Today I presented at the Coordinated Arts Program’s conference. This is a conference in our program where students can present the work that they’ve been doing during their first year at university. I presented my work about love and grief in The Reluctant Fundamentalist which I shared some of in my previous blog post.

I heard about this opportunity through Dr. Luger, our Arts Studies professor, who organized the event. I was interested because I found what I talked about really interesting and wanted to share that with others as well as that thought that it would be a really cool experience. I did Speech and Debate for four years in high school so I’ve found myself comfortable speaking publicly because of that. So I submitted my proposal for my essay and waited. I missed the first email so when enough time elapsed and I thought they hadn’t emailed me, I assumed that I was rejected from the conference. It wasn’t until I got the program in my email that had my name on it weeks later that I learned that I had been accepted.

I was put on a panel for “Representing Grief and Nostalgia” which fit my paper perfectly as it is what I speak about almost exclusively. Unfortunately, I’ve been busy with other academics and recently sick so I wasn’t able to work on the presentation as much as I would have liked. I came into the conference with low expectations because I heard so many people in my CAP stream talk about how they weren’t going. When it was time for our panel, all of the seats that had been set out were filled with a couple of people watching from the sides and back of the room. I presented second, the only member of our panel that didn’t have a slideshow, and the speech went well (I like to imagine). I found that the questioning period was the most fascinating part of the whole experience though. I found it super interesting when the other members of our panel would get the opportunity to open up more about their work and what they thought about it. The only low light of the whole experience was when someone asked me a simple question and I started answering it and forgot what I was saying half way through. It was quite embarrassing but I imagine it was amusing as an audience member to watch that.

Despite that, the conference allowed me to remember my love for public speaking and it allowed me to gain a little bit of confidence about my intelligence. Two things that I didn’t really expect to gain from this.

I am currently writing an essay about how love and death are intertwined and create nostalgia. In this essay, I focus this argument on how it relates to Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and I use the works of Danielle Barkley, an English professor at McGill University, and Megan Moore, a medieval literature scholar to further detail the discussion.

Barkley writes, “writing about the past and seeking to retrieve it … is essentially always an act of desire, reflective of the longing to take the emptiness created by the loss of a time and place and fill it with an imaginative reconstruction.” Instead of reconstructing the past, Changez spends his time creating ideas of what the present would look like if Erica and him were still together. On page 172, Changez lists, “We would have woken in my bedroom and breakfasted with my parents; we would have dressed for work and caressed in the shower; we would have sat on our scooter and driven to campus.” He continues on for a whole paragraph detailing how their lives currently would differ if she was with him. Instead of moving on from Erica, Changez takes time to focus on the longing and emptiness that she left with him when she left him. Imagining her with him allows him to be able to mend the longing that he feels for her, even if it is just short lived. In this fantasy, Erica is with him wherever he goes, when he is at home, work, out with friends. By imagining the present in an idyllic way, Erica has never died and has never left and life can remain feeling normal and safe for Changez. And yet, thinking too deeply about Erica makes him realize how much he longs for her. Moore states, “…understanding of the emotional tenor of romance pairs “amours” and “duel” – love and grief.”

In this term for ASTU, we are reading the novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. The novel revolves around a man named Changez who recounts his life to another person. He starts by talking about moving from Pakistan to America to study at Princeton, getting a prestigious job, and falling in love with Erica. In the novel, Changez’ word is changed on 9/11 where his “outsider”ness comes to the forefront.

The most fascinating scene in the whole book is that in Chapter 7 where Changez and Erica have sex for the first time. In this scene, Erica is unwilling to be with Changez because she is still in love with her boyfriend who had died, Chris. In order to remedy this, Changez proposes that he pretends to be Chris and as he does, they continue their physical intimacy, The whole scene is shrouded in allegory (as it has to be because this is an intellectual work and no one inserts a sex scene is high brow novels unless it means something.) Erica in this scene is a metaphor for America and in order to be apart of the American society Changez has to change himself, he has to pretend to be Chris.

