When Revolutions Attack

In Persepolis, Marjane and her family are initially very optimistic about the revolution and the hope of deposing the Shah. But it becomes clear that the revolution deviates from the direction that these characters hope. The formation of the Islamic Republic and the leadership of the Ayatollah proves to creates a nation that is just as bad and in many cases worse than its predecessor.

This phenomenon is not exclusive to Iran. The revolutions and civil wars in Russia, Cuba, China, Iraq, Libya, Cambodia, and many other examples have all deposed oppressive or unpopular governments and replaced them with regimes that were/are just as destructive. The population is these countries however seem to be too preoccupied with leaving their old governments that they don't usually realize the danger they are entering by going to these new regimes. The American Revolution could've been hijacked in much the same way. But it's also strange that despite the human rights violations (putting it lightly) in these countries, there has still been support from the people. Today, many people consider Josef Stalin to be the best leader in Russian history despite his tendency to kill and imprison millions of people. This is most likely due to the fear imposed on the opposition and the waves of crackdowns.

Persepolis illustrates a child's view of this national transformation. Marjane experiences the Revolutionary Guards and the censorship and shows how people lived during this period. Her parents, opponents of the Islamic Republic, understand what is going on much more than she does and her perceptions of her parents give her an example of how to think and explains her growth throughout the story.

This article covers the Iranian reaction to Egypt's revolution. The people give credit to Iran itself and it discusses that after 32 years, the Islamic Revolution still has a huge role in Iran's identity and psyche. The article also discusses the absence of opposition groups and foreign diplomats from the celebration.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/egypt/110211/iran-egypt-mubarak-ahmadinejad-islamic-revolution

Justice in a Democracy

Ariel Dorfman wrote in the afterword about Chile's transition from fascism into democracy and how this influenced him greatly while writing Death and The Maiden, mainly in the creation of the character of Geraldo. Proper justice and the search for the truth are main themes of the play and while Paulina is convinced that Roberto is the doctor that was responsible for her trauma and torture, Geraldo is conflicted by helping his wife achieve justice and his values of the proper way to do it.

America has one of the fairest ideals in law: the concept of making the prosecution prove to a jury that the accused is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Paulina is clearly damaged emotionally and this cripples the reliablity of her accusation of Roberto. She makes it clear that she wants to try Roberto and prove him guilty but only on her own twisted terms. This is the main conflict and Geraldo is caught in between Paulina's weak evidence and Roberto's pleas for release.

For further information of legal concepts mentioned, this article explains it much more clearly.

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Beyond+a+Reasonable+Doubt

State Religion

In The Painted Bird, the boy's time with the Soviet soldiers greatly changes him. The contact with people that finally treat him well allows him to trust them and they become his mentors. This is the first time such a relationship is seen in the book and they basically indoctrinate him with Communist ideals. The abandonment of conventional religion is ironic considering that the political ideology shown is equally based on faith. Stalin takes on a god-like position and Communism is shown to take the place of religion. That replacement is now political, not theological.

The boy's indoctrination is very important to his development as this is the first time he is treated as an equal. The ideology is no doubt void of an individual's free will or liberties but the boy has had no luck with that anyway so he takes no notice. There is the promise of power and this attracts the boy since he has been powerless for so long. His devotion to religion and magic in the past was rooted in the desire to advance himself or to hurt others that hurt him. It didn't stem from faith or sincerity at all.

This past newspaper article details the harsh indoctrination of children in the USSR. The boy was "educated" in a rather mild form compared to many children growing up in this era and subsequent decades.

Unseen, Unheard

Despite the atrocities of war in Sudan and other African countries, the coverage of these events are drastically downplayed on the world stage. In the decades before the 21st century and up to the present Africa has had the highest death rate due to conflict and the highest number of displaced people. Sudan is an example of unimaginable horror and brutality that is lacking the attention that such events should command. Conflict is running throughout the continent, in Sudan, Uganda, Cote d'Ivoire, and Congo. These problems are mainly internal and exacerbated by political corruption and ethnic and tribal tensions but the root causes of these problems are in the long history of colonial imperialism in Africa by European powers.

