What is it about the writer's identity?

Re: "The World has a Mobile Size: My Canadian Passport is twice as Big"
by Kaziwa Salih
  

Kaziwa Salih raises some interesting notions about self- identity and how writing is part of the social web, whether it be the local or global community. Salih could have found examples in the theology of self-identity in work by Cooley and Nietzsche.

Cooley discusses a theory of “the looking glass,” which states that a person’s self grows out of society’s interpersonal interactions and the perceptions of others. It includes how as an individual one might appear to others, then imagining the judgement that people will place on that appearance, therefore creating a self-identity through the judgement of others.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, claimed that the individual crafts their own identity through self-realization and does so without relying on anything transcending that life—such as God or a soul.  

Salih's article expresses the strain of being an Kurdish in1991 in Iraq during the horrible dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Salih discusses how she went through a process of finding her identity by including herself along with those who led the uprising that deposed Hussein .  

In 10 years after the Fall of Saddam,JJ Gould quotes:

 “…Barham Salih, the former prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan's regional government and a former deputy prime minister of Iraq's federal government. "Iraq, today, 10 years on from the war, from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, is not what the Iraqi people hoped for and expected. We hoped for an inclusive democracy, an Iraq that is at peace with itself and at peace with its neighbors," Salih said. "To be blunt, we are far from that."

"But," he added, "it's important to understand where we started from. ... Literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were sent to mass graves. Ten years on from the demise of Saddam Hussein, we're still discovering mass graves across Iraq. And Iraqis are better off without Saddam Hussein…”

I think Kaziwa Salih would agree with the former Iraqi prime minister, considering her father that was often arrested on unknown charges that were based on his being Kurdish. She tells us how alarming it was realize the marks on his body that she had at one time dismissed, were vidence of torture.

Under Hussein’s reign, she had to give up music and a sense of identity with her Kurdish nationality. The identity of a writer is meaningful, especially when in publishing one's novels, and not only due to the decrease in sales because of having to place the title under multiple pseudonyms.

Examples of a struggle for identity dog well-known authors as well as the lesser knowns. For instance, JK Rowling is known for having to publish under a pen name. Or for another example The Help is about a very sensitive subject in the United States. In both cases there’s the element of struggle that is seen through reception of both texts.

When it comes down to it, it no longer matters about having your name written in the corner of the cover. As many of the not-well-known Kurdish writers know, it is about the words that you have torn from the very pit of your existence and let splatter against the pale pages to bleed as they may.

Review: El Jones' "Live From the Afrikan Resistance!"

El Jones explodes into the scene of written poetry with her first book, Live From the Afrikan Resistance! (Roseway, 2014), with passion, intelligence, and scorching honesty. Working from past to present, Jones’ book portrays her constant drive to reinforce the connection she sees between poetry and social justice, evoking the activist poetry of Ntozake Shange and Milton Acorn. Poems like “Mandela” and “Grandmother Zilla” pay homage to the struggles of the past and honour those who came before her; poems like “It Can Be Done” demonstrate how those struggles persist into the present and urge readers to continue the work.

In “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World”, Stephen Slemon explains how “resistance itself is […] never purely resistance, never simply there in the text or the interpretive community, but is always necessarily complicit in the apparatus it seeks to transgress”. Jones’ poems show how one writes successful resistance poetry; as she navigates within societal apparatuses while pointing out their inequalities and failures. Live From the Afrikan Resistance! presents sharp commentary on the injustices that spring from ages of institutionalized racism and classism, as in the poem “Boxes” when she comments that “They are boxing us up,/ Boxing us out,/ And boxing us in” (90).

 Jones’ poems do not shy away from harsh truths. In “Kings and Queens” she states, “We’re all up in each other’s business but we can’t get up in each other’s businesses/ And then we wonder why we still don’t own shit?” (54). She constantly pairs such commentary with calls to action for social responsibility, as is brilliantly showcased by poems like “If You Done Shit”.  This pairing also demonstrates one of the main srengths of Jones’ abilities; her poetry appeals to anyone who reads it. While the book is written primarily to reach the audience of her communities and those who experience the same injustices she does, it simultaneously educates anyone who picks it up. Her accessible language reflects a desire to connect to multiple audiences. Jones’ poetry also ties global issues to her Atlantic Canadian roots, naming local culture heroes like Rocky Jones and Viola Desmond. It moves readers to understand the reality of what it is to be Black in Atlantic Canada, but also to understand the potential and actual sense of community that this identity brings. This book is about community itself, reading more as a loving collaboration than as a singular effort. The energetic, intelligent, and masterful technical wordplay of Live from the Afrikan Resistance! reflects Jones’ usual medium of spoken word, and readers can see how her work was translated from performance to the page. Her words more than survive the journey. 

