In most of my recent blog posts, I have discussed to dichotomy that Judith Butler introduces in her book Frames of War. This dichotomy or concept is labeled as “us vs. them”, and sets out to try to simply explain the divide in empathy between American imperialistic culture and the “other”. This concept has really left me reflecting on society, propaganda, and the role of the government the past couple weeks. It’s difficult for me to understand that people can be so “anti” one type of person that they are able to see another human’s life as “ungrievable”. This left me with a hunger for understanding morals and human nature, which was partially satisfied when my friend introduced me to the book The Righteous Mind, by Jonathon Haidt. Jonathon Haidt is a psychologist who studied morals—the intuition around personal morals and the reasoning that follow the moral intuition. He did many studied around the globe examining the moral tendencies of different cultures trying to understand, “Why good people are divided by politics and religion”.

To get the reader to understand the mind and moral processing he uses a simple metaphor:

“The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.”

-Jonathon Haidt

This metaphor is proven to be true throughout the book as he shows study after study of his where intuition from the elephant come first, and the rider just acts as a Public Relations for the elephant, to justify to others and yourself why you feel the way you do. For example he asks many people from different demographics the same morally confusing questions that contain shocking situations. Haidt uses the data from the answers/ responses from his surveys to show the how strong our morals are, or in other words “our elephant”. Haidt discusses in great deal the differences in morals between individualistic and sociocentric cultures and even the differences in morality between classes in individualistic societies.

There is an abundance of new knowledge that comes from this book, but I will only discuss the extremely pertinent points. Haidt puts to rest a lot of the questions I had about the humanity of those who cannot empathize with others, as according to him, “Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide” (152). He observes that there are things such as “moral matrices” that bind cultures together, and though these matrices are beneficial to the communal well being of a society, they can blind us to understanding that there are other moral matrices out there as well. For example growing up in a Western individualistic society that is very focused on autonomy can cause us to “detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong”. This explains a bit about America always trying to help those that are different from them when maybe they don’t really need any help.

Haidt’s expertly proven theories about morals and intuitions have opened my mind to the reasoning around disagreements, war, and individual/societal differences. Though Haidt adds to Judith Butler’s need for “shared vulnerability” and gives light the troublesome “us vs. them” dichotomy, it does not excuse the actions of those who do not strive to empathize with those of another moral code. After reading these works by two very intriguing scholars, I have begun to wonder what process we go through to develop our morals and how strong of an influence they have on the choices they make in our daily life.

Works Cited

Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon, 2012. Print.

At the beginning of the term in my ASTU class, we read the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathon Foer. This book follows a young boys journey through dealing with his father’s death in the incident of the September 11^th terrorist attacks. Throughout this book we are shown how young Oskar Schell copes with the frequently incomprehensible feelings brought on by what I hypothesized as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In Oskar’s narrative chapters when he becomes depressed or has feelings of sadness or guilt, Oskar’s abstract and childish mind interprets/ labels this state of mind as having “heavy boots”.

“I didn’t understand why I needed help, because it seemed to me that you should wear heavy boots when your dad dies, and if you aren’t wearing heavy boots, then you need help” (Foer 200).

This idea of children viewing this kind of emotion as a physical thing—making it hard for you to move (on) and weighing you down, restraining you from running and jumping as children tend to do—though abstract is an amazing representation of these hard to understand emotions. Does Oskar truly understand the feelings he is having and is just choosing to label them as that? Is his unconscious mind using this term to help him process these feelings and understand them in a less threatening way? This thought led me to generalize Oskar’s abstract coping mechanisms to the whole population of adolescents’. How do other children of his age group cope with their depressive feelings? Do they see them as physically as Oskar? According to Jean Piaget, a famous psychologist, children around Oskar’s age (9) have not yet learned to grasp the idea of abstract thinking and instead tend to approach unfamiliar situations or feelings by assimilating them into existing familiar schemas that they understand. He explains this as the “concrete operations stage” of development that occurs to normally developing children between the ages of 7-11. During this stage, children become logical, can solve problems and have a pretty stable grasp on reality. Children in this stage of development, though logical, seem to lack the skill of abstract thinking, and don’t begin to understand this complex action until ages 11-adulthood when they are in Piaget’s “formal operations stage” of development. Can we explain Oskar’s use of “heavy boots” as due to a stage in children’s cognitive development, or is it dependent on more? Does the way adolescent’s cope and interpret feelings also depend on the parenting style and frame that you were raised around?

