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Hello readers!

These last couple of weeks in my ASTU class, we have been reading a collection of articles and poems surrounding the “War on Terror”. Judith Butler’s book Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? poses many questions about which lives societies find valuable and invaluable in situations such as war. She asks “What is our responsibility toward those we do not know toward those who seem to test our sense of belonging or to defy available norms of likeness?”(36). Butler loosely answers her question about who the “we” and “them” are by stating “We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. The ungrievable life is one that can not be mourned because it has never live, that is, it has never counted as a life at all” (38). A life that is considered grievable, then, is one that shares similarities to us wether that be through nationality, religious affiliation, or simple proximity to us. Therefore, when Butler refers to people who have “never lived”, she is referring to the those people in third world countries thousands of miles away, whose lives have never effected ours and whose insignificance in the political matters of the world are greater than their significance. However, Butler uses the example of post 9/11 mourning to show that even proximity cannot make a life mourn able if the government doesn’t want it to be, stating that because public grieving was dedicated to making the images of the victims iconic for the nation, “..there was considerable less public grieving for non-US nationals, and none at all for illegal workers” (38).

To answer some of her many questions and bring new ones in to play, Butler cites Talal Asad and his book On Suicide Bombing, which I happen to have read. Asad’s book poses many questions similar to Butler, such as the grievability of life, and more mainly why certain ways of killing are condemned and others are accepted. Focusing on the act of suicide bombing, Asad states that “suicide bombing does not kill as many civilians as conventional warfare, and yet people react to them with exceptional horror” (65). He mentions that the horror might be found in the fact that while aerial strikes take place mostly in the context of war, suicide bombing can disrupt daily life; the attacker having the capability of walking around publicly, un noticed before the attack. Another part of the horror he pointed out, could be the fact that the attacker dies with his victims, while western warfare praises the act of dropping bombs,    “dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only less repugnant, it is somehow deemed, by western leaders at least, to be morally superior” (66). Scholars such as Butler and Asad have proposed the idea that in order for western nations to avoid guilt over their senseless killing through aerial bombing and other war tactics, they have made the public believe that war is necessary for survival. This kind of thinking leads people to accept the death of the “other” or the proposed “them”, because as Butler states, “When a population appears as a threat to my life, they do not appear as “lives”, but as the threat to life” (42). Therefore, one could say that in our world, lives are not actually lives until the media or the government tells us that they are.

Why do we accept certain ways of murder and condemn others? Is it a matter of ignorance, or lack of education? Is the acceptance a product of our modern western lifestyles in which we are too busy or simply do not care enough to question the beliefs and feelings that the media and our governments are instilling in us? I don’t know, but until the blind acceptance changes, not very much else will.

Until next time,

Mia Spare

 

Works Cited

• Asad, Talal. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Print.

• Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?London: Verso, 2010. Print.

Hey readers,

Lately my ASTU class has been reading a lot of writing based around the “war on terror”. Many of the works, such as Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? highlight the distinction that such occurrences have made between “us” and “them”, “good” and “evil”. Evidence will often point to the acts of the United States against the Middle East after the terrorist attack on 9/11 as the starting point of these assertions. Many scholars have even referred to our era as the “post 9/11 world”. What Judith Butler asserts is that these acts have shaped our idea as humans of who we should grieve for, and not grieve for, whose lives are valuable and whose aren’t. I agree with Butler on this manner, and believe that our reactions have been expertly crafted from decades of assigning emotions to certain news stories: sadness at the death of our soldiers, fear at the sight of a war scene, and relief at the death of an enemy. Recently the media instilled sadness in the public using the picture of the little refugee boy, Alan Kurdi, who washed up on shore. He represented the loss of innocent life, however, we were still meant to feel threatened by the mass volume of syrian refugees seeking safety in our countries. We are meant to mourn the life of the one little boy who was on his way to safety, but not the lives of the thousands of civilians who died in the war zones that they were escaping.

In the first chapter of her book, Judith Butler describes in great detail the process through which we as a society decide which lives are worth grieving for and which ones are not. On page 51 Butler states “It is only by challenging the dominant media that certain kinds of lives may become visible or knowable in their precariousness” meaning that currently the media is determining which lives we find worthy or unworthy, as Butler puts it quite poetically ” The tactic interpretive scheme that divides worthy from unworthy lives works fundamentally through the senses, differentiating the cries we hear from those we cannot, and likewise the level of touch and even smell.”(51). We cannot properly grieve for people we have never known or been introduced to, people who have been characterized as unlike us. What Butler is saying is that we mourn for the cries we can hear, the cries that are shown to us BY the media, and represented as “like us”. This represents a problem which I believe needs to be more publicly addressed: the problem of picking and choosing which lives hold more value than others. If we go off of the standards shown, then who is to say that our lives aren’t worthless to those we perceive as “others”?

