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Global Experience (Kate C) - Coggle Diagram
Global Experience
(Kate C)
Systems of Power
Borders
Kafka on the Shore
explores the idea of the borders between the physical and spiritual world
"Before long the borders of his consciousness fluttered around, just like the butterflies. Beyond these borders lay a dark abyss. Occasionally his consciousness would fly over the border and hover over that dizzying, black crevasse" (Murakami, 85)
Global movement is a constant human experience; borders run counter-intuitive to that reality. Borders are ultimately just arbitrary, like the law; they are simply constructed, typically to control power.
"So a border, Richard thinks, can suddenly become visible, it can suddenly appear where a border never used to be" (Erpenbeck, 209)
Exit West
examines what happens when this notion of borders suddenly dissolves, both geographically and interpersonally. Takes on the question of what happens when there is no more "here" and "there"
Porous, non-concrete nature of borders in
Exit West,
similar to what Richard discovers and explores in
Go, Went, Gone
"Without borders nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play. Many were arguing that smaller units made more sense, but others argued that small units could not defend themselves" (Hamid, 158)
Idea that living without borders is much more favorable than current conditions where borders dominate global life
The Law
"The violence with which the police go about clearing the square has its roots in the incestuous relationship between the law and its interpretation...in other words, this is based only on a bit of ink on a bit of paper" (Erpenbeck, 244)
Janina believes the laws as they stand are fundamentally wrong. She can't bear the normalization of crime and pain, and hates the lack of reverence for animals and the natural world
She ends up following her own sort of law, which she also views as a type of cosmic law of nature. She creates her own law to enact a sense of justice.
Germany essentially announces that they do not care about the refugees and create complex laws so as not to allow them to easily settle there. Richard operates outside of the law in order to provide homes to the refugees.
Ideological fiction of the law rendering "other" as "enemy"
Richard wants to smash the laws and create new, more just systems (page 293)
in
Exit West
we explore how militant hatred can erupt anywhere, and how some laws contribute to this process, especially laws regarding borders and power.
Exploration of how we can actively reimagine what society looks like when needless laws resulting in pain, punishment, and displacement are altered.
Hollowness
"The wall has a name: it is “The System.” The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others–coldly, efficiently, and systematically...Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow The System to exploit us. We must not allow The System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made The System" (Murakami 'Jerusalem Prize Speech')
Murakami thinks hollowness is evil
In
The Vegetarian,
the men in the novel portray this idea of hollowness. The brother-in-law for example, cares very little about Yeong-Hye's needs and simply uses her as a vessel for his own desire. He similarly treats his wife, ignoring her until one night when he transfers his desire for Yeong-Hye onto his wife.
Patriarchy
Patriarchy controls the narrative in
The Vegetarian
and Yeong-Hye opts out of that paradigm through defiance, passivity, and non-participation.
Colonialism
Tambu has inherited colonial assumptions about the world and they impact her worldview and sense of self; she must abandon these colonial perceptions and embrace a different sense of collectivity and power.
Wealth
in
Exit West,
rich people can choose to block the doors in their cities or homes as to not allow refugees in.
The Self
Agency/Autonomy
Fate/Destiny
Kafka obsesses over the prophecy handed down to him by his father and believes he must fulfill that destiny, and over time he in fact does that. He does also learn to overcome a pattern of domination in his life.
Janina believes deeply in astrology and thinks that there is a cosmic influence and impact for everything we do, every choice we make, and who we are as individuals.
In
Kafka on the Shore,
Kafka seems to ultimately be on a journey towards reclaiming agency and shedding the idea of his fathers prophecy controlling his life.
Yeong-Hye chooses a sort of passivity and non-participation that in itself becomes an act of agency through defiance. She, too, ultimately rejects a pattern of domination in her life passed on by patriarchy.
Janina has a worldview that causes her to believe animals themselves have agency and autonomy, even to the point where they can hurt humans who have hurt them even from beyond the grave.
"When you become foreign, Awad says, you dont have a choice. You don't know where to go. You don't know anything" (Erpenbeck, 63). This speaks to the loss of agency that refugees experience.
What ultimately hangs over
Go, Went, Gone
is who has agency and choice.