Review by Molly Strickland
with input from Monica Grasse, Sharisse LeBrun and Ben Lord.

Writers and social activism: How writers set out to change the world for the better

It's actually pretty simple to incorporate social activism into our writing. In fact, I'd argue that it's hard to avoid doing. It's impossible, after all, to write anything without incorporating at least some of our own experience, and the sad fact of the matter is that every one of us is affected by at least some of the countless flaws in human society. These social issues inevitably work their way into the worlds we write, and to some small degree our audience is bound to pick up on it.
We find ourselves accidentally raising public awareness of the social issues that concern us and before we know it, bam: we're activists.

That was easy!

The most straightforward way to go about this is to go out and have ourselves a personal experience that is both directly pertinent to the issue in question, and remarkable enough to be worth writing about. John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, for instance, is a journalist's firsthand account of wandering the southern U.S. in medically induced blackface in order to expose the extreme racial tension to the public eye.

For those of us who lack Griffin's heroic-to-the-point-of-insanity dedication to our writing, this can be done quite effectively with fiction. 

Zuzak's The Book Thief uses a fictional narrative to explore the Nazi regime's exploitation of the power of literature; their mass publication of propaganda novels and burning of any books they considered subversive bears an eerie resemblance to the Harper government's recent destruction of thousands of volumes of environmental science records.

Likewise, Hosseini's The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns paint a vivid picture of contemporary race and gender inequalities in Afghanistan, and Rob Moore's deceptively comedic Fat is an uncomfortably realistic parody of the contemporary West's attitude toward body-weight.

There is, however, another approach to activist writing. It is the rogue class of socially aware literature, often unnoticed for what it is, but even more effective in its subtlety: science fiction. Seriously. It is easy (and heartbreakingly common) to dismiss the science fiction genre as mere whimsical escapism devoid of any noteworthy intellectual content. 

And to be fair to the critics, not all of it was exactly profound.

However, this assumption is also dangerously ignorant; some of the most prevalent social issues in the contemporary world can be found prophesized in science fiction literature over half a century old.

Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, for instance, presents a man raised by Martians who brings to Earth a philosophy that could solve all of humanity's problems, and who (spoiler alert) is ultimately shot to death for challenging social norms too radically. (Okay, you're safe again.) This warning against the dangers of conservatism and structural functionalism is even more relevant today than it was then, as those very same conservative attitudes are possibly the biggest threat to our sustainability as a species.

Likewise, famed whistle-blower Edward Snowden just recently exposed the United States as a dystopia all too familiar to fans of George Orwell, where every aspect of everyone's life can and will be spied on for the sake of crushing subversive elements. Orwell's prediction may  have been thirty years off, but it is no less uncanny.

We don't even have to delve into sci-fi antiquity to notice this effect. The relatively recent Hunger Games trilogy uses a post-apocalyptic America to draw attention to the power of entertainment to subdue and mollify a population: an effect which has become painfully evident over the past year. Monsanto's campaign against small-scale organic farmers and the States' drone strike on a Yemeni wedding party somehow wound up with far less media coverage than a Louisiana redneck making a homophobic remark on reality TV (surprising, I know) and the various things Miley Cyrus has done with her butt.

The point here is that if we want our writing to really resonate with the relevant social issues of the day, the vivid worlds of deep space and the distant future can offer an incomparably engaging experience that will get readers even more passionate about the issues we address. What's more, they can appeal to an audience that might be put off by more blatant means of social criticism.

The 'final frontier', essentially, should never be the last resort. After all, if our society has any hope for improvement...

... it's going to be in the future.

Sources of reasonable legitimacy:

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/capt-trevor-greene/science-cuts-canada_b_4534729.html

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/nsa-carves-pathway-into-international-computers-1.2496943

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/nsa-collects-millions-of-text-messages-globally-the-guardian-1.2499963

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101331915
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/the-aftermath-of-drone-strikes-on-a-wedding-convoy-in-yemen/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0