The College Hill Independent Vol. 34 Issue 9 by College Hill Independent

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

APRIL 14 2017

COVER

La finca del gallero Maria Cano-Flavia

NEWS

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 34 / ISSUE 09 APRIL 14 2017

Week in Review Katrina Northrop, Patrick Orenstein, & Sam Samore

An Election Special Golnoosh Asghari

In Media Res Sophie Kasakove, Jonah Max & Will Tavlin

METRO 07

Behind the Veils Sophie Kupetz

ARTS FROM THE EDITORS

It’s lovely outside! Evade responsibility and spend as much time as possible in nature. Use your laptop to press flowers. Ditch your phone and tell time with sundials! Just plant a stick in the ground and see where its shadow falls. This seems much better than phones anyway, ‘cuz no one has to pay a stick bill every month! (Unless you are just plain stupid?!!!) Speaking of sticks, I always thought it odd that the popsicle wasn’t invented until 1905, when eleven-yearold Frank Epperson left a cup filled with powdered soda, water and a stirring stick on the porch overnight. Freezing a sweet liquid seems far less complicated than making bread or cheese, which predate it by millennia. But it still shows that everything worth discovering can be discovered from the comfort of your own porch! Whittle on, friends!

In a Word Tatiana Dubin

Paved Paradise Signe Swanson & Will Weatherly

FEATURES 09

Rotten Eggs Jacqueline Gu

Arch Enemy Anh Vo

SCIENCE 16

Suspect Science Fatima Husain

OCCULT 06

— LH

Mass Failures Dolma Ombadykow

LITERARY 17

Etymology for Catastrophe Kelton Ellis

EPHEMERA 15

Comic Anna Bonesteel

X 18

MANAGING EDITORS Will Tavlin Kelton Ellis Dolma Ombadykow

ARTS Ryan Rosenberg Will Weatherly Saanya Jain

NEWS Piper French Hannah Maier-Katkin

FEATURES Julia Tompkins Erin West Andrew Deck

WEEK IN REVIEW Sam Samore METRO Shane Potts Jane Argodale Camila Ruiz Segovia Jack Brook

METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Elias Bresnick SCIENCE Fatima Husain Liz Cory

TECH Jonah Max Malcolm Drenttel

X Liby Hays Nicole Cochary

OCCULT Lance Gloss Robin Manley

LIST Mark Benz Lisa Borst Will Weatherly

INTERVIEWS Patrick McMenamin LITERARY Stefania Gomez Isabelle Doyle EPHEMERA Anna Bonesteel

Letters to the editor are always welcome. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

STAFF WRITERS Eve Zelickson Marianna McMurdock Signe Swanson Josh Kurtz Zack Kligler Brionne Frazier Chris Packs Kion You Katrina Northrop

Princess Ava's Doodilito Cornerito Ava Zeichner

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Gabriel Matesanz

DESIGN EDITOR Chelsea Alexander

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Frans van Hoek Teri Minogue Ivan Rios-Fetchko Maria Cano-Flavia Pia Mileaf-Patel Kela Johnson Julie Benbassat Anzia Anderson Isabelle Rea Claire Schlaikjer

DESIGN & LAYOUT Celeste Matsui Andrew Linder Ruby Stenhouse

COPY EDITOR Miles Taylor

WEB MANAGERS Charlie Windolf BUSINESS MANAGER Lance Gloss SOCIAL MEDIA Jane Argodale Signe Swanson

SENIOR EDITORS Alec Mapes-Frances Sophie Kasakove Lisa Borst Jamie Packs MVP Liby Hays THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT — 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG / @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN INTRACTABILITY GETTIN’ EDEN The setting: a former World War II training ground in rural Scotland. The objective: to create a new society from scratch without any modern technology. The experiment: to broadcast the results 23 participants living in this Scottish, technology-free environment for a year as a reality television show, misleadingly titled Eden. The participants—which include a rowing coach, a plumber, a locksmith, and a dog groomer—began the experiment last July, and only ten participants succeeded in enduring the harsh conditions for a full year. Those ten participants re-entered the world to many upsetting surprises. Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. Britain decided to leave the European Union. 40 million people fixated on their cellphone screens as they played Pokemon Go. But perhaps most upsetting of all, Eden, the reality show to which they had dedicated the last year of their life, was cancelled after a mere four episodes. The New York Times reported that viewership dropped from 1.7 million for the first episode to 800,000 for the fourth episode, making the show unviable for the network. This pertinent information was not relayed to the participants, and so they continued to toil away, blissfully ignorant of their own irrelevancy. According to the participants who prematurely left Eden, the experiment had big problems from the start—sexual jealousy, starvation, and swarms of biting bugs called midges (just to name a few). Tara Zieleman, a 34-year-old life coach, was the first participant to quit. An expert at advising other people on surmounting life’s challenges, she couldn’t coach herself through the adversity of being a reality television star. Comparing her experience to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, she claimed that she was bullied for being weak. Other participants criticized her for failing to contribute real work and insisting on providing massages and counselling sessions instead. Zieleman recounted that some participants snuck off the show’s property to local stores after nightfall in order to satiate their alcohol and junk-food cravings. The nearby shop owners must have become accustomed to turgid clumps of people entering their stores late at night, rushing to grab handles of hard liquor and Hershey’s bars with dirty, calloused hands. She also cited sexual conflicts—aided by alcoholic home-brew that the group concocted out of pinecones and potato peels—as a major source of discontent. A dozen other participants quit shortly after Zieleman did, leaving only ten people in the Scottish wilderness as they attempted to reinvent modern society. If the remaining participants had been notified of the show’s cancellation, would they have stayed on? Were they genuinely interested in constructing society afresh, or did they only care about becoming household names through reality stardom? And perhaps more importantly, if no one was watching their struggle to gather food, brew alcohol from pine cones, and avoid biting insects, did it really happen? -KN

