Hey Guys,

So this is finally it, the last ASTU blog. With that also means the eventual end to our first year of University, how exciting, only three (or many?) more years to go. I’m sure this is not a new revelation for all of you; it certainly isn’t for me, the end of this school year has been on my mind a lot. In thinking about this I am drawn back to the beginning of the year and the general weight this year has had in influencing where my life will take me. One thing that I both find generally intriguing, and which I think is helpful when contemplating what my learning this year in CAP has amounted to, can be encapsulated in the words of a famous philosopher; Albert Camus. He says in his work The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays “Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.” Through this quote I’m in no way saying that we should reject tomorrow, that we should reject the next few years of our life; quite the opposite. I’m saying that our existence is absurd; it is stuck between the relationship of the world to that of our consciousness. Many people go around living their life as if it is normal, Camus suggests the opposite, that it is absurd and we should treat it as such; we should recognize the idea that we are chained to this absurd existence, and dragged through time with it. But this is not a reason to despair he says, on the contrary this means that life is what we make it, we should look on back on this year and simultaneously understand that we cannot go back and change anything we have done, nor affect what will happen to us in the future, we must only focus on this absurd moment that is our existence. In that moment we may revolt against that absurdity by accepting it, and using this moment to achieve what we believe makes us happy in life.

But how does this apply at all to our Global Citizens program? In CAP this year we have learned through a multitude of disciplines, about society, our place in it etc. Thus we are able to view ourselves as playing a unique role in the world from everyone else, yet, at the same time through this knowledge we have learned that all of us; all humans share this same intimacy in that all the roles we play allow for this world to function, allow for our existence. Such ideas of global citizenry we have immersed ourselves in through this program; many of the previous topics I have written on in my blogs take on this understanding (Judith Butler, Moshin Hamid etc.) by breaking down the barriers of the character we play to understand societal issues from a different person or groups perspective in order to achieve change. This idea of the ‘global’, of ‘global citizenship’ is really what I feel I’ve come away from in understanding that process; the idea of everything existing all at once. But even though it is incredibly interesting to be granted such abstract knowledge, I feel as though we may take this idea of global citizenship to an even abstracter level; to that of the philosophical.

The idea I discussed before in context of the global citizen; the idea of understanding your unique but intimately connected role of that of one person to all living humans can also be taken from the standpoint of Camus. In his essay, Camus emphasises the moment at which the stage of a person’s world is broken down, and they come to realize their absurd existence. But what does this destruction of the world as a ‘stage’ do for the idea of global citizenry? I think that we must also, in understanding ourselves as global citizens, in the back of our minds constantly be reminding ourselves that this unique ‘role’ we play in the context of all humanity is forever anchored in the absurd. Thus we all are existing in the same absurd moment. We are even more connected to each other than as we previously thought. Not only are our roles interconnected and intimately interdependent, but once we break down the stage that those roles are acted out on (the so called ‘world stage’ as Shakespeare puts it) we can see we are all also connected in the sense of our absurdity. Because of this, when we in class or in scholarly conversation attempt to break down the barriers of exceptionalist thinking, or of cultural dominance through Judith Butler’s lens let’s say, we are slowly breaking down the stage, slowly realizing this idea of our absurd existence and the fact that we are all one with its absurdity. This is what I think that we are getting at in the core of this program, and it is what I am so glad I have gotten from my first year of university. I hope that you all enjoyed it as much as I did and that we may look forward now, not in the way that Camus rejects, but instead towards using this knowledge to make something great out of our lives. Moreover, I want to leave you with this quote from Camus when he is describing in his essay the destruction of this world stage we exist in, and what happens when we realize our absurdity; a quote which I find calming but also invigorating. “But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement”.

Thanks for reading, and sticking with my blog this year. I hope you enjoyed my writing, and I hope you enjoy your summer!

Hi guys, it’s me again! These past weeks we discussed a couple of texts; Author and Veteran Phil Klay’s book: Redeployment, and Mohsin Hamid’s book The Reluctant Fundamentalist. While I found our discussion today of Hamid’s book to be very intriguing, I haven’t actually finished the novel yet, and so I feel obliged to discuss in greater detail the other, equally interesting text “Redeployment”. At first when starting the excerpt from Klay’s book “Redeployment”, the title didn’t really seem to catch my eye. It is a commonly used military term, and in the context of war does not seem particularly avant garde or enlightening. This, however is changed completely after reading and discussing in class the implications of the text. Klay’s novel centers itself on the theme of incommunicability of experience, through the most commonly used medium: language. Therefore, this one simple word; “Redeployment” is transformed through the focus of the story into representing a multitude of things, illustrating the troubling nature of communication.

