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.