8:46am.

September 11th, 2001.

2,996 people dead. Another 6000+ injured. And a whole world affected.

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Wake Me Up When September Ends:

American rock band: Green Day produced a song titled Wake Me Up When September Ends in 2005. The song was originally written by Billie Joe Armstrong: lead vocalist of Green Day regarding his father’s death in September. Although this was the original intent, the song has since been used as a dedication to the victims of Hurricane Katrina which hit the Gulf Coast of the U.S. on August 29th, 2005 as well as the thousands of victims from the September 11th attacks of 2001. In the band’s official music video, a couple is seen broken apart by the Iraq War in order to convey the song’s central theme of loss. The song represents the pain, heartache and sorrow felt when one loses a loved one.

The video pictured above is a memorial music video for the victims of 9/11 using Green Day’s song: Wake Me Up When September Ends. 

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9/11: 

The 9/11 attacks were a series of terrorist attacks perpetrated by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda on the morning of September 11th, 2001. Four airlines were hijacked: two of the planes crashing into the towers of the World Trade Centre in New York City, a third plane crashing into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and a fourth plane crashing into a field in Pennsylvania. This event marked a shattering of American citizens’ sense of security and the beginning of a War on Terror: a global military and political struggle against terrorism.

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Poetry: 

As Dr. Luger discussed in class today, following the events of 9/11, the poem September 1, 1939 by British poet W.H. Auden was circulated throughout the media. Although the poem was written almost 60 years earlier, individuals sought it out due to its similarity to the events of September 11th.

“The unmentionable odour of death offends the September night” 

“Psychopathic God” 

“Into this neutral air where blind skyscrapers use” 

“Uncertain and afraid” 

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September Tragedies: 

• September 21, 1923: Great Kantō Earthquake
  • 105,385 fatalities
• September 1st, 1939: Germany invades Poland: marks the beginning of WWII.
  • 150,000-200,000 Polish citizen fatalities
  • 50,000,000-80,000,000 total fatalities during WWII
• September 2nd, 1998: Swissair Flight 111 Disaster
  • 229 fatalities
• September 11th, 2001: Terrorist attacks in the U.S.
  • 2,996 fatalities
• September, 2005: Hurricane Katrina aftermath
  • 1,245-1,866 fatalities
• September 11th, 2015: Mecca Crane Collapse
  • 111 fatalities

Wouldn’t it be nice to erase the deadly month of September from our collective memories… to be woken up when the month had passed…

But we cannot forget traumatic events such as these. We cannot forget the lives of those who were affected by any tragedy. The victims are not numbers. Each and every one of these individuals was somebody’s somebody. Whether it be a father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, cousin, aunt, uncle, friend, partner, colleague…

We cannot forget.

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Time of Your Life: 

Instead of signing off with the song Wake Me Up When September Ends, I’d like to leave on a more upbeat note with another Green Day song: Good Riddance (Time of Your Life). 

Although “[death] is something unpredictable”, we must all “take the photographs and still frames in [our] mind” and take advantage of every opportunity to be had with a loved one.

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The Honeymoon Phase. 

That wonderful period of time in which the entire world seems like it’s just the two of you and the only thing that you want to do is spend your time together. You feel like you belong. The two of you strive for perfection and as a result… anything that might normally drive you up the wall somehow seems so very insignificant when you are this drunk in love.

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In the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, the narrator, Changez, experiences the honeymoon phase with his love interest: Erica, a wealthy, young and social Manhatten elite. When talking about Erica to the American, he describes her as being “strong, sleek, and invariably surrounded by her pride” (Hamid, 2007, p. 22). Changez also compares her to a lioness, one who has presence and “an uncommon magnetism” (Hamid, 2007, p.21), attracting dozens of people to her-just like America.

He adored her.

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Changez also experiences the honeymoon phase with America during his years at Princeton and at Underwood Samson. In the corporate world, Changez experiences the stimulating modernization of America and begins to feel accepted by the nation. He assimilates into the culture of the country through his financial pursuits throughout his degree at Princeton and his career at Underwood Samson. He strives for perfection and feels like he belongs.