The book starts off with showing the reader the problems that arise not just from communicating to others, but understanding your own experiences through your thoughts. Klay shows this by describing the difference of actually doing the things Sgt. Price describes, and thinking about them after: “At the time, you don’t think about it. You’re thinking about who’s in that house, what’s he armed with, how’s he gonna kill you, your buddies.” “The thinking comes later, when they give you the time.” (1). This separation of thought and action shows what the soldiers go though in the physical process of being “redeployed” back home. In the war zone your training, your muscle memory that has been embedded into your very being takes over and you just “do”. However, the problem arises when you are physically transferred back into “regular” society in which you are forced to think for yourself once again. Therefore, this transition of body to mind can be another way to view the title. Not only are the soldiers redeployed back home physically, they are redeployed back into their conscious minds, redeployed into being able to think about their experiences. “It takes you a while to remember Doc saying they’d shot mercury into his skull, and then it still doesn’t make any sense.” (1). This separation of body and mind that Klay makes, sets up this idea of incommunicability already on page one by showing the difficult situation soldiers face in grasping their own experiences.

Throughout the story, this feeling of incommunicability is expanded to other people who have never been to war. With Sgt. Price’s wife for example, he doesn’t really feel that connection at first when they kiss, and when they take it back home to the bedroom he says “She looked a bit scared of me, then. I guess all the wives were probably a little bit scared.” (9). However, I feel as though Klay is not trying to get at the specific incommunicability that exists in the relationships of soldiers to their families and friends, but on a more abstract level to that of the public. Like he says later in the story when he is at the mall “Outside, there’re people walking around by the windows like it’s no big deal. People who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died. People who’ve spent their whole lives at white.” (12). This idea of the mental level of awareness comes up a lot and is related to this incommunicability of experience. Not only do the soldiers have a hard time grasping their experiences, it is even harder for them to be around people who have no idea what that experience (being at ‘red’ or ‘orange’) entails. The way they think and act is completely different, so how could they ever understand? This, I believe is at the heart of Klay’s point. By portraying the experience of redeployment from a soldier’s point of view, the story outlines the incommunicability of soldier to civilian, thus attempting to communicate to the reader the incommunicable. For example, throughout the story there is a theme of killing dogs; at the beginning it is portrayed as normal in the context of war, and we are not shocked. At the end, however it is him killing his own American dog, and the reader gets this feeling of horror and trauma from this description. In using the death of a dog, a subject that in western (civilian) terms we deem as normal to be humanized, he attempts to show the irony of not being able to sympathize with the lives of a human Iraqi. Klay’s story questions why it is that we feel sadder and more traumatized from the killing of a dog, but ignore or glorify the constant redeployment of soldiers who’s main purpose is to kill other humans that are much like our(them)selves? What are the ramifications of that missed communication of soldiers to public? These questions that arise from the multilayered theme of incommunicability in Klay’s story is what I found to be so interesting about this reading. It changed my own view of Veterans lives, and made me question the structure of our system in producing this lack of connection between people.

Thanks for reading!

• Sam

Hey guys, it’s me again,

This week in our ASTU class we have been starting a segment on poetry, specifically poetry that deals with post-9/11 political events. Juliana Spahr’s book starts with a poem written on the day of 9/11 continues with other poems from November 30^th 2002 to March 27^th 2003. She prefaces the latter texts with an introduction of her life at the time. In it, she notes that since she was living in Hawai’i she felt disconnected from the continent of North America and the political and geopolitical events surrounding the post 9/11 world. She says “I felt I had to think about what I was connected with, and what I was complicit with, as I lived off the fat of the military-industrial complex on a small island.” (Spahr, 13). I think that this note she makes in introducing these poems is key to understanding the poems themselves, as well as a view that we may all take to greater understand our lives as connected geographically.

