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While reading and discussing Maus, Art Spiegelman’s comic about his father’s experiences as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust and Spiegelman’s own experiences interviewing his father, I thought about the way Spiegelman uses the combination of words and art to “approximate a ‘mental language’ that is closer to actual human thought than either words or pictures alone” (Spiegelman, as quoted by Young 672). I found the idea of words in combination with a different form as nearer to our interiority fascinating, and thought about another medium that does this quite frequently: music, and particularly rap, where a number of artists explore deeply personal, and even traumatic, experiences.

K’naan, a Somali Canadian rapper, is one such artist; his first studio album, Juno Award-winning The Dusty Foot Philosopher, is part autobiographical exploration of his lived experiences (“My Old Home”, “I Was Stabbed By Satan”, “If Rap Gets Jealous”); part furious criticism of those who have power in Somalia (“Soobax”); and part satiric take on and critique of hypermasculine rap and diss tracks (“What’s Hardcore”). Having just barely managed to leave Somalia as the civil war ramped up, K’naan now uses rap to deliver a form of witnessing trauma (McNeill). Like Spiegelman’s father, who feels guilty for surviving when so many did not (Spiegelman, Maus 1:44), K’naan is a survivor; K’naan talks about four cousins who were shot in “If Rap Gets Jealous” and two friends who were killed in “I Was Stabbed by Satan”. In fact, K’naan compares his experience directly to the Holocaust in “My Old Home”, saying it was “like Jews in the sequel”. Perhaps because of this guilt, K’naan seems to feel a very strong need to represent other Somalians; unable to shoot in Somalia for fear of his life, he instead decided to shoot his bilingual critique of Somalian warlords, “Soobax”, in a neighborhood of Kenya full of Somalian refugees. Like Spiegelman, who frets over the fact that he’s representing his father as a Jewish stereotype (Spiegelman, Maus 1:131), K’naan is concerned with the way he’s portraying the refugees, stating, “In my video, Soobax, I wanted to document struggles, of course, but you’ll also see so much love, so much passion. And that’s why I came here… I wanted to document so much love, so much pride in the people, in the eyes of the youth” (bloodmoney). Indeed, the music for “Soobax” is joyful, interjected with ululations, unexpected in a song about such a dark subject matter. But in the context of “Soobax” as a protest song, the upbeat rhythm seems to celebrate the joy and power of the average citizens of Somalia. K’naan uses the combination of a visual medium (the music video), auditory medium (music), and words to explore his deeply traumatic past in a more complete way than words alone might.

bloodmoney. “introducing k’naan.” Online video clip. Youtube. Youtube, 1 Aug. 2006. Web. 23 Oct. 2014.
McNeill, Laurie. University of British Columbia. Buchanan D218, University of British Columbia, BC. 21 Oct. 2014. Lecture.
Spiegelman, Art. Maus. 2 vols. Toronto: Random House of Canada Limited, 1986. Print.
Young, James E. “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of History.” Critical Inquiry 24.3 (1998): 666-699.

Whilst reading Maggie de Vries’s Missing Sarah and Wally Oppal’s Forsaken, two very different approaches to the subject of the missing women of the Downtown Eastside, I was troubled by ideas surrounding the depiction and representation of people, particularly marginalised groups, who had already died.

Missing Sarah, Maggie de Vries’s life narrative about her sister whose DNA was found on Robert Pickton’s property, frustrated me with the ways in which it adhered to the frameworks that Jiwani and Young so clearly elucidated in their article, Missing and Murdered Women. De Vries complicates the framework by including excerpts from Sarah’s diary, complex portrayals of Sarah’s life on the Downtown Eastside, and an emphasis on the ways in which Sarah lived a full life, with friends, love, and community, but ultimately, Missing Sarah also emphasises that Sarah is grievable because she is a mother, daughter, and sister (Jiwani and Young and reinforces hegemonic views that “degenerate bodies” (Jiwani and Young 900) such as Sarah’s are only grievable because of the ways in which they relate to respectable people. Given the intervention of de Vries’s editor on the subject, who requested that de Vries focus more on herself and excise many of the stories about and from women of the Downtown Eastside, I wonder if Missing Sarah was, at one point in time, a much better counterframe than the one that we are now left with.

