Friday, February 8, 2008
Of Mice and Murder: Art Spiegelman's 'Maus'
Of Mice and Murder: Art Spiegelman’s MausMaus: A Survivor’s Tale by Pantheon Books of New York
Volume 1: My Father Bleeds History © 1986 and Volume 2: And Here My Troubles Began © 1991
Around mid-January I read with great absorption Art Spiegelman’s Maus. (Thanks to colleague Chong Ardivilla who lent his copies!) These are comic books comprising two volumes on the plight of the Jews in Nazi Europe. For quite a long time now I have been preoccupied with Jewish history. It is difficult to depict the viciousness that they went through; much more explain the specific ideological and political underpinnings of their oppression. Many who are concerned with the past and its representation take the Holocaust as the historical subject par excellence. There are scores of documents and millions had witnessed the genocidal campaign. Yet how can such a phenomenon be narrated and re-presented to the present generation when the suffering is said to be ‘unspeakable’ and ‘unexplainable’? This is compounded by the realization that a lot of those who witnessed were accomplices to the crime, ‘Hitler’s willing executioners’ according to Daniel Goldhagen. The Jews’ dogged persistence to survive bears out man’s constitution of bare life.
Maus is the story of Polish Jews who survived Nazi persecution. Vladek the survivor tells his family’s story to his son Artie, also the cartoonist (but not quite) Spiegelman. Artie/Art visits his father and conducts an interview for the comic book project that he is making. Oral history is rendered visual through comics.
Maus is the story of Polish Jews who survived Nazi persecution. Vladek the survivor tells his family’s story to his son Artie, also the cartoonist (but not quite) Spiegelman. Artie/Art visits his father and conducts an interview for the comic book project that he is making. Oral history is rendered visual through comics.
Comic Representation and Suffering
The first problem a project such as Spiegelman’s encounters, and this is where conscious and erudite readers (as opposed to the mass) initially react to, is the representation of a serious and complex phenomenon as the Holocaust in a usually funny and flippant art form that is the comics. Here, drawings and text convolute to offer the reader an ‘honest-to-goodness storytelling’ of what happened to particular people during the most destructive war of recent history. I think a ‘high’ and complex history as that of the Holocaust rendered by an art form historically considered ‘low’ is sure to encounter disapproval. But the brilliance of Maus is precisely this: it struggles to tell a harrowing story (‘an epic story told in tiny pictures’ – new york times) in a form that reaches people who are averse to harrowing experiences. Comics and cartoons are usually for entertainment, almost exclusively tied to fun and leisure. It comes out of this challenge resolutely and critically affective.
It is indeed comic to see people imaged in animal forms: the Jews are mice, the Germans are cats, and the Poles are pigs and the others equally amusing (Americans as dogs, the French as frogs, Swedes as reindeers and the gypsy as a moth). Particular attention is given to the mice characterization. A Nazi-era German newspaper article given as an epigraph of Maus’s second volume refers to Mickey Mouse as the “most miserable ideal ever revealed” connected to the “Jewish brutalization of the [German] people.” The disease-carrying filthy vermin embodies the Jew, mankind’s plague according to Nazi anti-Semitism. A Jew is also a mouse in a sense that it is able to sneak out and steal food and fall prey to the carnivorous cats. Yet recall that the mouse type has always been used to lampoon people and criticize society. Remember Disney. Remember our Ikabod, Nonoy Marcelo’s naughty rat.
Another cool idea is the use of mask every time the characters assume another race’s identity. Whenever they are compelled to hide their Jewish identity, Vladek and his fellows wear Pole (pig) or German (cat) masks or even mouse masks. One perplexing example is the part when the cartoonist Artie is being interviewed on the success of Maus I, he and the people around him wear masks. Does the well-conditioned set-up of an interview reveal the artificiality of their identities? Are they pressured to perform racial categories as people see it fit? Why does this happen during the media interview, when the demands of commerce all the more inflect the reception of a very traumatic experience? (vol 2, 41-46) On page 41 of the second volume, one sees Artie atop so many dead bodies, his current success and predicament literally resting on the deaths of his fellow Jews. This is the burden of his history.
Maus is centered on Vladek’s survival but in each turn we set our eyes on sufferings from the people who have made the Jews’ extermination an unbreakable part of the campaign for European domination. In The War of the World, British historian Niall Ferguson pithily points out that one shocking atrocity of the Holocaust is that the Jews suffered from the hands of the very people who they grew up with, lived as neighbors, attended school and played with. It was as if the war ignited the hatred seething beneath the surface all along. Early in the story the Polish governess of Vladek’s household protested on the comment that Poles don’t need to be incited for anti-Semitism (37), later on this same governess rejected the Spiegelmans when they were looking for a place to stay (136). Spiegelman’s narrative art does not present Jewish condition in terms of the traditional rising and fall actions, with the climax at the middle; he imparts it to us in a fitful manner. We first learn of horror as an impending event, just round the corner, when Vladek relates the first time he saw the swastika (32) and hears stories of Jewish suffering in Germany, the pogroms, how they are forced to ‘sell’ their business and are insulted in public and how whole towns push them out (33). These are merely rumors that eventually befall their lives as unbelievably real as the renascent German nation conquers the east. People are licensed to kill Jews in the Reich, many were marched to the forest and there they were killed (61) and we also watched, as in movies, how creative the abuses were by making them sing, laughing at them (65). There was massive Aryan takeover of Jewish businesses (76) and they were relocated, with the spaces they vacated used by non-Jews for free (82); some, like those who engaged in the black market, were hanged in public to set example (83). Vladek’s wealthy friend Mandelbaum singularly exhibits the disparity from pre-war Jewish life as ‘but now, in Auschwitz, Mandelbaum was a mess’ with his uniform clothes and shoes too big for him and the beatings received from lost utensils (II: 29) Vladek also shares his observation of how one reacts like a dog when being shot – ‘how amazing it is that a human being reacts the same like this neighbor’s dog’ (II: 82) One feels sorrow combined with horror as the terror of punishment is revealed in the cut-out images of the chimney (II: 69, 25) and the details—discussed as though on a field trip to a heritage site—of gas chambers, the ovens (II: 70-71). Two graphic renditions of Vladek’s predicament were crafted creatively by Spiegelman, both dealing with directions, of how to move across space that rapidly encloses upon them: one night when going out to meet his friend, he sees Jews being beaten and he is confused whether to walk slowly or to run, whatever he does he will be attacked – he is shown standing on the star of David; past surviving in a bunker, Vladek and his wife Anja return to their town Sosnowiec only to ask, in a swastika-shaped road, ‘but where to go?!’ (125).