He was in awe of the western world.

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But this feeling of admiration, this honeymoon phase quickly wore off.

With Erica… With America.

Changez began to see the flaws in both Erica and America as time went on…

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In the beginning, he ignored these imperfections as he was blinded by his own ideals and admiration of Erica & America. When in Greece, Changez explains that there were “details which annoyed [him]” (Hamid, 2007, p. 21).  The Americans with which he was travelling with (including Erica) had no problem with spending large sums of money; an average meal costing them $50+. He then goes on to talk about their “self-righteousness in dealing with those whom they had paid for a service” (Hamid, 2007, p. 21). These little annoyances went to the back of his mind as Erica shimmered in the foreground to which gave Changez “enormous satisfaction” (Hamid, 2007, p.21). The honeymoon phase. 

As this wore off, Changez’s eyes opened to the faults around him. He noticed the condescending attitude of the social elites, including Erica’s father. He noticed Erica’s self-absorbency, her deep grief following Chris’ death and her eventual implosion. Simultaneously, he noticed America’s self-serving policies, its deep grief following the 9/11 attacks and its eventual explosion of Afghanistan.

This marked the end of the honeymoon phase for Changez.

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“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.”

~Ayn Rand

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When you think about the times you have travelled in your lifetime… would you have considered yourself a tourist or a traveller?

Were you wearing the classic “I ♥ [insert destination here]” T-shirt, a disposable camera around your neck, a bucket hat, sandals and socks?

Okay… maybe a lil’ stereotyped.

But how do you travel?

Do you spend the most of your time observing or do you prefer to experience things for yourself?

Do you stick out? Blend in?

Do you pay attention to the people and your surroundings? Are you aware and respectful of cultural norms?

Do you complain about the food, the weather conditions or the hassles that come with your journey? Or instead of comparing your new destination to the comforts of your home… are you curious? Do you have an open mind?

Do you come home with a thinner wallet, a dark tan and souvenirs or do you come home with new scrapes and bruises, new friends and countless stories to share when you return home?

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In the graphic narrative ‘Safe Area Gorazde’, Joe Sacco depicts himself as being different from other journalists during the Bosnian war in the approach he took with his journalistic technique. On the first image on page five of the graphic narrative, Joe Sacco first arrives in Gorazde surrounded by a dozen of other journalists and a buzz of excitement circulating amongst the locals of the village.

On page six, we see two different journalistic techniques and the distinct contrast between them. In the first image, we see an extremely busy scene: outside, journalists, cameras, microphones and dozens of local citizens observing the action. In the second image, we are taken inside one of the locals’ living rooms. Sacco draws himself on the edge of the couch and displays his openness with a huge grin plastered on his face and a posture displaying his attentiveness. He was full of curiosity and keen to listen to all of the personal stories that were being shared from those around him.

Sacco was a perfect example of a true traveller as opposed to a tourist.

Throughout his time in Bosnia, Sacco immerses himself in the culture, the history and the reality of the war-torn town of Gorazde. Rather than observing from afar or through the lens of a camera, Sacco directly places himself in the shoes of the locals. After returning to Gorazde through the ‘blue road’, Sacco states that “It’d been [his] turn to understand how much more than a few kilometres of road separated [him] from [the citizens of Gorazde]” (Sacco, 2000, p. 67).

In order to immerse himself even more, Sacco attends many get-togethers, parties and even “The Piramida”-Gorazde’s own discotheque. At one of these parties, Sacco meets a man named Edin who turns out to be Sacco’s “main man, [his] main man” (Sacco, 2000, p. 8). Edin serves as Sacco’s personal tour guide and sense of insight into the harsh reality of the town of Gorazde. Sacco returns to Gorazde three different times and each time, he said, “[he] sought out Edin to help [him] put the pieces of the story together” (Sacco, 2000, p. 16).

