Hello readers,

For the last few weeks we have been studying Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist in ASTU 100A. The novel traces the story of Changez, a young man who was born in Pakistan and came to study and work in the U.S. The story centres around how Changez’s sense of American identity is complicated after the 9/11 attacks, when his immigrant, Pakistani identity subjects him to increasing harassment from a paranoid, nostalgic and patriotic America mired in the “us” vs. “them” discourse of the War on Terror. Ultimately, Changez comes to have a very critical gaze of the neo-imperial tendencies of the U.S., and questions his own complicity with the privileged and dominating disposition of the U.S. through his work for a large American financial firm. In the end, Changez’s falling out with the United States is so great that he decides to give up the ideal, American lifestyle he has created for himself and move back to Pakistan.

While Hamid uses the dramatic monologue form to tell Changez’s story – Changez being the sole orator – the novel can be read as a more general representation of the immigrant experience in a post-9/11 world. So, when I heard the British rapper MIA’s new song “Borders”, the music video for which came out in February and depicts refugee men attempting to cross borders through imagery such as overcrowded boats, the word “LIFE” spelled out from human bodies climbing on a chain-linked, barbwired border fence, and a ghostly boat constructed from the bodies of migrants stacked upon each other, I could not help but think of Changez’s story. Although the song is most obviously a response to the recent refugee crisis (and the failure of the Western countries to adequately respond to this human rights crisis), it can also be seen as a general critique of the political and social climate that we have built in the West that is so hostile to immigrants and so full of borders. In fact, MIA (born Mathangi Arulpragasam) herself is a former refugee, immigrating to the UK after being raised in Sri Lanka during the Sri Lankan Civil War, and this aspect of MIA’s identity shows itself proudly in much of her politically charged music.

In terms of how “Borders” comes into conversation with Hamid’s depiction of the immigrant experience, MIA’s abrupt but poignant lyrics such as “Borders (What’s up with that?)” or “Politics (What’s up with that?)” or “The new world (What’s up with that?)” or “Your power (What’s up with that?)” can be easily spliced into the moments of existential crisis that Changez faces as he becomes increasingly disillusioned with the culture of the U.S. In fact, my favourite line of “Borders”, “Your privilege (What’s up with that?)”, could fit naturally within many instances in the novel when Changez feels alienated from his affluent, entitled American peers and colleagues, such as when Changez recounts his vacation with his Princeton peers in Greece and says “I found myself wondering by what quirk of human history my companions… were in a position to conduct themselves in the world as though they were its ruling class” (21). Or another example would be when Changez is on a business trip in Manila and locks eyes with a Jeepney driver next to his limousine – a moment where he is confronted with a destabilizing sense of “Third World sensibility” – and subsequently looks at his colleague and thinks to himself “you are so foreign” (67). MIA also expresses feeling bewildered and confused over the priorities and ambitions of the West, by devoting a stanza to questioning the way we seem to value things like Kim Kardashian’s butt (“Breaking internet (What’s up with that?)”) or being wealthy (“Making money (What’s up with that?)”) over the lives of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean. 

As much as MIA’s song “Boarders” can be superimposed onto a reading of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, I think it can also be read as a sort of handbook for global citizenship. What I mean by this is that all of the questions that MIA asks in her stanzas (some of which I mentioned above) are critical questions that need to be asked by anyone who has hopes of becoming a true global citizen. In fact, we have been indirectly asking these types of questions all year in the CAP Global Citizens stream. This sentiment is really brought home in her chorus, when MIA explains how we need to shift the conversation to understand that “We’re solid and we don’t need to kick them [the immigrants] ”, implying that she believes that as a global body we should all be involved in resolving the migrant crises; that we are solid, unified global citizens “North, South, East and Western”. However, I want to draw attention to how MIA explicitly says “Western” instead of the “West”. I believe she does this because she wants to make it clear that the “West” is not just a geographical point on the global map, but is inherently drenched in Western ideology, which continues to limit the West’s capacity for global citizenship by furthering the “us” and “them” type discourse which has destructively isolated its citizens from the peoples of the rest of the world.

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Hamid, Moshin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2008. Print.

Hello readers,

This week in ASTU 100A we discussed the evolution of memorials and monuments over time in order to contextualize how 9/11 was memorialized at Ground Zero and, more abstractly, how the people lost in the attacks were memorialized through works of poetry. Dr. Luger – my ASTU 100A professor – took the class through a sketch of the different waves of memorialization: from the upright 19th century pedestal-style monuments dedicated to war heroes, to the post-WWI memorials which “democratized” monuments by moving from commemorating the singular to commemorating the elusive collective (the “unknown solider”), to the rejection of the upright, overtly nationalistic monument in favour of the conceptual, architecturally diverse and perhaps even critically minded contemporary monument. In regards to the latter, Dr. Luger pointed to Maya Lin’s 1982 tribute to the Vietnam War, which descends horizontally and includes the names of every American life lost in the war on a reflective, black surface – a conceptual choice that has been suggested to gesture towards a sense of American grief and perhaps even shame.

