In Safe Area Gorazde, with the style of graphic narration, aiming to depict the real image of Bosnia war from 1992 to 1995, Joe Sacco introduces people a relatively new perspective of viewing the war and the victimhood. According to Tami Amanda, an academic scholar in the University of Manitoba, puts forward with a theory of victimhood identity; he argues that the victimhood constitutes with five stages: structural conduciveness, political consciousness, ideological concurrence, political mobilization and political recognition (Jacoby, Tami A., 2015). The five sequential stages mainly introduce that a victim-based identity or victimhood is both socially and politically structured and it needs the proper political culture and power to express itself. In other words, the social context matters for the definition of victimhood. Mariano Lima, the president of a Peruvian victim-survivor association (VSA), echoes Tami Amanda’s idea with his concept of “external victimhood”, one of the “two-model” of victimhood which also includes an “internal one”. (Waardt, Mijke De, 2016). The former refers to the objective definition provided by social institutions, while the latter self-definition of victimhood. Joe Sacco, however, not only affirms the internal definition of victimhood (which I’ll argue in my paper rather than here) in Safe Area Gorazde but also invents a relatively new one (my argument here) that can be achieved by another angle of the “external victimhood”, that is, from the readers’ perspective, rather than completely relying on the social context or institutions, to define the victimhood, and this new way of definition will be the basis of my further analysis of the rationality behind silly girls’ behaviour.

One of the merits of Joe Sacco’s graphic narration is that the characters are real, so do their lives. People living under threat of war, generally, seem to be unconsciously divided from people living in peace, as generally, it takes for granted for the latter to seek for and enjoy material life. In other words, in some precarious situations, the former, are totally excluded from owning the “normal desires” such as pursuing the materials as they are usually perceived to do what they should do rather than what they want to do. Where does the line diving the two groups come from, or “victims” living in danger naturally don’t have the right to own and enjoy the same stuff as onlookers who live in peace? On page 50, with the title named as Silly Girls, Joe depicted the scene in which he and Edin were enjoying a gathering with some girls. These young girls, without any access to education because of the war, as Joe called them, were the most “giggly hostesses” in the town, energetically sharing their personal stories and laughing with their guests. Then on page 56, when Joe implied that he would leave for Sarajevo and asked if there’s anything these girls want, on the second panel of the first tier, “JEANS!” amazingly appears in the bubble, placed above a couple of girls’ exciting expressions, and the next frame continues their “specific requirements of the jeans”. However, after Edin suggested preparing the money for their future education, the girls became silent and Joe concluded that: “they were a couple of silly girls”. What makes this section sad is that on one hand, saving the money for education is wise, but on the other hand, can anyone tags the girls as “silly” just because they spent the money purchasing what they want as normal young girls? I would like to argue that these girls’ “silly desires” are, in fact, natural and reasonable and should not be blamed at all; there’s nothing that can make such an exclusion, which, to some extent, devalues some people’s lives just because of their living conditions which they have no choice to resist. Girls are girls: money can be prepared for the better purpose, but it doesn’t mean that it’s irrational and silly to buy something satisfactory.

Furthermore, their so-called silly behaviors lead me to a deeper thinking: why the idea of future education didn’t come to mind when they were asked what they want? Were they really too silly to think about their education? Maybe not. I presume that the reason why these girls were crazy about materials was that they were pushed quite far away from their “spiritual needs”; in other words, they were suffered from a loss of hope. The war was so cruel that it not only deprives people’s basic needs but also indirectly sent people a message that the future may be as struggling as the presence. For these girls who were not capable of escaping from the war zone, what else could they seek for? What types of hope were rational for them to pursue? Hence, the “silly girls” were placed in an opposite position from the war, that is, they were victims, and that’s where Joe Sacco’s novel definition of victimhood comes from.

Briefly, through the deep analysis of those girls’ craziness about American-made Levi’s jeans can lead to more information than a simple tag “silly girls”. The cruel side of war “squeezed out” people’s hope and their planning for future, so it’s quite reasonable for people living in precariousness to ask for what may satisfy their material needs rather than an incredibly distant spiritual goods. Therefore, in most chapters of Safe Area Gorazde, the victim-based identity belongs to neither an absolutely subjective nor an “external one”; rather, Joe’s creative definition comes from a relatively external perception or, as we can say, the public’s perspective, to examine the internal lives and desires, and the “social criticism” can, on the other hand, help confirm the victimhood comprehensively.