In our sociology class, one of the key ideas which was introduced to us at the beginning of the year is C. Wright Mills idea of the Sociological Imagination. Mills says that the task of the sociologist is to look at their given milieu and apply the troubles that they encounter to a greater social structure in which theses milieu are contained and shaped. Spahr’s idea of understanding what you are connected with through your given geographical and political situation is much the same. Through her poetic language I would suggest that she moves us to look at our lives through our own “Geographical Imagination”. This imagination is tied to our Human Geography class, in the way that Spahr understands how the geography of Hawai’i with its military complex, its infrastructure and even down to the most basic of geographical items like a bed is inextricably linked with the different islands, militaries, even beds of people and countries across the world. Through this geographical imagination she asks us to question our boundaries and our connections with these other people who are at the most mortal, basic, level the same as ourselves.

To understand how she does this we have to look at how her language reflects this idea of connection. For example how she adapts the simplest of object pronouns to describe her experience as connected to the experiences of everyone else sharing the earth. “Beloveds, yours skins is a boundary separating yous from the rest of yous.” She changes “You” to “Yous”, “Your” to “Yours”. To me, the effect of pluralizing the words we use to describe others is similar to the goals of Judith Butler. By making these object pronouns plural she could be suggesting that the label “you” groups too many people into the same category. By pluralizing it she recognizes the difference of everybody as a ‘you’ but also their connection in a global context. This is but one example of how Spahr uses this idea of the geographical imagination to break down the frames of “us” and “them” (Butler) and implies this paradoxical situation of being “so close but yet so far”. What I mean by this can be shown using her analogy of the bed. When we are in bed we are in the most intimate of circumstances with each other; skin, the shortest of boundaries separate us. Yet, as we sleep we are also disconnected and isolated from everyone as the world goes on without us. At the same time, by realizing this we are also understanding a connection we have with everyone in that we all must sleep, regardless of our political circumstances. It is this paradox which Spahr illuminates in her poetry, and which I think argues the need for all of us to apply this geographical imagination to our lives, and question what we are complicit with, what the boundaries are separating us, and ultimately the connections we have through our increasingly globally interdependent world.

Thanks for reading, I hope you all have an awesome break!

Hey guys, glad to be back here and starting of our second term together! Over the break I read Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which is set in New York City right after the tragic of event of 9/11. The book uses this setting as a stepping stone to talk about the main character Oskar and his family’s experiences of post 9/11 trauma. However, the setting is significant in that a lot of the books post-modern artistic qualities (the pictures and drawings) act as fictional technologies of memory for Oskar’s life. I’d like to talk about the power that art has in discussing trauma, specifically the 9/11 memorial in New York, and Foer’s novel. As a work of art, Foer’s novel uses these technologies that connect Oskar’s narrative within this historic city to the world shattering event of 9/11, and push the reader forward into thinking about how people are connected by trauma. Similarly, the memorial also portrays trauma and I think can be discussed in tangent with Foer’s novel as a work of art.

When I was 15, my class went on a trip to New York, and this book brought back some memories of the atmosphere of the city and what it was like to live there. Near the end of the trip we went to see the 9/11 memorial located near the building site of the new tower. The memorial is really powerful and it relates to not only the novel but also our discussion in class of how art is used to portray trauma and spur healing, as well as also connecting to this classes theme of memory. In class we discussed Foer’s comments on art in relation to tragedy: “Why do people wonder what’s OK to make art about, as if tragedy weren’t an inherently good thing.” “Too many people are suspicious of art. Too many people hate art.”  At 15 I had a limited understanding of the context surrounding the memorial, and the memories I have of the memorial are cloudy. However, my memory of the feeling of how the memorial portrays 9/11 is still there and I would argue that feeling shows the relevance of how art influences our view of the narrative of trauma surrounding the event. While I think that Foer is a bit harsh as saying that people hate art, I feel he makes a relevant point about what is and isn’t ‘OK’ to make art about in relation to tragic events, in that people are suspicious of art related to trauma. Art is such an abstract and ever-changing open concept that it can be confining in its physical form. People may be suspicious of art that seeks to represent trauma as it does not fit their idea of how that particular trauma should be represented. At the same time, this openness can lead to connection between peoples experience of the art.