The reason I have briefly summarized our class lecture on monuments is that although I am no expert on monuments and memorialization, from my own experience I wonder if there is yet another category of monument that can be added to this list, what I will refer to as the “counter-monument” (a term that I have heard used in reference to contemporary art). This is what I see as a monument that is not only self-reflexive of the cause it serves to commemorate (such as what has been suggested about Lin’s Vietnam memorial) but which also appropriates the monument as a form/ genre/ structure to paradoxically critique the political and nationalistic implications implicit in the erection of monuments. On this latter note, the geographers Peter Meusburger, Michael Heffernan and Edgar Wunder argue that “Throughout the world, monuments… act as mnemonic devices; as the storage vessels of cultural identity and information; as educational and other communications media; as triggers for sensations, emotions, and sensibilities” and further argue that because of their role as spatial sites of collective remembrance – sites of genesis for national identity – that monuments are always saturated with political motives and movements (8). Thus counter to the patriotic monument, I argue that the “counter-monument” works to subvert the established national memory, and rebel against the patrons of traditional monuments who try to shape the national memory to work in their own interests.

On this note, I would like to talk about one specific “counter-monument” that I was fortunate enough to see exhibited at the Venice Biennale (sometimes referred to as “the art Olympics”) this past summer. The work I am referring to is RAQS Media Collective’s (a New Delhi based art collective) “Coronation Park”, a row of enormous 19th century-style monuments which I saw exhibited along a tree-lined, pedestrian mall in a typical European fashion. Colossal and resting on black pedestals with granite inscriptions, these towering white statues depicting the coronation of British monarchs at the time of Indian colonization, rose into the air, frozen in their triumph, and represented power, strength, heroism and conquest – the markers of a traditional monument.

However, upon closer inspection, it became clear that there was something askew about these monuments. Each of the figures had something missing from their bodies – a torso, a head, a face etc. In regards to this manipulation of the figure’s bodies, a RAQS Media Collective member explained in a Biennale interview that “power’s self image may be that its always very complete… but when ever we ask questions we can see that it is always both being eroded and simultaneously trying to build itself up” and therefore that the missing body parts were symbolic of the vulnerability felt (but often concealed) by great powers. Further deflecting from the typical monument structure, the inscriptions on the monuments’ pedestals did not describe the coronation taking place but rather were inscribed with quotes from George Orwell’s famous essay “Shooting an Elephant”. This allegorical essay tells Orwell’s experience of being positioned in a colonial position in Burma, and is Orwell’s “meditation on the inner life of power, its own doubt and its own sense of its own futility” as a RAQS Media Collective member explained.

Thus, it is apparent that the RAQS Media Collective “monuments” were far from being nationalistic markers of success, conquest and stability, but were rather what I have been calling “counter-monuments”. These sculptures used the form of the stable, erect, hierarchal monument to paradoxically speak of the instability and fragility of the imperial powers who were the very patrons of such traditional monuments. Returning to the geographers Meusburger, Heffernan and Wunder’s work, the artists used the idea of a monument as a manifestation of imperial power – as a site intended to generate patriotism and loyalty – and subverted it by manipulating the monuments’ form to commemorate the dissolution of power rather than the attainment of it, the instability of colonialism, and what the RAQS Media Collective called the “inevitability of abdication”.

Again, speaking merely from my own reflections and without intending in any way to undermine the importance of providing a site for public grieving and commemoration for the victims of 9/11, perhaps this critical lens of the “counter-monument” regarding the meaning behind the erection of monuments should be applied when thinking of the ramifications of 9/11 memorialization. Although Ground Zero is a conceptual, contemporary monument that is seemingly very distant from the 19th century, nationalistic, coronation-style, upright monument, in what ways does it still work to build a controlled sense of national identity and memory? Furthermore, it seems that one could draw some connection between the 9/11 attacks (and the ensuing conflicts and militarization of the U.S.) and the themes regarding the instability of hegemony and imperialism that are encapsulated by “Coronation Park”. In what ways can the trauma of 9/11 and the trauma felt by all sides of the War on Terror be understood using RAQS Media Collective’s understanding of the “inevitability of abdication” that comes alongside imperialism and hegemony? Is the way that 9/11 has been remembered as a decisive moment signalling the vulnerability of the U.S. evidence that there is fragility in all great power, even American? I am not sure I know the answers to my own inquiries, yet something about the RAQS Media Collective counter-monument has continually resurfaced in my memory as we have been working on this 9/11 focused unit, and I anticipate it will continue to do so as we carry on into discussing the War on Terror in ASTU 100A.