What interests (or disgusts) me about this scene, is if you read it as an event and not as an allegory. It becomes less about a man desperate to be accepted into society and more about a desperate man willing to pretend to be something he is not in order to have sex. The line that perturbs me the most is, “I was Chris and she was with Chris, and we made love with a physical intimacy that Erica and I have never enjoyed” (105). I find that this line in particular is ignorant to Erica’s experience during this event. In my opinion, Changez and Erica did not “make love,” you need a deep emotional bond between both parties in order to do that. He then goes on to compare the sex to entering a wound, making him feel like he had been violent.

This scene fails to answer, how did Erica feel about all of this? Although she does not explicitly say no, Erica does not explicitly say yes. The troubling metaphor of the wound makes me question whether or not Erica wanted to participate.

This week in class we took a little field trip (which sounds a bit like elementary school) to the Rare Books and Special Collections in the Irving K Barber Library. We didn’t just go to look around though, while we were there as a class we got the opportunity to look at the fonds, or the whole archive of papers from an individual, of Joy Kogawa. Kogawa wrote, Obasan, a novel that our Arts Studies class has been focusing on the past couple of weeks. This trip was very interesting because we were fortunate enough to see some of her early works scribbled on the backs on scrap papers or rejection letters she had received from many publishers before one accepted her work.

I thought going to the archives and reading Kogawa’s intimate works like letters and such really brought her to life as a person. Sometimes you look at a book and it seems like it wasn’t written into existence by a human, it feels as if it was willed into being individually of everything else. Seeing her writings outside of Obasan made Joy Kagawa come to life as an author and a person. Reading more writings about the book itself also led me to have a greater appreciation for the novel as a work of memory, allowing people who did not experience the Japanese internment camps to relive Kogawa’s life and her story.

The most amazing documents to me were the rejection letters that Kogawa had received during the early stages of her book, even before it was titled Obasan. Even though the rejection letters may have been seen negatively by Kogawa, I appreciated it because it means that even amazing authors get rejected from publishers and that it may take a couple of tries in order to to get something right. In a way, it’s inspirational that a distinguished author such as Joy Kogawa had difficulties publishing her first book.

These are two photos of documents I took while I was there. The first is document is a short rejection letter that Kogawa received, saying that they couldn’t offer her a deal for Obasan because they saw issues marketing the book. A shame for the publisher because the book has been popular not only in Canada, but in America and Europe as well. The second photo is a document that her editor sent her, reviewing every chapter of the novel. He gave some criticisms but the most repeated phrase of the document is, “Good.”

I would go back to the special collections now that I know what I can find in there and what kinds of stories it can tell about an author or a book in specific.

Hello readers,

Like the rest of the world (well… anyone that isn’t  racist, misogynist, xenophopic, homophobic, etc.), I was incredibly shocked to hear about Donald Trump winning the US election for president. I am from Arizona, a state located in the Southwest of the United States, so this issue is incredibly close to my heart. Although the presidency was on my mind, so was the reelection of Sheriff in Arizona. Yeah, yeah, I know, sounds right out of a old western film. But Sheriff Joe Arpaio, commonly known as the “toughest sheriff in America,” has been around the political sphere for almost seven terms. Phoenix New Times reports that locally and nationally Sheriff Joe is known for his horrendous jail conditions, reckless police operations, unconstitutionally discrimination against people of colour, and is a strict enforcer of immigration laws in Arizona. Oh, and he is also currently being investigated by the FBI for having personal vendettas against political rivals and members of press who publish negative media about him.