Racial Caricatures
Through Artie’s depiction of his father the reader’s pity on the Jewish condition is disturbed by Vladek’s attitude, the latter being the ‘racist caricature of a miserly old Jew’ (131). Similar to the old people of today who were hardened by war, Vladek saves on almost everything. He picks up the telephone wires he sees on the street (116), he saves the matches (II: 20) and gets tissues from and cheats on entering the hotel and the most embarrassing thing is when he returns groceries and buys out a refund by telling his sad condition (II: 89-90). Vladek gets to like his first wife Anja because she comes from a rich family and is always neat and clean with her stuff. He disapproves of Anja’s relation with a communist and insists that his wife must go her way (29). Oftentimes his second wife Mala, also a Jew survivor, is unfairly compared with Anja. In the concentration camp he is also averse to his Russian communist Jew supervisor. And to present the complicated character of racial tolerance, Vladek refuses to let a black guy hitch on their car, arguing that the colored man is a thief (II: 98-99). This merits the comment from Artie’s wife that Vladek’s behavior is similar to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews. When Germany was destroyed, Vladek and his friend are ‘happy’ to see Germans suffering – ‘let the Germans have a little what they did to the Jews’ (II: 130). The common portrayal of Germans as systematic and orderly is also evident in Maus. They account their prisoners very well (59) and they want everything neat and in good order, even the details of straw beds (II: 67). Again, from War of the World the incredible thing about Nazism, the paradigmatic modern political system of our time, is that it was a democratically elected regime using the most scientific methods in carrying out its criminal program. The Frankfurt School would criticize this Hitlerian legacy as an inextricable component of Enlightenment, sort of a pessimistic stance of a civilization gone wild because barbaric at its core and leads on to degeneracy and destruction.
Bleeding History: Reflexivity, Historical Consciousness
This must never happen again! To me the most perspicacious aspect of Spiegelman’s attempt to tell the tale of his father’s survival is his reflexive mode. He even discusses his wife Francoise’s image, whether she should be a frog by virtue of being a French, but is drawn as a mouse because she converted, to please Vladek (II: 12-13). Vladek had initially remarked that his life would take many books to draw, to tell (12) and when the story progresses he cautioned Artie that his relation with Lucia, his flirtatious and not rich girlfriend, should not be included in the book – ‘it has nothing to do with Hitler, with the Holocaust!...and isn’t so proper, so respectful’ (23). Artie said that it would make ‘everything more real – more human’ but relented to his father’s request. One can grasp here that the problems of choice, selection, inclusion and exclusion in a historical reconstruction are the problems of history itself. In raising the universality of the Jewish question in the Third Reich, even those who suffered the most want to cut down the anti-Semitism issue to the ‘proper and respectful’ matters of Hitler and the Holocaust. Granted that Vladek’s ‘unserious’ relation with Lucia does not concern the theme and subject of the tale, his insistence on his own view of things makes the story a black and white issue of the good guys versus them the evil ones. The survivor’s tale is in danger of being a co-conspirator to/collaborator of an oppressive victor’s history. One does not cease to be triumphant because the other’s defeat is his sustenance. Nazism was defeated but the racist ideology it embodies still lives, not less in its own victims who, today, many of them, use their suffering to exact the same violence on hapless Palestines and Arabs. And they are being used by Christians who are themselves as much anti-Jew as they are anti-Arab and anti-Muslim.
Though the events happened in central and eastern Europe, the tale is told from the peace and quiet of America, where many survivors immigrated after the war. This is the reason why children of survivors, and other people who approach the Jewish predicament with a historical and/or artistic intent, now learn and understand Holocaust helped by perspective (distance). Artie struggles to be fair, perhaps reflective of the post-war (he was born in 1948) democratic campaigns in the US and elsewhere in the world and butts in question to make his father’s account more complete and consistent. Some Poles hid Jews at their own risk. One time he clarifies by citing historical research that there was an orchestra playing music while the prisoners were being marched, his father does not remember this (II: 54). Another, he asks why the Jews did not resist, his father responded by saying that then they were starving and frightened and unbelieving of what’s happening and that ‘the Jews lived always with hope’ (II: 73). On page 82 of the first volume, he checks his dad’s telling by maintaining that it must be chronological or else ‘I’ll never get it straight’. When he and his father are arguing about serious things, they decide to affirm forgetting, like the case of Vladek’s prejudice against the blacks (II: 100). He grapples with the difficulty of presenting their reality as comics: ‘so much has to be left out or distorted’ (II: 16). When pressed about his intention, he answers that he doesn’t want to reduce the work to a message and/yet later on says that people should have guilt; then he becomes smaller and smaller and ends up as a child (II: 42), probably as a way of showing how he shrinks from the responsibility of such a tremendous artistic and historical task. Artie talks with his psychiatrist Pavel and they wear mouse masks, here patently assuming a ‘Jewish’ identity under pressure and he intimates his father’s guilt of surviving (many survivors, not only of Holocaust, but also civilians who suffered from anti-terror campaigns committed suicide), his accomplishment as lesser than surviving (II: 43-46). Foregrounding the pain of telling the truth about oppression, he quotes Samuel Beckett: ‘every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness’ (II: 45). Vladek, in a later passage, notes that ‘nobody can understand Auschwitz’ (II: 64). Many have declared that the Holocaust is unrepresentable, that Auschwitz is the zero degree of silence and the dead-end of storytelling and history, yet we must struggle that such suffering must be re-presented. Only through an account of the crime in ‘all’ its dimensions can we arrive at not only a just punishment for the perpetrators but a defining judgment on history.
