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