Thanks for reading 🙂

References

Jacoby, Tami A. “A Theory of Victimhood: Politics, Conflict and the Construction of Victim-Based Identity.” Millennium – Journal of International Studies, vol. 43, no. 2, 2015, pp. 511-530doi:10.1177/0305829814550258.

Waardt, Mijke De. “Naming and Shaming Victims: The Semantics of Victimhood.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 10.3 (2016): 432-50. Web.

Hey everyone, welcome back!

 Recently during our ASTU class, we talk about the term “general precariousness” argued by English scholar Judith Butler in her Frames of War. In the excerpt Survivability, VulnerabiIity, Affect, Butler notes many valuable arguments based on her definitions and analyses about the “body”, “interpretative frame” and “war”. The most amazing part, in my perspective, is the “lens” or “frame” that we use to interpret the world, and it is the “frame” that makes people form the position that “some lives are much worthy than others” (while in fact, it’s not the case).

    When Trump signed the American travel ban, aiming to ban people from Muslim countries enter the U.S., the meaning of “global citizen” seems to fall apart. Broadly, instead of viewing the ban just as an executive order, we can find that it’s actually an exclusion of certain people with “special” ethnic. In other words, the ban draws a clear line between “us” and “them” in order to protect “us” from “them”. “They” (as Trump refers to Muslims) are opposite to “us”; “they” are enemies, in this sense, the “body”, as Butler argues, of Muslims cannot be recognized as valuable and respectful ones as “ours” since they represent the sign of “threat” to Americans after 9/11, one of the most serious historical trauma planting an unpleasant seed in American’s heart, which keeps growing in the last sixteen years and waiting to break through the soil one day. To some extent, the one day has come. For some people who view the world from their glasses, made of fear, aggression, and egotism, Muslims are not qualified as lives enjoying the same status as “themselves”. The glasses or, the frames, prevent people from seeing what has never existed, what actually exists and what will exist in the near future. Hence, whenever some people from western countries hear about the news such as #Iraqis died during the war, they will, acting like Changez (the protagonist in The Reluctant Fundamentalist) watching the explosion of 9/11 on TV, feel pleasant and involuntarily smile. “That’s a victory”! But, is that a victory? When American soldiers stepped on the bodies of those innocent Muslims, the former also proclaim a sense of control, owning the right to kill people who are not recognized as “real people”, not to mention the human rights. The lack of human rights is just one of the “milestones” on the road towards the exclusion.

Furthermore, if the constitutions of the “frame” are fear, aggression, and war, as I mentioned above, what has contributed to these traits? In the excerpt, Butler gave us the answer: the power of media.

“The critique of violence must begin with the question of the representability of life itself: what allows a life to become visible in its precariousness and its need for shelter, and what is it that keeps us from seeing or understanding certain lives in this way? The problem concerns the media…”

Most of the people, in fact, are “nurtured” by the dominant media. We are told what to believe and what should be believed, and people just follow the norms. Taking the Japanese exclusion mentioned in Obasan the last term as an example, we will find that the most powerful push of the trauma didn’t come from people but from the government and the related media. The “sin” of Japanese were recorded perfectly in documents by dominant media to convince the mass that there’s a need to split (Japanese) Canadians in order to protect and grab what should be “us” from “them”. To encounter the precarious life is not an accident that can be formulated in an instant. Conversely, people are educated with the “selectivity” as time goes by, and the more they are exposed to the visual pictures printed in a newspaper or posted on websites, the more likely their appreciation is formed as “cookie cutter”.

Judith Butler is right: the general precariousness of life actually exists. Americans are precarious, or they will not issue the American travel ban to protect themselves. On the other hand, Muslims are also precarious because of the alert of Americans, so do people from the rest of the world. There’s no fault to protect lives, but the point is how to handle the problem. To exclude people looking like “bad guys” from my homeland? Yes, It may help..for one day? a month? a year? The fact is that it definitely will not help forever. Here’s an analogy: when you enter a room and turn on the light, you see a snake. Then suddenly, you shout: “oh no! there’s a snake! turn off the light!”. It doesn’t mean that some people are “snakes”, instead, what I really want to make clear is that dodging will never be the best way to solve the issues in front of us, no matter how publicly official it could seem to be.