All this examination of the way a fictional character and adolescents cope and interpret trauma lead me to wonder how differently we as individuals label and cope with feelings, and to be introspective, how my personal narrative frame in which I was raised impacts the way I deal with feelings and everyday events.

 Works Cited

Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Boston, Mass.: Mariner, 2005. Print.

Lindsay, D. Stephen, and Delroy L. Paulhus. Psychology: The Adaptive Mind. 3rd Canadian ed. Toronto: Thomson Nelson, 2008. Print.

The past couple weeks my ASTU class has looked at several intriguing pieces of writing. Each has made me question even further the principle of trauma, morality and national/individual superiority. In the scholarly article, “Regarding the Pain of Self and Other”, Ilka Saal argues the term “trauma transfer”, which encourages the transferring of ones trauma, to another’s trauma to find similarities and hope in the relatability of such. While this is helpful in the sense of providing encouragement for groups of people dealing with loss in the context of support groups, the act of simply transferring ones trauma creates a series of problems.

Transferring or comparing two different traumas can desensitize the traumas, putting more weight and power on one, taking away from the importance of the other.

So then does that lead us to believe one person’s or our pain is greater than another’s? Simply transferring trauma is far to literal of a solution when dealing with the complex and unique spectrum in which each person experiences physical and mental pain. One cannot simply compare two traumatic situations and expect a helpful release from that. Instead I argue the use of acknowledging our, “shared vulnerability”. Judith Butler introduces this term in her book Frames of War. This entails the act of understanding not the physical and surface characteristics of ones trauma, but instead identifying with the feelings that have harbored in the person because of it. I reason that to successfully emphasize with another’s trauma, we must altogether forget about any physical components of the situation and furthermore simply embrace the feelings that this incident has invoked.

Following the theme of emphasizing trauma and recognizing a shared vulnerability, Butler shows us a real life example of this deficit in the world. Butler asks what superiority and responsibility the US has in enforcing their system of “democracy” on other countries that they believe need change? We see ourselves as heroes and we are “giving voices to the voiceless”, but instead of doing just that we are putting ourselves on our pedestal and perpetuating the gap of inequalities between them and us, moving further away for recognizing the vulnerability that we as humans all inevitably share. In regards to the recently published book based on Guantanamo Bay containing compilations of prisoner’s poetry, we must wonder how we can treat those who we see as “evil” with torturous punishments but still claim our spot as “protectors of the peace”. By committing these torturous acts as “superior Americans” does that not make us as equally immoral as the prisoners? In this case, we are letting go of the chance to acknowledge a shared humanity between us and the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay, by labeling them as inhuman.

Parallel to this idea of the United States granting themselves a higher power to call the shots and judge all others who are not practicing the same traditions as us, who are we as individuals to believe we are anymore than another? Who are we to transfer our trauma to another’s and say that ours is more painful? The feelings we have and the reality we see is different than any others on the planet. Even when viewing the same event, we will all perceive it differently. Though this may seem lonely and incredibly isolating, we should instead see this as a gift. We ultimately control our lives. We are in charge of what we perceive and our affect from that—in a religious context, we are the gods of our personal worlds, and only our unique individual worlds. How can we step out of our own jurisdiction and govern over another’s experience and feelings?

In my ASTU class at the University of British Columbia, we began second term by examining the critically acclaimed book entitled, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This is a fictional novel written by Jonathan Foer that follows a young boy named Oskar Schell through his journey of dealing with his father’s traumatic death in the incident of 9/11. Oskar is a quirky boy and though it is not frankly stated, he encompasses many of the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Oskar, like many other people that experience PTSD, has problems sleeping and avoids things that remind him of the traumatic event—public transit, elevators, and tall buildings. He becomes panicky when faced with these things as well as having an increased irritability towards his mother, who he fails to see is suffering just as much as him.

I come from a family where my parents both worked in mental health professions, so reading a novel where the main character hints at having a mental illness intrigued me. I began researching PTSD relating to the September 11^th attacks and found a New York Times article entitled, “10 Years and a Diagnosis Later, 9/11 Demons Haunt Thousands” which brings attention to the mass disastrous mental health effects of 9/11.

This article touches on several stories of people suffering from PTSD caused by 9/11. Shockingly enough, “the city’s health department has estimated that 61,000 of the 409,000 in the disaster area experienced ‘probable’ PTSD within six years of 9/11” (Hartocollis). In addition to that appalling amount of people, the article also states how each anniversary of September 11^th there is an increase in patients needing treatment for PTSD. Because of this event, Congress passed a Health and Compensation Act called the Zadroga Act, which provided $4.3 billion to treat people with 9/11 related illnesses.

