The concept of personal identity is a unique one, particularly the connection between identity and place. The connection between one’s personal identity and past geographical place, current geographical place, or cultural place is distinctly complex and intricate[1]. This complex relationship between personal identity and place can be significantly shaped or influenced by a number of factors, including political turmoil[2]. The concept of expressing personal identity through creative practices can also influence and shape one’s identity. Through the lens of different creative practices, this blog explores discourses on the connection between personal identity and space within the context of cultural diaspora and political turmoil.

-Aileen McKeown

Artists may decide to exemplify their own forms personal expression in their portrayal of a certain experience. For example their work may resonate an oral storytelling tradition, incorporate ideas of song and dance or include illustrations. This can make their work both more personal and more universally receptive. 

“Image is an international language.’ -Marjane Satrapi

-Maria Fowler

 Where there is a cultural or language gulf, methods of artistic expression must become innovative and more thoughtfully carried out.

‘Sozaboy’s language is what I call ‘Rotten English’ […] whether it throbs vibrantly enough and communicates effectively is my experiment.’ -Ken Saro-Wiwa

-Maria Fowler

Experience is unique and personal. It cannot be perfectly transferred, but through various artistic endeavours, experiences can be described 

to the effect that the reading/viewing of these artworks present the audience with a new experience in themselves.  This experience is one that can be shared by many over a wide range of places.

‘The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.’   -Chinua Achebe

-Maria Fowler

So many things shape our identity. We pick up pieces of it everywhere we go – the place where we are born, where we grow up or where we grow old. We find pieces of it in the people that we meet, those we study with or the ones that remain close to us despite the distance. Our identity is who we are, a collection of memories, experience and heritage. It defines us as individuals, each with their own little habits and guilty pleasures, their background and history. This collage is only a tiny drop in the sea of photographs and memories that carry pieces of our identity. The colors in it are different (just as we are), but the more colors you add, the more beautiful and complete the picture becomes. Identity is constantly evolving and changing, reflecting newfound knowledge and experience. Identity is affected by current events, current location, and current (yet evolving) attitudes towards current events and current impacts on our lives. So many things shape our identity.

-Simona Iontcheva

Please See the Powerpoint Attached:

Explorations of the Relationship between Space and Personal

-Dougie Morgan

Persepolis

By Marjane Satrapi

Originally published in French, Persepolis gained much recognition, as an autobiography, for its unique style as a graphic novel. The novel was first published as two separate books, Persepolis and Persepolis 2, now published together as one complete work of literature: ‘The story of a childhood’ and ‘The story of a return’. In 2007 the film adaptation was released, depicting the same illustrations as in the novel, in a major motion picture, in which Satrapi co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud a French comic book artist. Not only did the novel attract so much positive attention, the film also received an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Animated Feature’ at the United States Academy Award. The comic was well received in western countries, with British critics praising Satrapi’s unique approach to an autobiography in which she succeeds to completely to change Western views on Iran as she believes ‘that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists’.

Set in Iran, Persepolis depicts the story of Satrapi’s childhood and her struggle to live in Iran during the rise of the Islamic Revolution. The first part of the novel demonstrates a child’s education into the world she lives in and her family’s participation in the protests taking place in Iran against the inevitable war. The 10 year old Marjane often talks to God and sees herself as the last prophet in which she dreams of social equality, brought about by the law that women were forced to wear the veil and men and women were separated in every aspect of life. Satrapi portrays her struggle as a young woman who just wants to be ‘normal’ in a country where posters and designer clothes were seen as an opposition to the regime and parties had to be held in secret. Finally ‘The return’ depicts Marjane’s struggle with the separation from her family and her own personal battle with her identity, after moving from a religious Iran to an open and secular Europe. Having struggled with not only the separation from her family and home, but with a new language and a new way of life she returns home to find a country destroyed by the war with Iraq.