They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky and similar literature serves to provide the world with some sort of account of the problems people face everyday in these conflicts. In class, we discussed the validity of certain aspects of the book such as exact quotes and other literary inconsistencies but that shouldn't take away from the social significance that books like this can have on the public.

http://www.globalissues.org/article/84/conflicts-in-africa-introduction

Different Than the Rest

The Road to Lost Innocence is different than most of the books we have read for many reasons. In other blog posts, people have pointed out that it is non-fiction and that it's from a woman's point of view. However, I think the most important difference than the other works in the course so far is the quality and quantity of violence in the book that isn't in the context of war. Granted war was a huge factor that led to environment that exists in the book but the violence isn't in combat or battle. Paul had to kill someone but that was in a desperate attempt to stay alive. Kien cleans up bodies and other grotesque miscellaneous body parts but that was from a war zone. Somaly, however, is a civilian that is repeatedly beaten and raped in peacetime.

The life of a prostitute is a life of pain and suffering and the book exposes this in the same fashion that prior books in the course exposes the lives of soldiers. They have certain things in common. Both resort to addiction and abuse, suffer physical, mental, and emotional damage and are misunderstood by a portion of society. They are also both the oldest jobs in history. However, the soldier seems to be more inclined to have a sense of duty while the prostitute is held against her will by either abductors and pimps or by her own economic limitations. This is the main difference that sets this book apart.

The following link shows research and statistics that show the problems prostitutes face. http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/mhvhealt.htm

Unable to Find One's Self

A theme shown in "Luxurious Hearses" was the struggle to find and maintain an identity. Jubril is stuck between worlds in the sense of his religious and geo-social affiliations. He was baptized a Catholic and later became a Muslim. He has family in the north and south. His brother became a born-again Christian and was ostracized and killed by his community. This is not an easy way to grow up and leads to his confusion on the bus. Jubril sees himself as a Muslim from the north but acknowledges his dual-identity in Nigeria. It is unfair for the entire bus to murder him because of such an arbitrary label and the ridiculous paradigm of the country is exposed by his death.

The conflict between the way you see yourself and the way the world sees you is apparent in Jubril. He is scared more than anything and this fear is crippling in trying to find a safe label to travel with. There are too many physical traits that give away his Muslim identity (cut-off hand and accent) so he must exaggerate his Christian ones (his baptism and family). But the traits that are more obvious eventually give him away because the crowd is angry and don't believe his more abstract Christian aspects. Jubril is confused and afraid for most of the story and his confusion is understandable because he tries to leave a part of him behind and embrace a new part but then go back to the part he left behind. This identity crisis must've been unpleasant and disillusioning. The society in which he lived, however, found no sympathy.

Erik Erikson detailed the theory of identity development which can be found in this link:

http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/identitycrisis.htm

The Sorrow of Life

In class, many people expressed that they did not feel bad for Kien and some said that they didn't even like him as a character. Later I thought that maybe this impression is purposeful by the writer. The novel is based on a manuscript that is found by an unknown narrator and the story is written after the fact by Kien himself. Kein is a veteran that has had many long years to think about his life and see all of the mistakes he has made. His writing is overcome with guilt and regret. The story has a focus on war and in the end war is what tore Kien and Phuong apart but it was with the mistakes that Kien made as well. He has been traumatized by war and his guilt has been amplified by his experience. The reader hates Kien because Kien hates himself because of all the opportunities he sees that he lost. Kien drinks, smokes, and does other self-destructive behavior. The narrator at the end describes,

"However, the sorrows of war had been much heavier for this author than they had been for me. His sorrows prevented him from relaxing by continually enticing him back into his past."

Kien was unable to escape his past and his loss from the war. He probably wrote for catharsis since his manuscript was "burned", "moth-eaten", and pages "withheld by the author" along with the fact that the had been no effort by Kien to keep any kind of chronological order. This story may have been Kien's dying wish, his purpose given to himself. He may have just wanted to relive something or see where he went wrong just to rid himself of his guilt. Near the end of the book, after Kien gets the letter from a fellow soldier, he writes,

"There would be a miracle, he had written. A miracle that would allow people to emerge unchanged by the war... His Phuong would remain young forever."

This is all Kien really wants. But as he writes, he realizes that he can't achieve this "miracle" and degenerates into self-hatred. That's where the reader doesn't like Kien. Guilt makes him write about himself in such a self-deprecating fashion. He feels guilty about surviving the war, not sacrificing himself to save others, and most of all he feels guilty that he couldn't save Phuong time and time again.

This article details guilt and it's genesis. Kien can easily be diagnosed with PTSD and his guilt can be seen to have roots in the trauma he experienced.