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As a journalist, it is often required to do a significant amount of observing. Joe Sacco accomplished not only this but was also able to do some of his own experiencing by immersing himself in the culture of the village and getting to know the local citizens as dear friends. Sacco certainly wasn’t wearing an “I ♥ Gorazde” T-shirt but instead, he took home with him his ♥ of the people of Gorazde along with his memories, connections and various stories in order to create this graphic narrative that readers such as you and I are reading today.

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*crimple*

*crinkle*

*crumple*

BANG.

Oh, the sounds you make as you sit impatiently waiting for the ideas from your brain to miraculously appear on paper.

You have been staring at your blank screen or your blank paper for hours now with no inspiration, no luck and no great big mind-blowing ideas.

You feel a headache coming on and you look longingly at your bed for comfort and serenity.

Sleep? Yep… that sounds like a pretty good idea.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

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Have a case of writer’s block? 

Don’t worry.

The good news is: even the greatest authors out there have been through it.

Joy Kogawa, Japanese Canadian poet and novelist, is best known for her award-winning novel: Obasan, a novel that has become an essential reading for the nation. The Literary Review of Canada has ranked this novel as one of Canada’s 100 Most Important Books. Through writing this extraordinary novel, Kogawa has educated youth and adults all over and has helped redress a very dark and often ‘forgotten’ part of our history. Kogawa writes about her experience during the Second World War; being interned with her Japanese-Canadian family and expressing the suffering, the pain and the hardships that she faced growing up.

After visiting the Kogawa Fonds at the Rare Books and Special Collections section of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at UBC, I uncovered some of Kogawa’s very first drafts and brainstorms of her novel: Obasan. It is evident in her old notes that she, too, experienced writer’s block-just like any one of us.

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On this paper, Kogawa creates a family tree to trace back and learn the connections in her family.

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On this paper, Kogawa writes a very messy bullet point list on the back of a scrap mailing paper of the different memories she has of her childhood house in Vancouver.

Making this type of list is one of the strategies I use to get started on a paper, a story or even a blogpost such as the one I’m currently writing now. It’s neat to see that even the best of authors start at square one and use some of the same tactics that students such as myself would use in creating a written work.

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This paper was my personal favourite.

Kogawa knows that she must write this specific chapter about sugar beets but just can’t quite figure out a way to get started. Instead, she decides to just write whatever is on her mind, stating that she has the “vomit syndrome”. Kogawa also talks about how her fingers are hitting the keys and she is “letting ‘er rip”. She talks about certain events she wants to include in this chapter but doesn’t know how to begin to piece together the details of the memories onto paper. She writes that her writer’s block is occurring “mostly because [her] mind keeps flipping to get away from the task… mostly because [she] wants to forget it”. She writes that she is exhausted from digging up and remembering her past.

Finishing the little write-up with simply the word ‘what’, Kogawa really demonstrates the true state of an author’s aggravating writer’s block.

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In honour of Joy Kogawa, I am going to sign off this blogpost with the same haphazard ending as her sugar beet write-up.

what.

“Empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes.” -Daniel H. Pink

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In her book Obasan, Canadian author Joy Kogawa depicts Canada’s internment and persecution of Japanese civilians during World War II, following the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. The story is told from the perspective of a young girl, Naomi Nakane who tells us the story of her childhood living through the Japanese internment and of her life thirty or so years later.

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At the beginning of the novel, Naomi begins to think back on her past and remembers many happy times that she shared with her family. She talks about her favourite children’s tales such as the story of Momotaro, a boy who emerges from a peach, memories of her train ride to Slocan, carrying a red umbrella and wearing a shirt decorated in red flowers and memories from the New Year celebrations with her family. Although she doesn’t recall everything, when she is thinking back, Naomi remembers happy and vivid memories from her past. The red in her memories represents how the memories that Naomi does remember are bright and intense-just like the many red items she treasured as a little girl.