The chapter that we read of Judith Butler’s book gave me a lot to think about, and left me with many more questions than answers. I look forward to reading and learning more!

Till next time,

Mia Spare

Hello readers,

It’s not very often that I describe a book as being “curious”. I believe such personification requires a truly deserving novel, but I don’t think there is a book more deserving of the description than Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”. His novel is set in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade center in New York City.Written from three perspectives, it follows the story of a nine year old boy named Oskar, his grandmother, and his grandfather. Foer’s novel is bursting with curiosity, mostly towards the key he found in his father’s closet in an envelope labeled “Black”. This discovery sends him on a quest around New York to find the lock that the key fits, hoping it will reveal something that could keep him close to his father after his death. But when I use the term “curious” I don’t only mean it in the sense that the characters had questions they wanted answered. I also use it to describe the situations that the characters find themselves in: The grandfather’s inability to speak, the grandmother lying about her “crummy eyes” and her life story of blank pages, the small connection of everyone with the last name “Black”, the “something” and “nothing” spaces grandma and grandpa created around their house, and Oskar’s array of unique inventions.Each of these situations leaves the reader asking so many questions, and leaves them forever, and frustratingly, curious.

Oskar’s inventions remain a theme throughout the book, showing up at times when he feels emotional and vulnerable. As I was reading the novel I began to view his inventions as one of his coping mechanisms- a way to take his mind off of the stress and grief of losing his father. When Oskar invents, he is inventing ways that he can improve the world, or make other people’s lives better. A number of his inventions involve ambulances, ones that tell you if the person inside them will be okay, and even one long enough to stretch from a house to the hospital. I think these represent Oskar’s fear of loss, and his desperate want to fix things. In the last paragraph of the novel, Oskar imagines what would have happened if his father hadn’t gone into work that day, he says “He would’ve gotten back into bed, the alarm would’ve rung backward, he would have dreamt backward. He would’ve gotten up again at the end of the night before the worst day. …He would have been safe”.

Foer’s novel left me more curious than I’ve been in a while. I fell in love with his style of writing, and I look forward to reading his other books. I hope you all enjoyed the book as much as I did, and continue to check in as I analyze it more.

Talk to you soon!

Mia Spare

 

Hey everyone,

This past week in my Arts Studies class, we took a field trip to the Rare Books, Special Collections, and University Archives in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. The purpose of our trip was to explore the hundreds of documents that were collected by Joy Kogawa, surrounding her novel Obasan. Among these documents were letters from publishers (acceptance and rejection), letters from editors and fans, and draft after draft of Kogawa’s poetic writing. Obasan tells the story of a young Japanese-Canadian girl living in Vancouver during WWII and the Japanese internment. Due to the story’s many harsh truths, and the year Kogawa was trying to get it published in(1981), many of the artifacts were rejection letters from publishers and hate mail from readers. All of the documents in Joy Kogawa’s archives are of much importance when examining the process of Obasan as a whole, however, I found that I left the Archives that day with more questions than I’d started with.

When thinking the process of writing such a traumatic book, I can’t help wondering how Kogawa, herself, felt throughout the time. There were many drafts of paragraphs and chapters among the stacks scribbled with thoughts on the plot and characters; however, what was missing was a first person account of Kogawa’s thoughts and feelings, such as a journal. I understand that a journal-type document would be far too personal to leave behind in an archive; but It would give perfect insight into everything that is hidden about the process. Because we don’t have such documents, I can only imagine what Kogawa was thinking every time she got rejected, ridiculed, or judged for writing Obasan. I would love to know if Kogawa’s connections to characters like Naomi and her mother, made it harder, or easier for her to write. While the Archives paint a pretty good picture of how Obasan came together, and of and the effect that it made across the country; I still wonder what was going through Kogawa’s mind when all of it was happening.

Until next week!

Mia Spare

 

Hello readers!