In a deeply sad evocation of Artie’s psychological problem, a case history titled Prisoner on the Hell Planet (100-103) was inserted in the first volume. This is a comic book Artie made on his mother’s suicide. With a strict and thick delineation of black and white colors and characters emanating like shadows, this particular work (which appeared in ‘an obscure underground comic book’, reflecting the repressed underside of history in the comics market system) punctuates, through an intensely personal approach, the tensions of Jewish collective memory and the private realm of forgetting. Artie blames himself for his mother’s fate. We see him being approached by his mother for the last time, asking for the confirmation of his love and later on Artie is seen in a prison/sanatorium accusing his mother of murdering (psychologically? emotionally?) him by committing the perfect crime (of suicide).
Maus symbolically moves violently against this murder and death. In some ways Vladek did not survive, Artie rants when his father’s returning Mala’s groceries (II: 90). Volume 1 ends with Artie calling Vladek a ‘murderer’ for burning his mother’s records. This we happen to know was a false claim, his father thought he lost it (II: 113). Volume 2 ends with Vladek bidding goodbye to Artie and calls him Richieu! (II: 136), his first son with Anja who died in the war. Tired from talking of their stories, Vladek resurrects Richieu and transposes the living memory of his dead son on to the still living, historically conscious and death-indebted Artie, Art Spiegelman.
To bleed history is to loose by taking out what is in you that carries life. From the vermin that carries death and disease, Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a supreme creative effort to circulate this life – from the father to the son, from one generation to the next, from the survivor to the challenger, from the Jew to non-Jews. On and on until the next catastrophe boils our blood and discharges our emancipatory intervention in history.
The first problem a project such as Spiegelman’s encounters, and this is where conscious and erudite readers (as opposed to the mass) initially react to, is the representation of a serious and complex phenomenon as the Holocaust in a usually funny and flippant art form that is the comics. Here, drawings and text convolute to offer the reader an ‘honest-to-goodness storytelling’ of what happened to particular people during the most destructive war of recent history. I think a ‘high’ and complex history as that of the Holocaust rendered by an art form historically considered ‘low’ is sure to encounter disapproval. But the brilliance of Maus is precisely this: it struggles to tell a harrowing story (‘an epic story told in tiny pictures’ – new york times) in a form that reaches people who are averse to harrowing experiences. Comics and cartoons are usually for entertainment, almost exclusively tied to fun and leisure. It comes out of this challenge resolutely and critically affective.
It is indeed comic to see people imaged in animal forms: the Jews are mice, the Germans are cats, and the Poles are pigs and the others equally amusing (Americans as dogs, the French as frogs, Swedes as reindeers and the gypsy as a moth). Particular attention is given to the mice characterization. A Nazi-era German newspaper article given as an epigraph of Maus’s second volume refers to Mickey Mouse as the “most miserable ideal ever revealed” connected to the “Jewish brutalization of the [German] people.” The disease-carrying filthy vermin embodies the Jew, mankind’s plague according to Nazi anti-Semitism. A Jew is also a mouse in a sense that it is able to sneak out and steal food and fall prey to the carnivorous cats. Yet recall that the mouse type has always been used to lampoon people and criticize society. Remember Disney. Remember our Ikabod, Nonoy Marcelo’s naughty rat.
Another cool idea is the use of mask every time the characters assume another race’s identity. Whenever they are compelled to hide their Jewish identity, Vladek and his fellows wear Pole (pig) or German (cat) masks or even mouse masks. One perplexing example is the part when the cartoonist Artie is being interviewed on the success of Maus I, he and the people around him wear masks. Does the well-conditioned set-up of an interview reveal the artificiality of their identities? Are they pressured to perform racial categories as people see it fit? Why does this happen during the media interview, when the demands of commerce all the more inflect the reception of a very traumatic experience? (vol 2, 41-46) On page 41 of the second volume, one sees Artie atop so many dead bodies, his current success and predicament literally resting on the deaths of his fellow Jews. This is the burden of his history.
Maus is centered on Vladek’s survival but in each turn we set our eyes on sufferings from the people who have made the Jews’ extermination an unbreakable part of the campaign for European domination. In The War of the World, British historian Niall Ferguson pithily points out that one shocking atrocity of the Holocaust is that the Jews suffered from the hands of the very people who they grew up with, lived as neighbors, attended school and played with. It was as if the war ignited the hatred seething beneath the surface all along. Early in the story the Polish governess of Vladek’s household protested on the comment that Poles don’t need to be incited for anti-Semitism (37), later on this same governess rejected the Spiegelmans when they were looking for a place to stay (136). Spiegelman’s narrative art does not present Jewish condition in terms of the traditional rising and fall actions, with the climax at the middle; he imparts it to us in a fitful manner. We first learn of horror as an impending event, just round the corner, when Vladek relates the first time he saw the swastika (32) and hears stories of Jewish suffering in Germany, the pogroms, how they are forced to ‘sell’ their business and are insulted in public and how whole towns push them out (33). These are merely rumors that eventually befall their lives as unbelievably real as the renascent German nation conquers the east. People are licensed to kill Jews in the Reich, many were marched to the forest and there they were killed (61) and we also watched, as in movies, how creative the abuses were by making them sing, laughing at them (65). There was massive Aryan takeover of Jewish businesses (76) and they were relocated, with the spaces they vacated used by non-Jews for free (82); some, like those who engaged in the black market, were hanged in public to set example (83). Vladek’s wealthy friend Mandelbaum singularly exhibits the disparity from pre-war Jewish life as ‘but now, in Auschwitz, Mandelbaum was a mess’ with his uniform clothes and shoes too big for him and the beatings received from lost utensils (II: 29) Vladek also shares his observation of how one reacts like a dog when being shot – ‘how amazing it is that a human being reacts the same like this neighbor’s dog’ (II: 82) One feels sorrow combined with horror as the terror of punishment is revealed in the cut-out images of the chimney (II: 69, 25) and the details—discussed as though on a field trip to a heritage site—of gas chambers, the ovens (II: 70-71). Two graphic renditions of Vladek’s predicament were crafted creatively by Spiegelman, both dealing with directions, of how to move across space that rapidly encloses upon them: one night when going out to meet his friend, he sees Jews being beaten and he is confused whether to walk slowly or to run, whatever he does he will be attacked – he is shown standing on the star of David; past surviving in a bunker, Vladek and his wife Anja return to their town Sosnowiec only to ask, in a swastika-shaped road, ‘but where to go?!’ (125).
