As I alluded to in my first post for this class, I feel that we all share many cross-cultural similarities that often get swallowed up by investigations of our differences. There are many examples of common values and beliefs between people which may not be immediately evident, as I’m sure as we have come to realize now after reading the stories of home written by our fellow classmates. Our sense of home is undoubtedly something shared across nations and cultures, and below are some examples of similarities that were immediately evident to me as I read through a handful of your blogs.

•  One obvious connection we have is that home must contain our families; Sarah’s story shows us that our families are what make ‘home’ so special, and Christie says that her home needs to be full of people and live or it isn’t a home at all.
• Along this notion of a visceral but not quite physical home we can see that the concept of home is capricious for many people and it evolves as we grow. Heather tells us a story of a girl who is tragically unable to find a home, and the tale explores the importance of finding home and the harrowing search for one who struggles to do so. Florence and Lauren’s stories also show us how our sense of home can move spatially, without losing its importance.
• Home is also something we cherish, something we consider very valuable to who we are as people. Leana describes her “sabotage” attempts, with her brother as co-conspirator, when her parents considered selling their house. Jasmine similarly has a very emotional connection with home, and her story describes the tough transition from a warm family home to a strange dorm building (ultimately opening new opportunities, but nonetheless a difficult transition).

While not all of these values are ubiquitous we can certainly find many of them shared between ourselves. I encourage you to go to the stories I linked if you feel that your sense of home matches what our fellow classmates have written about because the connections we make with others allow us to grow, not just as students but as people too. This was something I learned from travelling, but thanks to this exercise I learned that I really didn’t have to look too far. All around us are people who share many of our beliefs, and it seems that story-telling is a great medium to realize this fact.

I once met a young man named Josh; we were sitting at a cafe in Rome discussing the Euro crisis, and I remember it well. We discussed the economic impact the crisis was having on Italy, and Josh began to tell me about Italian family structure. He said that the Italians were a close knit bunch at home, and often took time out of their workday to come home for lunch with their families. This did not bode well for Italian GDP, but Josh was fine that fact. “Life is about more than endless production” he told me. “Why should we work all day if we cannot enjoy the fruit of our labors”, he implored. Josh had found peace in the Italian lifestyle, and Josh was at home. 

I once met a student named Sofie; we were sitting at a cafe in Vancouver discussing the Euro crisis, and I remember it well. Sofie was studying ECON at UBC and was frustrated that she was unable to ski as often as she would like. She was so swamped with work she could barely find time for anything else, and when she finally had a break there was no snow on the mountains! But Sofie quickly told me it was quite all right; she would have some time off in the summer to travel, hike, and kayak. There was no place in the world she world she would rather live, and the sacrifices she made to enjoy her surroundings were worth it. Sofie had found peace in Vancouver’s beautiful outdoors, and Sofie was at home. 

I once met a Forex trader named Franz; we were sitting at a cafe in Beijing discussing the Euro crisis, and I remember it well. Franz loved currencies, and we had a lively discussion about where the Canadian dollar was going in the wake of recent economic events. Franz had grown up in Winnipeg but moved abroad after school in search of work. He never lost touch with his roots, but he had made a new life for himself in China. He worked during the week at a bank, but he was able to spend time his family on the weekends. He loved playing mahjong with his friends, and it wasn’t unlikely that you would find him at a Party World testing out his vocal cords. Franz had found peace in a foreign land, and Franz was at home. 

A quick note about the story: I find it difficult to write about myself, as I feel most people do, so I came up with a few characters to demonstrate my sense of self through the story. I typically don’t think of stories when I connect myself to home, but I certainly think of the values that my family has, and continues to, instill in me. As such, my characters told their own stories (histories) in way that centered around their values, the choices they made, and what they sacrifice to attain what they want. The key to each of their stories is that they are all different, but that does not change the ultimate sense of home they find. Home is more than the four walls that surround us most of the time, it is a sense of belonging that can exist anywhere and at any time. The reason I chose to use multiple characters because I feel that identity (or at the very least my own identity) is constructed with a variety of variables, and no single connection to the world accounts for the entirety of who we are. I think this notion meshes well with the dialogue we are being asked to explore between native and settler cultures, as a multiplicitous sense of identity leaves more room for expansion and acceptance.

Works Cited

“Family Karaoke.” Party World KTV. Web. 27 Jan. 2015. <http://www.partyworldktv.com.sg/>.

Jarvis, Johnathan. “The Crisis of Credit Visualized.” YouTube. Web. 22 Jan. 2011. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx_LWm6_6tA>.

Evil was first brought into this world by students. Not witches or warlocks,  not ghouls or ghosts, nor vampires or even Voldemort. Students. Students from all kinds of backgrounds, way back on January fifth, and they all came together for an English class. On the interwebs. A bona fide collection of students, interested in engaging with scholarly material and pursuing knowledge through discussion in a strange online setting. Well, not discussion, more dialogue actually. It was a dialogue to discover the crucial component of a Canadian literary canon. Some of the students suggested Margaret Atwood, others suggested Farley Mowat. It must have been exciting for the professor to hear all these great ideas! But as the class drew on, there was one student who had not suggested anything. Nobody was even sure if this student went to UBC. Having nothing else to share, this student told a story. It was a story full of long assignments and complex theories, of late Friday nights in the library and a dwindling social life; pure evil. This student had no input for the Canadian canon, and won no prize, so consequently the other students demanded a redaction in fear of the horrors of such a tale. “But, of course, it was too late. For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world” (King, 10). 

