Sarah Polley’s use of multimedia, inclusive of interviews, voiceovers, photographs, home videos, and testimonies, in her documentary Stories We Tell creates a narrative that is dynamic and layered.   As such, Polley’s documentary fosters an authentic understanding of her family’s narrative, her late mother, and a well-kept secret of Sarah’s biological father.

Through this documentary, Polley has attempted to depict the many different voices, narratives, and interpretations of the individuals involved in her mother’s life, so as to provide a fulsome and multifaceted narrative. In her personal review titled “Stories We Tell: A post by Sarah Polley” published on the National Film Board of Canada’s website the day of the movie’s debut, she explains that she “wanted the story told in the words of everyone [she] could find who could speak about it.”

However, her documentary has left many viewers, including our class peers, critiquing the absence of her perspective and voice.  Polley explains her absence as a need to gain a more objective understanding of her mother by learning about her through the perspectives of others.  This is evidenced as she explains in the aforementioned personal blog post, “But I found I could lose myself in the words of the people closest to me. I can feel and hear and see their histories, and I wanted to get lost, immerse myself in those words, and be a detective in my own life and family.”

Peter Bradshaw review’s titled “Stories We Tell- review“ on The Guardian asserts that despite Polley’s intent on demonstrating multiple stories about her mother through third-party narrative, Polley’s construction of the film may in fact be her way of erecting control over her mother’s life narrative. Bradshaw contends, “The film, with all its images, fragments and layers, is Polley’s semi-controlled emotional explosion.”

While a verbal perspective on the part of Sarah Polley may have been absent inside the documentary, the way in which she controls the entire documentary as the director, intentional or not, may very well reflect how she views her mother and how she wants her mother to be conveyed and interpreted by the world.  Polley has dictated her mother’s life narrative despite not making it explicit in her documentary, by choosing what parts of her mother’s life narrative are conveyed and by whom, and that may signify her perspective, as it discretely conveyed.

Notwithstanding the fact that Sarah Polley exercised ultimate discretion in how her mothers narrative would be directed and produced, she outright acknowledged that embedded in any one life narrative are multiple interpretations, and as such she has attempted to provide us with a dynamic narrative by embedding diverse accounts of her mother’s life.  She describes this process in her blogpost as “ […] watching a story take on a life of its own, mutate, and change….  And as the story was told, or perhaps because the story was told – it changed. So I decided to make a film about our need to tell stories, to own our stories, to understand them, and to have them heard.”

Polley’s understanding of our innate need ‘to tell, own, understand and have our stories heard’ resonates not just with her production of Stories We Tell but fits soundly with the theme of this course surrounding autobiography.  Our innate need to express has been demonstrated through the facets of this course from our use of social media platforms to convey our life narratives to the role of self-representation in documenting trauma and bearing witness.

In approaching Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel series Maus I & II, I had my reservations in how I would engage with this literary genre, albeit, the reference of Jews and Nazi’s to cats and mice, was enticing. However, within reading the first ten pages of Maus I, I found myself giggling at Art’s honest portrayal of his father, Vladek, and hearing his voice through the text- or more specifically, I found myself hearing my own fathers voice, accent, and story told through a different lens and as a different hardship. Therefore reading Maus for me, was not a story which engrained in me “Auschwitz 101” as Spiegelman admittedly resists in this interview, rather for me, I truly engaged with Spiegelman’s portrayal of a “story of a son trying to understand his fathers life” and I read this as a parallel to a story of a Canadian-Iranian daughter trying to understand the adversities her parents endured in order to give their children the opportunties that they are surrounded by today.

I empathize with Art insofar as his way of understanding his fathers life narrative relocated me into my parents’ life narrative, and how growing up it felt as though I was always trying to piece together the atrocities my parents faced being young adults in the 1979 Iranian revolution, forcing them to be smuggled out of the country in hopes of fostering a family in a democratic state. Their story, while it is not one that can be satisfied in a brief blog post, did carry in itself a similar theme to Vladek, of hardship, perseverance, wit, pride, and survival. So like Art, often times I find myself piecing their repressed memories together, and filling in the gaps in their timeline with details that were so often forgotten and left out.

Particularly striking to me in this interview of Spiegelman was the question of Vladek’s casual racism made evident in Chapter III of Maus II, which is something I note from my father as well, and in particular in the scene where Art and his wife pick up a black hitchhiker, which makes Vladek very angry. Spiegelman here very eloquently addresses a generalization that I believe many people succumb to, which is the:

“tendency to think of holocaust survivors as martyrs, and how one expects one to be made better by suffering. Suffering makes you hurt that’s all you can say for it, some people were indeed made more sensitive by what they lived through, some people- that part of themselves was not touched one way or the other, and I wanted to insist that Vladek was not an unsympathetic character but he was not a character that was made better by going through the crucible of the holocaust.” (9:20-10:10) 

This scene and Spiegelman’s explanation were striking to me for two reasons:

1) The scene in itself showcased exactly what James Young in his article titled “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of History” commends of Spiegelman when he asserts that: “indeed, it may be Artie’s unreliability as a son that makes his own narrative so reliable” (676). Young here is evidencing a moment in the graphic novel where Art strays from the notion of ‘reliable son’ by exposing a character flaw in his father and in turn, himself, making his work in Maus II & II honest and rich.