Foer’s book as a work of art deals with this specific trauma of 9/11 and also many other traumas which collide through intergenerational relationships. Oskar’s specific narrative of trauma shows it as being incomparable to anything else; he calls it: “the worst day”. “A lot of the time I’d get the feeling like I was in the middle of a huge black ocean, or in deep space, but not in the fascinating way.” 9/11 as an event affected the whole world so completely that (as mentioned in class) people distinguish events as pre or post 9/11. It is this inability to speak or describe the totality of the event that makes art relating to it so open, but yet so hard to create. It is like a giant hole that swallows the memory of it, but also collects it and represents it as a connection that we all have to this trauma. It is in this way that I think we see through Foer’s book and the 9/11 memorial, how by creating art we are able unite through experience, without having to discuss it. The memorial itself is somewhat like I have just described. Inside are two squares the circumference of the two towers cut out from the ground. Waterfalls pour down the sides into a large flat pool (kind of like Oskars idea of the pool of tears) a foot deep. At the centre of this pool there is another square cut out of black rock in a way that it’s depth does not allow the viewer to see the bottom. As I have said before, we all may find a different meaning from this installation, just as we may discuss different meanings to Oskar’s narrative in Foer’s novel. What I believe is significant about the memorial though, is this centre part that is cut out. It is as if all the tears that people have shed are collecting inside of this unseeable pool at the bottom of the memorial. While all these people’s tears may have different meanings for each person, and their trauma may not be communicable, through art we are able to bridge the gap between unspeakability and connection. While Foer’s novel is not comparable to the memorial in form, I think as art it uses its medium to discuss 9/11 and the connection of people from different generation’s experiences of trauma through a powerful narrative.

Here is an image of the memorial in NYC:

Thanks everyone, see you next week!

Last week in out ASTU class we read and discussed Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan. While the book itself is complex and stimulating in its discussion of memory and themes of cultural memory, trauma and silence as well as narrative lenses (which I have talked about in previous blog posts), I thought this book was interesting as it connected to a recent Political Science lecture and class discussion. In this lecture Professor Erickson went on a rant following the recent November 13^th Paris attacks that shocked the world. He discussed the effects of such attacks and how, as an international community, we should respond and fight back against these forces of terror. The apex of his lecture for me, was when he talked about discrimination and how we should not be goaded into ‘painting with a large brush’, as a Culturally hegemonic view of the ‘west’ vs ‘east’ does not benefit anyone but the terrorists as it creates divides, instead of bonds. Joy Kogawa’s novel may not have specifically intended to connect with such a subject, but it’s themes of cultural oppression and discrimination are relevant to the discussion of fear and the crisis of IS terrorism that the world is experiencing in the present age. By connecting Obasan’s discussion of discrimination, fear and hatred of a certain group of people or cultural heritage, to the discrimination that people of the Islamic faith and Syrian refugees are experiencing, I think we can learn some very important lessons from Joy Kogawa’s book.

Joy Kogawa’s novel has an especially profound effect on me, as I was born and raised in Vancouver where the book begins. Her descriptions and name drops of places in Vancouver, particularly the Hastings park field by the PNE, and her house on West 64^th in Marpole are places I have visited, played soccer on and driven by many a time, all with a darker background that I didn’t know about before. One quote particularly resonated with me because of this: “Vancouver – the water, the weather, the beauty, this paradise – is filled up and overflowing with hatred now.”(130).  As a Canadian living in the same city as Joy’s home town, it’s hard for me to imagine that other Caucasian people like myself, especially Vancouverites, would ever discriminate so harshly against other Canadian citizens based solely on skin colour. This is an interesting theme of the book which relates to the terror crisis of our world. With support from the government and for such a long period, Japanese people who were Canadian citizens were seen as so alien as to deport and imprison them. “Father says. ‘We’re Canadian’. It is a riddle, Stephen tells me. We are both the enemy and not the enemy. (100)”.

After going to Erickson’s lecture, I see a parallel with the discrimination and hatred that Naomi faced and that which Syrian refugees, as well as people of Islamic faith are experiencing. Like in Obasan, these people face broad discrimination which extends to all people with their same skin colour or religion, even if they are citizens of your home country and have lived next to them for many years. While I myself am not scared by the terrorist’s threats as I understand that their goal is to paralyze people with fear so that they turn against each other, the politics of fear that ISIS is spreading across the world is changing people’s views of other cultures and religions. Even in Canada, we can see the effect of ISIS’s fear spreading, with a mosque in Peterborough being burnt down on November the 15^th, just two days after the Nov. the 13^th attacks. Such hate crimes are reminiscent of the actions and feelings of Canadians caused by the fear of the Japanese, which were sparked by Pearl Harbour and the war time atrocities of the Japanese military. We can see from examples in Obasan that painting generalizations of cultures with such broad brush strokes does nothing to solve such conflict. In fact, in the case of IS it fuels the fire of such forces of hatred as to divide us. How can we fight for peace, when we are disabled by hatred and fear?