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Meusburger, Peter, Michael Heffernan, and Edgar Wunder. Introduction. Cultural Memories: The Geographical Point of View. Ed. Peter Meusburger, Michael Heffernan, and Edgar Wunder. Dordrecht: Springer, 2011. 3-14. SpringerLink. Web. 25 October 2015.

Hello readers,

Last week in ASTU 100A, my class had the opportunity to visit the “c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city” exhibit at the Museum of Vancouver. This exhibition was centered around the ancient Musqueam burial ground and village cite c̓əsnaʔəm, which few people know – including myself prior to this visit – is located just before the Arthur Laing Bridge, in Vancouver’s current Marpole neighborhood. Ćəsnaʔəm continues to be a cite of great cultural significance to the Musqueam people, and was historically “first occupied almost 5000 years ago and became one of the largest of the Musqueam people’s ancient village sites approximately two thousand years ago”.

At this exhibit I was informed that in 2012 a condo company retained a permit to build on the c̓əsnaʔəm Musqueam burial ground. This act was met with fierce resistance from the Musqueam community and other activists when the bodies of several Musqueam ancestors (including those of two children) were overturned during the project’s excavations. After a 100 day vigil in honour of the disturbed ancestors and in protest against the project, the construction was eventually halted.

The contention over construction on the c̓əsnaʔəm burial ground can be critically considered using the philosopher Judith Butler’s theoretical lens from her work “Frames of War: When is Life Grievable”, of which we just read the chapter “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect” for ASTU 100A. Although written in the context of society’s attitudes in times of war, it seems fitting to use Butler’s central theoretical question of “when is life grievable?” to reflect on the 2012 c̓əsnaʔəm incident, and by extension more generally on the colonial divisions between “us” and “them” that still plague mainstream Canadian society. At its essence, Butler’s approach inquires into why it is that “we mourn for some lives but respond with coldness to the loss of others”, especially on a public scale (36). One of the conclusions that Butler reaches is that it is the extent to which we recognize ourselves in other people that leads us to mourn for them. Butler continues by stating that those who we cannot recognize ourselves in (largely due to the ways in which we are socially conditioned to view “us” and “them” by factors such as the media and the culture we are raised in) are then considered “ungrievable” or a life “that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all” (38). Considering the treatment of the c̓əsnaʔəm burial ground, it could be argued that even today in our celebrated multicultural Canadian society, the mainstream public’s apathy towards Indigenous ancestors alludes to a greater issue of a mainstream Canadian view of Indigenous lives as “ungreivable”. As many of the protestors to the c̓əsnaʔəm construction project pointed out, such a gross disrespect to the ancestors laid to rest there would have never occurred at a “white person’s” or settler’s cemetery. Furthering this idea, perhaps Mount Pleasant cemetery – with its spatial location in the heart of Vancouver, balanced neatly on the edge of the city’s East, West, South and North neighborhoods – is a cite of public mourning that, using Butler’s theory, is a clue as to who it is that we as a nation consider to be a part of “us”.

On this note, I would like to end this blog post by pointing to another group who has been unjustly excluded from the Canadian “us”. The 26th Annual February 14th Women’s Memorial March – a political act of public grieving – is coming up to commemorate the lives of and the injustice faced by the missing and murdered women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. This event also draws public light to the issue of violence against Indigenous women and girls in this country, which is an issue of human rights (as Amnesty International reported in 2004) that has largely been enabled by a sense of indifference from Canadian public. The historic lack of media attention and serious political action regarding these women and girls is further proof as to how we have drawn the distinction between greivable and ungrievable lives here in Canada. However, after reading Butler’s article, I think it is exactly events like this march that can work towards the dissolution of the boundaries of “us” and “them”, “mournable” and “not” in our society. As Butler writes, “The very fact of being bound up with others establishes the possibility of being subjected and exploited… But it also establishes the possibility of being relieved of suffering, of knowing justice and even love” (61). I wholeheartedly believe that we can achieve the latter in this country if we can publicly recognize that there was a long, long time before Canada was a settler nation, before the Marpole area was a box-store-cum-auto-sales belt, and before Indigenous peoples were denigrated to an “ungreivable” status.

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Butler, Judith. “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect”. Frames of war: when is life grievable?. Verso, 2009. 33-62. Print.

Hello readers,

My class has just entered our second semester of ASTU 100A, which will be focused around critically exploring 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror through the lens of a literature class. Right now, we have just finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, the main plot of which tells the story of Oskar, a nine year old Manhattanite buzzing with curiosity and intelligence, but also with anxiety and grief after loosing his father during the September 11th attacks. After discovering a seemingly random key in his deceased father’s closet, Oskar begins a search for its corresponding lock over New York’s five Burroughs, which can be interpreted symbolically as his search for connection to his father and as a search for some sort of answers or meaning behind his death.