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Katrina Northrop, Patrick Orenstein, & Sam Samore ILLUSTRATION BY Liby Hays DESIGN BY Dolma Ombadykow BY

TAXATION WITHOUT DOCUMENTATION Almost two years after he declared his candidacy, nine months since he became the Republican nominee, and 12 weeks into his administration, President Donald Trump still has not released his tax returns. The media seemed to lose interest in the issue after the inauguration until March 14, when MSNBC host Rachel Maddow claimed to have obtained Trump’s tax returns. In a melodramatic segment on her show that night, it turned out that Maddow only had two pages from the president’s 2005 returns uncovered by reporter David Cay Johnston, information almost entirely irrelevant to Trump’s presidency. But the discovery that Trump paid an effective income tax rate of 25 percent—although low—refuted the idea that he was paying no taxes at all. Whether as a result of the MSNBC segment, or simply coincidence, the last few weeks have seen an explosion of renewed interest in the subject. Journalists have continued their search for the returns, which Politico recently called the “holy grail” of presidential reporting (but maybe also the black hole). Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued Trump in January for possible ethics violations resulting from his business dealings with foreign governments and want to subpoena his taxes as evidence. A few state legislatures may try to dig up the returns by using a little-used clause of the Constitution to put restrictions on what candidates must do to qualify to be on the ballot in the state. And this coming Saturday, three days before the 2016 tax filing deadline, a collection of left-wing political groups will hold rallies in Washington, DC and around the country to bring greater attention to the issue in order to drum up political engagement in the months leading up to the bloody fight over tax reform predicted for the next congressional term. Historically speaking, presidential candidates have used their taxes as a means of connecting with the economic concerns of the average voter, but as a candidate, Trump managed to generate working class support without downplaying his wealth. For Trump to release his tax returns now would only confirm the opinions of his opponents without dampening his political power on the right. -PO THE AUSTRALIAN RAPPER Aspiring Australian rapper “2Pec” (née Terry Peck) understands the importance of having role models. Besides the obvious appellative inspiration, Terry’s recent entrance onto the media scene might have taken its cue from another towering figure in the world of hip hop: Sean Kingston. Kingston, remarkably, almost died twice following a disastrous jet-ski accident in September of 2016. 2Pec isn’t a simple copy-cat, though—he practices repetition with a difference. Consider the following: the New York Post reported that last Sunday, 2Pec visited oceanfront restaurant Omeros Bros Seafood Restaurant. He ordered two lobsters, one baby octopus, 21 oyster shooters, and a few beers, for a total of $621. When the bill arrived, Peck dove into the ocean to make a jet-ski escape, pursued by water-borne police. Upon his apprehension, Peck claimed he had rushed out to help a pregnant friend. And that the lobster was overcooked. Omeros Bros, founded by brothers Nick and Angelo Omeros, is now owned by Nick’s son, John Omeros. He denies the lobster was overcooked. -SS