Professor Erickson in his rant also talked about this type of Western centralized thinking that makes us not so different from the terrorists, in that we think that our thinking is the right one. We see this in Obasan as well, with the government detaining their own citizens due to discrimination. They believed so strongly that anyone Japanese was wrong and evil, that through this fear it gave them the right to abuse the Japanese’s rights as citizens. “So long as they designate the enemy by that term and not us, it doesn’t matter.”(Obasan, 118). But these people, just as the ones who are Muslim and want to freely practice their faith, without being labeled as a radical or a terrorist, are just like you and me. Their religion and culture is just as peaceful as yours, or mine. It is the people, and their situation that cause the violent acts we see in the IS, not a skin colour or type of culture. This goes for Syrian refugees as well. Not taking into account the economic and political factors that surround their admittance to countries, these people are labelled too broadly by the public as harmful and dangerous, when in fact, they are fleeing the exact same thing that we fear. “’(that) the innocent should be made to suffer for the guilty?…That’s scapegoatism.’” (49). In Obasan the same is true, and yet all new Japanese immigrants were sent back to the horror of war that they tried to leave behind. Assuming that you know the right way of thinking is pure ignorance, and it is worse when that translates into action and hatred of the cultures and practices of a people you have taken little time trying to get to know or understand.

This idea is what I took away form Erickson’s lecture, and what was reinforced for me by our reading of Obasan. The novels narrative lens makes it an even more powerful message, as it shows how it affects further generations down the line, with issues of their past and the silence conflict of cultural identity that comes with that past. I think that what Rough Lock Bill says in chapter 21 summarizes what we should take away from Obasan as how it relates to the worlds present crisis: “Don’t make sense, do it, all this fuss about skin?” (144). As humans across the world, we all come from the same beginnings and all face the same end, we are the same regardless of skin colour, and should treat each other as such. Similarly, Erickson concluded his lecture by saying that our current hegemonic way of thinking does not get us anywhere. We have continued this way of thinking for centuries and it has landed us in the same boat every time. Instead, we should look to greater cosmopolitan solutions that differ from our current ways of dealing with such events, and not be swept away in a wave of fear. Obasan reinforces this as it is an example of how this way of thinking has gotten us nowhere in the past; it is a forecast for the future, which, from reading the book is pretty gruesome and serious without collective action taken to change our ways.

In our ASTU class we have just finished Joe Sacco’s graphic novel on the Bosnian controlled area of Gorazde, cut off from the rest of the Bosnia by the Serb forces. We went through the book in class very quickly, but it is our last graphic novel that we are reading in ASTU and I found it interesting as it related to my last blog topic on the way Maus II and Persepolis differed in the way they portrayed Trauma. The author Joe Sacco, like Speigleman in Maus, is only an observer to the violence post conflict in Bosnia, and specifically Gorazde. He cannot speak directly to the experiences of the people, but as a cartoon journalist he is able to interview and portray through his graphics, what the people who did experience such horrible events saw. This situation leads to complex situations for both the reader and the artist, in the way that Sacco’s graphic novel portrays both his, and the Bosnian witnesses experiences of a global conflict.

Going into this book I had very little knowledge of the Serbian-Bosnian conflict of the 90’s which occured just a couple years before I was born. The graphic novel certainly shocked me and opened my eyes to the seriousness and international importance of such a small area. One frame of the book that stood out to me especially is in the chapter “15 Minutes”, where Sacco is describing the state of Gorazde’s education situation in war time.  Sacco shows Edin grading papers and tells us that even though he’d passed all his classes at university in Sarajevo, he had yet to declare his thesis and had “been 15 minutes from his degree for the past three and a half years.” (Sacco, 98). This frame shocks me as a university student myself. The idea of it takes me away from the safe environment that UBC grants us and put me in the shoes of a county, and a people, who for no reason other than who they were born to means they are in danger of being killed. Directly after this frame is the chapter “Riki part II”, which juxtaposes the Gorazdians awful situation, with their infatuation with the perfect nature of the west. The top frame on p. 99 shows Riki and Edin listening as Sacco’s words form pictures of America. By doing this, I think Sacco is showing the reader his complex situation as a journalist in Gorazde. This contradiction of the Gorazde situation with that of Sacco and the west (like we see in “Riki part 1”, “Silly Girls”, “The Blue Road”)  through Sacco’s dark but poignant graphics, helps people understand and question not only the historical and international ramifications of the Bosnian conflict, but also questions whose story that is to tell.

