Author Archives: sammykmarsh

We have just finished the novel Zeitoun by Dave Eggers in our ASTU class. The novel follows the Zeitoun family leading up to, during, and following Hurricane Katrina. In class we have watched a documentary about the hurricane by Spike Lee called When the Levees Broke which gave us background of the cities preparations for the hurricane and the federal government’s response (or lack of) to the disaster.

I am very glad we were able to read this novel and watch this documentary because this topic relates to the other classes in the CAP stream of Global Citizens. In our geography classes were also looked further into the causes and responses to Hurricane Katrina and I plan to write my geography paper on this topic. I am supposed to look at the social, political, and cultural influences that are integral to understanding Hurricane Katrina and I feel Zeitoun has so many examples applicable to this prompt.

For social, I find the discrimination Zeitoun faces really represents the demographic of New Orleans. Zeitoun loses customers because of his Syrian heritage and affiliation with being Muslim. Kathy also often finds that people will turn away Mexican or South American workers because they are not white. Similarly the rainbow logo for Zeitoun’s company is associated with the gay pride flag and he loses many customers and workers who don’t wish to be connected with the gay community. Still there are people who he has gained as customers because of his logo and Zeitoun even feels that if someone has a problem with the gay community they probably with have a problem with Muslims.

For me I found Zeitoun was a very stark example of the political response to Hurricane Katrina. Instead of aiding the people who need to be rescued, helicopters are taking pictures. It is up to the people to help each other with the little resources they have access to. Then instead of focussing their military force in rescuing or getting food to people in need, military forces are arresting looters and supposed terrorists. This disorganization of federal aid greatly characterizes the governments response to the hurricane.

The cultural implications in Zeitoun are very similiar to the social. They have to do with the way Americans are represented and what values their country has taught them in relation to othr countries such as Syria.

I really enjoyed the novel Zeitoun and look forward to making further connects between it and my geography paper.

This week in our ASTU class we discussed Juliana Spahr’s book of poems called This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. This book is a response to her feelings towards the trauma of 911. What I found to be very interesting in her poetry was the break from lyric poetry and instead a transfer to “confessional poetry”. The use of “I” portrays a personal experience but what made Spahr’s poetry so unique was her use ability to escape the “me” and create a connection between the reader and author.

By retreating from individualism and idiosyncrasy, her renovated language can be applied to many people and situations. Her use of “we”, “our”, and “yous” makes her reactions very open ended allowing for interpretation. One line from her poem especially stood out to me when reading, “I can’t predict our time together either. Or why we like each other like we do”(33). This line could easily be applied to victims of trauma, survivors, and those who have lost loved ones. On a more personal level it caused me to consider our families, whom we don’t necessarily choose but love unconditionally. Life’s unpredictability’s can cut our time short inexplicably like Oskar’s father in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Oskar has such an attachment to his father and attempts to fill the void that now is left after his father’s death.

Similarly in Persepolis, when Marjane loses Uncle Anouche she never expected their time together to be so short. We must value what we have and never take for granted the time we have together. It can be unpredictable when we become attached to someone but necessary to create connections. Just like Spahr’s use of inclusive language we must remember to include and consider all the people in our lives as valuable.

This is my first post of the New Year on my blog. Within our ASTU class we have finished the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, a novel I very much enjoyed and would recommend, and we have read an analysis of Foer’s novel and trauma connected to terror attacks called Frames of War by Judith Butler.

Last week as class blogger I noticed many people spoke about the trauma of 911 and how characters within Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close responded to trauma either unreasonably or logically. I commented on how my classmates spoke about Oskar’s response to trauma and how it transformed his character, some saying negatively (like his racism and sexism) or positively (after all he is just a child trying to remember his father).