NEWS

A CROWDED FIELD The upcoming Iranian election

BY Golnoosh

Asghari ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Ruby Stenhouse The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) arrested Ali Ahmadnia and Ali Heydar Valizadeh in mid-March. The two managed channels on Telegram, a popular messaging app, where the politics and tensions leading up to Iran’s May 19 presidential election have played out. Most of the arrests have been of online activists and journalists who support current President Hassan Rouhani. The increased suppression of his supporters may be a sign from Iran’s conservative bloc to Rouhani to tread lightly in his re-election bid, where he may be disqualified from running. Telegram is currently the most popular messaging app in Iran and a major site of political discussion and news. It is Iran’s own virtual polis, though with only slight safeguards against the country’s rigid speech laws. Due to its ease of access compared to firewalled sites like Twitter and Facebook, Telegram allows users—20 million strong in Iran, according to the LA Times—to join channels of interest, which are similar to public chat groups and online forums. Telegram’s focus on privacy and anti-censorship allowed a surge of political channels, where Iranians can openly engage in political discussions. Rouhani, whose 2013 campaign slogan was “moderation and prudence,” promised a safer environment for journalists and a citizen’s rights charter. In the months following his election, multiple news sources reported journalists in Iran feeling safer than they did under Ahmadinejad. One Iranian journalist interviewed by the Guardian said, “The police-state atmosphere is gone. Today, you can actually criticize politicians.” Over the past three and a half years, Rouhani criticized journalists’ arrests. IRAN Daily reported that he called arrests by hardliners “baseless” in a November cabinet meeting.Yet, his objections did not curb journalist and activist arrests, partly due to the strength of the IRGC, a branch of the armed forces that protects Iran’s Islamic system of government, and the power of the Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He appoints the leaders of the IRGC, which in turn steers policy and daily life in Iran. In December 2016, Rouhani texted Iranians to check out his Citizen’s Rights Charter. The charter fulfilled a campaign promise, but holds no real legal standing. Al-Monitor cites speculation that the timing of its publishing, only months before the election, is political posturing. Many are dissatisfied with Rouhani’s failure to mitigate Iran’s economic downturn and doubt that Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal will persist now that Donald Trump is President of the United States. Such doubts signal a shaky road to re-election for Rouhani. What happens in the election will affect the direction of Iran’s shifting politics, which led moderates and reformists to win 42 percent of the seats in the 2016 parliamentary elections. A conservative, isolationist president will have heavy implications for the crisis in Syria, the fight against ISIS, and US-Russia-Iran relations. +++ Unsurprisingly, the charter’s release coincided with new restrictions and surveillance on Telegram. In December, Iran’s internet police—the Supreme Council of Cyberspace—caught onto Telegram’s subterranean use as a platform for political expression and implemented surveillance methods. Under the new guidelines, channels with over 5,000 members have to obtain a permit from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance by February 2017. The

NEWS

application requires that channels include a government bot as a co-administrator. The conservative Tasnim News Agency reported in January that 700 permits had been issued. Many users have left since the institution of government surveillance. Following the arrests of Ahmadnia and Valizadeh over management of Telegram channels, a number of journalists were also arrested. One of them, Hengameh Shahidi, a former advisor on women’s issues at the National Trust Party, is currently serving a six-year sentence. She has relayed letters and statements on Instagram through family and friends. Last Friday, an Instagram post announced that “at the urging and begging of her mother, [Shahidi] accepted to break her dry hunger strike, but will continue a wet hunger strike.” It is difficult to know what Rouhani would do about the detainees if he had more power than Khamenei; he is a long-standing member of the Islamic Republic and was categorized as a hardliner by moderate and conservative news outlets until he began vying for moderate support ahead of the 2013 election. However, his vocal objections to journalists’ arrests raises concerns over the extent to which the two leaders agree on social issues. What may decide the election, though, is the economy. In their respective New Year’s speeches on March 20, Khamenei and Rouhani evoked competing ideas about Iran’s economy. Khamenei noted Iran’s decreasing inflation and economic growth but focused more than half of his speech on the “many problems” that remain. Rouhani lauded the positive trends, eliding problems like high unemployment. New Year’s speeches by the supreme leader and president in Iran carry weight similar to the State of the Union in the US and can reveal much in an election year, which is why hardline publications continue to quote Khamenei’s speech in their criticisms of Rouhani. Rouhani’s claims of economic growth are not unfounded. In an assessment of the economy over the past three years, Bijan Khajepour, a managing partner of a group of strategic consulting firms in Tehran, wrote in Al-Monitor: “Inflation, which hovered around 40 percent in 2013, came down to 7.5 percent in 2016,” while economic growth rose 12.8 percent in the same period. Khajepour credits the overall improvement of economic conditions to “a more technocratic approach to economic management” and Rouhani’s economic policies; in Iran, one of the major roles of the president that distinguishes him from the Supreme Leader is economic management. A February International Monetary Fund report on its 2016 consultation with Iran praised an “impressive recovery” of the economy, citing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), popularly known as the nuclear deal. The moderate-reformist coalition announced it would only support Rouhani as a candidate. Rouhani’s main challenger may be able to use his economic skills to improve his chances of winning. Ebrahim Raisi, the conservative coalition’s preferred candidate this year, is the head of Astan-e Quds Razavi, Iran’s wealthiest and most prominent charitable organization. (The taxonomy used to describe Iranian politicians of moderate, reformist, hardliner, pragmatic, and principlists must be conceived of in the context of Iran’s history; the categories change and are relative to each other.) As the sole trustee, Raisi directs the Imam Reza Shrine in Mashad, which is the core of Shi’ism in Iran. Khomeini appointed Raisi to the position after the death of Ayatollah Abbas Vaez-Tabasi.