Thanks for reading 🙂

Hey there 🙂

According to Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, if readers consider the book as a thriller, then “they have already been afraid”. Instead of making a clear narration of the ending of his work, Hamid intentionally, as my classmate Anthony mentioned, left the “huge picture” for people to imagine and think. In other words, without any hint from the book, the only resource we can get to analyze the central idea is from both the cultural and political background of the world in recent years. In this case, if people feel strained and anxious after reading the book, then their response clearly demonstrates the fact that: we are now helplessly living in a tense situation filled with numerous security propaganda which we are suffered from. Then, here is the question, since a culture of fear has been swirling around the world, who are the real victims of it? And whether those so-called “victims” really fit into the frame?

The most magnificent point of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, in my perspective, is that Hamid depicts a culture of fear but with no further insights or explanations. Readers are exposed to such an inspiring condition to figure it out by themselves. No matter in the novel or real world, the United States seems like a permanent owner of the tag: a culture of fear. From national governments to local organizations, the propaganda of fighting against terrorism, including setting the Homeland Security Advisory System, indirectly push American people into the terror from time to time. Actually, what we cannot deny is that as a “favorite” attacking aim for terrorists, America can act as the victim of the game. However, instead of making a response like “Ok, you attacked me, then I will punish you attackers”, the United States took a much more radical attitude towards the attack: “Ok, you attacked me, then everyone sharing the same cultural or blood relationship with you will all go to heck”. To some extent, it seems that the real game has just begun after a series of terrorist attacks since 9/11 and this time America may not enjoy the title of “victim” anymore. So, where has the label gone?

Of course, innocent people like Changze who belong to Muslim but have nothing to do with the terrorism relay the baton. Raising the flag of Humanity (for its own citizens), America has taken an extremely sensitive position towards Muslims. Standing with American people, it is right and justifiable, but what about the situation of other innocent Muslims from the Middle East? It seems that these people are too foreign, like Changze, so they must be excluded from the scope of humanity by the United States. For instance, whenever people from the Middle East enter American airport, they are suffered from the fear of being detained. Why? Because they are Muslims with the beard, so they are treated as “bad” guys who may plant a bomb somewhere. Although the logic sounds unfair, that’s what actually happened nowadays. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Changze acts as a representative of a particular group, living a life that each Muslim who seeks for life opportunities and success in America may have to go through. Therefore, comparing to innocent Muslims, American people are definitely not or not the only one who bear the pressure of culture of fear.

There’s no reason to doubt the existence of the other side of a coin when we see a coin dropped on the ground with just one side upward, nor do our comprehensive perspectives of a culture of fear. No one owns the dominant power over the tag. Under the propaganda of American cultural of fear, Muslims, no matter you’re “good” or not, all have to walk in the shadow everyday. In order to provide security for their citizens, western countries make a huge effort to play up the negative image of countries which may be a hidden threat. Such a humanity, just like the coin on the ground, could show one side of it but hide another one forever as if it doesn’t exist. In other words, no one owns the privilege of humanity. Far from spreading and sharing the culture of fear like a joy to everyone, the real humanity is the one which still pursues justice for the innocent even if something unpleasant happens.

Thanks for reading.

Hey guys 🙂

Welcome back! This term my ASTU class starts with another political comic book Safe Area Gorazde (following the Persepolis) accomplished by a U.S. journalist, Joe Sacco. With the narrative, mainly the story related to Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995, inserted into the drawing, the book acts as a recount of local people’s terrible experiences during the wartime. As cruel as it can be, the war, in my perspective, shows us more than what could be perceived from the surface. For instance, the role of media, especially “foreign media” which looks like a “passer-by” of issues as well as events, should also be taken into consideration, and Joe actually pictured the relatively dark side of the phenomenon in his book, too.

