Kennedy's Korner

Hello again fellow humans! Hope all is well, we finally got that god forsaken poli sci paper in, and man it’s never felt so good to turn in a bad paper. However, I’m not here to talk about the struggles I have with writing about globalization and the nation-state, what I’m going to talk about today is the archives that we visited.

Ok, well to start off I’ll be perfectly honest, when I heard about this field trip I was not super stoked about it. I mean, lets go look at achieves? That doesn’t exactly scream excitement. Once we got there though it only took about ten minutes for me to eat my words. It was so cool. I was like stepping into a time capsule, I mean that’s exactly what it is, an organized time capsule and the main focus of that time capsule is everything you’re learning about and interested in.

First of all, that lady who was teaching us about the time capsules was so nice, not just nice, the so is a very necessary component of her niceness. She showed us how to look things up, where to go, but the coolest was obviously when we opened up the archives. I mean you see things in there that you never even think about. I saw letters to and from Joy Kagawa, saw rejection letters, some risqué poems, and really just a jaw dropping amount of material. I had no idea how much really goes into writing a book.

I found the archives really so fascinating that I had to go back Tuesday. I was rummaging through box 13-3 (of like a million) and I found this really neat piece of history. At least I like to think of it as history. But what I found a letter by Joy Kagawa to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau the letter looked liked this:

Now this was super cool to me. This is a private letter to a one of the most powerful people in the world, it amazes me just how far words in a book can travel and the potential impact they may have. What’s even cooler though is that he responded! I looked and looked for that letter though but I couldn’t find it. What I took away from this field trip though is that we have so many research options at our disposal and we have such an awesome opportunity being here. I’m really excited and grateful to have these archives and can’t wait to start taking advantage of them. Thanks for reading my blog guys, and until next time!

• Kennedy

P.S. I found a lot of really cool artifacts in these boxes and could write about all of them, but for times sake I might just save it for next time. But here’s a gallery of some of he cooler things I found.

Hey readers, I’m back and I’m really excited to share my thoughts with you all. This week we’ve covered a lot of material, we’ve begun talking about Obasan and just finished up reading Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde. This entire book was really interesting, it gave me unique perspectives on the conflict during that time, made me think critically about what it means to be the enemy, what it means to be a victim of war, and what it means to be human, as well as the book being written in a non-conventional genre. What really caught my interest though was the motif, the “Real Truth”, and what that concept means.

What made Safe Area Gorazde such an enlightening book was the fact the Joe Sacco didn’t just write about whatever the common narrative during that time was, but instead immerged himself as best he could into a culture and society, and then wrote about his experience. Sacco himself deals with the question as to what truth is and how he can best show the world the “Real Truth”. I think though in Sacco’s mind, or at least mine for sure, the “Real Truth”, in terms of political culture is very difficult to define as there are always thousands if not millions of individuals within a political culture who are being affected in different ways. I guess you can say that the “truth” is what happened, thousands of Bosnians died during their civil war, that is the truth. How that differs from the “Real Truth” though is something I found very difficult to think about.

What I understood “Real Truth” to mean (in context of the book) is that the “Real Truth” is a bunch of different perspectives, ideally all, but in Sacco’s case as many as he could, and mashing those different perspectives, backgrounds, trails and tribulations into the story. The story wouldn’t be the “Real Truth” had it been from one perspective because the way the world unfolds isn’t from one person’s view.  My understanding of what Sacco meant with the term “Real Truth” is that truth isn’t this one concrete fact, the “Real Truth” isn’t that all these people trapped in Gorzade aren’t still people, and he tried his best to illuminate that for us.

The “Real Truth” is something that I think will stick with me for a while if not the rest of my life. It’s something that I’ve always been excited about, learning about the world, different people, their lives and their culture, it doesn’t get much more interesting than that. After reading this book I think it’s important to keep asking yourself, “Is what I’m hearing the Real Truth?” and always always listen to other people’s stories, because everybody has a story, it’s what makes us human and we need to remember that at the end of the day we are all human, and we need to start acting like it. Thank you for reading this, I’ll be back next week, sorry this is late for all of you faithful readers, I was bed ridden last week, but no worries as I’m better now and am finally able to enjoy that beautiful Vancouver rain. Until next time!

-Kennedy