2) I found significance in Spiegelman’s explanation in the interview as it relates to how popular media encodes us to view Holocaust survivors through a particular lens but rather these survivors, or any survivor really, are individuals who indeed endured hardship but simultaneously we must be cognizant of the idea that one who has endured hardship may still harbour a prejudice they had in a past life; it is very easy people to see the hardship inflicted on them personally, but it is difficult for people to understand their actions on other people.

Our class trip to the Museum of Anthropology’s exhibit “Speaking to Memory: Images and Voices from St. Michael’s Residential School” was a moving experience that immediately invoked a sense of responsibility in me to have a well-informed understanding of Aboriginal history in Canada, so as to play my part in facilitating a reconciliation and to ensure that this type of prejudice does not repeat itself. I was particularly struck by the honesty, richness and layers of the exhibit that can be observed through a multitude of perspectives, using imagery, posters, letters, apologies, and books to emancipate those affected and give them a vehicle to have their sentiments heard and to be healed, as a visible body of people.

In particular, what struck me most was that there was two different entrances to the exhibit, which invoked different sentiments and perspectives to those whom entered the exhibit from each respective entrance.
1. One entrance to the exhibit commenced with a portrait of the various experiences of children who participated in the residential school system juxtaposed against apology letters written by various groups including government officials and religious bodies. This entrance instantly commenced a dialogue of the diverse body of experiences.
2. The other entrance to the exhibit commenced with a blackboard available for guests to write their thoughts down of the exhibit and the residential schools. The most common comment was “it is sad” or “it makes me sad”.

Viewing this blackboard upon leaving the exhibit, I nodded my head in affirmation of those who expressed the sad nature of the content we viewed. However, having read the term “sad” repeatedly on the blackboard made me question whether guests of the exhibit felt limited to writing that content was “sad” because that was the dominant perception expressed, rather than truly grappling with the rich, moving, and troubling nature of the exhibit.

It would seem logical for the blackboard to be the “end” of the exhibit, but since guests could commence their visit at the exhibit from the blackboard, I can’t help but question whether this would color their perception of the exhibit so as to construe the rich exhibit from the viewpoint that “it is sad”, rather than allowing visitors to formulate their own conclusions on the exhibit.

Thinking of this duality in the entrances makes me question whether popular perception and knowledge of the residential school system is much like the “black board” experience. Most people know that the residential school system is a part of our history and that it is sad, but how many of us Canadians know much about the various experiences of the children who partook in these schools and how it affected their families and communities, and the ripple effect it has had on our social fabric?

I find it incredible that such a pertinent part of our history that is as recent as 1996 has such limited discourse surrounding it in our society for those who do not seek it out. An integral part of any healing experience is discourse, so while it’s great that we have these exhibits available to us, perhaps we need to facilitate greater discussion around this historical event, instead of just simplifying it to “it is sad”.

Maggie de Vries’s memoire Missing Sarah: A Memoire of Loss is well versed and addresses thought provoking and under-represented discourse in her writing on taboo subjects such as adoption and identity, sex work, and addiction. In writing Missing Sarah, Maggie de Vries’s strives to:
make it real for [us], the reader[s]. Many Vancouver women are missing. […] If we can start to leave the gritty image of the sex worker behind and begin to see real people, real women, to look them in the eye and smile at them and want to know who they really are, I think that we can begin to make our world a better place for them and for us, for everyone (xv).

As a reader, I was incredibly entrenched in the memoire captured by Maggie de Vries, and I immediately withdrew from my ignorant view of sex workers after engaging in Sarah’s story. However, upon reviewing other texts and reading more closely into Sarah’s story, I began to notice that Maggie de Vries omitted certain details of Sarahs upbringing that could potentially cast a negative light on the de Vries family, and how they may have contributed to Sarah feeling like an ‘other’ in her own home, alienatied or being conscience of her ‘othered space’. This view was adopted after referring to Wally Oppal’s Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry and viewing an article published by the Suzanne Fournier titled “Sarah de Vries: 1 of 20 women for whose murder Pickton will never be tried”. These sources both shed pertinent details surrounding Sarah’s upbringing that Maggie de Vries fails to address in her memoire of Sarah, withdrawing the reader from a fuller picture of Sarah’s upbringing. Oppal notes that “[h]er sister believes that Sarah was sexually abused repeatedly in her childhood by a neighbour”; however, Maggie recalls in Missing Sarah that “[s]everal boys and young men in [their] neighborhood got into trouble with the police periodically. One of them had been charged with rape. Did he hurt Sarah?” (Oppal 43) (de Vries 46). The former statement made by Oppal indicates that Maggie believes a neighbor sexually abused Sarah. Why does Maggie decide to limit her narrative to the question of “did he hurt Sarah?” instead of elaborating on the potential sexual abuse that the Commission suggests?