When thinking back on my own past and on my own childhood, I similarly begin to remember many happy times as a kid such as the times when we threw my Dad’s football around in the backyard and I always thought I was throwing the perfect touchdown throw (little did I know, I could probably only aimlessly throw it a couple of feet ahead of me). I remember the times my Mum and I would toss “reindeer food” every Christmas Eve out on our grass to feed Santa’s reindeer in the midst of their long journey. I remember the times I splattered paint all over myself and created an endless amount of artwork that covered every wall in the house to showcase my inner-Picasso. I even remember playing with my red and yellow umbrella and wearing a shirt decorated in red flowers-just like young Naomi in the novel.

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As I read through Obasan, I stepped into the shoes of the protagonist Naomi Nakane, reading about all of the hardships and difficulties she and her family faced during the Japanese Internment in 1941 to 1949 and onwards. Being referred to as an “enemy within” or an “enemy alien” and living in a world full of violence, xenophobia and hatred is beyond hard to imagine. The Japanese Internment in Canada affected over 23,000 Japanese, many of them being Canadian citizens, some of them even third generation Canadians, such as Naomi. This is echoed in the novel when Naomi says angrily: “Why in a time of war with Germany and Japan would our government seize the property and homes of Canadian-born Canadians but not the homes of German-born Germans?” (Kogawa, 1981, p. 213).

It’s heart wrenching to imagine stepping into the shoes of Naomi during this time and to imagine all of her happy times being taken away due to the threat that she and her family presented because of their being of Japanese descent.

No child should have to face this type of discrimination-no matter what their race, ethnicity or identity.

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To conceal or to reveal is the question.

When you’re sitting down at the Thanksgiving dinner table and your ol’ Uncle Dave asks you “How is university going?”, you might want to say that your courses are very interesting, that you’re enjoying your professors, that you’re studying hard and that you’re doing well. But how true is this really?

Did you happen to mention the fraternity party you went to last Friday night? Or the nights you procrastinated until 12:00am and stayed up until 4:00am, convincing yourself you were being productive? Or how about the time you barely passed that midterm that you started studying for the night before? Did you mention how you’re secretly dying on the inside just trying to survive this crazy thing we call university; by balancing all of your classes, your millions of readings, your social life, getting a workout in here and there, trying not to check your bank balance as much as possible, attempting to get a good 8 hours of sleep but in reality only getting 4 or 5, remembering to eat 3 meals a day, being a part of 1, 2 or 3 clubs, councils, sports teams all the while keeping a happy face plastered on when you get asked the dreaded: “How is university going?”

We have all been there.

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This idea to conceal or to reveal comes up in our day-to-day lives, whether consciously or subconsciously, each and every one of us is guilty of concealing certain things in our lives while revealing others. What we reveal to others varies by who we are interacting with; our teachers, our professors, our parents, our friends, our co-workers, our classmates, people of the opposite sex, employers, etc.  We generally have the tendency to want to reveal things about ourselves and paint ourselves in a rather positive light such as what we reveal on social media, what exam marks we choose to or to not reveal or what we choose to reveal about ourselves during ice breaker activities. Sometimes, however, we choose to place ourselves in a negative light such as when we tell our friends of how little studying we have done, how little sleep we have gotten or of how much of a clutz we are.

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This idea of concealing and revealing also applies to our memory, of what memories we choose to reveal to the public and of what kinds of memories we choose to conceal and to keep to ourselves. Marita Sturken, a communications scholarly writer, writes in her book: “Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering” about cultural memory and how cultures have the tendency to forget certain parts of the past by using a form of forgetting that is both “highly organized and strategic” (Sturken, Tangled Memories 7). As Dr. Luger mentioned in our ASTU class, Canada, as a nation has done its best to conceal the Japanese Internment from our cultural memory in an attempt to strategically forget the suffering, trauma, and torture that we caused over 20,000 Japanese people from 1941 through to 1949. Our country is not proud of these actions and of this xenophobia that the Canadian government and its citizens felt during this time period. As a result, we all choose not to reveal this part of our history but to conceal it as much as possible. 

According to Sturken, cultural memory is produced through representation-in contemporary culture, often through photographic images, cinema, and television” (Sturken, Tangled Memories 8). She then questions the idea of whether or not it matters if we remember “correctly” and how accurate one’s personal memory or cultural memory really is. Yes, cultural memory is produced in various forms such as in film, television and photographs and from all sorts of different perspectives-but what are these various sources choosing to conceal or choosing to reveal? 