Satrapi outlined, in the introduction to Presopolis, that she wrote the graphic novel to demonstrate to the world that not all Iranians should be blamed for the wrong doings of the extremists. However, the graphic novel also appears to demonstrate a young Iranian woman’s struggle with her own personal identity in a foreign country and the hardships faced by the separation from her family and her own way of life. Therefore, Satrapi presents to her readers a fundamental and very relevant depiction of how an individual’s identity can be shaped, not only by the political turmoil surrounding them, but also by her own form of creative practise in the form of an autobiographical graphic novel, an integral work of literature in our society today.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. Paris: L’Association, 2003. Print.

-Louisa Grace Clark

At face value, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s novel Sozaboy shows the Nigerian Civil war from July 6th 1967 to January 13th 1970, from the naive viewpoint of a disadvantaged young man named Mene. Yet the novel not only touches on this anti-war point, but it also underlines crucial issues of identity, which often heavily effect people involved in political turmoil. These issues of identity seem to focus on how war can change and develop a person’s identity; it is also shown how a place can be part of an identity. These discourses linking place and identity, and subsequent issues evolving from these concepts, are illuminated through the character of Mene. Mene is pulled into the life of a young soldier, unaware of situations outside his understanding, which stems from his lacked of educational opportunities; these lack of educational opportunities are intimately connected to how his personality and emotions are shaped, and thus is a significant factor in shaping his identity. On Mene’s level, the reason for him becoming a soldier was to impress his new wife and show other men that he was not a little boy. Yet this need to impress is not simply about Mene’s desire for importance; it is about wanting to change his identity from a boy to that of a soldier. Alongside this identity as a soldier, Mene desires to have the respect that is fostered alongside the identity of ‘soldier’.

At the beginning of the novel, Mene’s identity is that of a boy who is part of a small, tight-knit community; his lack of education does not seem to be that big of a deal. However, at the start of the War, Meme, alongside a great number of other young men, are attracted to the power and demanded respect of a soldier. This attraction has many tragic consequences for him, as he loses his part of the small community and the identity he had within it. At the same time, Meme fails to settle as a soldier due to the horrific circumstances it puts him under. Therefore, this leaves Mene as an outsider, with no defined and absolute identity. Shunned by both his old community and other soldiers in the war, his identity now lies in-between these two communities, adding to the horrors he has been through.

The novel is able to combine the concepts of anti-war assertions and questions of personal identity. These two points are brought to the reader with a high impact; the reader is really able to feel his identity changing and become something unknown. This identity is further explored and redefined by the use of Rotten English, adding to the idea that Mene’s identity is something undefined and unique, similar to the language used. The concept of personal identity is one in which Mene is strongly connected to in the novel, as he wished to change his identity but only seems to lose it. The relationship between personal identity and place is also shaped by political turmoil for Mene; this is because he loses his home, which his previous identity was strongly connected to. Overall the novel Sozaboy is extremely successful at showing the reality of war in the post-colonial Nigeria while driving home the point of how war can change and even damage a person’s identity, leaving them as an outsider.

Saro-Wiwa, Ken. Sozaboy. Port Harcourt, Nigeria: Saros International, 1985. Print.

-Rachel Mackay

War is all around, in every culture

The government becomes like a vulture

Feeding off their people to make more money

It’s not big, it’s not clever, it’s not funny

They say they look after us, but they lie

We are individuals, it matters if we live or die

We have no water, we have no food

We have no one to bring is good

We have dreams, we want more

We don’t want to live at deaths door

The big men live happy in their home

Happy and content, like a dog with a bone

The vultures have gone, I am alone

Where is my country? Where is my place?

Why cannot I not see my own face

I don’t fit in, I don’t belong

I know not their story, nor their song.

At home we were happy, we lived as one

A happy boy I was, my father with his son.

Now I am a man, I’m left out in the cold

My everything is gone, I’m alone to grow old.

-Selina Redgate