On page 130, Joe drew some journalists who “blew in” in Gorazde in the morning but “blew out” with the U.N. convoy in the afternoon after taking some shots and short interviews there. Particularly, in order to get what they wanted in an instant, photographers threw candy which named as bon-bon at kids and “captured predictable mad scramble”. When I read here, I was really shocked and uncomfortable. The original emergence of media, I believe, symbolized people’s urgency to the REAL FACT, because a number of issues, as well as events, started to blur within the chaos made by the rapid development of the world. In this case, journalists and photographers ought to doubtlessly act as the defender of reality and purity. However, in Joe’s book, these “defenders” didn’t realize their responsibility but treat their interviews there as terrible tasks to be done. What could we expect from the interview, which may illustrate disastrous events, just accomplished in few hours? What could we get from the photographs where children are scrambling for candy thrown by the photographer? How could we trust the big picture in front of us? What’s the story behind fake story shown to us? It’s pretty hard to answer these cruel but sad questions, and it can be more dreadful if a lot of innocent people are deceived by the media.

Again, on page 217, a group of Spanish TV crew requested Riki to lead them around and told them the war in Gorazde before they left in the afternoon. In response, Riki pointed to some damaged buildings and said: “Look!”, which meant that the story these journalists sought for, was just around them. As I mentioned above, the TV crew saw their interviews as workload rather than a responsibility, and here is much more obvious when one of them begged Riki: “please help us”. In class, my classmate Nic mentioned that it looked like an irony that people from real safe areas asked survivors of the disastrous war to help them. Think about it, isn’t these journalists job to help and save people in Gorazde by doing real interviews about there? What’s more, there are almost no intact buildings around the crew; however, paradoxically, the damages seemed transparent and invisible to them at that moment. Then, what’s the consequence of phenomena like these? Yes, most of us, more or less, are fooled by what we could see in newspapers, journals or TV channels.

On the other hand, does it mean that we could trust nothing shown on media? Probably not, but to be honest, I’m not sure. A few days before, an Iraqi journalist was released from a kidnapping, and BBC commented that: “ Iraq is considered one of the most dangerous places to be a journalist”. I am deeply touched because no matter how hard it is, some people still choose to do what they think is right. To some extent, there seems a huge gap between Iraqi journalists and journalists from western countries; in other words, the severe pain just can not be felt by the passer-by.

Briefly, as a global citizen today, it’s my duty to be sensitive to the surroundings and the “worlds” far away from me, and I’m convinced that some of our media, those fake defenders, could not disguise themselves forever as long as we people do what we should do: appreciate but may not accept the entire picture in front of us completely.

Thanks for reading 🙂

Bibliography

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-38510102

Recently I’ve reading Obasan, a book telling the Japanese-Canadian history after the second World War from the perspective of a child. Compared to Persepolis and Running in the family, which concentrate on the relationship between personal memory and history, Obasan further the question of the people’s attitudes toward the history. In other words, we need to make a choice on the essential question: is it right to let the past just be past?

At first, before reading the book, I always put myself as a complete spectator of history; because for me, what had been done could just be in the past tense. “History” is a word which only occurs in the textbook: apathetic, without much emotions. So I believe that I can understand why Naomi doesn’t want to uncover the history and talk about it, and there may be several explanations. For one, the fear and discomfort brought by history, even just thinking about it, will easily limit ourselves in the safety zone. The past, especially filled with pain and misery, is like a wound, which just recovered. It will never hurt unless we try to touch it or hit it again. We offer ourselves a placebo, not trying to forget what have happened but escaping from what we have experienced. For another, it seems that if something has already been done to our ancestors, nothing could really be contributed by people like us living at present. But after witnessing how Naomi’s aunt Emily treats the injustice that had happened, I begin to wonder, in a real sense, if it is right to cover the misery or accept the history as something cannot be retrieved, something once lost and then lost forever.

In 1937, with the desire to occupy its regional neighbor, Japan began to invade China, also known as the Second Sino-Japanese War ( Teng, S., & Wu, H, 1956). Numerous cultural artifacts were damaged and destroyed by the Japanese army, and countless Chinese people lost their lives. A total nightmare for Chinese people. Even now when I’m typing down these words, I feel really upset; the dark side of history makes me hurt. One of the most infamous crimes done by Japan during the war is the Nanking Massacre in 1937 (John G. Magee). When Nanking was captured by Japan in December 1937, the disaster began. People at different ages had different fates, while all their destinies led to death. Women were raped no matter whether some of them were pregnant or not, children were killed without any reasons and most of the men were taken to the Unit 731 where vivisection was waiting for them. These related materials and articles show up in my textbooks again and again when I was in China. In order to escape from the fear and pain, I seldom think about or mention it. “Let the past be past”, I used to fool myself, pretending that I don’t care about it too much, in order to get some temporary comfort.