Racial Caricatures
Through Artie’s depiction of his father the reader’s pity on the Jewish condition is disturbed by Vladek’s attitude, the latter being the ‘racist caricature of a miserly old Jew’ (131). Similar to the old people of today who were hardened by war, Vladek saves on almost everything. He picks up the telephone wires he sees on the street (116), he saves the matches (II: 20) and gets tissues from and cheats on entering the hotel and the most embarrassing thing is when he returns groceries and buys out a refund by telling his sad condition (II: 89-90). Vladek gets to like his first wife Anja because she comes from a rich family and is always neat and clean with her stuff. He disapproves of Anja’s relation with a communist and insists that his wife must go her way (29). Oftentimes his second wife Mala, also a Jew survivor, is unfairly compared with Anja. In the concentration camp he is also averse to his Russian communist Jew supervisor. And to present the complicated character of racial tolerance, Vladek refuses to let a black guy hitch on their car, arguing that the colored man is a thief (II: 98-99). This merits the comment from Artie’s wife that Vladek’s behavior is similar to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews. When Germany was destroyed, Vladek and his friend are ‘happy’ to see Germans suffering – ‘let the Germans have a little what they did to the Jews’ (II: 130). The common portrayal of Germans as systematic and orderly is also evident in Maus. They account their prisoners very well (59) and they want everything neat and in good order, even the details of straw beds (II: 67). Again, from War of the World the incredible thing about Nazism, the paradigmatic modern political system of our time, is that it was a democratically elected regime using the most scientific methods in carrying out its criminal program. The Frankfurt School would criticize this Hitlerian legacy as an inextricable component of Enlightenment, sort of a pessimistic stance of a civilization gone wild because barbaric at its core and leads on to degeneracy and destruction.
Bleeding History: Reflexivity, Historical Consciousness
This must never happen again! To me the most perspicacious aspect of Spiegelman’s attempt to tell the tale of his father’s survival is his reflexive mode. He even discusses his wife Francoise’s image, whether she should be a frog by virtue of being a French, but is drawn as a mouse because she converted, to please Vladek (II: 12-13). Vladek had initially remarked that his life would take many books to draw, to tell (12) and when the story progresses he cautioned Artie that his relation with Lucia, his flirtatious and not rich girlfriend, should not be included in the book – ‘it has nothing to do with Hitler, with the Holocaust!...and isn’t so proper, so respectful’ (23). Artie said that it would make ‘everything more real – more human’ but relented to his father’s request. One can grasp here that the problems of choice, selection, inclusion and exclusion in a historical reconstruction are the problems of history itself. In raising the universality of the Jewish question in the Third Reich, even those who suffered the most want to cut down the anti-Semitism issue to the ‘proper and respectful’ matters of Hitler and the Holocaust. Granted that Vladek’s ‘unserious’ relation with Lucia does not concern the theme and subject of the tale, his insistence on his own view of things makes the story a black and white issue of the good guys versus them the evil ones. The survivor’s tale is in danger of being a co-conspirator to/collaborator of an oppressive victor’s history. One does not cease to be triumphant because the other’s defeat is his sustenance. Nazism was defeated but the racist ideology it embodies still lives, not less in its own victims who, today, many of them, use their suffering to exact the same violence on hapless Palestines and Arabs. And they are being used by Christians who are themselves as much anti-Jew as they are anti-Arab and anti-Muslim.
Though the events happened in central and eastern Europe, the tale is told from the peace and quiet of America, where many survivors immigrated after the war. This is the reason why children of survivors, and other people who approach the Jewish predicament with a historical and/or artistic intent, now learn and understand Holocaust helped by perspective (distance). Artie struggles to be fair, perhaps reflective of the post-war (he was born in 1948) democratic campaigns in the US and elsewhere in the world and butts in question to make his father’s account more complete and consistent. Some Poles hid Jews at their own risk. One time he clarifies by citing historical research that there was an orchestra playing music while the prisoners were being marched, his father does not remember this (II: 54). Another, he asks why the Jews did not resist, his father responded by saying that then they were starving and frightened and unbelieving of what’s happening and that ‘the Jews lived always with hope’ (II: 73). On page 82 of the first volume, he checks his dad’s telling by maintaining that it must be chronological or else ‘I’ll never get it straight’. When he and his father are arguing about serious things, they decide to affirm forgetting, like the case of Vladek’s prejudice against the blacks (II: 100). He grapples with the difficulty of presenting their reality as comics: ‘so much has to be left out or distorted’ (II: 16). When pressed about his intention, he answers that he doesn’t want to reduce the work to a message and/yet later on says that people should have guilt; then he becomes smaller and smaller and ends up as a child (II: 42), probably as a way of showing how he shrinks from the responsibility of such a tremendous artistic and historical task. Artie talks with his psychiatrist Pavel and they wear mouse masks, here patently assuming a ‘Jewish’ identity under pressure and he intimates his father’s guilt of surviving (many survivors, not only of Holocaust, but also civilians who suffered from anti-terror campaigns committed suicide), his accomplishment as lesser than surviving (II: 43-46). Foregrounding the pain of telling the truth about oppression, he quotes Samuel Beckett: ‘every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness’ (II: 45). Vladek, in a later passage, notes that ‘nobody can understand Auschwitz’ (II: 64). Many have declared that the Holocaust is unrepresentable, that Auschwitz is the zero degree of silence and the dead-end of storytelling and history, yet we must struggle that such suffering must be re-presented. Only through an account of the crime in ‘all’ its dimensions can we arrive at not only a just punishment for the perpetrators but a defining judgment on history.