Another interesting point of consideration is that Suzanne Fournier claims that Sarah’s “ father, a University of B.C. science professor, appears to have adored de Vries, but called her “his little chocolate drop” and “nigger girl,” according to some of her friends who cite passages in the journals she kept all her life.” If this were in fact true, it would bring to light a knowledge gap to the reader regarding Sarah’s uphill battle with her identity, which she faced both in the public and in the private sphere, lending to her feelings of isolation and identity crisis. Evidently, Maggie seems to omit certain details of Sarah’s upbringing that may have caused Sarah to turn to the streets, which questions the honesty and integrity of Sarah’s narrative through the omission of these details.

While these considerations do not remove the reader from Maggie’s goal at large in writing Missing Sarah, which is shedding light to the issues surrounding such taboo subjects and integrating them into society with acceptance, it does take away from Maggie’s representation of Sarah, and inclines the reader to question the de Vries’s families devotion to help Sarah as an impressionable adolescent, overcome the internal pain she felt and the identity crisis she endured. As a reader, it was emotionally frustrating to watch Sarah enter into the DTES at such a vulnerable age, but it was more frustrating to read about how the de Vries family addressed Sarah’s disobedient nature. For example, Maggie recalls that when Sarah was stealing from her family, “dad would talk to Sarah about it. He tried to be patient, but it kept happening”, so the solution to Sarah’s problem was to place locks on every door in their home (39). Sarah at this time, was twelve years old, and her family felt that the most appropriate course of action to Sarah’s problem with stealing was to physically lock Sarah out of every room in her own home, which in turn, isolated her from her home and did in fact drive Sarah into the streets, running away again and shoplifting elsewhere.

I am left wondering if Maggie de Vries perhaps intentionally omitted these details for the sake of her own memories of Sarah and their family. How do you view de Vries’s narrative with these points of consideration in mind? How would a more encompassing memoire changed the way in which Sarah’s narrative is projected to readers?

Reading Diamond Grill as a Canadian-Iranian, I felt many moments of intersection between Fred Wah’s personal narrative and my own. I was born in Canada shortly after my parents emigrated from Iran to Vancouver, as young entrepreneurs, who escaped the Iranian revolution. My parents like Fred Wah’s parents opened their own restaurant, catering Mediterranean food to the Western palette. Growing up, I despised eating the food my parents cooked both at home and at their restaurant and I tried to integrate myself into Western culture as much as possible, for fear of being marginalized by the dominant race or being labeled as a “FOB” if I brought ethnic food to school for lunch. As I grew older I began to embrace coming from such a rich culture, and in my adulthood life, I have noticed that I have unconsciously adopted many Iranian values into my predominantly Western way of thinking. Growing up in a home that embraces a culture that parts from the West, albeit at times difficult, especially in developing a sense of identity that encapsulates both my family’s values and my own, it ultimately allowed me to span my local understanding of people to an international one, heightening my emotional intelligence and perspective of people from various cultural backgrounds.

As an adult, I am proud to be Canadian-Iranian, but like some peers have already underscored, I have found my identity undermined by those who ask me “What I am” and “Where I’m from” to which I respond, “Iranian” and “Here-I was born in Canada”, but this answer usually does not suffice. It is followed with, “but you’re not full Iranian, you definitely do not look it, what’s your other half?” This last question is usually answered with an internal frustration, to which I think to myself, just because I do not look like your conception of an Iranian, I am no less Iranian. Moreover, the way in which the latter is asked is commonly coupled with a stigma of what being Iranian means and how one must look in order to look like a “generic Iranian” or what an Iranian looks like from a Western lens.

David Kertzer and Dominique Arel assert in their article “Censuses, identity formation, and the struggle for political power”,

“The compulsion to divide people into racial categories has never been far from the drive to divide them into ethnic categories. In fact, the two concepts are often blurred, a confusion having largely to do with a belief that identity can be objectively determined through ancestry” (11).

As such, I’d like to pose a question for the class, using an interesting excerpt from Diamond Grill where Fred Wah recalls,
“The teacher telling us who we get to be, to write down what our fathers are. Race, race, race. English, German, Doukhobor, Italian. But not Canadian, there’s a difference between a race and a country. No matter what, you’re what your father is, was, forever” (36).

While there is certainly a difference between a race and a country, Canada is not a pure bread country; rather it is comprised of diversity and a land of immigrants with many different cultural experiences. I am interested in hearing what my peers think of what it means to be Canadian, in particular.

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