However, it is Emily’s answer “We are the country”, the response to the claim “But you can’t fight the whole country” made by Naomi that leads me to think about the following questions: can the past really be past?  “I will never be hurt and nothing will happen if I keep hiding my sadness”, is that true?  If it’s the case, how long can I insist on? The curiosity to discover the answers makes me realize that it’s time to make a change and remove the “barriers”. We can pretend not to see something but does it mean that there’s nothing? As long as it exists, someone needs to touch and feel it, then, why not us?  The dark side of the history will never be corrected or resolved without examining it carefully. And what we cannot deny is that sometimes the “history” is still the problem or the fact at present. For example, the racism towards Asian people still prevails in western countries even if some tragedies including the one recorded in Obasan have been published for so many years. Therefore, the only way to prevent the dark side of history from happening, again and again, can only be achieved by facing bravely rather than hiding deeply.

When Zach and I talked about the torture our own countries suffered brought by the Second World War, both of us were amazed by the incredibly dark side of the history. He showed me the camps owned by Nazi Germany to imprison Belgian Jews as well as the grand library burnt down by Germany during the war. I can understand how he’s feeling because China has always been “the heaven for robbery” since the beginning of the 19th century. For example, except the Second Sino-Japanese War, another disastrous event is the Siege of the International Legations in 1900, and Zack found that Belgium was one of the belligerents against Qing Dynasty. (Okay, it seems that my neighbor was my previous enemy.. Anyway, just joking) However, at that moment, I wasn’t filled with anger but clearly realized the importance to face our history. The fact that we don’t feel very sad today in 2016 towards the war occurred hundred years ago doesn’t equal to our apathy and ignorance of it. On the contrary, as the descendant of the generations who had suffered before, we choose to take a relatively “silent” way to face it. Just like Obasan’s silence: it can be much more powerful than Emily’s anger which showed openly and loudly. I remember in 2002 many cars made by Japan were smashed by a group of emotional Chinese, who use an extremely irrational way to express “how much they love China”. I don’t want to make any judgments about their behaviors, but I’m really shameful of them. In this case, how to face the history may be much more essential than whether to face it.

Human’s memory is always selective, and it’s totally fine to forget something. However, not everything should be covered and forgotten consciously. Our future, different from the history which cannot be rewritten, is completely controlled by us. It’s our task to remember and talk about the past, especially the dark side of it because the real comfort will never the momentary one. At the same time, the rational way to face the history may bring more than our expectation, comparing to the emotional one.

Thanks for reading:-)

Bibliography

Teng, S., & Wu, H. (1956). Journal of Asian studies. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies

John G. Magee Family Papers, Record Group No. 242, Special Collections, Yale Divinity School Library.

 

In his Michael Ondaatje’s “Well-Told Lie”, Matthew Bolton disagrees with critics like Mukherjee who labels Ondaatje as “race blindness” because he believes that we can’t accuse Ondaatje of making a sacrifice of the authenticity by the usage of a creative form of narration—memory. In other words, there’s no clear boundary between memory and history. The memoir, usually treated as subjective and emotional, is rarely associated with the “real history”, which is always tagged as objective and accurate. Almost everyone who reads a memoir or autobiography has already adopted a stance that the boundary between the personal account and the real history is clear and indisputable; writers who make a connection between them will definitely receive accusations.