In a deeply sad evocation of Artie’s psychological problem, a case history titled Prisoner on the Hell Planet (100-103) was inserted in the first volume. This is a comic book Artie made on his mother’s suicide. With a strict and thick delineation of black and white colors and characters emanating like shadows, this particular work (which appeared in ‘an obscure underground comic book’, reflecting the repressed underside of history in the comics market system) punctuates, through an intensely personal approach, the tensions of Jewish collective memory and the private realm of forgetting. Artie blames himself for his mother’s fate. We see him being approached by his mother for the last time, asking for the confirmation of his love and later on Artie is seen in a prison/sanatorium accusing his mother of murdering (psychologically? emotionally?) him by committing the perfect crime (of suicide).
Maus symbolically moves violently against this murder and death. In some ways Vladek did not survive, Artie rants when his father’s returning Mala’s groceries (II: 90). Volume 1 ends with Artie calling Vladek a ‘murderer’ for burning his mother’s records. This we happen to know was a false claim, his father thought he lost it (II: 113). Volume 2 ends with Vladek bidding goodbye to Artie and calls him Richieu! (II: 136), his first son with Anja who died in the war. Tired from talking of their stories, Vladek resurrects Richieu and transposes the living memory of his dead son on to the still living, historically conscious and death-indebted Artie, Art Spiegelman.
To bleed history is to loose by taking out what is in you that carries life. From the vermin that carries death and disease, Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a supreme creative effort to circulate this life – from the father to the son, from one generation to the next, from the survivor to the challenger, from the Jew to non-Jews. On and on until the next catastrophe boils our blood and discharges our emancipatory intervention in history.
8 February 2008
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
A Patriot's History of the USA
Paputul-putol kong binabasa ang A Patriot’s History of the United States nina Larry Schweikart at Michael Allen. Nauna na nitong makuha ang atensiyon ko mga ilang buwan na ang nakakaraan dahil kababasa ko lang ng A People’s History of the United States ni Howard Zinn noon. Oposisyonal sa people (bayan) ang patriot (loyalistang makabansa) na tauhan ng kasaysayang isinulat ng dalawang historyador. Lantarang tutol ito sa kritikal, mapanuri at maka-kaliwang pagbasa sa kasaysayan at patuloy na pagsasakasaysayan ng marami sa Amerika na dominante diumano sa mainstream history textbooks at media. Para mahalin ng mga Amerikano ang kanilang bayan, kailangang maging patas at obhetibo ang pag-aaral sa kasaysayan, hindi puro pagtuligsa sa rasismo, sexismo, tunggalian ng mga uri at kung ano pang hindi pagkakapantay-pantay. Hindi pagbalanse kundi pagbawi at pagganti sa pagkatalo sa simbolikong pagtutunggalian ang tingin ko’y sadya ng libro. Nanganganib kasi ang posisyon ng Amerika at ang paglaban mismo sa mapang-api at marahas na kasaysayan nito ay nanggagaling sa mamamayang inaasahang magtanggol sa ginugulong pagpupulis ng Estados Unidos sa daigdig.
Sa introduksyon pa lamang ay idiniin na ng mga awtor ang gampanin ng ideas at virtue sa kasaysayan ng Amerika. Ang mga konseptong ito ay nakabatay sa karakter ng mga lider ng bansa, karakter na mahigpit na kabahagi ng liberty at property. Nais linawin nina Schweikart at Allen na nagmumula ang lahat sa “dalisay” na karakter ng mga indibidwal at pinunong magpapausad ng kasaysayan ng Amerika. Kaya sa puntong inabot ng aking pagbabasa, pangunahin sa mga sumulat ang mithiin ng kung sinumang magkakamit ng bansang balang araw ay mangunguna sa buong mundo: mithiing maging tanyag, magpalaganap ng salita ng Diyos o makapagkamal ng yaman na maaaring palaguin nang husto.
Mali naman ang maging counterfactual ang paglapit natin sa kasaysayan, ‘yon bang magpilit sa pagsagot sa mga tanong na “paano kung?” Pinakamatinding tira marahil sa pagbago ng kinabukasan itong hindi mapinal na aktitud sa nakalipas. Hindi mali ang pananaw ng mga awtor na “European military superiority” (6) at “European political constructs of liberty, property rights, and nationalism” (7) ang nakapagpanaig sa mga kolonisador laban sa atrasadong sibilisasyon ng mga sinakop. Pero dahil sinusuri at dapat lamang husgahan (upang makagawa pa ng mas nararapat) ang nakaraan batay sa pinakawastong pamantayan ng kasalukuyan, higit pang mapang-api ang pananaw na nakolonisa at naghirap ang marami dahil sa payak na sanhing sila ay mas mahina. Kumplementaryo ng victimology ang self-righteousness ng oppressors. Kapag susundin natin ang lohikang ganito, nanakawin sa mga nagapi maging ang katwiran kung bakit sila natalo. Wala nang kaligtasan sa kasaysayan.
Inuugat din ng Patriot’s History ang ilang mga usaping mainit na pinagtatalunan sa ngayon patungkol sa esensiyal na katangian at kagawian ng Amerika. Sa simula pa’y nandiyan na ang “role of God in human affairs” (70) kaya hindi dapat paghiwalayin ang pulitika at pananampalataya. Ang “separation of church and state” ay nanganganib kung gayon dahil pilit sinasabing mula sa simula pa (at hindi dapat baguhin) ang independence leaders ay “steeped in the traditions and teachings of Christianity” at “any reading of the American Revolution from a purely secular viewpoint ignores a fundamentally Christian component of the Revolutionary ideology.” (71) (Nakasulat ang “in God we trust” sa kanilang pera. Hindi kaya pera ang naging diyos ng marami sa kanila?) Kung kaya ngayon ay pinupuwersa ang mga kandidato sa pagka-presidente na sabihin ang kanilang paninindigan sa usapin ng pananampalataya, bagay na mag-aalis sa kapasyahang maniwala sa diyos sa personal at mapayapang pamamaraan. Noon pa’y may gun culture na dahil sa “nearly universal ownership and use of firearms” (72) upang labanan ang lahat ng nagtatangka sa kanilang pagmamay-ari, mapa-dayuhan man o lokal. At mula’t sapul ay ang pro-war policy upang ipagtanggol ang katiwasayan ng buhay sa loob.