While many parts of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close are striking and deeply touching, ultimately upon completing this novel I found myself unsatisfied with Foer’s depiction of trauma and loss associated with 9/11, largely because I find that the experimental form of the novel is awkwardly incongruent with what I would argue are the traditional themes espoused by it.

In terms of the form and style, I would posit Foer’s novel in the postmodern* domain. To begin with, in a very postmodern way the novel has an unapologetic blending of sub-genres, in that the story is one of mystery and suspense (as when Oskar plays detective with the key and in terms of the reader’s work piecing together its multiple narratives), while at the same time has elements of romance (particularly evident in Foer’s side narratives of Oskar’s grandma and grandpa, as well as the grandma’s sister Anna), historical fiction (with significant attention given to depicting the bombing of Dresden and also, a solitary account of Hiroshima placed in the novel), the classic coming of age story (in terms of Oskar’s character development), and perhaps even contains elements of the genre that is often connected to postmodernism of magic realism (in terms of Oskar’s inventions and fantasies, and with reference to the irrelevance of the actual likelihood of Oskar’s and grandma and grandpa’s whimsical, almost fable-like tales). Furthermore, in congruency with the postmodern tradition of recycling existing artistic work into the new, Foer uses direct allusions to past work, most notably in how he gives significant attention to Hamlet and Oskar’s portrayal of the skull Yorick, to carry forward the novel’s own themes – in the case of Hamlet, one of mortality.

Secondly, the novel defies the bounds of classic, traditional literature and moves into the range of the postmodern in that it mixes prose with images from Oskar’s scrapbook, as well as collages together other media including business cards, formatted excerpts from newspapers, letters, selections of writing that have been marked up as if by hand, pages formatted in experimental and conceptually pointed ways, and even entire blank pages.

Further distancing itself from the traditional novel, Foer alternates between narrators of Oskar, his grandma and his grandpa, each of whom have a very distinct way of storytelling and a very different audience to whom their stories are meant to be addressed to. This fragmentation of narration also works to obscure the chronology of the novel, with its characters flip-flopping from past to present, from the voice of the elderly, to the elderly’s memory of being young, to the voice of the young itself. Additionally, the curation of these three narratives next to each other (as in which story or chapter goes where) as well as the placement of the aforementioned collage style texts and images, seem to suggest a sense of postmodern self-reflexivity on the part of Foer. What I mean by this is that Foer as an author has to understand himself as present in the novel – and perhaps the reader is supposed to understand this as well – as he is the hand putting the story together. This is in contrast to if Foer let the story play out in a more traditional sense where the protagonist’s voice would be the only orchestrater in driving the story forward.

Lastly, in true stride with the postmodern tradition, the novel seems to end with a lack of conclusions – indeed it seems that Oskar’s efforts, no matter how strenuous or taxing, have not led to the meaning or answers that he was searching for. As a reader this is disappointing. Conceptually however, this lack of a neat and tidy ending seems to fit with an analysis of the novel as a postmodern work.

What I am suggesting by all of these observations is that the postmodern form of the novel – with all of Foer’s seemingly postmodern stylistic choices – seems to suggest a self-aware attempt of Foer to be experimental and critical in his representation of trauma. What I mean by this is that through the chaotic, non-chronological, collage style of Foer, he seems to be making a case that the trauma represented in his novel cannot be represented by a novel, in the classic sense of the word. Trauma cannot be tied up easily – something like 9/11 or the Dresden bombings cannot be told through a conventional story with a neat and tidy ending. To do so would imply some rationality to what was experienced by his characters. As the lack of conclusion in the novel suggests however, meaning or rationality is what Oskar was searching for but could not find. Thus, the postmodern style of the novel would lead one to infer that Foer was trying to highlight this postmodern rejection of an objective sense of “meaning” or “truth” or “rationality” in the world. Indeed, in line with how postmodernism arose following the horrific absurdity and trauma of the Second World War, to represent 9/11 Foer seems to be suggesting that a whole other stylistic approach is needed – one that does away with neat and tidy master narratives and instead explores a human story through a non-rational, more eclectic and perhaps more human way.

Or at least that is how I would like to read Foer’s novel.

Instead, however, I found Foer’s use of postmodern techniques to be incongruent with what the novel is ultimately centred around, that being an exceedingly American, traditional story of loss following a day that changed everything for Oskar, and a day that is often remembered and represented as having changed everything for the rest of humankind as well. Perhaps the most central aspect to postmodernism is a questioning of the master narrative, particularly those related to events like 9/11 that tend to be treated with an air of objectivity, as if these events, their histories and repercussions exist outside of the rhetoric and narratives that continually reinforce their importance. What I expected from Foer’s novel then, given its postmodern stylistic techniques, was a more nuanced, critical telling of 9/11 and its repercussions – if not a counter narrative entirely. It seemed that all of Foer’s cards were leading him towards this, but the hand he played was aimed back at tradition and back at the master narrative.