Ondaatje, mixing up the limitation mentioned above, creates a new way to accomplish his Running In The Family. In this “historiographic metafiction”, Ondaatje narrates his return to Ceylon to discover the “tracks” of his father as well as the history of his family. The book, in my perspective, is made up of pieces of information, and there are huge gaps between different chapters; in other words, its casual and personal style make it almost unrelated with the “real history” that he seeks for. In fact, Ondaatje may make most of his audiences frustrated because his organization and writing style totally contradicted with their previous recognition of “what a memoir should be” or “what the history is not”. However, it is the exceptional feature of Running In The Family leads us to develop a new conception of the real relationship between memoir and history. The history consists of numerous events, while the writers were subjects and witnesses of the whole bunch of incidents; in other words, it is quite difficult to tell the boundary between a personal account and the real history, that is, the memoir is not the just memoir but a part of history. Moreover, I believe that the former sometimes can be more accurate than the latter because most authors who compose the history materials that today treated as indestructible Bible haven’t experienced what they write about. In this case, our reliable access may come from people who are “real memory owners”. Moreover, it could be even worse if the authors are controlled by the ruler, like what happened to the incomplete or extinct records related to the Insurgency in 1971 in Ceylon. Without the account from Ian and those unbroken spirits who actually experience the Insurgency, People will never get to know about the real history that the ruler tries to cover.

I remember last time when we talked about the Cultural Revolution from1966 to 1976 in China, my grandmother sighed with grief because she viewed it as a nightmare. She still remembers that working as one of the Red Guards whose mission was to protect the country and our president, she rushed into the house of landlord and destroyed the kitchen with the spade in order to find out those “hidden treasure” underground. She also witnessed how many historic attractions were destroyed without any reason at that time. When I sat in front of her and listened to the account, I suddenly realized that I was discovering the history rather than a memory. My grandmother has a strong feeling towards the revolution because she experienced it. However emotional her memory could be, it’s the product of real history and experience. Rather than being limited to a bunch of boring references, we could find more than we want through the subjective but reliable memory. It is the emotion makes audiences like us have the chance to touch the real history by ourselves with no intervention.

In The Lover, Marguerite Duras employs her memory of her pubertal love with a Chinese guy to illustrate people’s life and social classes in Vietnam, where was still a colony in the 20th century. Although always considered as an autobiography, The Lover shows the audiences not only a personal love story but also the reality behind the impossible love. Here, Marguerite uses the first person “I” to tell us her experiences, memories and feelings as a pubescent girl who almost lost in love. By connecting these subjective pieces together, she accomplishes a “memoir”, which is filled with her own life and seems like has nothing to do with the historic background at that time. However, readers can clearly receive the information of the related social conduct, traditions or ideologies. With the use of narrating the reality beneath the love story, Marguerite successfully shows that the history consists of memory, and that makes the memoir no longer just a memoir itself.

What we cannot deny is that nowadays the main source for people to look up for history is a bunch of serious and scholarly bibliographies. But with the appearance of historiographies such as Running In The Family and The Lover, we can also explore another kind of history through these personal accounts. Taking the same position as the writer and acting as a witness of the writer’s surroundings and experiences, we can easily get the perceptive comprehension about what was actually going on at that given time. As my classmate Zach suggested in class, the history which is visible may not be true. Similarly, I want to argue that just like “what we think of the memoir is not the real memoir”, what we think of the history is not always the authentic one, and we need some emotional accounts to make it complete. For example, if people are willing to learn more about the First Nation people in Canada, they need to read memoirs of the First Nation writers rather than the current writers or mass media, who can be seen as winners and are capable of distorting the real history which we are looking for.

Concisely, the memoir cannot be treated as history, but the history without the account like memoir will definitely be incomplete.

Thanks for reading 🙂

Recently I’ve been reading Running In The Family written by Michael Ondaatje who talked about his return to his native home Ceylon, an island named Sri Lanka now. The book, in fact, looks like the combination of pieces of information. With the use of various literature types including logs, poems, and dialogues to accomplish his “travel journal”, Ondaatje also implied his identities in numerous ways; in other words, we cannot define and tell which role Ondaatje really plays in certain section of the narration. In the chapter named The Karapothas, from the excerpts such as “ Heat disgraces the foreigner.” and “I’m the foreigner”,  it’s obvious to tell that he acted as a traveller who stepped on this island purposely in order to discover his family’s history. On the other hand, the identity as a “local one” is also shown in some other chapters. Although we read the book through the perspective of “I”, no one can make sure who the “I” really refers to. If we change it into a question: does the “I” indicate the Ondaatje with the colonialist heritage or Ceylon’s background, the answer can be “YES” because the point is not about the choice between “either” but of “both”.