After several terms in office, he was finally ousted and now there’s a new sheriff in town (quite literally). I was overjoyed when hearing this, hopeful that my state was turning over a new leaf despite our electoral votes going to Trump. Earlier this week as I was reading the news I came across an awe inspiring article about Trump releasing a list of who might be in Trump’s cabinet and lo and behold Arpaio made the list. He made the list as potential for Secretary of US Homeland Security. So in summary, Arizona voted him out because he was a terrible Sheriff and Trump promotes him because he was a terrible Sheriff

During our ASTU class last week, we discussed the idea of common sense vs. uncommon sense. Common sense is defined as what we think because of our every day experience with the world whereas uncommon sense is the knowledge we create by asking questions and discovering beyond what we already know. Common sense is thought of as a good thing, with the saying “use your common sense,” as a way of indicating that someone has done something stupid.  Although common sense is usually seen as a good thing in every day language, to scholars it can come with some consequences such as the belief that going out in the cold will make you sick or even more drastically, women in short skirts “deserve whats coming to them.” Uncommon sense isn’t really used in the every day vernacular so it can be confusing when someone first comes across it. Uncommon sense would be the knowledge that flu season hits in the winter because more people spend time indoors, closer together or that the belief that women deserve rape comes not from the short skirts but because of the rape culture that has formed in society.

Joe Arpaio and Trump display common sense. The idea that all Mexicans are drug lord rapists or that prisoners should be kept in inhumane conditions are not common, especially since Arpaio was not reelected, but that these are assumptions made without looking further into the issues. The common sense that these two show along with many other politicians is based on their own experiences in the world, not based on facts or truth, but in opinion and perspective. The fact that these politicians have made it so far based purely on dangerous assumptions tells us about a dangerous side to America.

This is just the opinion of one Arizona girl.

-Maddy

Works used

Gooding, Richard, Daniel Burgoyne, and Marlene Sawatsky. “Scholarly Styles I: Nominal Style.” Academic Writing An Introduction. By Janet Giltrow. Third ed. N.p.: Broadview, n.d. 211-33. Print.

Stern, Ray. “Arizona Ex-Politicians Kyl, Brewer, and Arpaio Are on Trump’s Short List for Cabinet Picks.” Phoenix New Times. N.p., 17 Nov. 2016. Web. 18 Nov. 2016.

Hello again,

At the beginning of the semester in Arts Studies, we read and discussed the book, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. In this graphic memoir, Marji (a younger version of Satrapi and protagonist in the text) is living in Iran during the Revolution and is telling stories from her life.  I wanted to revisit the book because I find the author uses some very interesting techniques in her illustration. For the most part her panels are laid out two or three in a row in three rows but in certain points of the story Satrapi changes that norm to put larger panels on the page. The question I pose in this blog is, what is the purpose for using panels that take up the entire page?

The first instance a full page panel is found is on page 42. The page before shows how the Shah was ousted from power. The caption at the very top of the page reads, “The day he left, the country had the biggest celebration of its entire history,” and below is shown a large group of about 30 people, each with a smile on their face and many hands showing peace signs. Every person has a different pattern on their shirt and no two faces look the same. Marji and her family can be found in the bottom left corner of the panel. Satrapi uses a full page to relay the immense size of the event. She wants the audience to know that the celebration was truly the largest the country had ever been apart of and therefore she uses the largest panel she could for it.

The second time the author uses this kind of image is further in the book on page 71. On the top of the panel is written, “And so I was lost, without any bearings… What could be worse than that?” This panel is about how she feels after she has been disconnected from God and she feels alone in the universe. The illustration is almost completely dark with a couple of stars, a planet, and a lone Marji floating out in space. In the bottom right corner is a jagged speech balloon saying, “Marji, run to the basement we’re being bombed!” in bold, capital letters. At the very bottom on the page, the caption says, “it was the beginning of the war.” In this case, Satrapi uses the large panel to signify two different things, how small Marji feels in this moment and the polar extremes between the quiet of space and the force of the bombs. This particular part of the story is when Marji grows up and is no longer a child.