Marami pa siguradong masasalubong na mga lumang bagong usapin sa sulating ito. Makapal ang libro dahil sa pagkalap ng datos upang suportahan ang maningning at puno ng pag-asang nakaraan ng Amerika, ayon sa mga may-akda. Pero bumaling naman ang interes ko sa The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West ni Niall Ferguson.
Sa introduksyon pa lamang ay idiniin na ng mga awtor ang gampanin ng ideas at virtue sa kasaysayan ng Amerika. Ang mga konseptong ito ay nakabatay sa karakter ng mga lider ng bansa, karakter na mahigpit na kabahagi ng liberty at property. Nais linawin nina Schweikart at Allen na nagmumula ang lahat sa “dalisay” na karakter ng mga indibidwal at pinunong magpapausad ng kasaysayan ng Amerika. Kaya sa puntong inabot ng aking pagbabasa, pangunahin sa mga sumulat ang mithiin ng kung sinumang magkakamit ng bansang balang araw ay mangunguna sa buong mundo: mithiing maging tanyag, magpalaganap ng salita ng Diyos o makapagkamal ng yaman na maaaring palaguin nang husto.
Mali naman ang maging counterfactual ang paglapit natin sa kasaysayan, ‘yon bang magpilit sa pagsagot sa mga tanong na “paano kung?” Pinakamatinding tira marahil sa pagbago ng kinabukasan itong hindi mapinal na aktitud sa nakalipas. Hindi mali ang pananaw ng mga awtor na “European military superiority” (6) at “European political constructs of liberty, property rights, and nationalism” (7) ang nakapagpanaig sa mga kolonisador laban sa atrasadong sibilisasyon ng mga sinakop. Pero dahil sinusuri at dapat lamang husgahan (upang makagawa pa ng mas nararapat) ang nakaraan batay sa pinakawastong pamantayan ng kasalukuyan, higit pang mapang-api ang pananaw na nakolonisa at naghirap ang marami dahil sa payak na sanhing sila ay mas mahina. Kumplementaryo ng victimology ang self-righteousness ng oppressors. Kapag susundin natin ang lohikang ganito, nanakawin sa mga nagapi maging ang katwiran kung bakit sila natalo. Wala nang kaligtasan sa kasaysayan.
Inuugat din ng Patriot’s History ang ilang mga usaping mainit na pinagtatalunan sa ngayon patungkol sa esensiyal na katangian at kagawian ng Amerika. Sa simula pa’y nandiyan na ang “role of God in human affairs” (70) kaya hindi dapat paghiwalayin ang pulitika at pananampalataya. Ang “separation of church and state” ay nanganganib kung gayon dahil pilit sinasabing mula sa simula pa (at hindi dapat baguhin) ang independence leaders ay “steeped in the traditions and teachings of Christianity” at “any reading of the American Revolution from a purely secular viewpoint ignores a fundamentally Christian component of the Revolutionary ideology.” (71) (Nakasulat ang “in God we trust” sa kanilang pera. Hindi kaya pera ang naging diyos ng marami sa kanila?) Kung kaya ngayon ay pinupuwersa ang mga kandidato sa pagka-presidente na sabihin ang kanilang paninindigan sa usapin ng pananampalataya, bagay na mag-aalis sa kapasyahang maniwala sa diyos sa personal at mapayapang pamamaraan. Noon pa’y may gun culture na dahil sa “nearly universal ownership and use of firearms” (72) upang labanan ang lahat ng nagtatangka sa kanilang pagmamay-ari, mapa-dayuhan man o lokal. At mula’t sapul ay ang pro-war policy upang ipagtanggol ang katiwasayan ng buhay sa loob.
Marami pa siguradong masasalubong na mga lumang bagong usapin sa sulating ito. Makapal ang libro dahil sa pagkalap ng datos upang suportahan ang maningning at puno ng pag-asang nakaraan ng Amerika, ayon sa mga may-akda. Pero bumaling naman ang interes ko sa The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West ni Niall Ferguson.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Korea, Our Korea
When the audience learned that the female lead character did not end up with the man of her liking, they cried of disappointment. This is the pivotal scene in Ditto, one of the entries in this year’s Korean Film Festival, held in UP last week. The story is of a guy from the future who is communicating with a lady from the past. We hold the present in abeyance as we watch them fall in, and out, of love.
In Joint Security Area (JSA) a neutral international investigation team was dispatched to probe the shooting incident between North and South Korean forces. By way of multiple reconstructions, we are afforded of the encounter as narrated by partisans. We then learn that the soldiers being examined are determined to twist the story so that no one would be indicted in the proper, that is, traditionally unfair, sense. Out of the boredom and intense pressure of keeping an eye at the other side, the South and North Korean soldiers befriended one another. Those commanded to watch sneak out to share happy moments in the devil-forbidden border. Indeed one humor is the hidden desire for a fellow by a South Korean soldier, uttered in a homosocial environment of the demilitarized zone. It is interesting to know the views of feminists in this regard, as the neutral investigator and sole female character (excluding the extras of course) crystallized the North-South divide. She herself has a past to examine. It was revealed that her father, a North Korean general, was exiled; she, a product of an interracial union, is now re/turning for the first time to the land of her lineage. Our central character must investigate an incident that denies the personal out-and-out in the political constitution of things. The burden of her own history is embedded in the conflicts that made Koreans fight one another, friend against friend, brother against brother.
Even though the acting is just passable (they move and talk visibly on cue), JSA is to me better than Taeguk-Gi, the other Korean film that worked on the Korean problem in its story. While it is true that the personal is political, this movie made the Korean War merely a backdrop to the family story being told. There is no “relation of acts and forces” in the wisdom that Raymond Williams makes clear of backgrounds in history.