What is interesting about Sacco’s situation is that he does not write his articles but draws them. By doing this, as well as the content that he portrays, shows the personal narratives of memory and therefore the cultural memory of the Bosnian people. I have discussed in previous blog posts about the different lenses of graphic narrative when it comes to the depiction of trauma, and Sacco’s situation described as a lense seems very interesting to me. The idea of a journalistic lense differs from a personal narrative like in Persepolis, and also from a family connection and bias, in Speigleman’s Maus II. Sacco must balance his portrayal of the citizens personal narratives of trauma, with his own views and depictions of them through the graphic framework, all while surrounding the work with historical context to shed light on a conflict in the shadows. Therefore in his creation of his work Safe Area Gorazde, whose story is he telling? Is it his to tell? On page 126 in the chapter “Total War” Sacco points out that “Gorazde had been cut off from cameras. Its suffering was the sole property of those who had experienced it”. As a journalist and especially one who portrays his stories in graphic form, Sacco has a difficult task in showing the reader the atrocities these people experienced, pulled from his imagination as an artist. The historical and political aspect of the attacks and the conflict come through a lot, but are the personal stories of eye witnesses (such as the old man on p. 109)  that Sacco depicts his to show? A couple pages later on p. 130 Sacco describes how other journalists would arrive in the morning, get a couple shots and quotes and then leave in the afternoon. Is this a better way to tell the story of a conflict, or like Sacco should you share the personal stories of a culture with the whole world?

Because of the difficulty of Sacco’s lense as a journalist I wonder, how should the personal stories of these people be told? Sacco has no fear to portray the stories of violence through his realistic graphic form, but to what end? I suppose to open up the conversation from one stuck inside the boundaries of International Relations and large news companies like he describes on page 130, as well as to show the cultural memory of those who experienced it first-hand. This still does not answer the question of if their personal stories are his to tell. Many journalists are caught up in the historical aspect of a crisis and the debate on international intervention and portrayal of a conflict can go on for days. It is relatively impossible to answer the question of whether the Gorazdian people’s stories are Sacco’s to tell as that asks more significant questions about memory of a culture as well as personal stories. But, I think that Sacco’s narrative helps to show the people of Gorazde as what they are, real people with real stories of conflict and suffering. Sacco’s portrayal of these people through his western journalist lense, and graphic medium gives an international crisis a face by which people can relate and therefore makes it much more real, even if that face or that story is not Sacco’s to show.

In our ASTU class we finished reading and taking apart feminist scholar Hillary Chutes article on the graphic novel Persepolis, written by Marjane Satrapi. Her article discusses many aspects of Satrapi’s work, but her main argument surrounds the idea that the style of comics do something differently than that of text in the way they approach narrative. She argues that “complex visualizations in many graphic narrative works require a rethinking of the dominant tropes of unspeakability, invisibility and inaudibility that have tended to characterize recent trauma theory”. (Chute, 93) The sections of her article focus on the child’s eye view that her graphic narrative forces us into, the style of that graphic narrative and the way it conveys her view through lenses of memory. And finally the way the first person lense of memory (testimony) shows us the ordinary nature of violence in Iran through the arrangement and style of graphics. In my blog post this week I would like to discuss and compare the style of two graphic narratives of trauma, and how they both use lenses of memory to depict trauma in two separate, but meaningful ways based on chutes argument and my thoughts on both texts.

The second graphic narrative I will be talking about is Art Speigelman’s Maus series (specifically Maus II). When I moved into residence at UBC this year, I brought along a few of the books I own, and the ones that I thought would interest me, and I might like to read again. Among those I brought Maus II (not sure why I don’t have Maus) and after our summary and discussion of Chutes article in class I thought I would skim it to see what I could gather in regards to a second graphic narrative, and maybe apply chutes ideas to it. Not surprisingly I got engrossed in the book and realized that the two books, while seemingly visually and thematically similar are very different due to the different lenses of memory and therefore the stylistic components of the work, and how they convey trauma in two separate ways.