In fact, in class we have been discussing how there are many elements to Foer’s novel that seem to have it contribute to the idea of 9/11 exceptionalism and American exceptionalism more generally. Oskar refers to that day as “the worst day” and exhibits a drive towards action, which, as one of my classmates mentioned, can be interpreted as his character representing America’s immediate action oriented response to 9/11 and the ensuing exceptionalist, neoconservative and flattened rhetoric of the master narrative of “good” vs. “evil”, “us” vs. “them”.

As this is a blog, and a log of my most immediate thoughts, my opinions may change as we continue on in class with exploring the arguments for and against whether or not Foer’s work contributes master narrative of 9/11. For now however, I remain disappointed that Foer’s experimental and what I have argued postmodern style did not lead to more of a critical telling of Oskar’s experience of 9/11. Perhaps what this leads me to conclude is that Foer’s style was not very postmodern at all but instead was a stylistic choice of the author that had little to do with the critical postmodern tradition of questioning the foundation of knowledge, the power of language and the master narrative. On this note, I would like to leave you with a quote by Walter Kirin who reviewed Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close for the The New York Times. Kirin says “(Foer and his peers) can’t really be called experimental, since their signature high jinks, distortions and addenda first came to market many decades back and now represent a popular mode that’s no more controversial than pre-ripped bluejeans”. So perhaps, building on this interpretation, Foer’s style was not a postmodern move at all, but a mere stylistic trend of this current age used to tell what appears to be a very traditional story of a boy and loss. 

* Here I am referring to postmodernism as I have learnt about it in several of my classes (including sociology, geography and political science) as well as what I know of it from outside of school and not from a position of a formal analysis of postmodern literature specifically.

Hello readers,

Last week my ASTU class went to visit the Joy Kogawa fonds held by the Rare Books and Special Collections Library at UBC. We did this as a part of our unit exploring Kogawa’s celebrated novel Obasan, which tells the story of Naomi and her Vancouver based Japanese-Canadian family’s experience of internment – the government mandated relocation of Japanese-Canadians away from the West Coast during the Second World War – and all of its later repercussions.

Seeing the trace of Joy Kogawa through her archive – seeing her annotated drafts of Obasan, her handwriting, her deeply felt intelligence captured unpretentiously on pieces of scrap paper, her philosophical riffs typed up for work that was perhaps never fully realized – was an incredible experience. I think it’s easy to forget the earnest effort of what it takes to create a novel when reading a work as seminal as Obasan. By seeing Kogawa’s archives however, I was able to understand Obasan as a work fabricated out of someone’s subjectivity – a work that had to be physically created by a real, breathing, complex, thinking human being – and not just as a work that has always existed in its heralded and canonized form.

Visiting the Kogawa fonds therefore extended my awareness of what a novel can be – Obasan is more than just a literary masterpiece that has been printed thousands of times over, it is also a material meeting place of reader and author. When reading Obasan one is privileged with the incredible opportunity of encountering Joy Kogawa on the pages of Naomi’s story; one is connected to Kogawa through the words that she so carefully crafted, and this was made apparent to me after seeing Kogawa’s writing process captured in her archives. Obasan, this physical book which has sat casually in my bag next to my daily clutter, which I have read on the bus, at the beach and in bed, contains the exteriorized thoughts of Kogawa, in a wild way it is a rare glimpse of another person’s (brilliant) mind. Maybe I’m just a total nerd, but to me that’s pretty cool. It’s something we take for granted all the time, that we meet this author – this thinking human being – in the words we read.

What is really interesting is that after being so inspired by witnessing these material traces of Joy Kogawa through her archive, I actually encountered her legacy again later that week. On Saturday I participated in a historical walk at Hastings Park – a site of internment for 8,000 Japanese-Canadians in 1942 – led by Nichola Ogiwara, the museum programmer of the Neikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre. Before the walk Ogiwara gave a presentation on internment camps in B.C., which included her showing archival photographs of the Bayfarm internment camp in Slocan. This is the community that Naomi describes being a part of in Obasan. As I found out in Ogiwara’s presentation, Bayfarm was also the camp in which Kogawa herself was interned.

Nevertheless, even though one can see traces of Kogawa in-between the lines of Obasan, the novel remains a fictional telling of Naomi’s life and is not autobiographical. Yet – and even more so after visiting her fonds – it seems that this novel is replete with the life and spirit of Joy Kogawa on its pages. How would the novel change if Kogawa hadn’t been a victim of interment herself? Would the authority of her storytelling change, or is her highly rich prose powerful enough in itself to carry the story? These questions of Kogawa’s biographical influence on Obasan aside, visiting the fonds reminded me that there is something truly beautiful about being able to see the trace of the writer at work.

