Our work on summaries has caused a total 180 degree shift in my thinking– in high school, we were taught to move away from summaries or reports. Summary was considered to be an elementary-level work, completed competently by anyone and used only to take up space in a book report. That there could be multiple accurate summaries of a work had never occurred to me, and yet of course a summarizer choses what to focus on. I just hadn’t realized that could be used in an intentional way– I thought that there was one “best” way to summarize each work.

As someone who is quite into in comics and graphic novels (what Gillian Whitlock would have us call “graphic narratives” http://www.jstor.org/stable/27649737 ) I have been incredibly interested in our analysis of Persepolis. I have spent a decent amount of time studying both visual arts and graphic novels, and that knowledge combined with our exploration of summary has helped me to solidify a concept that has been kicking around in my mind for a while. Namely, that art, and specifically comics, are a visual summary of what they are depicting.

This new knowledge of the malleability of summary has made the word “summary” seem all the more accurate to describe comics. As no two people experience, remember, or talk about an event or object the same way, no two people would draw it the same way either. And even one person will probably change their depiction depending on the context and the audience. You’ll tell a story differently if you’re talking to your grandma or your friend, and depending on how you might feel about it that day your retelling might have a completely different tone. The same goes for summary: each artist has their own style, and manipulates that style in order to use to represent the emotions and subject matter that they are portraying. Add onto that each author’s choice of words, layout, and design, and comics become an incredibly effective tool for presenting something to an audience.

Professor Laurie McNeill (if you’re reading this, uh, hi) has described summary in our ASTU class as an “act of remember and forgetting.” The writer chooses what to leave out and what to include– and in the case of abstractions, sometimes what to add. When talking about comics as summary, I would incorporate the idea of exaggeration to these two other acts. Comics aren’t super realistic. Depending on the style, some come closer to reality than others, but in my experience they usually take considerable stylistic liberties. This exaggeration, this “hyper-realism”, is what I think partially makes them such a powerful form of communication. Take charicatures, for example (those goofy, completely over-the-top sketches you can get drawn of yourself at carnivals)– looking at them, one would be hard-pressed to say they look real, and yet you can pretty much always tell who they’re depicting. They are a good visual summary– they don’t include every detail, but they embellish the critical and important features so that the audience knows exactly what to focus on.

A note about linking: I can’t figure out how to link to one specific post of Riverbend’s blog, or even link to a certain date. The best I could get was a month’s worth of archived posts, in this case August of 2008. To access the post I analyzed, click here and scroll down to “My New Talent” (from Thursday, August 21st @ 3:15 pm)– it should be near the bottom of the page. If anyone can figure out how to set this up more effectively, let me know!

First off, I highly recommend reading her original post– it’s powerful, descriptive, and in general very well done. For those of you who won’t, though, I will try to summarize (because apparently I haven’t done enough already…). In one of her first posts, Riverbend narrates the course of one sleepless night, and captures along the way how the U.S. Invasion has changed Iraq and Iraqis. I was struck by how well this post managed to convey the messy and very real, everyday consequences of the Iraq War. While reading, she manages to make the events she experiences feel as real as my own life. Riverbend accomplishes this through her combined use of easily-identifiable (to a Western audience) anecdotes and vignettes of violence or despair that are quite far from many (I’m assuming) of our ranges of experience.

She begins: “Suffering a bout of insomnia last night, I found myself in front of the television, channel-surfing.” I have done this myself, countless times, and as I read I picture specific times that it has happened to me… drawing dangerously close to the “they’re just like me!” fallacy that Whitlock described in Soft Weapons. Riverbend continues “Promptly at 2 am, the electricity went off and I was plunged into the pitch black…” Suddenly, quite different from what I am used to, but Riverbend is unfazed: this is a common occurrence in her life. I can easily identify with the first line, as it is part of my grounded reality. The proximity of the unfamiliar parts to the familiar ones makes it impossible for me to exclude the power outage from a grounded, “real” reality.

