Month: January 2017

Dearest readers,

This past week I have continuously been  thinking about what to investigate in this blog post. Our ASTU course has recently been exploring with the 2007 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist written by Mohsin Hamid. This novel was written as a response to the “culture of fear” developed in the years after the 9/11 terror attacks and deals with the experience and life of a Pakistani Princeton graduate, Changez. Through the story of Changez, Hamid permits his readers to question their understanding of how we collectively create an understanding of events and aspects surrounding it. As a part of the class discussions in relation to the novel during the past weeks Professor Luger has guided us through a range of material. Introducing the novel, Luger explored the historical aspects of the event including the physical implication it had in terms of warfare and national fear and suspicion. She further presented the comments and understandings of 9/11 by several political and literary scholars, carefully illustrating how Hamid skilfully embodies the nature of US after 9/11. Indeed, one essential argument Luger put forward and continued to explore during all of our discussions that really stuck with me was that of challenging assumptions.

The idea of assuming that there is a certain nature of how we view the world around us is something so seemingly close to us that it almost goes past us unnoticed. Reading Hamid’s work I often found myself surprised, and slightly offended I must admit, by constantly having my preconceived assumptions about the information of the character Changez directly thrown back at me. This theme of repeatedly pushing for awareness and the importance of being aware of how coloured our perspective is reminded me of one of my biggest scholarly role models.

I believe that true understanding derives from awareness. Because, only when aware and attentive towards the reality of a situation or oneself, I believe, one can catalyse a change. This idea, however, is not simply my own, but was to a large extent influenced by Hans Rosling. The first time I encountered Rosling, a Swedish professor of global health, he did not stand out to me. A fairly old, university professor was miles away from my 14-year-old image of a leader. Yet, there was something about the way he spoke that captivated me. Since that day I have spent a considerable amount of time in front of his software Gapminder fascinated how different global patterns and the media’s images were. Gapminder is a non-profit project that aims to promote an increased understanding of statistical data and other information about economic, social and environmental global trends. Doing so Rosling intends to encourage the public to understand and work towards a more sustainable global development, such as the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

What fascinates me about Rosling and the Gapminder Foundation is how he, in contrast with general tendencies, uses knowledge and facts to promote awareness and to fight ignorance. I strongly identify with his belief that by making information more available for people to access, one has the potential to influence these individuals’ thoughts and actions. I also share Rosling’s momentum against ethnocentrism and xenophobia. For instance, his current work focuses on reducing the distorted knowledge-gap about the Third world, which seems to have spread like a wildfire in Western countries.

I find it fascinating how similar Hamid’s usage of ambiguity and suspense as literary techniques manages to catalyse the same thought process within me as Rosling’s work does, yet from an opposite direction in the form of fiction. Because awareness does not merely depend on knowledge, but understanding or emotional understanding, thus Rosling and Hamid have collectively opened my eyes for this on several levels. Borrowing the words of Professor Luger, I wish to end this post by thinking that maybe there is a reluctant fundamentalist in all of u and this only because we often fundamentally believe that we aren’t.

Seen you next week!

 

Dearest readers!

Coming back to UBC after the holidays, and especially to my ASTU class, I have started to grasp to what extent the beginning of this university journey has affected me. Although, the scope of this impact includes experiences beyond the academics, the scholarly material I have been presented with is the core of my internal transformation. It has come to my realization during the holidays that I have not only altered the way I perceive and construct knowledge about external factors, but also my perception of internal knowledge about myself. Throughout the previous term in our ASTU class, we have addressed several works focusing on the exploration of personal experiences and public depictions of historically told memories and stories. All of the literary works together with the scholarly essays have invited me to think about my memories in a different light. Yet, it was not until reading our first work for this term Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco that I was able to put these newly acquired lenses to address national memory of trauma on a more individual level.

First, being ethnically half Bosnian Serb, although I usually refer to myself as half Croatian as most of my relatives now live there, my perspective as a reader of this work was radically different from the previous works that we had studied. During the year of my birth, the native nation of my mother ceased to exist. The horrors and genocide committed by my people after Tito’s death are the stories of my childhood. Just 20 years ago, a horrendous genocide was committed by individuals whom some my grandmother can name. Undeniably, I have been aware of this since as long as I can remember and unfortunately I am repeatedly reminded of the persisting hatred between the ethnic groups every time I visit Bosnia. Prior to reading Sacco’s work, I had used a strategy of trying to understand and explain the historical factors from a rather scientific point of view. This meant me spending a significant amount of time and energy watching and reading about Marshall Tito who ruled Yugoslavia before the war broke out.

There is no doubt that Marshall Tito was praised as a strong, successful and charismatic leader by many of his own people and on the international scale. Yet, Tito’s political and economic policies were in many cases not build on a stable foundation causing Yugoslavia to become ethnically divided. Aleksa Djilas, a former Yugoslavian journalist, in his article “Tito’s Last Secret: How Did He Keep the Yugoslavs Together?” describes the Bosnian Genocide as consequence of Tito’s failure to create national cohesion. Djilas states that to remain in control of the economy, Tito slowed down the natural development of a market economy, including the development of goods and workers being exchanged between the different regions (Foreign Affairs). Despite this attempt to limit the influence from the west by restricting the economy and reinforcing Leninist principles, Yugoslavia still became rather westernized, which according to Djilas diluted the communist party and made it unable to remain in control when Tito died (Foreign Affairs).

Another essential aspect to notice is also the icon Tito himself became for the Yugoslavian people. According to the documentary “Tito the Rebel Communist” by the History Channel, there is a strong correlation between Tito as an individual and the coherence of Yugoslavia. Rising to power essentially by leading a communist guerrilla group fighting against the Nazi-Germany during the Second World War (Pavlowitch, The History Channel), Tito became an icon and war hero representing the collaboration of all Yugoslav ethnicities. Indeed, the official concept of Yugoslav unity solely depended on Tito and his socialist ideology and socialist values were taught to students and young schoolchildren substituting culture and religion, thus creating both support for Tito’s actions and a sense of a common ground under him that then fell apart when he passed away. Knowing these historical facts about the conflict, I had managed to shield myself from the emotional footprint of the genocide and the subconscious ethnic guilt I somehow felt.

It was therefor rather surreal the way the emotional applications of Sacco’s graphic narrative hit me. It was on the 7^th of January and I was on my way to some family friends to celebrate Serbian Christmas (Orthodox Christians) after I just started reading Sacco, when I realized how emotionally hard it was for me to read. It is strange, because Sacco of Sacco’s position as an author writing about histories of his interviewees, I found myself in a situation where I was a reader of an external observer and at the same time feeling a personal connection. Interestingly, because of Sacco’s external position he was able to describe a realistic portrayal of emotions that my relatives could not describe to me because it was too painful form them to do so. Thus, although sometimes difficult, it really opened up another aspect of the war that I had been able to access, which is what I believe really is a remarkable power of literature dealing with trauma.

Have a nice weekend !