One of the tortured tales in this article had me captivated. Earl Holland, a 48-year-old paramedic supervisor who responded promptly to the disaster after the towers collapsed has a very haunting story and severe PTSD. He is still unable to visit the memorial and has kept the list of the missing. For him, the Zadroga Act covers his therapy costs, but for many others treatment is not as easy. Though this act provided billions of dollars to treat the survivors of September 11^th, no money is used to help the family members and bystanders who had been seriously damaged from the disturbing event. “Ultimately, federal financing for PTSD treatment was limited to firefighters, police officers, employees of the New York City medical examiner’s office who handled body parts, and other rescue, recovery, cleanup and support workers at ground zero” (Hartocollis). The terrorist attack of September 11^th is only one of the many examples in which those whom are burdened by mental illness are not being cared for, as they need to be.

One of the victim testimonies in this article states that the reason “the trauma had been so hard to shake was that it ripped at the most ordinary fabric of daily life” (Hartocollis). This made me think about the seemingly strange mannerisms and habits Oskar adopts after his fathers death, such as; shaking the tambourine everywhere he goes, becoming obsessive over inventions and him referring to himself as having “heavy boots” when feeling sadness and or guilt. Oskar is trying to cope with his now shattered life. Though Oskar and some of his family members show signs of mental illness caused by the event, they would be one of the families that would not receive money for treatment. This book not only shows us the lack of aid people with mental disorders face but also how common dealing with a mental illness can be. It’s not about being crazy, or US vs. THEM (mentally ill vs. stable), it is about normal human beings dealing with the roller coaster ride of life in different and unique ways.

Works Cited

Hartocollis, Anemona. “10 Years and a Diagnosis Later, 9/11 Demons Haunt Thousands.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 9 Aug. 2011. Web. 13 Jan. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/nyregion/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-from-911still-haunts.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>.

On November 18^th, my Art Studies class at UBC visited the Rare Books Archives in one of the libraries on campus, in an attempt to get a deeper understanding of a book we read and are now analyzing. The book, Obasan by Joy Kagawa, though classified as a fiction novel, is based off of the real-life events that the Japanese Canadians experienced during World War II. Obasan follows Naomi Nakane, a Japanese Canadian living in Vancouver in 1972, but frequently jumps to the past to intertwine events from the war, in relation to the affect they had on Naomi’s family.

During this trip to the Rare Books Archive, I found myself engulfed in the treasured rough drafts of Obasan. In these first drafts, I found interesting metaphors that were not included in the book. Kagawa refers to Snow White in her beginning writings. In each mention of this Disney princess, Kagawa paints the picture of her being tormented and running through forests.

“Snow white running through the forest, beautiful and pursued, the forest branches swaying seductively, their leaves falling down to surround her flight.”

“A child is running through a think forest. Snow white runs and runs and terror surrounds her. The theatre is dark as the forest.”

-Joy Kagawa

Though I found these quotes extremely intriguing but they seemed out of place, as there are no other references to Snow White in the rest of the novel. I question if Joy Kagawa used Snow White as a representation of Naomi Nakane maneuvering through the disturbing memories that overwhelm her family history. As I continued my exploration through these rare documents, I came across a newspaper clipping from the Citizens Forum, of an article written by Joy Kagawa entitled, “Divorce Lawyers: a Profit From War at a Safe Distance”. After reading the first couple sentences I was enthusiastic at the reoccurrence of the Disney princess theme. To open the article, Kagawa writes, “Much of society today is still wandering in the after glow of the Cinderella Story. As children, we were almost universally launched on the rocket of the romantic myth with the expectation that we would land in a Happily Ever After world of marriage” (Kagawa). She then goes on to discuss how this childhood expectation proves to be fictitious throughout the inevitable struggles of life. This idea of the falsification that Disney creates for children, especially young women intrigued me to do more research on the subject as I have noticed this phenomenon in my life as well.