Riverbend goes on to describe the heat that night as “so hot, it feels like you are cooking gently inside of an oven.” Hyperbole, complaining about the weather: what’s more familiar to us than that? A few lines down: “The silence was shattered a few moments later by the sound of bullets in the distance. It was just loud enough to get your attention, but too far away to be a source of any real anxiety.” The sounds of bullets is, to me, a source of anxiety for sure– regardless of how far away they are. Again, she pairs relatable narrative with intense, unfamiliar, violent detail. I am forced to respect the Occupation as a concrete occurrence rather than a concept. In addition, I am turned away from the urge to put Riverbend and myself in exactly the same category: though we have some similar experiences, her life is fundamentally different than my own.

By placing easily-identified-with anecdotes, e.g. “stubbing my toe on the last step, (which wasn’t supposed to be there)” that will be very real to many Western audiences (because they are often part of our lived experience) next to sensory details about the violence and heartbreaking nature of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Riverbend forces the reader to see the Iraq war as equally real, physical and contemporary as Western everyday life. At first glance, the two kinds of anecdotes appear to be juxtaposed, but in fact they are both equally real parts of her life that happen synchronically.

Experiencing Witnesses: Art and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools was an incredibly intense, heartbreaking, powerful experience for me, as well as a transformative one. It brought up someone questions that I think I’m going to explore in another (probably more positive) post. As a very recent inhabitant of Canada, I’m no expert on Canadian current or historical events– please let me know if I have an inaccurate understanding of something. During the exhibit, and while writing this post, I kept thinking “who am I, to have an opinion on this?” As a white woman, those are not my stories, this is not my struggle, and I am most definitely a product of a long line of colonizers– something I definitely have to keep in mind as I learn about this.

“When the Apology by Stephen Harper happened on June 11, 2008, I was both amazed and enraged. I never thought it would happen in my lifetime, or even ever, but how empty it seemed and how quickly it came and went on the Canadian consciousness was unsettling.”  – Chris Bose, creator of the video art piece “Savage Heathens”

The full text of his apology is visible immediately upon entering the Belkin gallery in the form of Cathy Busby’s enormous piece “We Are Sorry.”(Exhibition catalogue with artist’s statements available here.) Frustratingly, Harper’s words manage to sound much more sincere as a written piece than spoken aloud. In the wake of massive, devastating budget cuts to First Nations organizations, the Canadian government’s apology is more powerful on paper than in practice.

In an earlier installation, Cathy Busby listed 12 programs that have had their budgets seriously or completely slashed. I noticed that quarter of them are organizations for First Nations women, and each of those organizations (Sisters in Spirit, Native Women’s Association, Pauktuutit Inuit Women of Canada) has had their funding cut by 100%. This is just one example of Canada’s disenfranchisement of Aboriginal women– later that day, I came across an article on the Globe and Mail: “Canada rejects UN call for review of violence against aboriginal women.” The UN Human Rights Commission has asked the Canada to look into the extremely high rates of violence against First Nations women, and Canada has refused. Said Elissa Goldberg, Canada’s UN Ambassador, “Canada is proud of its human-rights record, and our peaceful and diverse society.”

When Aboriginal women are 3% of B.C.s population, but 33% of women who are missing or murdered, is that a “peaceful and diverse” society? How about when the families of those women are told that their mothers, sisters, and daughters deserved what  happened to them? A report* published by the Honourable Wally T. Oppal, QC Commissioner investigates this disturbing, upsetting pattern, focusing the missing women of British Columbia. Racialized violence is alive and well in Canada, and Stephen Harper’s apology was a solitary Governmental healing step amidst a slew of harmful ones. I hope that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is able to spark real change for Canada.

*This link is for the executive summary (time to apply your summary knowledge) of the report. It can be found in full on Connect (good luck…) under “Web Links.” I think it’s there as an additional resource for Missing Sarah, one of our books for next term. How’s that for connections?

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