Hello readers,

In the conclusion of my last blog post I acknowledged the comic book artists Art Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi for having the boldness to use the highly stylized form of the comic book to represent historical events that are often intentionally left unrepresented. As we continue on in my Art Studies (ASTU) class with discussing this aspect of Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, I have been reminded of another author who also uses her work to question the “unspeakableness” of past trauma – the Canadian author Anne Michaels. Michaels’ 1996 award-winning novel Fugitive Pieces follows Jakob, a Jewish boy who was orphaned in Nazi occupied Poland, throughout his life as he attempts to overcome the trauma that he experienced. Despite the fact that the highly visual, graphic narrative form of Persepolis and the highly dense poetic/prose form of Fugitive Pieces are on opposite ends of the form spectrum, the works remain comparable in many ways. In a similar fashion to how Satrapi uses the graphic narrative to deconstruct the taboos surrounding the representation of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and ensuing Iran-Iraq war, Michaels’ use of language in Fugitive Pieces serves to invert the legitimacy of the popular sentiment that “there are no words” to describe the absurdity and horror of the Holocaust.

In order to better understand the implications of this aspect of Satrapi’s work, my ASTU class has been referencing an analysis of Persepolis by the literary scholar Hillary Chute who asserts that “the complex visualizations that many graphic narrative works undertake require a rethinking of the dominant tropes of unspeakability, invisibility, and inaudibility that have tended to characterize recent trauma theory…” (93). Through her choice of the comic book form and furthermore through her use of a distinctly simple, abstract and monochromatic illustration style, I agree with Chute that Satrapi’s work effectively shatters previous norms surrounding the way that trauma is portrayed. In fact, as Chute notes, Satrapi harnesses the power of the abstract to paradoxically create a more realistic telling of her story.

While Satrapi reclaims abstract illustration to represent trauma, Michaels reclaims the power of the written word to do so. She does this through the structure, syntax and diction of the Fugitive Pieces itself. The novel is a very abstract narrative that reads like stream of consciousness poetry; Michaels’ training as a poet is noticeable in the prose. Michaels has been criticized for this by those who find it problematic to fictionalize and make poetry out of what was/is a painful reality for so many, especially because Michaels uses her artistic craft and highly stylized diction to make this dark history sound, well, beautiful. Satrapi’s work functions in a similar way in that her representations of trauma often result in aesthetically striking or even formally pleasing illustrations. Satrapi does not illustrate realistically but rather opts for abstraction, just as Michaels does not write factually but rather poetically. Thus, a critic could claim that the use of abstraction in both Fugitive Pieces and Persepolis overly romanticizes the historical events that these works attempt to represent. In an article she wrote for The Guardian however, Michaels defends her controversial prose by emphasizing that “Nothing can recreate the horror of certain events; a brutal language would not be capable of expressing this, yet it would pretend to do so… I turned to another way of telling, language that I hoped would bring both myself and the reader very close to events in another way…”. Chute suggests very similar conclusions about the representation of horror in her analysis of Persepolis. Thus, I would agree with Chute that Satrapi avoids glorifying the trauma in Persepolis not despite but in fact because of her abstraction of it, and I would argue the same for Michaels in Fugitive Pieces.

One reason I believe this to be true is that Michaels’ stylized diction is in fact an explicit response the misuse of language by the Nazi regime. The Nazi’s used language to destroy; they used it to manipulate society by integrating their doctrine into the vernacular and by taking away the power of language from the Jewish people. In her exemplary craft of it, Michaels therefore reclaims language from its use as a tool for destruction, using it instead as a tool to rebuild and heal. Likewise, as Chute discusses, Satrapi’s bold form and style of representation in Persepolis is in itself a statement against the censorship of the Islamic Iranian regime (106/7).

One interesting thing I would like to note as I wrap up here is the shared sentiment towards memory that both of these authors express through their work. Satrapi concludes her introduction to Persepolis by stating that “One can forgive but one should never forget”, a theme that continues throughout the narrative. This theme is prevalent in Fugitive Pieces as well. In the aforementioned article, Michaels explains her objective behind writing the novel as being that “Morality is a kind of muscle which must be exercised to remain strong… Memory itself is a moral issue: “What we save, saves us.”” While the importance of retaining certain memories is expressed in the content of both works (both of our young narrators struggle with the weight of painful personal and collective memories), this sentiment is also addressed in a more postmodern way in the very existence of the works themselves. By way of existing, both works have physically bound into book form and therefore solidified certain memories. Thus, while both of these authors explicitly emphasize the importance of what we remember, Michaels and Satrapi also stress in multiple ways the importance of how, or in what form, we choose to remember.