The Hoover Institution reported that the foundation is worth about $15 billion, with business enterprises in healthcare, agriculture, and construction. Fars News reported a recent trip to a poor village outside of Mashad that showed Raisi walking through unpaved streets and cramped homes. His organization’s social welfare projects paint a picture of a benevolent cleric turned savvy businessman. An established politician, Raisi has served in high judicial positions, most recently as a member of the Assembly of Experts. In the post-revolution period, Raisi served as one of four judges who ordered the mass executions of leftists and dissidents. Raisi’s announcement raised eyebrows, since many political insiders assume Raisi is on the short list to succeed Khamenei when he dies. The death of the former president Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani in January renewed the buzz around succession, and many point to Raisi as the one with the leader’s favor and the highest chances of taking over his office. A term as president could give him the executive experience he lacks to make him a stronger candidate for Supreme Leader, compared to other rumored possibilities like Rouhani and Ayatollahs Hashemi Shahroudi and Sadeq Larijani. Apart from Rouhani and Raisi, it is unclear who will run for president. Registration for candidates began this Tuesday and will continue until Saturday April 15. The final list of candidates will be announced by April 27. In the two weeks leading up to the list’s reveal, the Guardian Council will vet all candidates, disqualify many, and compile a final list. Typically, the council does not release its justifications for disqualifications, but it does address the candidates themselves and hear possible objections. None of these meetings and communications are public. This year, the council will address objections on April 21. The Guardian Council is the central electoral authority in Iran. It also functions as the constitutional court and wields legislative veto over all legislation passed by Majlis, Iran’s parliament. It is comprised of twelve members for six-year terms, six Islamic Faqihs chosen by the supreme leader as experts on Islamic law and six jurists selected by Majlis. The jurists are confirmed by Majlis from a shortlist of nominations promulgated by the Chief Justice, a position selected by the Supreme Leader. The Popular Front Revolutionary forces, commonly referred to as the conservative coalition or by the acronym JAMNA, held a summit last week where Raisi received the greatest number of votes. The coalition has announced that it plans to narrow its list of candidates from 14 to 5, and ultimately support one of these after the vetting process. Entekhab, a moderate Iranian newspaper, reported that Saeed Jalili and other conservative hopefuls seem unwilling to withdraw for the sake of one candidate since they are likely to make the top five. Current mayor of Tehran and two-time conservative presidential candidate Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf withdrew last week, but Asr-e Iran reported that a former member of parliament close to the mayor believes his decision is not final. Entekhab reported Ghalibaf may have stepped aside in order to seek the vice presidency under Raisi. Two-term Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad registered as a candidate on Tuesday. Khamenei told Ahmadinejad in a publicized meeting last year to stay out of the race. The BBC reports Ahmadinejad told reporters at the Interior Ministry—where he registered—

APRIL 14, 2017

that the Supreme Leader’s words were “advice.” More than 100 people registered on the first day according to international and local media, and hundreds more are likely to register by Friday.

Iran’s political parties, and statements of support from Khamenei take place long before the firm May 17 end to campaigning. +++

+++ The absence of women in this election and in this article is glaring. The Guardian Council summarily disqualifies women from presidential races, as well as elections to the Assembly of Experts. BBC Persian reported in 2004 that the Guardian Council interprets the constitutional requirements to run in Article 115 to be limited to men. BBC reported that six women registered to run on Tuesday for this election. The Guardian Council’s position is not predicted to change for this election. If JAMNA and the moderate-reformist bloc choose only one candidate each, the election may be a race between Rouhani and Raisi. Although disgruntled conservative candidates have started to defy their camps and register, the longevity of their candidacies may be short because of possible political retaliation and the modest nature of the electoral process. Unlike US presidential campaigns, which can overwhelm the media and public discussion for more than a year, the Iranian presidential elections allocate a threeand-a-half-week window to campaign after vetting. Nonetheless, public appearances, deliberations between

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The election will inevitably affect international relations, as Iran is a major supporter of the Assad regime in Syria and the war in Yemen; economically, the country is a potential market for Europe and East Asia now that its economy has been opened by the nuclear deal. Rouhani’s March 27-28 trip to Moscow was his final state-sponsored visit before the election season commences. Domestically, Rouhani’s visit shows he wants to continue expanding Iran’s relations with western countries. The current US administration is hostile to Iran. The détente ushered by the enduring diplomacy of Rouhani, Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, former President Barack Obama, and former Secretary of State John Kerry has been swapped for illegal immigration bans on citizens from countries with majority Muslim populations, including Iran. The potential for expanded trade with Russia additionally conveys that Rouhani can seek Western trade beyond the US. The multilateral status of the nuclear deal is holding strong as a safety net against US obstruction. Europe’s chief negotiator of the deal, Federica Mogherini, wrote in the Guardian, “There should be no doubt that the EU

stands firmly by the deal, which is a multilateral endeavour.” Mogherini reported that for the first three quarters of last year, trade between Iran and the European Union increased by 63 percent. Iranians will soon elect their new president—from whomever makes the approved list—but until then, daily challenges persist. There is increased concern over imposed reduction in Internet speeds and blockages of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). The surge of recent arrests of social media moderators, online activists, and journalists is disturbing. If Rouhani loses the favor of Khamenei, Iranians may suffer from increased crackdowns. Yet, you can count on Iranians to vote. Al-Jazeera reports that turnout for the previous presidential elections was an estimated 73 percent. That’s higher than 2012 voter turnouts in the Netherlands and France according to the Pew Research Center, and much higher than the US’ 58 percent according to statistics collected by the US Elections Project. With the next president likely to play a major role in appointing the next supreme leader, this election will decide Iran’s future for the next half century. GOLNOOSH ASGHARI B’17 is relieved the Iran elections are only 3 weeks long.