These last few weeks my ASTU 100 class has been reading the graphic narrative Safe Area Gorazde The War in Eastern Bosnia, by Joe Sacco. In this narrative Sacco travels to Gorazde, a safe area in Bosnia during the war from 1992-1995 in order to report on the state of the town and its citizens. This book has quickly become one of my favorite pieces of literature, due mainly to the fashion in which journalist Sacco so animately portrays the town of Gorazde and the people who preside in it. Sacco brings the town characters to life by integrating himself into the culture and lives of the people he meets there, and is in turn able to create a unique image of what life within Gorazde was truly like. Joe Sacco managed to take a small war torn town that had been largely invisible to the world, and give it a face. Sacco not only personalized the war in Eastern Bosnia by putting faces and personalities to the victims and soldiers, but his style and accounts made you grieve for individuals in a war with thousands of casualties.

There are many people who believe that graphic narratives do not belong in the classroom, and that they belittle and possibly over simplify the facts of history. However, I strongly believe that Safe Area Gorazde The War in Eastern Bosnia would not have produced the effect that it did if it was written in a more formal, traditional style. Without the graphic narrative aspect, Sacco would have simply been relaying a mass of interviews and facts, and certain important words or moments would have been lost among the homogenous pages. Instead, what the graphic narrative has managed to do in this situation, is allow Sacco to highlight certain moments and memories through impactful images in order to tell a deeper story.

It is my opinion that the characters in Sacco’s book contained far too much life and personality to be constrained to words. Although words can be incredibly strong, it’s been said many times that a picture is worth a thousand words; in the case of Gorazde that could not be more true. Many of the images Sacco draws are incredibly violent and detailed, such as the images in the section “Around Gorazde” in which Rahim tells his story. Rahim has been an eye witness to countless horrid acts of violence; including the day by day murder of men, women, and children in his town. From his window, Rahim watched dozens of innocent families be dragged out to the bridge by his house, have their throats cut, and be thrown into the river. He repeats the words “I was an eye witness” multiple times throughout his account, as if to reassure us of the legitimacy of his words. Although Rahim’s personal account would have still made an impact if solely written in words, the images added an entire layer of emotions onto the story. To actually see such violence, even if only through drawings, made it feel almost as if we were standing right there next to Rahim the whole time, and witnessing it with him.

One main theme that I noticed throughout Sacco’s book were faces. When introducing important characters, Sacco tended to use an entire frame on solely their face. In the case of Rahim, Sacco drew him with exactly the same expression in every frame: tired and grief stricken. This portrayal of Rahim, years after the events occurred, may represent the long lasting effects of trauma. Throughout the pictures Sacco drew, we see a side of Rahim that could not have been shown the same way through text; we see in his eyes that Rahim’s spirit was broken throughout the course of the war.

Rahim was not the only example of Sacco’s use of faces to portray emotions; in fact several times throughout the book the faces of the characters said more than the words did. One of the best examples of this is the last frame on page 90 where Edin tells the story of him and his father finding their neighbor’s burnt body. The faces of the four men are painted with grief, disgust and disbelief. This image is so strong that it would have been able to stand alone without a caption. Contrastingly on page 50, the top image of “Silly Girls” depicts three women whose eyes and faces show them as happy, excited, and even a little shy. This particular style allows Sacco to tell a much deeper story than what is seen on the surface, and what is interpreted from words. Instead of only thinking of the girls as “silly”, we see that they are more down to earth than that, and have real emotions other than silliness. The style that Sacco uses allows us to be transported into the town of Gorazde. While reading the narrative, I almost feel as if I am the reporter interviewing the characters and walking among the town.

Although I personally argue in favor of graphic narratives, there are many who disagree. Because of this we come to ask, should graphic narratives be used to teach history to students in a classroom? Or do they tend to over simplify history to the point of near fiction? Think about it.

Thank you for reading! Until next time!

Mia Spare

 

Hello readers! 

For the last week my ASTU class has been reading the graphic narrative Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Persepolis tells the story of Satrapi’s childhood through “Marji”, an ambivalent and rebellious young girl growing up in the midst of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. In the introduction, Satrapi argues how Iran has been associated with “fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism” and states “This is why writing Persepolis was so important to me. I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists.”. The importance of Persepolis does not only resonate with Satrapi, but with many young girls who grew up surrounded by social or political turmoil all around the world.