As I delved into more research on the gender roles reciprocated in Disney movies, I found an intriguing article by scholar Nicole Sawyer that discusses the effect of Disney movies on young children. When we are children, we are at our most prone to acquisition and our brains have the most plasticity. We are easily influenced and learn at a rapid rate. This is extremely helpful as we are able to acquire rules, morals, appropriate behavior and language quickly. The downside to this developmental stage is that our environment heavily influences us, and sometimes the things we learn from observation prove to be somewhat permanent. Children at a young age are shown movies by Walt Disney, though very entertaining and contain an abundance of positive morals; these movies depict the female role in a very negative light. “Walt Disney has set forth standards for girls on how to grow up into proper women in order to find their prince. It is assumed from the films that women are supposed to be beautiful, acquiescent, skinny, and perform all the duties of a housewife. They do not hold jobs of their own and will not disobey direct orders” (Sawyer 3). Sawyer also shows how Disney movies show an unrealistic, over exaggerated view of love, this “Happily Ever After” per se. “The young romance helps fulfill the ideal of a ―Happily Ever After‖ life that includes the princess and her prince, and the life that they are about to embark on together” (Sawyer 7). Though I strongly support Sawyer about unfair female norms and Kagawa’s unrealistic happiness shown by Disney, I am not claiming that Disney is consciously misogynistic in any way. I was raised on Disney movies, and played my part in the princess fantasies most girls participate in, which is more than acceptable. I am not asking for a boycott of Disney. I, like many other scholars, would just like to bring to light the unequal and unrealistic ideals presented by this production company. These overdramatized ideas of gender roles and love, though blissful and dreamy, are not necessarily true in today’s society and should not be looked at as reality.

Though Joy Kagawa doesn’t necessarily mention the feminine outlook on Disney movies that Nicole Sawyer so obviously outlines, the point she brings up is congruent. Both scholars mention how much of the world is focused on this Happily Ever After Ideal that fairytales and Disney represents. When Kagawa uses the metaphor of Snow White in her rough drafts for Obasan, she is in a way questioning the surreal happiness of Disney movies by bringing them into a realistic light. She does this by not only depicting a well-known princess as distraught and being terrorized by the environment, but by in a sense, relating Naomi to Snow White and showing her being tortured by the disgusting events of discrimination during WWII.

Works Cited

Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Toronto: Penguin Books, 1981. Print.

Sawyer, Nicole. “Feminist Outlooks at Disney Princesses.” James Madison University. N.p.. Web. 11 Dec 2012

Many people see graphic narrative simply as a form of entertainment; unfit to be analyzed by students at a world-renowned school like the University of British Columbia. This uneducated assumption would be just that, an uneducated assumption. Graphic narratives can aid in a scholars understanding of events as they provide a deeper meaning that requires intellectuals to think deeply and find meaning in symbols and the art, rather than just blatantly looking to the syntax in written novels to understand the deeper meaning.

After reading the graphic narrative, Persepolis, in UBC’s first year ASTU class, we went on to analyze an article by scholarly writer, Hillary Chute, which examines the effectiveness of graphic narratives in relation to retelling history and explaining trauma.

Chute makes her position clear by the first couple paragraphs of her article, “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis”, that she passionately supports the use of graphic narratives in regards to retelling events. In the second key paragraph of her literary piece, she specifically focuses on the simplistic style of art utilized by Marjane Satrapi. She describes the minimalist and childlike artwork throughout Persepolis as “[A] sophisticated, and historically cognizant, means of doing the work of seeing” (Chute 99). Here, Chute recognizes the complex meaning embedded in minimalistic artwork and how less detail can bring about a deeper understanding of events that cannot adequately be represented by language alone.

This idea of minimalist artwork has been incredibly influential throughout art history. It became an outlet to reflect on societal culture with an ironic twist in the late 1950’s when “Pop Art” or “Dada” became well known throughout America and Europe. This seemingly simple art was ridden with deeper meanings, and in most cases was a rebellious style of art that was used as a way of passively protesting laws or societal norms. This use of art as rebellion reflects the deeper meaning throughout Persepolis as the book is centered around the peoples rebellion of the social/religious norms and laws in Iran at the time.

Keith Haring (1958-1990), a modern artist and activist who started out with graffiti but became well known for his murals, has a similar style of art to the artwork in Persepolis. Though Keith Haring did not consistently use the strict black and white palette that is used by Marjane Satrapi in her graphic narrative, he utilizes simplistic figures and objects to portray a greater and more complex meaning, in his case usually to spread awareness about HIV/AIDS. In a biography of Haring by the A&E Television Networks, his art is described as, “deceptively simple” with “deeper themes of love, death, war and social harmony”. This is extremely similar to the opinion Chute has towards Satrapi’s basic art in Persepolis, “The visual emptiness…shows not the scarcity of memory, but rather its thickness, its depth;” (Chute 98).