NEWS

AT THE PRESIDING MOMENT US media’s coverage of Trump’s strike in Syria Sophie Kasakove, Jonah Max, and Will Tavlin ILLUSTRATION AND DESIGN BY Jamie Packs BY

In the wake of last Thursday’s supposedly retributive airstrike against the Syrian Army and Bashar al-Assad, the Trump administration’s actions were praised by countless pundits, politicians, and political analysts—many of whom Trump had previously demonized as “failing” and “fake news.” According to a compilation of news coverage by FAIR Media Watch, five major US newspapers—the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and New York Daily News ran 18 columns the following day that either praised the strikes or criticized them for not being harsh enough. But in the days since, the Trump administration has tried to shift the American public’s focus away from Assad and back towards ISIS. In his first Pentagon news conference Tuesday, Defense Chief Mattis said, “The military campaign is focused on ... breaking ISIS, defeating ISIS in Syria,” and that the missile attack was a “separate issue.” Even as the Trump administration is seemingly trying to posit the strike—an extensive bombing of the Al Shayrat Airfield near the Syrian coast—as a targeted retribution for Assad’s chemical attack earlier in the week on anti-Assadist rebels in the north, the media has already elevated this moment to one of presidential becoming. This type of language has been a cornerstone of reporting across the political spectrum. In the days following the attack, Fox News lauded Trump for “showing the world who’s boss,” in total opposition, as the discourse goes, to Obama’s flip-flop approach to Syria. The fact that he declared the attack while the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, was visiting Mar-a-Lago has been spun in this narrative to further indicate Trump’s machismo. The spontaneity of Trump’s decision does not seem to contradict its presidential significance. Rather, Trump’s emotional erraticism is being hailed as a key ingredient in his promising potential to pressure not only Assad but Iran and Russia into compliance with US wishes. This discourse has extended well beyond the proTrump media. Speaking on CNN, Fareed Zakaria exaggerated this claim even further: “I think Trump became president of the United States” last night. What made this moment so presidential, according to Zakaria, was Trump’s recognition of the responsibility of the “president to act to enforce international norms...to have this broader moral and political purpose.” Zakaria concretized a definition of presidential that presupposes the mutual dependency of violence and moral authority. Such an action is presidential because this is what presidents do. In uncharted territory of Twitter diplomacy and Mar-a-Lago press conferences, the media’s responses answer an American desire for something that looks all too familiar—military force. +++ Diplomacy has long been enforced by US presidents in subjective and violent ways. Even after claims of weapons of mass destruction were discovered to be unfounded, the Bush administration continued to justify the US military intervention in Iraq by posing the war as a mission to spread democracy, as evidenced by the official name of the invasion: Operation Iraqi Freedom. American media giants like the Times were quick to adopt this narrative too, portraying the US military as a liberating force—so much so that when it became clear that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, the Times felt compelled to issue an apology for the lack of rigor in their coverage. In a 2003 op-ed, Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that Western militaries are “coming into the heart of their world to promote more decent, open, tolerant, women-friendly [sic], pluralistic governments

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by starting with Iraq—a country that contains all the main strands of the region: Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.” The prevailing motivation for American interventions is that our democracy—full of paradoxes and violences—must be everyone’s too. While neither the American media nor the White House have embraced calls for democracy with the same fervor as in 2003, the basic premise that the US has a moral obligation to ‘fix the Middle East’ has proved persistent. Stripped bare of its pro-democracy wrapping, this obligation now presents itself in emotional hues. In a gravitas-laden post-strike press conference held at Mar-aLago, Trump spoke of the “beautiful babies” being “cruelly murdered” in Assad’s “barbaric attack.” This sort of atrocity, in the mind of the US media, could only be countered by an equally affective response: as MSNBC’s Brian Williams stated, quoting the late Leonard Cohen, “I am guided by the beauty of our weapons,” continuing on to describe the “beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making what is for them a brief flight over to this airfield.” +++ On April 8, US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told CNN, “There’s not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime.” Though it remains unclear whether anyone in the United States has a firm grasp of the political problem at the heart of the Syrian conflict. The troubling uniformity of much of the American media’s response to the strike is particularly visible in contrast to the the vast range of differing, coinciding, and complicating opinions coming from the various factions vying for power in Syria. This week the Free Syrian Army, the democratic-leaning rebel group who were targeted in Assad’s chemical attack, released a statement that they “welcome the military operation carried out by the United States.” The report went on to express the army’s hope that this strike marked a “turning point” in the conflict and asks that the “international community [assume] its moral and legal responsibility to protect Syrian civilians.” Trump’s bombing of the Al Shayrat Airstrip, however, also drew praise from Ahrar Al-Sham, a Salafist group with ties to Al-Qaeda, who stated: “The armed opposition welcomes any US intervention through surgical strikes that would deter the Assad regime.” Other members of the Islamic Front, the Islamist faction of the anti-Assad rebels, such as the Jaysh Al-Islam, have also supported the strike. A number of groups which have historically been allied with the US, such as the Syrian Defense Force, an anti-ISIS coalition that grew from the leftist People’s Protection Units (YPG), have refrained from commenting, instead underscoring their dedication to the autonomy of their region of Rojava in the north. The PKK, the Kurdish Workers’ Party and an ally of YPG, have vocally denounced the attack, stating they are “ready to help Syria in need” and urged the US to “destroy the Islamic State rather than strike the [airstrip].” While ISIS has yet to release any statement on the Trump airstrike, in the days following the attack it launched a number of attacks in eastern Homs, near the airstrip. In its coverage of the Trump airstrike, the US media has failed its much publicized commitment to keep the Trump administration accountable and has reverted to the tried-and-true method of selling presidents’ wars to the American people. SOPHIE KASAKOVE B’17.5, JONAH MAX B’18, & WILL TAVLIN B’17.5 think we can do better.