It would be quite interesting if we apply the paradox above to the poem The Cinnamon Peeler. Here, Ondaatje described the cinnamon peeler’s eager love for his wife, and there are plenty of plots related to desire, sex, and belonging. From the first stanza “If I were a cinnamon peeler…on your pillow”, we can feel the strong desire of the cinnamon peeler make sure the belonging of his wife. He wants to leave the “yellow bark dust” or, as we can say, to leave anything he could to take hold of her and offer her a label that “you are mine”. In my perspective, instead of assuming that both the cinnamon peeler and his wife are real “people”, maybe we can suppose that the relationship of the couple, to some extent, is also the connection between Ondaatje and Ceylon. The latter is full of stories and history that the former was seeking for. It seems like that Ceylon, as a cinnamon peeler, tries to leave something on Ondaatje’s body or mind. The culture of the island worked as the yellow bark dust: trivial but obvious and cannot be erased easily. Playing as the “cinnamon peeler’s wife”, Ondaatje is quite passive because of his half-Ceylon identity, and Ceylon with its history kept flowing around him, cannot be caught but just there and left him a significant mark.

The same discovery can be made at the end of the poem as well. It’s quite obvious that the pronoun changes from “I” to “You” here, and the inversion makes the cinnamon peeler’s wife, who acts as an object in the previous stanzas, win the initiative. “I am the cinnamon peeler’s wife. Smell me” implies a confirmation of the identity, that is, the woman admits that she is the cinnamon peeler’s wife but nobody else. That’s the key sentence referring to the belonging. We can assume that during the travel of seeking for history, Ondaatje, who was left a mark of Ceylon’s culture and spirit, began to be conscious of his own belonging. Surrounded by the “yellow bark dust” all the time when he travelled as a “foreigner”, Ondaatje realized that he was also the “Ceylon’s wife” even though he cannot identify himself as a hundred percent Sri Lankan biologically. In this case, the last sentence “Smell me” can be treated as Ondaatje’s fervent longing to be accepted as a part of Ceylon.

We cannot just tell the character just from the disguised one made by the writer purposely. Even a little change of representation can lead us to a completely new world where we can find more than we have thought about. I still remember how I was impressed by Walt Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain!, a poem composed to memorize Lincoln’s contribution to the country. And I guess this can be an easy but typical example of altering the representation of characters in literal works. Although Walt Whitman didn’t mention his objects straightly in the whole passage, audiences can still get the point that the Captain is not just a captain, and the ship is not just a ship at all. With the knowledge of American background and history at that time, we can find that what the writer was willing to show us is a picture that Lincoln acted as a great Captain who went through hard times and brought America to “a new era”. Hence, avoiding to be blind is quite important when we read literature works especially poems because there can be a lot of invisible but essential information beneath each symbol.

What we cannot deny is that the identity in Running In The Family is pretty hard to be defined because of its broad range. However, just like my analysis in The Cinnamon Peeler, if we can think about the “I” critically and treat it not just the “I” but the half-Dutch Ondaatje, half-Sri Lanka Ondaatje or even Ceylon, I believe that we will find more than what we perceived at the first time. Briefly, the representation sometimes can be everything but the ostensible meaning in Ondaatje’s “fever dream”, and it’s necessary to take advantage of the method to discover his real identities in the book.

Thanks for reading! : )

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Reference:

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/O_Captain!_My_Captain!

Hey 🙂

How’s going this week? I hope all you guys can enjoy your life here!!

Recently, I’ve been reading a graphic-narrative book called Persepolis, which tells Iran history from a child’s viewpoint. The book makes me quite shocked not only from the story it illustrates but also from the social issues related to religion, politics and classes it reveals; in other words, it gives me a chance to discover something underneath the surface but exceptionally important. 

Before analyzing and discussing my ideas about the social-class problem revealed in the book, I will share some of my questions about it.

• How did Satrapi illustrate the phenomenon of social classes?
• What’s the effect of the gap between different classes on people?
• Does your social class really determine who you are?

The Letter. 

context

At the beginning of the revolution, Mehri, the maid in Marji’s family, fell in love with the neighbor’s son, and their love only based on looking at each other from the window and writing letters. However, unfortunately, Mehri’s “boyfriend”left her after knowing her real identity–a maid rather than a daughter in a upper-class family.