This week though we focused on Judith Butler’s Frames of War, and spoke about how she relates Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close to other trauma and discrimination such as Guantanamo Bay. What I found most interesting in our discussions in class was the idea that we all vulnerable and that creates an interconnectedness. Vulnerability means that a part of everyone is subjected to suffering and that being a victim can come in all sorts of forms. Vulnerability not only creates interconnectedness but it also reminds us of our responsibilities to each other. This leads to another conversation we had in class, “What makes a global citizen?” A global citizen feels sympathy for others resulting in an intergenerational connectedness and awareness. A global citizen realizes that “intervention is not a form of responsibility” and imposition does not mean resolution. The guilt we feel is the emotional manifestation of responsibility because we feel remorse for acts that hurt others. Often our media and even government shape our impressions of other cultures by attributing negative or positive connotations to images. Oskar is afraid of turbans, which is just a misconception that has been projected onto him by images he is exposed to. As global citizens we must realize that who we are is nothing without others lives, this world cannot be made by any one individual culture.

This week in our ASTU class we were able to explore Joy Kogawa’s Fonds located in in the Irving K Barber Learning Center. Within class, we have finished Kogawa’s novel Obasan and we are beginning to relate personal memories to larger cultural memories. The Fonds that we were able to view where extremely varied and contained everything from letters from the prime minister to drawings submitted by sixth graders. The breadth of the archives was shocking and fascinating to see the variation in the types of files kept.

These artifacts greatly altered my perception of the book but also how it is remembered. While going through the Fonds, I found a file of letters from a middle school class. Within the file were the responses of these Canadian middle schoolers after reading Obasan and I was shocked at how young these students were when learning about such a serious subject in their cultures history. I think the integration of Obasan into the curriculum of young Canadians provides a basis of cultural remembering and a value that we must remember these events rather than forgetting them because we are ashamed. By taking responsibility for their actions Canadians are able to not only prevent them from happening again in the future but also demonstrate to the people that they hurt that they are sorry for their actions.

While the modern responses to Kogawa’s book are very good representations of current sentiments of cultural memory, the letters that are much older and helped Kogawa write her book are also intriguing sources of insight into creation of Canadian history. In one case, I came upon an unsent letter that Kogawa wrote to the owners of the house Kogawa and her family formerly lived in. It is a heartbreaking reminder of how houses were taken without fair reciprocation from their owners during the war and how Japanese were reluctant to reach out even though it was originally their land.

Both personal memories and cultural memories are encased in the Fonds and their archive symbolizes and immortalizes the memories of the many in order to instill the emotions related to the war and its affects. Obasan is able to give a personal account of the negative affects of war but Kogawa’s Fonds do an even better job at demonstrating the many emotions of people of all ages affected by the war but also the memories of war, not just a singular young girls experience. By getting a larger picture of the war and the creation of the book, Obasan become a technology of memory solidified in cultural memory.

It’s been a while since our last blog post and a lot has happened during that time. We have presented our literary key term in groups, read Safe Area Gorazde, and finished our literature review papers. While researching the key word “forgetting” for the literature review and examining Safe Area Gorazde I couldn’t help but draw connections of cultural forgetting to the Serbian and Muslim conflict.

I found it extremely shocking that neighbors who grew up together could suddenly turn on each other, burning down houses, looting, and killing families. The pages of Safe Area Gorazde that very much impacted me were page 160 and 161. These pages are labeled “Can You Live With the Serbs Again?” and depict Sacco asking Muslims what their sentiments are towards their Serbian neighbors. Their responses are varied, some say they are able to forgive, others say that they can only live with Serbs if they have not committed a crime, and other strongly opposed to ever trusting Serbians again. The phrase “Forgive but don’t forget” came to my mind during this section, but what if you have to forget to forgive, or does actual forgiving require a conscious memory of the event?

Researching forgetting made me consider something I had never really thought about before, that remembering is very valuable in conjunction with forgiving. If you don’t remember an event you can never really hear the two sides of a story and make an evaluation of the validity or justification of it. Forgetting is a valuable resource in starting fresh or allowing space for more memories but it can also be very dangerous if used incorrectly to intentionally forget memories that shape your identity.