Marji is introduced as a ten year old girl whose every day life is drastically changed by the Islamic Revolution. Having previously gone to a co-ed school where she could play with boys and girls combined and be a care free child, the move to an all girls school where she was required to wear a veil was confusing and unsettling. Despite these restrictions put on Marji, she still acted like any normal rebellious teenager. She pushed the rules to the limit by wearing a denim jacket over her burqa, wearing nike sneakers, and listening to “punk” music. These are actions almost every teenager has taken to be rebellious, and they show that the punk movement did not surpass even Iran. The perception that the west has on Iran and of the Iranian Revolution has been heavily influenced by what our media has chosen to show us. Western media tends to be mediated to fit a certain criteria of how we are meant to think of  Iran and the Middle East. That perception is, as Satrapi stated, one of terrorism. However, haven’t there been many other extremist groups throughout history? For example take the Ku Klux Klan, an extremist white-supremacy group formed in the United States. This terrorist group was originally affiliated with the Protestant church, however neither the protestant church nor America as a whole have been clumped in with the wild extremists of the KKK. So how come the same measures aren’t taken to distinguish the extremists from the citizens in Iran like Marji’s family, who simply wanted social justice and change?

Iran has been constantly painted with one brush- showing them as terrorists and extremists. However, the reality is that the majority of Iranians were much more similar to us than we have been taught. I can guarantee you that Marji and much of the western world, although in completely different environments, had similar childhoods. What child didn’t dream of becoming something completely unreachable? To Marji it was a prophet, to others an astronaut, or a superhero. What child didn’t rebel against social norms? for Marji it was wearing Michael Jackson pins, for others it was Metallica t-shirts and ripped jeans.

We are not as different as we thought. Persepolis tells the story of a childhood much like mine and much like many, and we should not let the extremist views of a few lead us to think differently.

Until next time! 

Mia:)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hello all!

I am excited to be writing my very first blog post! In such an occasion an introduction to myself seems essential, so here it is: My name is Mia Spare, I recently moved to Vancouver, British Columbia from the excessively small town of Round Hill, Virginia. However, I began my life in Annapolis, Maryland, and have since lived in Germany, Austria, India, and Indonesia. Round Hill was somewhat of a culture shock for me, but it is where I fell in love with nature and hiking as I was surrounded by miles and miles of farm land and mountains.

My most recent journey has taken me to UBC where I am taking courses within a Coordinated Arts Program (CAP) focused on Global Citizenship. We’ve spent some time in class discussing what we believe it means to be a global citizen, so for fear of dwelling, I would like to focus my blog post today on a more recent article that we are discussing: an academic research paper by Farhat Shahzad. The paper, “The Role of Interpretive Communities in Remembering and Learning” discusses how the interpretive communities that surround us (family, friends, schools) affect how we remember and learn. According to Shahzad, an “important feature of the landscape of remembering is a community that has a history of remembering together”(304). I took this to mean that communities learn and grow as a group based on their past collective experiences, and bring them closer together. Shahzad also pointed out how interpretive communities such as family and peers create “frames for the interpretation when a human agent mediates with data provided by the textbooks or media representations of an event”(304). I believe this observation allows for a direct connection between the broadness of one’s perspective and the interpretive communities which surround them.

Shahzad gathered the information needed to make these observations by asking a diverse range of university students to write about how they remember and learn about the War on Terror (302). Many of the students recalled instances in which the majority of their learning of the war was mediated by their family. In one passage, an 18 year old female student wrote “My father is the most viable source of information for me. We discuss about many issues whenever we watch TV together”(310). Her passage and many of the others made me realize how much of what I personally know about the War on Terror and many other historical events, was learned through stories my parents and grandparents have told me.

When I was in the sixth grade I was assigned a project in my English class in which we had to find a family member or a family friend who had participated in a war, and prepare a presentation which documented their experience. For this project I chose my Grandfather who fought in the Vietnam war. Over the course of 3 weeks I talked to my grandfather on the phone and recorded story after story of his time in Vietnam, collecting memories and unconsciously forming a very specific view of the war in my head. I didn’t realize that I had gotten only one very biased point of view of the war until my junior year english class when we read a book called “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. This book described the war in a very different light and highlighted many of the more cruel aspects of war. I went into that class having been already unknowingly influenced by my interpretive community (my grandfather). However, “The Things We Carried” became a technology of memory for me, and mixed with the memories of my grandfathers stories to forever alter my view of the Vietnam War.

There are many other examples of how my learning has been directly affected by my interpretive communities and technologies of memory, and much more to come in my ASTU class, but unfortunately those will have to wait until next time!

Talk to you soon!

Mia Spare 🙂