Oppal’s Forsaken is, in many ways, even more problematic than Missing Sarah. It mentions race only as it pertains to racialised groups, a practice that reinforces whiteness as the default or norm. In many cases, the women’s nations seem to be the primary attribute about them; while Oppal emphasises – rightly so – that there are larger societal forces at play here and, as noted by Jiwani and Young, “sexualized violence against racialized others and, more particularly, against Aboriginal women is a hallmark of White settler societies such as Canada” (898), Forsaken also obscures the women’s agency. This is particularly troublesome because Aboriginal people are frequently seen as childlike (Jiwani and Young 898) wards of state.

One notable exception is the story of Rebecca “Becky” Guno as told by her childhood best friend Carroll Street. Street takes great care in her choice of anecdotes, always portraying Guno as smart, funny, charming, and aware of the choices she was making. Although Street acknowledges the social forces that affect indigenous people today, saying Guno’s father, “like many [indigenous] parents, struggled with alcohol” (Oppal 50), she juxtaposes this against instances in which Guno’s father is caring, communicative, and responsible. Guno, in consultation with her father, agrees to give her first child up for adoption because “she knew the baby deserved more than what she could offer”; she then does her very best to find someone who would be able to offer that to her child, making sure the child would be loved and safe. When Guno admitted to Street that she was a sex worker, she stated very clearly that she knew what she was doing and was not ashamed of her choice.

Guno’s story provides an excellent counterframe for the dominant narratives that these women were either swept up by the White settler society that they lived in and deposited neatly into prostitution and the idea that they are only grievable subjects because of their relationships with others. Rather, Street provides a well-rounded view of Guno as an actual person, one who lived a hard life due to White settler society but who also made rational decisions about the way she lived her life.

Fred Wah’s biotext, Diamond Grill, is a semi-fictional account of his life growing up mixed race in small-town BC in the 1950s. Wah’s grandfather is a Chinese man who moves to Canada in adulthood and marries a white woman; Wah’s father is half-Chinese and half-white, grew up in China, and lives his adult life in Canada, marrying and having children with a white woman. Diamond Grill explores the intergenerational experiences of Jim Wah, Fred Wah Sr., and Fred Wah Jr. and their experiences in and responses to a white racist Canada.

Intersectionality was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 to examine the ways in which different forms of oppression intersect and inform a person’s experiences and argues that said forms of oppression – based on gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, etc. – do not act independently of each other. It provides a useful analytical tool to examine Wah Jr.’s experiences in Diamond Grill as Wah Sr.’s status as a restaurant owner and businessman conflicts with his status as a racialized person.

Class is a constant companion to race in Diamond Grill: Jim Wah’s gold tooth, a marker of wealth, is a frequent descriptor and he is “a spiffy dresser who sported a gold nugget stickpin and diamond cufflinks… You could tell he was attracted to living the spiffy life” (Wah, 58). It is one of the reasons Wah’s mother may have first been attracted to Wah Sr.: “Well you can imagine Swift Current being like a farmer/working class town… A rather risque element… these Chinese kids with a little change in their pockets. Which would be very appealing for young girls” (Wah 94). Class allows these Chinese men to move beyond their racial limitations in order to date pretty white girls – much to their parents’ chagrin – and to participate in social circles they may not otherwise be allowed to, as when Wah Sr. joins the Lions Club. Wah Sr. explicates the importance of money to Wah Jr., “[advising him] to get into the food business. He said you’ll never get rich but everybody has to eat so you’ll always make enough to get by” (Wah, 42). While Wah Sr. doesn’t like it when he sees people “putting on airs or using class advantage” (Wah, 69), he is accutely aware of class: “It’s not class itself, really, but how you use it” (Wah, 69). Wah Sr.’s status as a restaurant owner is leveraged for a small amount of security against the constant disadvantage of his race.