APRIL 14, 2017

BENEATH THE SURFACE

Dolma Ombadykow ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz BY

Imagining a future for the unclaimed dead on Hart Island content warning: state violence

On March 31, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio backed a ten year plan to close Rikers Island, the city’s prison infamously known for its brutal treatment of inmates, with hundreds requiring hospitalization each year. The torturous conditions are only exacerbated by the island’s physical inaccessibility and the bureaucratic slush that prevents inmates from filing complaints—nearly 70 percent of whom have yet to receive sentencing. The closure of Rikers is largely symbolic: the inmates will be transferred to other prisons in the New York area, and ending the explicit brutalization of incarcerated people at this site does little to account for the structural violences enacted by incarceration in the first place. But Rikers’ closure also has implications across the city. For Hart Island, the New York’s mass grave for unclaimed bodies less than 5,000 feet southeast of the Bronx’s Pelham Bay, burial labor is currently performed exclusively by Rikers’ inmates. It is the only cemetery in the world operated by a prison. With growing support from abolitionist groups and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), advocacy efforts are shifting toward an alternative future for the cemetery. In 2012, Bill #0134 was introduced to the New York City Council by member Elizabeth Crowley (D-30) to petition for a jurisdictional transfer of Hart Island from the Department of Correction (DOC) to the Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR). At a public hearing for the bill after its reintroduction in 2016, Mark Levine (D-7) argued that transferring oversight to the DPR would make public visitation possible “to pay respects to the one million people who are buried there. People who reflect the history of New York City from how we’ve dealt with contagious disease, how we dealt with our war dead, the history of poverty over two centuries, the AIDS epidemic, the modern homeless crisis.” The remaining structures on the island—a former infirmary, a workhouse for boys, and a rehabilitation facility—are in desperate need of preservation, which proponents of the bill believe should be completed under the purview of the DPR. +++ Purchased by the DOC for $75,000 in 1868, the 0.2 square mile island was first established as a juvenile workhouse for boys. Before its purchase, the island functioned as a prisoner-of-war camp for Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, and since then, has operated as a quarantine site following the yellow fever outbreak of 1870, a women’s psychiatric hospital in the 1880s, and a storage site for missiles for the military’s Project Nike during the Cold War. Louisa Van Slyke, a 24-year-old woman who died alone at Charity Hospital in 1869, was the first recorded burial on the island. As the largest tax-funded cemetery in the world, Hart Island functions as the City’s major potter’s field, providing burial for some of New York’s most marginalized: primarily, bodies that remain unclaimed or unidentified. Keeping expenditures to a minimum, bodies buried here are not embalmed in any way and are placed in simple pine coffins. Though many states require that individual coffins be encased in cement, the coffins on Hart Island are instead grouped by the thousand

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and stacked in a series of trenches across the acreage. Because of this bare-bones burial method, bodily remains decompose every 25–50 years, and trenches are frequently refilled. A catalogue system introduced in the late 19th century groups coffins by age in separate trenches, and each coffin is now labeled with an identification number to facilitate the reinterment process for those claimed post-burial. In 2008, the Hart Island Project, a charity headed by artist Melinda Hunt, filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests from the DOC. With support from the NYCLU, the advocacy efforts required that the DOC make burial records and the procedure for survivors of the interred to request for a private re-burial public. In 1977, nearly two decades of burial records for the island were destroyed in a fire, and despite numerous gaps in the archive since, available records suggest that more than 68,000 people have been buried since 1980. After the original purchase by the DOC, the potter’s field was first serviced by prisoners on what is now Roosevelt Island. When that prison was demolished in 1936, the DOC transferred the burial labor to the incarcerated people at Rikers, who still are responsible for the gravedigging and burial procedures to the current day. Paid a paltry 50 cents an hour, inmates are ferried to Hart Island most weekdays to tend to the grounds and inter upward of three thousand bodies per year. Rikers inmate Michael A. Roman said of Hart Island in April 1992, “an island of those poor unfortunate souls buried here in the unknown to others. If only I had the power to help this lost island.” Often referred to as the ‘City Cemetery,’ body disposal on Hart Island is dictated by the city’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Though most bodies buried on the island are now identified, uninsured and underinsured people who cannot afford private burial or whose surviving family cannot provide arrangements are offered the option of “City Burial.” Rhetorically obfuscated by this seemingly routine option, Hart Island is anything but standard. +++ After the DOC made their interment records public, the Hart Island Project developed a digital, interactive archive of the people buried there. The homepage for the Project’s website serves—with an endless scroll function—as a series of identification cards for the Hart Island dead. Each card lists all publicly-available information: age of death, burial date, location of the plot on the island, and sometimes, additions from visitors to the website who knew the deceased. Each name is attached to a clock that tracks the length of “anonymity” for the unclaimed bodies; the clock stops only when the body is exhumed or identified digitally by a loved one. Leo (Ramon) Summers died on April 1, 1985 at age 59 at the VA and was buried in plot 168 one year and 15 days later (a stipulation in New York state law offers any unclaimed bodies for scientific research and medical education for a year or more before ‘proper’ burial). On the Project’s website, Jamison Graff offers in December 2016 that Leo was an award-winning sci-fi illustrator in the 60s for the serial Amazing Science Fiction Stories novel, among other published works.