Satrapi uses this device is on page 77 as well. In this panel is an illustration of Marji and her family riding a magic carpet between an Euopean tower, apartment building, and the leaning tower of Pisa. There are images of curls and waves all around them to signify the wind. The caption on the image reads, “In September 1980, my parents abruptly planned a vacation. I think they realizd that soon such things would no longer be possible. And so we went to Italy and Spain for three weeks… It was wonderful.” The fact that this panel is so large is supposed to represent how wonderful the trip was for Marji and how it was the very last time that her and her parents went away together. This is the final time that Marji gets to spend quality time with her parents without the war in the foreground.

Satrapi has many uses of full page panels. The panels are metaphors for extremes in the story and are used in order to show the audience how important the different aspects of the story are. This panels also show a finality in Marji’s life where something comes to and end or the plot drastically changes.

Hello there,

If you are reading this, then you have artfully found my blog. This blog’s sole purpose is to share my insights and opinions in what we are learning in my Art Studies class at the University of British Columbia.

If you know me, you know that I love Disney (and posting on my ASTU blog.) So for this blog I decided to combine the two and tell the story of Running In The Family through my favorite genre of music, the Brother Bear soundtrack.

“On My Way” is my favorite song in the move Brother Bear and I think that it fits the book perfectly. In this scene, Koda, the smaller bear, is taking Kenai, the larger bear, to the salmon run, a tradition that all bears partake in but Kenai has never experienced. Kenai represents Ondaatje as the tourist and Koda represents Ondaatje as the native. As you watch the scene in Brother Bear play out, you notice that Kenai has trouble doing things that most bears find easy, such as eating berries, because he has been disconnected from his roots as a bear. When Ondaatje returns to his home of Ceylon he has been disconnected from his roots for so long and such finds things such as “bear”ing the heat difficult, just as a tourist or traveler would.

Certain lines of the song relate to the book outside of the traveler/native metaphor as well. Phil Collins sings,”And the stories that we tell will make you smile,” which is reminiscent of chapters such as, “Aunts” and “Jaffna Afternoons” where Ondaatje sits with his family and talks about stories from their past. Some stories that they tell, like that of a “funny hideous scandal” make them smile as they retell it and some stories, like that of the governor’s daughter who “threw herself down a well,” don’t have the same effect. As the bears and Ondaatje continue their journey, the lyrics, “not the rain, can change my mind, the sun will come out, wait and see,” reminds me of the many chapters entitled “Monsoon Notebook.” These chapters do not actually talk about monsoons but what it is like to live and experience Ceylon for what it truly is.

https://youtu.be/v95tQG1-KRQ?list=PLVLwLXWb_ZpNT20S1LjTQfThl9xj3VfhI

In this scene in the movie, Kenai, or in this metaphor Ondaatje as a traveler, reaches the salmon run and is immediately accepted into this group of bears. When Ondaatje reaches Sri Lanka, his family welcomes him home with open arms even though he left the island for so long. Ondaatje as the local is joyous because he is reunited with his family and is able to spend time with his siblings and extended family who he has not seen in a while. Ondaatje as the tourist is here to learn new things about his father and to explore that relationship, just like a tourist would with a new place.

Similarly, there are lines in this song that stick out in a different way than this overarching theme of the tourist. The lyrics, “remembering loved ones departed, someone dear to your heart,” reminds me of one of the purposes of the book, to speak about memory and remembering his family in a way that is emotionally true to the author. The quote, “this has to be the most beautiful, the most peaceful place I’ve ever been to, its nothing like I’ve ever been to” reminds me of Ondaatje’s daughter in the chapter, “Kuttapitiya,” and she remarks after traveling all over the island, “If we lived here it would be perfect.”

What we’ve learned from this post is, Brother Bear was greatly under appreciated. Also that the two polar roles of traveler and local that Ondaatje must wear is a complicated line to walk but important due to the way the plot of the text plays out. Ondaatje as the tourist explores the island with new eyes due to the time he has spent away from it. Ondaatje as the native spends his time on the island coming home to what is familiar, cities he lived and close family members.

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