Month: November 2015

              This past week my ASTU class visited the Archive of Rare Books and Special Collections in UBC. The purpose of this outing was to examine the “Kogawa Fond”, a special collection donated by Joy Kogawa, the author of one of Canada’s most treasured novels: Obasan. This was a unique experience; being able to see such exclusive and rare artifacts, as well as being able to follow in Kogawa’s footsteps before, during, and after she wrote the novel was incredibly powerful. Reading all the personal and raw material that surrounds the novel allowed myself and the rest of the class to peek into Kogawa’s mind and immerse ourselves in her creative process. This furthered my understanding of the literary work and author, because we could see far more than the finished print. Her creative process, as I mentioned earlier, spans far beyond just comments on drafts. The Fond is a collective of letters of reference, rejection letters, reviews, and include pieces as fascinating and historical as a comment from former PM Pierre Trudeau. Personally, I found the rejections exceptionally interesting because they showed Kogawa’s creation of as an authentic success story, with struggles and failures along way.

              As I was reading through a jumble of reviews sent by an elementary school class it made me think about the importance of the novel as one of Shahzad’s “technology of memory”(Shahzad, 2015, pg. 303). Which she defines as resources like books, documents, media that human beings use to “interpret, relate, select, record, share, and tell their memories.” Despite the novel’s fictional nature, the story of Naomi and her family is highly informative and provides the reader with a detailed view of what life was like for Japanese-Canadians during that time period. I found her approach to the novel highly unorthodox as she uses silence, a main theme in the novel, as a powerful method to portray a story and impact the reader’s memory.

Works Cited

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

Shahzad, Farhat. “The Role of Interpretive Communities in Remembering and Learning.” Canadian Journal of Education                 34.3 (2011): 301-316. Web. ProQuest. 1 Sept. 2014.

Hello Readers,

My ASTU class has been collectively reading through “Safe Area Gorazde”, a graphic novel by Joe Sacco, that chronicles multiple accounts of the Bosnian war that devastated Eastern Europe and challenged the international community throughout the last decade of the 20th century. This unique combination of literature and art provided me with a perspective on a historical event that I previously had very minimal knowledge of, if any at all. The story is one of mass atrocity, global injustice, cultural tensions, and immense failure on the part of the United Nations and I was immediately shocked by the extremity of the events and the reality that this was my first encounter with it. I was pushed to wrestle with the concept of cultural memory in relationship to this major world event and try to explore why it is the Bosnian war is pushed to the background, behind memories of events society has deemed more important. Sturken writes that, “cultural memory is a field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history”, and it seems that the stories of the people who were affected by this conflict did not, for whatever reason, make the cut (1). It is my observation that Joe Sacco realized the importance of a comprehensive narrative that documents this event in the prevention of forgetting this story. The unique genre of graphic narrative, allows for a type of storytelling that works against the traditional “desire of narrative closure [that] forces upon historical events the limits of narratives form and enables forgetting” (Sturken 7). According to Sturken, we are tempted to neglect complex memories in an attempt to bring clarity, and Joe Sacco works to avoid this (7).

As I read, I was able to connect the events of the Bosnian war and the international community’s response with other events that are occurring today, leading me to believe that this story is not an outlier on the world stage. Cultural, religious, and nationalistic allegiances continue to disrupt peace between and within states, even within those which rank high on development scales. As religious and cultural diversions wreak havoc in Syria and neighbouring nations, the world is at a loss at how to respond with compassion and urgency. Meanwhile, racial tensions within the United States are at a breaking point, manifesting in uprisings such as those occurring at the University of Missouri, and it seems that no one has the answers.

Tragedies continue to unfold and the world continues to be unprepared to prevent and address them, which causes me to reflect on the role of global citizenship in these trying times and question whether it can truly take root and lead to peace or whether the idea is merely a utopian idea that is confined to academia. Perhaps, the test of the power of global citizenships is in the response that we as individuals take in the midst of these crises and the work that we do to ensure stories, such as those affected by the Bosnian war, the Syrian refugees, and Sandra Bland, are rewarded with a place in our cultural and social fabric.

Works Cited

Sturken, Marita. “Introduction.” Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: U of California, 1997. Print.