For an infant with the surname Bermeo who died in August 2000 and was buried two months later, Estrella Quizhpi writes in February 2017, “Mi angelito, nunca te he olvidado todos los días te tengo presente en mi corazón.” Estrella attached a number of photos of the baby’s siblings and relatives, and the message ends, “te amo mi niña por siempre.” Others on the site have yet to be identified by loved ones: Larrier Budelo, who died at Sloan Kettering in April 1982 (age unknown), was buried a month later and has not yet been found through the Project’s site. Of Jose Rodriguez (1958-2015), Carola Martinez writes in September 2016, “while we were not able to physically say goodbye, he will forever remain loved and remembered by his family.” Efforts by the NYCLU and the Hart Island Project have offered a potential for reburial for many, like Gladys Van Aelst, who died in 2014 at the age of 85 and was reinterred a year later. For others, the Project is an opportunity to render visible the deceased most obscured by the state, even if the physical remains stay stacked in the island’s trench system. In 2015, the NYCLU filed a class-action lawsuit against the DOC to grant families of the deceased access to the grounds. On July 19 that year, 50 family members who petitioned the department for visitation were transported by ferry for the first-ever public visit. For one weekend day each month since, visitors are shepherded onto the island; this January, the program was expanded to accommodate 70 visitors at a time and to include new permissions allowing family to photograph the grounds. The surface of the island is quite bare: aerial footage of the island shows large, grassy spaces, save a few decommissioned buildings. Except for the individual grave of the first child to die of AIDS in New York, no markers reveal the island for what it is. +++ Transferring oversight to the DPR would place Hart Island in a long linage of New York potter’s-fieldsturned-public-park. Among the former mass graves are the heavily foot trafficked Madison Square Park, Washington Square Park, Union Square, and Bryant Park. This year, the city’s Historic Districts Council named Hart Island as one of their annual Six to Celebrate—an initiative to highlight neighborhoods in need of preservation. If Hart is taken over by the DPR, proponents of the bill argue the island’s structures would be better prioritized for preservation efforts and access to the island would significantly increase. In collaboration with the Hart Island Project, environmental architects propose the island as a site for eco-burial practices that would reduce the physical labor required of the current interment methods used (at the cost of losing the potential for re-interment), while addressing the spatial limitations that make traditional burial methods unsustainable in the city. Transfer to the DPR opens the possibility for a new public memory for the centuries of life hidden beneath the soil. DOLMA OMBADYKOW B’17 will keep digging.

OCCULT

WHEN WILL THE SENTENCE END? A call to end public housing discrimination in Rhode Island BY Sophie

Kupetz Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Andrew Linder ILLUSTRATION BY

Edwin Rivera is an active member of Behind the Walls, Providence grassroots organization Direct Action for Rights and Equality’s (DARE) prison reform committee. Rivera was released from the Adult Correctional Institution (ACI) three years ago, after spending 25 years in prison. He still feels the effects of incarceration. “I can’t get housing. I’m living in a dump,” Rivera told the Independent. “Sometimes I want to go back to prison, because, you know it’s hard, it’s not easy.” Upon his release from the ACI, Rivera was unable to live with his mother because she lives in public housing. The Providence Housing Authority (PHA) told Rivera that she would be evicted if he moved in with her, preventing him from caring for his mom in her old age. Ron Doyle, who is also a member of Behind the Walls, was released from the ACI in 1992. He has applied for public housing for himself and his two children seven times, only to be repeatedly denied by the PHA. Rivera, Doyle and many others are released from prison eager to integrate into ‘free society’ only to find that the odds of successful reentry are stacked against them. The stigma of a prior conviction severely limits their access to public housing, employment, and social services. +++ At the March 16 Providence Housing Authority public hearing, nearly 50 people packed into the PHA’s office at 40 Laurel Hill Avenue carrying signs with slogans such as “PHA, when will the sentence end?” The group of concerned community members gathered to demand that the PHA change their discriminatory application and eviction policies that target individuals with prior convictions, such as Rivera and Doyle. Recognizing that the carceral system disproportionately targets people of color, the United States Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) released a report on April 4, 2016 warning that public housing policies that target people with records violate the Fair Housing Act (FHA). The 1968 act “prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental, or financing of dwellings and in other housing-related activities on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, disability, familial status or national origin.” People of color are disproportionately represented in the carceral system due to its discriminatory foundations, policies and practices. Thus, restrictions on access to housing based on prior convictions are likely to unfairly burden people of color. Although the FHA does not prohibit housing providers from taking into account an individual’s prior convictions, “arbitrary and overbroad” restrictions are likely unjustified, according to HUD. As part of the report, HUD released new, less restrictive guidelines for the public housing application and eviction processes for those with prior convictions. Local agencies are not bound to adopt HUD’s new recommendations, though. By changing their guidelines, the federal government sent a message to public housing agencies like the PHA that there ought to be a shift in our treatment of formerly incarcerated people.

