was simply just a comic book or a regular novel. 

In Farhat Shahzad’s article,The Role of Interpretive Communities in Remembering and Learning, she writes about the use of technologies of memory in interpretive communities. She states that “human beings interpret, relate, select, record, share, and tell their memories with the help of a variety of technologies of memory such as media, textbooks, documents, the internet, museums, monuments, and landscapes.”

Though I never thought of social media in a scholarly way such as a “technology of memory,” I think Facebook is a great example of it. With the rapid rise of the internet, the ways in which people connect and communicate with one another has significantly changed and is continuously changing all the time. Facebook itself is a community, and there are thousands of different communities within it.

While I was looking through the page of a recently joined group, I noticed some connections with what Shahzad shared in her article, and saw Facebook in somewhat of a different way. The specific page I was looking at was called “Friends of Dan Mindich.” This page was created in memory of a teacher from my previous school who had tragically died during a rough water swim earlier this month. There were several posts about Dan from fellow colleagues and students in Hawaii, as well as people from his hometown in New York, close friends in Africa, and college classmates, all spread throughout the continental US. The posts included pictures of Dan from classes, weddings, vacations, and reunions, as well as some anecdotes on his silly outgoing personality or the ways in which he changed the lives of those around him. 

Although the circumstances of the page was very sad and unfortunate, I think it’s a pretty awesome thing that came out of this tragedy. It’s a place where all these different people from around the world can come together in this sort of online “community” and share stories, pictures, lessons, etc, of Dan that can be available for everyone no matter where they are. 

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