Hello readers,

This week in my ASTU class we have been reading Persepolis: The story of a childhood, the graphic memoir by the Iranian-born French comic book artist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi uses her former self, young Marji, to recount her experiences of growing up during the highly stigmatized 1979 Islamic Revolution and the following Iran-Iraq war. In doing so, the reader is reintroduced to these historic events from an unconventional and perhaps previously unheard perspective – that of a young girl from a “modern and avant-garde” family (Perspolis, 6). While the content of the work can stand alone as an impressive mix of political commentary, historical allusions and of course, a child’s personal wartime narrative, what makes Satrapi’s Persepolis so powerful is the way that she has expressed this heavy content through the dynamic comic book form.

As we were discussing in class today, the effectiveness of the comic as a genre has become a hot topic in academia, particularly since the esteemed comic book artist Art Spiegelman shocked the literary world in 1992 when his work Maus: A Survivor’s Tale became the first – and to date only – comic to win a Pulitzer Prize. Thus, relative to the serious analysis of this medium that exists (for example, Scott McCloud’s highly acclaimed work Understanding Comics) and to the abundant cult comic sub cultures out there, my own understanding of this form and the world of comics is very limited. Yet still, I find the medium to be incredibly fascinating. For the sake of brevity, this blog post will not focus on the effectiveness of the comic medium in portraying narratives, but rather on how the comic genre plays into conversations about the art industry and its socio-economic relationship to class.

In an interview uploaded by the YouTube channel I Am Film, Satrapi accredits her use of the comic genre to her “love” of “popular art”. Expanding on this, she continues by saying “I didn’t want to make some paintings that would go to some galleries and then some elite peoples would come and watch my paintings and that would be it… I said I can make something that would be popular and not stupid.”

Interestingly enough however, my own exposure to the comic medium has primarily been through these very gallery settings. In 2008 I saw KRAZY, the dynamic summer exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery which centred around comics, graphic novels and other such genres, and last spring I saw the Art Spiegelman’s CO-MIX: A Retrospective show at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Thus my personal exposure to the art form that Satrapi intentionally uses in order to create “popular art” has been through institutions that generally align themselves with more “serious” “high art”. This is interesting because it reflects a certain trend in the art world in which popular art, like comics, has come to be coopted by previously separate domains of high art, like the gallery.

I have to admit that at times I am somewhat skeptical of so-called popular art. Popular art is inherently associated with mass culture and therefore its mass appeal can make it an easy target for the corporate world to appropriate – art that appeals to a big market is art that can turn a huge profit. Thus popular art as a form helps contribute to the increasing commercialization and trivialization of art and culture (for a similar account of this idea explore the Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and their theory of The Culture Industry). For example, when thumbing through The New York Times Magazine one may encounter ads for Jeff Koons (the iconic American artist) edition Dom Perignon. Seen from one perspective the Koons bottles represent popular art, seen from another this collaboration is mere brand building for both artist and corporation. Yet Satrapi proves my cynicism to be too simplistic by reviving a still beautiful, uncorrupted side of the popular art form – a side in which popular art and more specifically the comic genre is used to create something powerful for everyone to experience.

Playing devil’s advocate one more time however, to what extent is the comic genre actually distanced from the classism that exists in the rest of the art world? Traditionally, comics are often associated with youth culture – think of the weekend funnies in the newspaper or of any iconic superhero series. Thus, in one way the comic represents a sensorial form that is unpretentious, relatively inexpensive and easily accessible to a popular audience. In another sense however, comics can also be associated with a political, highbrow and generally wealthy class – take the political cartoons and comics produced for publications like The New York Times and Charlie Hebdo. The highly erudite comic perhaps is not a “popular art” form because it is only distributed to and only intended to be interpreted by a certain elite class.

The real significance of works like Satrapi’s Persepolis and Spiegelman’s Maus then becomes that they effectively bridge these two worlds of comics and use the popular art form to transcend the potential elitism in the art world. They document political and historical commentary onto an unpretentious page. As Satrapi says in the I Am Film interview, “it is possible to make something that everybody can read but is well made.” In this synthesis something truly incredible is created. Using the genre of the comic book to explore often taboo and traumatic issues takes an incredible amount of artistic bravery. If one thinks of Theodor Adorno’s famous declaration that “it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz”, one has to celebrate Spiegelman’s courage to go on to use not the poem but the even more stylized form of the comic book to recount his parents experience of the Holocaust in Maus. Likewise, Satrapi’s work is equally poignant. She utilizes the comic to represent the best (and not the commercial) aspects of the popular art form – she cuts through demographic blockades to reach a wide audience with her strong voice and powerful pen.