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How many times do we really reveal the full story?

… If the full story is rarely revealed, how are we supposed to remember the past accurately and truthfully?

…Does this mean that we always have an inaccurate memory of the past?

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Hello readers,

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What do you notice when you see this image?

Perhaps the first thing that might have caught your eye was the amount of waste piled high in the background or perhaps it was the dirty hands enveloping the young child’s face? Maybe it was the thin dog walking towards the boy with its ears pulled back and its legs so tiny that they could snap at any step?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words but does a picture always depict reality?

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With the ever-increasing globalization on our planet, we are becoming more and more aware of the living conditions that people are faced with on a daily-basis around the world. Living in a relatively highly developed country, we have access to multiple media outlets that constantly remind us of what is going on in the world around us. Whether it’s in the morning newspaper delivered at our doorstep, on the radio while driving to work, on our newsfeed while scrolling through Facebook, Instagram and Twitter or on the 5pm news when we come home at the end of a long day; the media is always present. It is part of our everyday routines to tune in to these media outlets where we are shown graphic images and videos of the disasters and of the poverty that currently exists in regions all over the world. But do these images really reveal the truth or is it the truth that they are concealing?

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The image above was taken in the community of El Limonal which is a garbage dump located just outside of the city of Chinandega, Nicaragua. Close to 3000 people live here, scrounging through scraps and throw-a-ways in hopes of finding items they can later sell for whatever little sum of money they can get. Garbage disposal in the area is not highly developed so it is very common to see piles of garbage being burned throughout the community. The fumes that come off as a result of the burning are extremely toxic and affect the breathing all those living in the community. Now these were the facts and images I heard about this community prior to visiting it for myself, so evidently I expected to enter a world of dispirited people and depressing terrain.

The reality that I found however? A group of endearing, grateful and purely happy people. 

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In my Arts Studies course (ASTU 100A) that I am taking at the University of British Columbia in the CAP: Global Citizens Stream, we have been reading and analyzing Marjane Satrapi’s graphic narrative: Persepolis in which we are able to see the perspective of a young girl who is growing up during the Iran-Iraq war throughout the 1980s.  The choice that Satrapi made in creating a graphic narrative was an interesting one that has intrigued me since day one. Why choose to use drawings to depict such a grim and difficult topic? At first, I came to the conclusion that images can make it easier for readers to understand events that are taking place. Images, after all are worth a thousand words, right? As I kept thinking about it however, I began to question: do these images really depict the entire reality?

To begin with, on page three, Satrapi draws an image of her classmates stating “This is a class photo. I’m sitting on the far left so you don’t see me.” This was an example that we discussed in class, demonstrating the fact that Satrapi has the complete control and power over what we see and what we don’t see, of what she reveals and what she conceals. Another example of this is with the topic of the veil. In the book, the religious veil is portrayed as a negative symbol of oppression by Marji, however had this story been told by a member of the revolutionaries, believing strictly in the Muslim regime in Iran, the images of the veil would have been drawn eminently differently. Rather than seeing a field full of children running around with the veils on their heads, flying around in the air and used as skipping ropes, we might see a more serious image of straight-faced children attending school and obeying orders. Finally, the fact that this story is written by an adult, remembering and reflecting on the perspective she had as a young child demonstrates the fact that not everything that is told is wholly accurate and that the images that are drawn are not able to depict everyone’s reality. As readers, we are seeing the story from the perspective of one child from one social class with one specific way of thinking but what about the story told from the perspective of an adult? A lower social class? Different beliefs? What about the perspective of the story told from the media or from the Shah’s kingdom? Or perhaps the story told from an outsider such as myself?

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Whether you’re seeing an image of a poverty-stricken country, a headline in the local newspaper or a series of images in a graphic narrative, one must always keep one’s eyes open to the possibility of different perspectives to each and every story that is told in our everyday lives.