Tae-guk Gi opens from the present preoccupation with the past in a scientific pretense of archaeology. The remains of what was the brother of one of the two lead characters was found in an excavation site. The commercially successful film did not interrogate the past! All we have are scenes of brotherly love, the sacrifices of the older brother to save the younger brother from military draft and when they both joined the army, his sacrifices for the younger one not to be killed and to merit an exemption to return to studies. The younger one tries to balance it out by questioning the false heroism (not for country but for the family) of his brother and sacrificing ultimately for their family to be reunified. Patriotism, nationalism, capitalism, socialism and communism are all dogmas sworn out of the scenes! Like the artifice of clothing (always a sign of setting), the Korean problem is reduced to being a surface of filial piety, family unity, tradition in every sense! Emotions, affects, feelings and longings are just demonstrated as either cause or effect of all the actions and drama that are happening!
There is a moment when, in want of entertainment, the South Korean soldiers made the North Korean captives fight one another. Another when one group executes those suspected of being supporters of the North Korean forces. One scene when military high-ups escape defeat and responsibility. These happenings are just presented as empirical evidences of what happens in a war. Characters are one-dimensional for they do not dialectically interact with the context; more fatally, they do not determine the narrative structure. No pattern of intention in relation to the brutal war was shown, only Koreans blindly defending whatever territory they have.
Film scholar Roland Tolentino (Global Desire: Neoliberalism,
Korean films are so popular nowadays. Whenever we talk of irony, we talk of contradiction, our constitution. This divisible whole interpellates us and summons our decisive acts for progress. We just hope that we learn from their particular ways of understanding their past so that we may illumine what fares Philippine cinema. Our cinema.
3:25 am
1 October 2007
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Ngayong Gabi Maisusulat Ko
Ngayong gabi maisusulat ko ang pinakamalulungkot na taludtod.
Maisusulat, halimbawa, ‘Mabituin ang gabi
at bughaw ang mga bituin at nanginginig sa kalayuan.’Umiikot ang hangin ng gabi sa kalangitan, umaawit.
Ngayong gabi maisusulat ko ang pinakamalulungkot na taludtod.
Inibig ko sya, at kung minsan inibig din nya ako.Sa mga gabing tulad ng gabing ganito hinapit ko sya sa aking mga kamay.
Hinagkan ko syang muli’t muli sa lilim ng walang hanggang kalangitan.Inibig nya ako, kung minsan inibig ko rin sya.
Paano hindi iibigin ng sinuman ang kanyang iisa ang titig at malalaking mata.Ngayong gabi maisusulat ko ang pinakamalulungkot na taludtod.
Isipin na lang na wala sya sa piling ko. Ang madamang nawala na sya sa akin.Na marinig ang dambuhalang gabi, lalung dambuhala nang wala na sya.
At umuulan ang taludtod sa kaluluwa tulad ng hamog sa pastulan.Anu naman kung hindi sya mapanatili ng aking pag-ibig.
Mabituin ang gabi at hindi ko sya kapiling.Ganito ang lahat-lahat. Sa kalayuan may umaawit. Sa kalayuan.
Hindi nasisiyahan ang aking kaluluwa na nawala na sya sa kanya.Tinangka ng aking tinging makita sya waring hinahatak syang palapit.
Hinahanap sya ng aking puso, at wala nga sya sa akin.Ang gabi ring iyon ang nagpapasilahis sa mga kahoy ring iyon.
Kami, ng panahong iyon, ay hindi na nakakatulad.Hindi ko na sya iniibig, tiyak ang gayon, ngunit talagang inibig ko sya.
Tinangka ng tinig kong mahawakan ang hangin nang mahipo ang kanyang pandinig.Sa iba na. Magiging sa iba na sya. Gaya ng kaharap pa sya ng aking mga halik.
Ang kanyang tinig, ang kanyang katawang naliliwanagan. Ang matang walang hanggan.Hindi ko na sya iniibig, tiyak ang gayon, ngunit maaaring iniibig ko sya.
Napakaiksi ng pag-ibig, ang paglimot ang napakahaba.Dahil sa mga gabing tulad ng isang ito hinapit ko sya sa aking mga kamay
hindi nasisiyahan ang aking kaluluwa na wala na sya sa kanya.Kahit na ito ang huling pasakit na ipinadurusa nya sa akin
at ito ang mga huling taludtod na sinusulat ko para sa kanya.
Salin ng “Tonight I Can Write” ni Pablo Neruda, Poem XX sa kanyang Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, salin ni W. S. Merwin ng Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada ni Neruda, unang nalimbag noong 1924, halos 20 taon pa lang ang makata. Ang Veinte Poemas… ay muntik nang hindi malimbag, tinanggihan ng pabliser, sabi’y nilibak ng mga kritiko. Mula kay Stephen Dobyns, isang makata ring nag-“Foreword” sa salin ni Merwin, ito ang ilang tala: ipinanganak sa Parral, Chile si Pablo Neruda noong 12 Hulyo 1904, ang ama nya’y nagtatrabaho sa perokaril, guro naman ang kanyang ina, na isang buwan lang matapos isilang si Neruda ay namatay na sa tuberkolosis; lumipat sila sa Temuco, higit na malayo sa Santiago, kabisera ng Chile, kung saan muling nag-asawa ang kanyang ama; minahal man ni Neruda ang madrasta at mga kinakapatid na babae’t lalake, naiba sya: palabasa, nagsulat ng mga tula at nag-umpisang isalin si Baudelaire nang 12 taon pa lamang, 14 na taon pa lang sya nang lumabas ang kanyang unang tula sa isang magasin sa Santiago; naging kaibigan nya si Gabriela Mistral, isa ring makatang premyadong Nobel mula sa Chile, nagpahiram sa kanya ng mga aklat, karamihan ay kay Dostoyevski at Chekhov; si Pablo Neruda ay si Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto sa tunay na buhay, galing ang Neruda sa isang manunulat na Czech ng ika-19 na siglo, samantalang Lucila Godoy Alcayaga naman sa totoo si Gabriela Mistral. Ayon pa kay Dobyns, mahaba ang pampublikong buhay ni Neruda, mula sa pagiging konsul at diplomat tungo sa pagiging Komunista’t embahador ng gobyernong Allende sa Paris tungo sa Premyong Nobel ng 1971 tungo sa kanyang kamatayan sa kanser noong 23 Setyembre 1973, sa gitna ng madugong kudeta ni Heneral Augusto Pinochet laban sa gobyernong Allende, “isang kudetang binili at binayaran ni Henry Kissinger at ng gobyernong Estados Unidos,” ngunit sa una’t huli isa syang makata. “Ang kanyang mga tula ay bahagi ng kanyang buhay-publiko, laluna nang nagsusulat sya pagkatapos maging isang Komunista nang ilaan niya ang kanyang sarili sa paglilinaw at patuloy na artikulasyon ng katanungang Paano ka ba mabubuhay?” Dagdag ni Dobyns ang sipi sa makata sa binigkas nito sa PEN sa syudad ng New York noong Abril 1972:
Maraming mukha ang kadakilaan, ngunit ako, isang makatang nagsusulat sa Espanyol, ay mas maraming natutuhan kay Walt Whitman kaysa kay Cervantes. Sa panulaan ni Whitman, hindi kailanman hinamak ang mga mangmang, at ang kalagayan pantao ay kailanma’y hindi kinasuklaman.