The Road to Rwanda

On the Holocaust, Ian Kershaw famously said that, "the road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference." The genocide in Rwanda was perpetrated without shame and done using mass communications. There was no doubt to the world that ethnic cleansing was happening. However, the worst part was that those that could have easily intervened did not. The UN had peacekeeping troops deployed in Rwanda as were troops from multiple countries. They left when the conflict started however, leaving the genocide to occur without interference from foreign powers. The UN even avoided using the term "genocide" for the period of killing, one of which had the rate unrivaled in modern history. It was the inter-tribal hatred that started the killing but it was the blind eye of the world that allowed it to continue."Never Again" seems like a sick joke in this modern era. From the Balkans to Kashmir and South Asia to the Sudan, genocide has been committed and could have been prevented by the most powerful nations in the world. These mass killing can't be truly prevented but they can be halted before they reach the disgusting levels of carnage seen in Rwanda. You don't get to be a superpower and then claim you don't have it's responsibilities. Peoples in other nations can pressure action by their governments. It's a democratic responsibility as a citizen. That's what I took away from this reading. There will always be heinous crimes in the world but maybe there can be less of them.

This BBC article has most of the details I used in my post.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/3577575.stm

Trying to Understand

"The Last Days of Muhammad Atta" is extraordinarily speculative. While some details can be confirmed like what Atta's will stated and his information from al-Qaeda because they were recovered in his lost bag at Logan.

(http://web.archive.org/web/20080526011027/http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uslugg274705186apr17,0,6096142.story?coll=ny-nationalnews-print)

This makes the aspects of the story that are taken with artistic liberty more convincingly realistic. Thoughts and sensations experienced are obviously fabricated but this does something very important. They create a person that can be examined and an attempt to understand can be made by people in modern Western society. Readers can see the world that made these men monsters through the eyes of Atta. On the advice of Adichie, one can't start with the story of the Middle East with the 19 hijackers and 9/11 but instead consider how it got this way. The story paints a picture of a religious extremist that isn't religious but feels a need for something. A sort of desperation is seen in Atta and can be seen in many young terrorists. Does a person's environment and upbringing excuse these people? No. But hopefully we can see what it is that brought them to do it.

"Muhammad Atta was not religious; he was not even especially political. He had allied himself with the militants because jihad was, by many magnitudes, the most charismatic idea of his generation. To unite ferocity and rectitude in a single word: nothing could compete with that." Amis pg 3

The era of jihad is coming to a close in the midst of the Arab Spring but while some problems may be solved in this transition, other problems will definitely arise. Atta's story can be taken a cautionary tale that detail the recipe to create a generation of militants.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/opinion/04friedman.html?ref=thomaslfriedman)

The constant theme of "Last Days" is looking into the mind of someone that the world hates. Atta destroyed the North Tower on 9/11, killing thousands of people. His story is an important one to tell because it affects so many people, directly and indirectly. It also examines the creation of a monster and what can really drive people commit the worst atrocities.

Worse Than Death

"Wearily I stand up and look out the window. Then I take one of the books, intending to read, and turn over the leaves. But I put it away and take out another. There are passages in it the have been marked. I look, turn over the pages, take up fresh books. Already they are piled up beside me. Speedily more join the heap, paper, magazines, letters. I stand there dumb. As before a judge. Dejected. Words, Words, Words - they do not reach me. Slowly I place the books back in the shelves. Nevermore. Quietly, I go out of the room." (pg. 173)

A major theme of All Quiet On The Western Front is war's ability to destroy not only lives but what life is left of the ones who survive. War kills and maims but it also does something much more sinister. In the excerpt above, Paul comes home on leave and realizes what his experience on the front has really done to him. He loved reading before he became a soldier and now he tries to rekindle that pre-war interest and yet finds an emptiness. The front has changed the way he sees the world. Paul finds that he cannot go back to the life he had and that tears him up inside. His family and community seems different and there is a quality of disorientation when he returns to his old life. The darkest aspect of war is that it is waged by older generations and fought by the younger ones. The reason why Paul feels like the life he had is gone is because it is the only one he knew as he was so young. It is a horrific cruelty of war and its advocates to send the youth to fight and die, but it is even worse to watch them come back with invisible scars and not be able to find where their lives went.

The following link describes the contrast of emotional damage in younger veterans to older ones.

http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/news/20060206/war-rough-young-soldiers