Other than the simple lines and generally black and white color used in both Satrapi’s and Haring’s art work, they also share a stylistic trend of portraying masses as all identical and similar. This shows how they both see society as a collective group rather than individuals. In Persepolis, Marjane draws the masses as undistinguishable because, in a sense she is showing them as a united front for rebellion, creating a visual representation of the power in masses of people. Similarly, Keith Haring’s art portrays the crowds as identical as a way of calling out to society to make a change together, to show how unified we can be, and how we are all similar and equal.

Works Cited

Chute, Hillary. “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 36.1 & 2 (2008). Print.

In the Coordinated Arts Program stream, “Global Citizen”, our English class analyzes different pieces of literature and finds meaning in texts. We recently examined an article by the educational scholar Farhat Shahzad that introduced the term, “Interpretive Communities” and the effect these communities have on our perspectives. Shahzad states that these interpretive communities such as family, education, religion and culture affect the way we perceive events. Since we analyzed this text, I have been noticing the influence of these communities when reading or listening to a retelling of events.

In my English class with Dr. Luger, we have jumped into the quirky graphic memoire by Iranian author, Marjane Satrapi, titled Persepolis. After reading just the first couple chapters, I began to notice the strong influence that interpretive communities have on the main character, Marji.

In the first part of the book you can locate the interpretive communities that Marji responds to. Culture, religion, family, and education stand out and make their appearance known as influential. Religion and culture go hand in hand in the sense that they have a bi-directional relationship, mainly in the first couple chapters. Not only does Marji correspond with her image of God very frequently throughout the novel, but she dreams of being a prophet when she grows up. Because of the large role religion plays in her life, she sees most things through the lenses of prophet-like ideals. Later this dream deteriorates, as the culture surrounding her begins to frown upon her somewhat “absurd” future goals. The culture that engulfs her in Iran negatively affects her ideas of religion throughout the graphic memoire, and Marji begins to set new goals for herself through the social lens of what is “culturally appropriate”, and at that time its patriotism.

Another powerful interpretive community you can recognize throughout Satrapi’s graphic narrative is the ever-present family and educational community. Throughout Persepolis, Marji gets many different outlooks on the events in Iran thrust upon her. Her parents, who are against the king and both demonstrate regularly, influence the way she sees the war and government. While her parents may feel one way, her teachers and school claim to support the king and teach that loyalty to the government is good and necessary. As the story goes on, there are many places where Marji has conflicted feelings between believing books and the educational system, while remaining loyal to her families beliefs and ideals.

Though I state that all of these influences are as Shahzad writes, “Interpretive Communities”, as I read the novel and look at it from a Sociological lens as well, I can see these communities as also being social influences. I say this because Marjane Satrapi writes Marji to be very consciously aware of these different influential factors in her life and is constantly grappling with which one she should believe and trust. Are social influences and interpretive communities one in the same? Or can we make a clear distinction between them?

Sabine Ciechanowski

September 18, 2014

ASTU-Luger

In the article, The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning by Farhat Shahzad, different ways of remembering events are discussed. It appropriately states the idea that there are social influences on our perception and memory of these events. According to Shahzad, a community such as family plays an incredibly important role when one is recalling events or understanding meaning in moments.

In most cases we tend to unconsciously base our opinions and ways to approach situations through the metaphorical eyes of our families beliefs and ideals. Not only is ones family (mainly parents or guardians) seen as an authoritarian role in our lives, but compared to the other influential communities Shahzad mentions, one generally has a strong emotional attachment to family, which in my opinion makes them the strongest influence when recalling memories or interpreting historical events.

This theory, directly relates to some of the material I am learning about in my Family Context of Human Development class. In my custom FMST 210 textbook, it acknowledges the three main philosophical roots that relate to human development. The first is, Original Sin (Christianity), which states that all humans are born selfish and stubborn, and can only seek redemption by leading a disciplined and law-abiding life. In this regard, parents following this philosophical root tend to facilitate their child’s struggle to resist immoral acts by correcting their “evil” inborn tendencies. The second philosophical root is, The Blank Slate by the English philosopher John Locke that says children are born a blank slate, and parents can mold them into whatever they want them to be. The third philosophical root is referred to as, Innate Goodness, by the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This third root claims that all humans are naturally good and seek out experiences that help them realize their full potential. Parents following this approach believe that children need only nurturing and protection to help them grow.

These roots in relation to the article by Farhat Shahzad made me think about how these philosophical developmental approaches can effect how people witness events or recall memories. How does the way YOU were raised effect the significance or meaning you see in well-known events throughout history?