This failed love story impressed me a lot. From the book, we can get that Mehri’s boyfriend didn’t like her at all. In fact, what he really cared about was an identity. He thought she was a daughter from an upper-class family, so he approached her; later, when he knew that the fact was the opposite, he disappeared in her life without a word. The great difference in his attitudes clearly shows that the importance of social class (at that time).

According to Marji’s father’s words, we can tell that in his eyes, the love between two different classes is ridiculous and impossible. But I really wanna ask why he was so confident about its failure?  

The Key

Context:

During the wartime, because Iraq had much more advanced weapons than Iran, the latter had to use “quantity” to fight against the former’s “quality”. As a result, many young kids were recruited for the front, and most of them died there. Taking advantage of theses children’s innocence, the government gave each boy a key, which could take him to the “paradise” when he died as a martyr on the battlefield, before he attended the war.

Noticeably, comparing to other pages, most of which take three blocks a tier, this page only has two pictures there. The first one shows bodies of children who had keys around their necks; ironically, meanwhile, Marji and her friends were having a punk rock party in the second picture, and Marji wore a neckless made of nails and chains. During the analyzation in class, I found that my classmates did a great job here, and they also noticed that the first block is bigger than the second one; to some extent, it seems that Marjane wanted to use the organization to stress the difference.

Therefore, I get another question related to the difference shown here: since both Marji with her friends and those “young martyrs” were kids, why their fates were totally different—the latter died on battlefields while the former were enjoying themselves at a party?

With Marjane’s narrative in former chapters, we can find that she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth; in other words, she lived in a social class which was much higher than any other people at that time. Besides, when Marjane illustrated the story, she used an adjective “poor” before those boys chosen to fight for the country. Therefore, in my perspective, the answer to my questions may be closely related to the distinction between social classes.

The movement of care workers from the Third World to First World.

Source: Hochschild’s Love and Gold 

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxtaWRkZW5hbTQ2MHxneDo0ZjIxMGIwNWQ0ZTZiMDRk

In this article, Hochschild talks about women immigrants, who come from the Third World, leave their own children but work as nannies in the First World. Both the huge gap between different classes and its effect can clearly be seen here.

As Hochschild implied: the growing global trend, which made rich nations became richer and poor nations became poorer, resulted in the importation of care and love from poor countries to rich ones. If we treat the whole world as a state, then the First World will certainly be the upper or middle class, while countries in the Third World will represent the lower one. The only reason why the Third World is beaten by the First World is that the latter has a strong strength in wealth. Hence,people in the First World can easily achieve their aims or interests by exploiting the lower class.

For women in the Third World, they have to leave their own children to provide a better life for the family, but what really makes the whole matter become ironical is that they work as nannies in the First World and offer all their love to other people’s children rather than theirs. Why do these women leave their country? The answer, of course, is that they need money to survive in the society. If we think about it deeper, we may also ask: what makes them cannot make a living in their own country? Why there’s such a huge difference in wages between the two Worlds?

Again and again: the effect of social classes.

Fates of three babies from different classes in America.

By the way, a video here can also confirm my answers.

Think about this question when you watch it: What makes their fates so different, even if they graduated from the same high school?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XM-YcgGWQA

Well, in my opinion, according to backgrounds and wealth they own, all people in this society are divided into different classes, and these classes design different modes of life for them.

People in the upper class, including Marji’s family, with powerful backgrounds or much money, instead of worrying about basic needs for living like people in lower classes, may choose to pursue a higher quality of education or more political rights; in other words, they can completely control their lives. In some cases, to achieve their interests, the upper class can even manipulate and exploit the lower class. However, no matter how tightly are bound by the former, the latter hardly try to change the situation because of their absolute weakness in many aspects.

As a result, when the society becomes unrest, people in the lower class will definitely be sacrificed by people in the upper class who can take advantage of their strengths both in economy and politics to protect themselves. The story sounds sad but true, and I guess that’s the reason why kids at the same age in the same society usually have surprisingly different fates. Just like the key around every poor boy’s neck means a better life while Marji’s necklace is just for fun.

Thanks for reading.