Shadows/Darkness
"The physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two. They were directly linked" (Murakami, 225)
"We all die and disappear, but that's because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss. Our lives are just shadows of that guiding principle" (Murakami, 336)
In
Swing Time,
the concept of dance and lived history is explored. The narrator learns that she has been living a kind of shadow existence, especially by viewing dance as separate from reality and history. She abandons these notions and eventually abandons this shadow existence in order to live more fully, presently, and in tune with history.
Relational Nature of Self
Moral Responsibility
Because the self is relational, we have a moral obligation to treat each other with certain kindness and respect, and we must abandon a notion of individualism and embrace collectivity.
Tambu in
This Mournable Body
must abandon her sense of individualism, and its roots in colonialism and domination, and embrace relationality in order to foster a fuller sense of self and repair her community which she damaged through her exploits with Green Jacaranda
We have a moral responsibility to be empathetic listeners and actively hear the narratives of others, especially marginalized people impacted by structural injustices like the refugee crisis.
Erpenbeck argues for a kind of radical hospitality without conditions, and that we owe it to each other to act in such a manner; especially that the Global North has this responsibility towards the Global South.
In
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Janina has a heightened sense of moral responsibility. She believes human and animal life should be valued equally.
Janina believes all of our actions have a great impact, all the way on the cosmic level. She discusses how she wishes there was a "Cosmic Impact Channel" which would "show lines of influence and fields of planetary strikes" (Tokarczuk, 44). She believes that both our interpersonal actions matter but so do things like star patterns and planetary movements.
The self is inherently relational; we are bound up with others and our mutual actions impact each other in profound ways.
Go, Went, Gone
explores the power of narrative as a political tool, and ultimately a means of maintaining a sense of self. We realize that our sense of self is influenced by others, and by sharing stories of who we are then others can either build us up or break us down.
"without memory, man is nothing more than a bit of flesh on the planet's surface" (Erpenbeck, 151)
Yeong-Hye wants to abandon a physical and material sense of self and instead become a plant, abandoning the responsibilities of being a person and instead embrace a kind of non-participation that extricates her from systems of domination that seem inherent to being a person. She believes her sense of self can embrace a different state of consciousness and thus reality.
Otherization
Objectification
Brother-in-law dominates Yeong-Hye like a muse; in idealizing her he turns her into an object for his desire. He turns her into an idea, into the thing he wants her to be, not who she is.
Dangagrembga explores how patriarchy, capitalism, and objectification are linked.
"Capital is about scale...women like you just haven't got it. Scale. Because no one wants you to have it. They have to make sure you never do! They don't want women like that. They want women they way they are now, just something with a shelf life, that ages" (Dangarembga, 145)
The tourists objectify the women in the village.
"I am your picture, me!...Me, that's what you think i am. Not a someone, but that I am whatever you want to put in your picture" (Dangarembga, 279)
"I had the eerie sensation of viewing myself as really being one of these things, not a person at all but a sort of object...not even an object but a kind of conceptual veil...like being fictional" (Smith, 427)
Tokenization
Inherited/Intergenerational Trauma
Kafka has to empathize with his mother in order to forgive her and move on with his life.
Tambu has a hard time recognizing how the violent legacy of colonialism impacts her and is carried through her family lineage, that trauma still affecting her.
Yeong-Hye attempts to relinquish family trauma and regain a sense of control through her vegetarianism.
Internalized Oppression
The narrator in
Swing Time
experiences internalized oppression when she questions her "rightness" based on the fact that she was not white. "Unlike my reaction to the girl-- simply that some kind of fraud was under way-- looking at the boy I found I could not deny his essential rightness...yes, he is right and I am wrong, isn't it interesting?" (Smith, 46)
Psychic Alienation: "become foreign. To yourself and others. So that's what a transition looks like" (Erpenbeck, 63).
"It seems to me you don't like white people." "They never see me. It doesn't make any difference who they are. Nobody sees me" (Dangarembga, 107)
"In my dream we were all elegant and none of us knew pain, we had never graced the sad pages of the history books my mother bought for me, never been called ugly or stupid, never entered theaters by the back door, drunk from separate water fountains or taken our seats at the back of any bus" (Smith, 100)