Yet race is always there, always a threat to Wah’s business: “No matter what, you’re what your father is, was, forever… Race makes you different” (Wah, 36). Wah Sr. was able to marry his white girlfriend, but she was “shunned… for marrying a Chinaman” (Wah, 42) until Wah Jr.’s “blond hair and blue eyes… ease her parents” (Wah, 43). Wah Jr. himself has a highly charged confrontation with the father of his first (white) girlfriend:

“He says I’ve got nothing against you or your family but I don’t want my daughter marrying a Chinaman… I know your father’s a respected business man downtown but you’ve got sneaky eyes and I don’t want you seeing my daughter any more so don’t let me catch you around here again and no more phone calls either… I can’t even speak Chinese my eyes don’t slant and aren’t black my hair’s light brown and I’m not going to work in a restaurant all my life but I’m going to go to university and I’m going to be as great a fucking white success as you asshole and my name’s still going to be Wah and I’ll love garlic and rice for the rest of my life.” (Wah, 39)

Wah Jr.’s middle class privilege is explicitly brought up and rejected here, his father’s status as a businessman not enough to protect him from racial oppression. In fact, Wah Sr. seems to live in a constant state of high alert: the one time we hear of him hitting his son is when Wah Jr. taunts a bus driver – an innocuous act for any white kid – and Wah Sr. worries that this will be a threat to his business: “I can’t fool around out there when my father’s a business man, a Chinese business man, and I’d better not talk back like I did today, to anyone, particularly when they’re white, because it all comes down on him, my father” (Wah, 101). And, heartbreakingly, when Wah Sr. joins the Lions Club, he stumbles over the word “soup” and feels obligated to mock himself and his race in order to ingratiate himself to the white audience (Wah, 65).

Wah Jr.’s mother tells us “there was a lot of racism in those days… [miscegenation] isn’t like it is now, a completely accepted thing” (Wah, 14), but her words belie the lived reality of racialized people in “the West”: class does not protect against racial prejudice as race does not protect against homophobia as other forms of privilege do not protect against transphobia. Intersectionality remains as relevant today as it has ever been.

In Eli Pariser’s TedTalk “Beware Filter Bubbles”, Pariser talks about his hopes, as a youth, for the internet and its ability to push democracy and society’s ability to connect. Ted.com’s description for the video emphasises Pariser’s theory of the “filter bubble”, his metaphor for the internet world that is tailored to each user’s presumed preferences based on algorithms designed to scan a user’s likes, search history, clicked links, and other online activity. Pariser believes that this is ultimately harmful for democracy, as we are insulated from viewpoints that do not challenge our own and meaningful dialogue is prevented.

While I recognise the danger in the filter bubble, I believe that the creation of the online filter bubble is symptomatic of a different problem. Pariser himself supports this: while he claims that, despite being “progressive politically”, he has “always gone out of [his] way to meet conservatives… [and] likes hearing what they’re thinking about [and] seeing what they’re linking to”, he also notes that Facebook’s algorithms observed he ”was clicking more on [his] liberal friends’ links than [his] conservative friends’ links”. Pariser, who considers himself open-minded and interested in exploring opposing viewpoints, is not, in actuality, doing so; like many people, it is his habit to only click and read links that are of interest to him while skimming links that he is not interested in. Online algorithms do not create the filter bubbles we live in; they assist in making pre-existing, self-made filter bubbles more impenetrable. We as individuals are perfectly capable of puncturing the filter bubble by actively seeking out opposing viewpoints, clicking links that we disagree with, and engaging with those whose politics we do not support. Should this occur, online algorithms would note this activity and begin to include people, links, and viewpoints that challenge our worldview.

Controlling our filter bubbles is made more difficult by another criticism Pariser levels against online algorithms: their invisibility. Few people are aware of the existence of online algorithms that curate our online lives; fewer yet are aware of how they work and how to circumvent them. While I believe that individuals’ tendencies to seek out viewpoints that support our own and dismiss viewpoints that oppose us is the reason filter bubbles are so myopic, the opacity of online algorithms and our inability to actively participate in choosing what we are shown is troublesome. Being clear about the existence of tools that scan our online lives and the methodology they use to choose what information is presented to us would go a long way to giving us the choice of whether to puncture our filter bubbles. The rest is up to us.