The process of approaching storytelling in this class has been incredibly difficult for me; as a prospective law student the idea of dialogue without debate is incredibly conflicting. However it is clear that this is the rule of law for stories, where previous events only influence (and do not shape) the stories that come after. I decided to play with the story and put our class in a cave having a party, an attempt to make a novel connection between our class and storytelling. But it has a serious implication; it does not suggest the existence of evil, but it does suggest the possibility of evil that can arise from a story. One of the most important details from this story is the fact that stories cannot be taken back; no give-backs or tradesies, redoes or re-spawns. We forgive but we don’t forget. With this in mind I want to turn to the residential schools of not long ago, and think about how there is a meta-narrative within the history of these schools. The attempts at assimilation are now part of the historical narrative between settlers and Aboriginals, and no matter what we do these events cannot be reversed. But on a deeper level, the settlers in fact changed the narrative that the Aboriginal students were learning, and they took those kids out of a native culture and taught them ‘white’ stories in an attempt to bridge the gap between Them and US. But this gap, which I will call the ‘otherness gap’, cannot be changed by dismantling the distinctions between Them and Us. Try as they might, the settlers could not reshape the Aboriginal communities but could only influence them, because the Aboriginal story had already been told and can never been swept away now that it exists. I think this is a crucial reason that dialogue rather than debate is essential in bridging the ‘otherness gap’ that currently exists between Western and Aboriginal cultures, because there is no debate to be had. There is no empirical right or wrong answer to the question of cultural superiority (if such a thing even exists), and our job is to understand this fact and to appreciate Them rather than preach about Us. Along this vein we see the importance on irreversible stories; a story can profoundly damage the relationship between Them and Us which will lengthen the ‘otherness gap’, making it imperative for us to attune ourselves to the consequences of the stories we tell.

Works Cited

King, Thomas. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi, 2003. Print.

Mean Girls. Paramount, 2004. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUFT35S7Jb4

“The Residential School System.” UBC Indigenous Foundation. Web. 24 Jan. 2015. <http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/government-policy/the-residential-school-system.html>.

Schrodinger’s cat  is a well known concept for quantum physicists that is used to demonstrate the notion that something can be and not be at the same time. It is a powerful and complicated concept that can help us picture how quantum particles can exist in multiple states at the same time because they are not subject to the same universal rules that other types of matter are.

‘But Nick, this is a literature course, why are you talking about quantum theory? I’m studying arts to avoid math!‘

Ah, but interdisciplinary study can be so powerful in helping us understand the things we love (in this case, literature) as it allows us to gain insight from an angle that we may never have thought possible before. Also, please do not be afraid to click on my link, it is a novel introduction to Schrodinger’s theory written as a short story. And that piece is not the only place we find quantum theory in literature; Chamberlin offers us some troubling thought in If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories?

As Dr. Paterson has noted in our third prompt, Chamberlin tells us of his childhood learning experience and his insistence that the cat on the classroom board was not actually a cat. The first thing that popped into my mind was Schrodinger’s cat, and the clear connection between Schrodinger’s thought experiment and Chamberlin’s description of language. Dr. Paterson calls it an intersection, Schrodinger calls it entanglement, Chamberlin sees it as a connection between reality and immagination; all of them are picking up on the way that language connects our ideas to the events and feelings of our world. When we interpret the stimuli around us we all have different ways of perceiving the world, no doubt influenced by our unique perspective, our past, our biases, and our desires. What exists in the world exists empirically; a cat is a cat, nothing more and nothing less. But when we interpret the cat it morphs. Maybe it becomes a pet, maybe a nuisance, maybe a companion. Importantly it is all of these things all at once, just to different people, and language allows us to express this.

This can be a troubling thought when we begin to disagree with one another, and I think this is one of the key concepts that Chamberlin is hinting at in his book. We clearly see this issue in colonial narratives. Colonizers, unable “to see what is really there” (italics in original), misunderstand the aboriginal connection to nature and pass it “off as native romanticism” (Chamberlin, 133). Because our words gives us a profound connection with the world around us, allowing us to express feelings that others would otherwise never know, our words become deeply personal. When they become deeply personal any changes to language are not only a threat to our ability to communicate, but a threat to our identity as well. I think this creates huge tension between native populations and colonizers the world over. Adapting to the customs of the primitive natives would have been disastrous, yet simultaneously the villainous invaders were wreaking havoc of their own. As we explore Canadian literature and enter the “world of words” (Chamberlin, 1) we must remember that there are two sides to a story, existing at the same time, existing only in words, but existing as so much more than words.

‘Hmm, that actually makes sense. I guess math isn’t so bad after all! ‘

Works Cited

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.

Jafek, Bev. “Schrödinger’s Cat.” Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art 15 (1990): 216-32. Print.

Nichols, Suzanne. “What Is Quantum Entanglement? SuperConsciousness Magazine.” 2011. Web. 16 Jan. 2015.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 1.2 Story & Literature.” University of British Columbia , Vancouver. 15 Jan. 2015. Lecture.