I think that you do have to remember wrongdoings order to forgive, and remembering makes you stronger and less susceptible to being taken advantage of or hurt in the future. The people of Gorazde whether they had mal-intentions or good intentions towards their Serbian neighbor, both agree that their nation must not forget the atrocities that their people had to endure because these events have shaped their cultural identity.

This is our third week of blog posts in our ASTU class. The past few weeks we have looked into scholar Farhat Shahzad’s essay The Role of Interpretative communities in Remembering and Learning which explored collective memory and forgetting, we read the graphic narrative Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi the account of a young girl growing up in Iran during the Iranian Revolution, and this current week The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, a scholarly essay by Hillary Chutes investigating the importance of Persepolis as a graphic narrative and the different styles Satrapi utilizes in her work.

When examining Chute’s essay in class, different groups were assigned sections of her essay and the section my group looked at was Style Trauma: The Child. Within our section, Chute calls attention to Satrapi’s depiction of a child’s disconnect with violence and how her translation through simplicity of images demonstrates the gap of knowledge a child experiences, calling attention the “horror of history”(Chutes 98). Chute finds that it is more successful for Satrapi to present violence in more abstract images instead of realistic ones in order to present the real process of trauma. The key theme of anti- realism or non-realism represented by the architectural and “highly stylized” childlike drawings with impersonalized faces makes chaos structured and faceless.

What I found most interesting about this section was Satrapi’s display of the normalcy of violence for youths. Within Persepolis, Marji is a witness to unspeakable tragedies, increasingly common placed and copes with this display of violence by either blocking out the realism of the images, such as the dismemberment of tortured men, or accepting the violence as the new normal. As an American growing up in California, this idea of violence becoming more common placed had become more prevalent in the media, especially in the case of gun control and its affect on various school and public shootings. In my politics discussion group this week we spoke about the availability of guns and if access to guns gives people more freedom. This subject is loosely related to school shootings in that the loose nature of gun control and regulations has caused mishandling of guns and the common occurrence of guns reaching individuals who have killed many defenseless people.

I am not saying that school shootings are anywhere as nearly traumatic as Marji’s experience in Iran but the connecting factor is the distress and pain caused and then the responses that come after. Hearing about school shootings such as Columbine, in my community have created a hyper awareness of violence. One example would be when my high school received a anonymous tip of a shooter targeting the school which created an immediate lock down of the campus and evacuation. The tip was a hoax but since there had been similar cases of attempted bombings in my area, they took extra precaution, almost anticipating it as a normal occurrence like an earthquake drill. It is unfortunate that such exposure to violence causes it to become ordinary but Satrapi even states herself “…while Persepolis may show trauma as (unfortunately) ordinary, it rejects the idea that it is (or should ever be) normal…”

Remembering and representing collective memories is difficult to continue merely through word of mouth, which is why cultural artifacts are much better at sustaining, but also proving, that such historical events existed. Artifacts can both encompass memories and history without having a bias, which a storyteller may have when recounting an event. The only problem with artifacts is that they can potentially be destroyed or stolen. However, this problem is quickly being solved with developments in technology. Photos and videos can capture both artifacts and significant events, and museums and art galleries are using these tools to their full advantage. While browsing the Internet I found that the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History now has a website where you can take a virtual tour of all their exhibits with additional information when you click on each exhibit (http://www.mnh.si.edu/vtp/1-desktop/). This utilization of technology made me interested in learning more about my own and other cultures history, and I realized that anyone who has a computer and Internet is also able to access the same information I was seeing. The museum’s Human Origins exhibit on the development of the Australopithecus Lucy was especially interesting to me because many people may have heard about the extraordinary discovery of Lucy, a unusually complete skeleton almost 3.2 million years old, the on the news but the museum is able to catalog Lucy’s discovery more in depth and share that information online. As much as technology can be criticized for desensitizing society to the accessibility of information and creating isolation instead of personal contact, it is also helping to immortalize history and spread knowledge of cultural memory to people around the world. Museums with the help of technology are able to make collective memories more accessible to a greater amount of people, allowing for better understanding of other cultures and their belief systems but also history that all of humanity has in common.