There is so much to talk about in relation to the two narratives, but the first thing that I noticed is that they are both drawn in only black and white. Chute points out that Satrapi decided to do this based on the normalcy of violence in Iran, and her thought that writing in colour reduces the realism of this violence and the power of the work. I find this in Maus as well, although the level of realism is contrary to the minimal, expressionist style in Persepolis, and is still effective. In fact at times the drawings can be quite realistic in the sense of portraying violence and harsh conditions. I wondered to myself why is this? Is minimal or realistic style better to convey trauma? My answer to the latter is that it depends, I believe it has to do with the lenses of memory at play for both authors. In class we discussed the idea of graphic narrative as a testimony. I think that in Satrapi’s work, as she experienced the trauma of the Iranian revolution first hand as a child, the minimalist expression of violence and her experience of that violence is powerful in the way that it forces the reader to imagine, and therefore understand her experience and the normalcy of violence in Iran. With Art Spiegelman’s work it is much harder to come to this conclusion.

Maus II deals mostly with Vladek (Auschwitz survivor) and his cartoonist son. The graphic novel jumps from their interactions post-Auschwitz, to Vladek’s stories to his son about his experience in Auschwitz. The style of art does not change between these two time frames, and neither does Vladek’s “out of tune” English. At the same time Speigelman’s visuals of his experience are very brutal when accompanied with Vladek’s voice, they portray shootings, visuals of German gas chambers, beatings, and starvation all encompassed in Speigelman’s genius metaphor of portraying certain ethnicities as different animals. The Jewish people are mice and the Germans cats. I could go on for a long time on the significance of such a metaphor on the work but I am concerned with the broad idea, why this metaphor? Why did he not draw them as people, wouldn’t this be more effective in portraying the trauma that Vladek and millions of other Jews and POW’s experienced? Again I bring this back to our ASTU discussion of Testimony. Spiegelman, in comparison to Satrapi does not have the same authority in his testimony. We as the reader are getting this information and are interpreting these visual descriptions third hand. Spiegelman in writing this is not afforded the ability to write (or draw) as if this was his testimony. He cannot display the visuals of his father’s experience in the way that Satrapi displays hers, through expressionistic minimalism. It is as if he is in the place of the reader if he were reading Satrapi’s Persepolis. Satrapi’s testimony and style of narrative gives rise to the reader’s imagination of her trauma and her experience. This is like how only through Vladek’s stories can he grasp the unimaginably brutal trauma that Vladek experienced. Because of this, he must draw only his imagination of the brutality that Auschwitz prisoners experienced. We are still faced with this question of why not draw people? I believe that the fact that it happened to his own father brings him closer to what it actually may have felt like. The metaphor of people as animals therefore serves two purposes. It puts the author further away from the 1^st hand experience that he is so close, and inherently attached to, by having an Auschwitz survivor as a father. This metaphor also serves the reader of the text by showing us the lenses of memory we must look through. The metaphor puts us in Spiegelman’s shoes, by trying to convey through the reality of what it must be like to be so close to a person who has experienced trauma firsthand what it must have actually been like to experience said trauma. In this way, Spiegelman’s use of lenses of memory, while not in the same style as Satrapi’s work, fit Spiegelman’s situation as an author and use the genre of graphic narrative as just as powerful of a tool as in Satrapi’s work in conveying the effect of trauma.

An example of this in Spiegelman’s work is in the panels that depict Vladek post-Auschwitz. We see how his experience of Auschwitz has shaped his reality. He will spend nothing if possible, save it for another day when it will be needed more. This lense of memory is particular to what Spiegelman’s graphic narrative is trying to show us, just as Satrapi’s child’s eye rendition and specific style show the reader the message she is trying to get across in a specific way. Both are valid as they convey different ways of portraying trauma and memory, through the medium of graphic narrative. If we relate this back to Chute’s argument for the purpose that graphic narrative serves, we see her point is proven in the comparison of the two graphic narratives and how they do something differently to re-work narrative. Different forms of graphic narratives and their style, lense, situation in history and the way they interact with the reader provides a personal, and adaptable, customizable way to share narratives so that they are powerful in their voice and broad in their scope. Something which is specific to the genre of graphic narratives, and which in some cases texts fail to do at such levels.

Welcome to my blog for ASTU! This is my first blog ever, so i might end up posting some stuff unrelated to ASTU if i feel the urge to write, enjoy!