Hello readers,

Last Friday my professors from the program that I am enrolled in at UBC called CAP Global Citizens, came together to deliver a joint lecture on what exactly it means to be a ‘global citizen’. At the end of the lecture, a peer of mine asked a question that evoked some provocative later thought from me. To paraphrase, it went along the lines of: “If we are living in a globalized age where there is increasing fluidity of people across national borders, what becomes of national and ethnic identity… more specifically in the case of children born from parents of different ethnic heritages?” This concept correlates back to a question that Professor Luger raised in our first Art Studies (ASTU) lecture: “How are we shaped by and identified with our local, ethnic and national communities?”. Being half Korean and half Anglo-Canadian, I feel that I can personally speak to this issue. I have observed there to be an interesting dichotomy between what I see my national and ethnic identity as being and what others see it as being. Furthermore, others’ ethnic identification of “halfies” (the colloquial term often used for half Asians) differs in different parts of the world; in my case for example, I am identified differently in Canada than I am in South Korea. This has led me to think about not only how globalization has contributed to new mixes of ethnicities, but also how globalization has changed the way people are ethnically identified across the globe.

Having been raised in Canada, a country that prides itself on its current multiculturalism, it may seem that I have not been brought up in a society that has demanded me to struggle with my ethnic identity. Yet, I have personally found at times that being a halfie from a Canadian perspective means being seen as a “whitewashed” Asian person. In the eyes of others, it can mean being a person who has a token element of ethnic diversity while still having been assimilated into “white” culture. For example, in high school I immediately fell under the “sits with the white kids” category of the cafeteria social hierarchy. The worst part of it is that when my peers would point this out to me, they would say it like it was a compliment, as if it was to my advantage to be more white than Asian. If one thinks of the recent controversy over the casting of Emma Stone as a part Asian character in Cameron Crowe’s blockbuster Aloha, one can be rather literally reminded of this whitewashing of half Asian people in North American society.

Yet at home, I do not feel completely white, but actually very Korean. Farhat Shahzad, a scholar whose sociological work we have been discussing in my ASTU class, defines what she calls an “interpretative community” as being a “collectivity of significant ‘others’” (302) whose “memories, world-views, practices, and behaviours can and do have impacts on students’ learning experiences and strategies” (310). Given this definition, I would not hesitate to call my Korean community a highly influential interpretative community in my life. So why is it that in Canada I am constantly told by others that I am more white than anything else?

Now, thinking of this from the perspective of a global citizen, consider how my ethnicity is seen in Korea. Due to the fact that Korea remains a primarily ethnically homogenous nation, halfies are still a bit of an exotic anomaly. This aside, what becomes particularly interesting and relevant to our ASTU class is the influence of globalization on how I am ethnically identified in Korea. Through growing ties with North America (culturally, economically and politically), Western beauty ideals are now considered sacred in South Korea. Consequentially, Korea has become the number one plastic surgery capital in the world (for further information on this phenomenon read this article by Patricia Marx in The New Yorker). Thus, in Korea I have been asked by complete strangers where I got my surgeries to look “more Western” done. So not only am I not Korean in Canada, I am not a white Canadian in Korea but rather it is assumed that I am a Korean under the influence of Western beauty norms; I am plastic, I am not real and my identity is a trend, an aesthetic and a mainstream cultural choice – not an ethnicity.

This, however, is a very contemporary perspective. The importation of the West into Korea through globalization trends has a history much longer than the recent plastic surgery epidemic makes it seem. In fact, the above noted article from The New Yorker attributes the beginnings of plastic surgery in Korea to “the aftermath of the Korean War, triggered by the offer made by the American occupational forces to provide free reconstructive surgery to maimed war victims.” The article continues by explaining that these procedures advanced quickly into the cosmetic realm as they “caught on fast, especially with Korean prostitutes, who wanted to attract American G.I.s”.

Indeed, the Korean War left many strange legacies. In 1983 when my mom returned to Korea for the first time since she emigrated to Canada as a child, and brought along her white boyfriend (my father), she was immediately ostracized for being with a white man due to the fact that Korea has a dark, partially forgotten history regarding interracial relationships. During and after the Korean War, many of the American Soldiers on service in Korea utilized Korean sex workers. Thus the half Korean children from that generation were largely associated with trauma. The sociologist Grace M. Cho’s Haunting the Korean Diaspora investigates this subject. Here is an excerpt from the book’s description: “Since the Korean War—the forgotten war—more than a million Korean women have acted as sex workers for U.S. servicemen … Haunting the Korean Diaspora explores the repressed history of emotional and physical violence between the United States and Korea and the unexamined reverberations of sexual relationships between Korean women and American soldiers.”

Not only are halfies a product of the increasing global fluidity of people across the world, but the very way that we are viewed by others has also been dramatically impacted by globalization. Thus, although I am a Canadian national, my ethnic identity remains a sort of grey zone to myself and to others. As discussed in the joint lecture, these are issues that more and more people will encounter as globalization continues to connect the world in a myriad of old and new ways.