Gaya ng salin ng tula, ang mga halaw at sipi mula sa “Foreword” ni Dobyns ay salin din ni Monico M. Atienza, estudyante at guro ng wika, lipunan at kultura, mula sa DFPP, KAL, UP sa Diliman.
- mula sa Pinoy Weekly, 16 Pebrero 2007
11:30 ng gabi
20 setyembre 2007
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Hinggil kay Cris Mendez
Nagulantang ang marami nang may isa na namang namatay sa fraternity hazing. Taga-UP pa. Pero ang partikular na tuon ng mamamayan sa ngayon ay may malaking kaibahan sa mga dati nang kaso ng mga namamatay sa initiation ng mga kapatiran.
Panghihinayang dahil malapit nang magtapos ng kolehiyo si Cris Mendez. Hindi na mapapakinabangan ang kanyang pinag-aralan, sayang ang ibinuhos na rekurso ng mga magulang at ng lipunan. Awa dahil mahirap na naman ang naging biktima – mahirap na biktima pa ng mga mayayamang kasapi ng fraternity na kanyang sinalihan. Bagama’t masasabing ang kaso pa rin ni Niño Calinao ang kaawa-awa: ang simpleng estudyanteng tumambay sa isang lugar sa pangunahing gusali ng unibersidad ay napagkamalang miyembro ng kaaway na kapatiran at binaril ng isang hired killer. May klase ako noong mga oras na ‘yon, akala ko’y simpleng fireworks lang dahil madalas namang may mga aktibidad na gumagamit ng mga paputok. Yon nga lang, ang ilang putok na narinig nami’y pumaslang ng isang inosenteng ipinag-uutang pa ng kanyang mga magulang para lang makabiyahe papuntang UP. Si Niño din ay natutulog sa Sunken Garden kapag walang pamasahe pang-uwi. Wala pa noong Special Security Brigade na magpapalayas sa mga tambay at hindi naman gano’n kapursigido ang undermanned na UP Police. At ang kanyang pamilya ay nakatira lang sa kariton sa isang basketball court.
Pero siyempre ang awa di’y bahagi lamang ng biktimisasyon, paglulugar ito sa mga nasawi/naapi/napagsamantalahan hindi lamang sa isang pasibong posisyon; masahol pa dito ay ang pagtatangi sa kanila bilang mga tagatanggap ng nalalabi nating pakiramdam—at ang konsolasyon na nasa mas mabuti pa tayong kalagayan dahil nga naaawa tayo—ang pagturing sa ating mga sarili na may kapasidad (pang) tumugon, kahit pa pinananatili ng mga kondisyong panlipunan (isang kahatian nito) na maging reaktibo na lamang tayo sa mga nagaganap.
Sinapol ng nangyari kay Cris ang taimtim na ugnayan ng karahasan sa katawan at buhay nating lahat. Sentral sa usaping ito ang pagkuwestiyon sa pulitikal na mga mithiin ng kapatiran: paghihimok sa kanila na iwasan ang senseless violence, magbalik-aral sa saligang mga prinsipyo at mag-alay ng talino’t lakas para sa pamantasan at sambayanan. Hindi dapat mag-away at magkahati-hati bagkus ay magkaisa para sa dakilang layunin.
Sino ang may lehitimong gamit ng karahasan?
Sapagkat nakapaloob sa diskurso ng pampulitikang pagpaslang na iniuumang laban sa pamahalaan at sa rebolusyonaryong kilusan ang pagkamatay ni Cris Mendez, hindi natin dapat tawaran ang pagpupursigi sa makatarungang kapakinabangan ng karahasang nasa ubod ng pampulitikang kapangyarihan. Sang-ayon ako na parusahan ang may kasalanan dito. Tutol ako na walang-silbi ang buhay ni Mendez sa kasong ito; kahit na palasak, itinatampok pa rin niya ang karahasang nananalaytay sa mga eskuwelahan, partikular sa pamantasang hinuhubog ang bagong henerasyon upang mamuno sa hindi naman talaga makatarungang kaayusan. Pagsasakatawan si Cris ng suliraning ito.
Gagawin daw ng UP ang lahat para mapanagot ang may sala at hinihimok tayong lahat na pagsumikapang si Cris Mendez na ang huling sakripisyo (Oblation?). Isinasalin papaloob ng unibersidad ang karahasang literal/pisikal sa labas na palagiang may pakikibakang paninimbulo.
Sana, ang mga halimbawa nina Sherlyn Cadapan at Karen Empeño ang magtagumpay na simbulo ng Pamantasan ng Pilipinas sa pakikibaka nating tiyak na lalampas sa dimensiyong simboliko.
18 setyembre 2007
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