METRO

Hundreds of people are released from the ACI each month, and they, as well as those who have been out of prison for decades, face immense barriers to obtaining housing. +++ Acknowledging the pain that the denial of public housing inflicts on formerly incarcerated people and their families, Behind the Walls took up a campaign to demand the PHA follow the example of HUD and change their policy. Sophia Wright, the co-organizer of Behind the Walls, described the group’s advocacy process to the Independent: “The entire time we’re working in consensus, trying to make decisions that are directly informed and lead by folks who are directly affected by the issue.” Over the course of two years, Behind the Walls conducted research, referencing New Orleans’ progressive public housing policy as a model, and partnered with other community organizations and advocates to draft policy recommendations for the PHA. The committee then brought the demands to the PHA, asking them to change their outdated policy. Wright says that although Behind the Walls tried to communicate directly with the PHA, the PHA replied with dismissive emails and did not respond to the committee’s numerous requests to meet. In fall 2016, the PHA released a draft of their 2017 policy changes, which included some of the changes that DARE had recommended. For example, the PHA agreed to shorten the lookback period (the period of time during which arrests or convictions can justify disqualification from public housing) from ten to five years (a few years short of the requested three year lookback) and eliminated the lookback for misdemeanours, except for those categorized as drug crimes. The authority changed their definition of “currently engaging” in drug use from a person who has used drugs in the past two years to a person who has used drugs in the past six months. The policy ignored many of the demands of Behind the Walls, such as allowing formerly incarcerated people to live with their families in public housing and creating a multi-step denial process that provides formerly incarcerated individuals with adequate defense opportunities. By the time they arrived at the PHA, the demands had already been curbed to increase the chances that the PHA would be receptive. DARE ideally preferred to put forth a policy that does not treat people differently based on the nature of their prior convictions. Behind the Walls, however, was aware that they were working within the constraints of a system that is extremely resistant to change, and hoped to reduce the immediate harm for at least a part of the formerly incarcerated population through their proposed policy. The PHA policy remained far stricter than the recently published HUD guidelines. +++

At the hearing, the chairman of the PHA welcomed Behind the Walls members, representatives of organizations such as the RI American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), RI Legal Services, and other supportive community members:“This is a really cold night. It would be easier to stay home and just let it pass, but you took the time to come and I thank you for that.” Although not intentionally malicious, the chairman’s welcome assumed that all those gathered in the room have a home, and beyond that, a home that is warmer and more comfortable than the room in which they stood—an ironic welcome to a group of individuals gathered to advocate for those who do not have access to affordable housing. Numerous individuals who testified asked the PHA to clarify aspects of their policy and incorporate the rest of the Behind the Walls demands into the final draft. Marcella Betoncur of the RI ACLU told the Independent that the PHA’s 2017 plan lacked a clear process for handling denials, since it said that they would be reviewed on “a case-by-case basis.” She believes that “especially when it comes to larger organizations like [the PHA], there needs to be a policy behind it and it needs to be written down...when you take things on a case-bycase basis, what happens if your director changes or your deputy director changes? Then the policy and how it is handled might change.” Betoncur asked that the PHA clarify the denial process in writing to hold the PHA accountable. Benjamin Seymour, who researches fair housing in Providence for RI Legal Services, expressed additional concern with the denial process. He testified at the hearing and argued that, like the Housing Authority of New Orleans, Providence ought to include pre-denial hearings, so that, before an individual is rejected, “they have a chance to clarify their experiences.” Pre-denial hearings serve as a very important tool for individuals to advocate for themselves and put a human face to the files that the PHA reviews. Fred Brissette began his testimony, “Currently I am the VP of the Student Association Commission at Charter Oaks State College; I am on the Board of Directors for the Charter Oaks Foundation and I’m also the student representative. I’m currently working to earn my graduate degree. I’m graduating in May with high honors. I’m also the founder of the Freedom Project, an organization that is working towards incorporation in the state of RI to work with people that are coming home from the prison system.” Brisette has engaged in all of these projects in the past three and a half years. “According to this background, and according to your policy, I’m a perfect candidate for housing,” Brissette continued. “However, 17 years ago I was incarcerated for a violent crime. That negates me.” Brissette explained that when they decided to give him parole, the parole board looked at his situation, and felt that he had appeased his sentence requirements. Speaking to a board of politicians, Brissette emphasized that he and others released from prison are deemed fit to reenter “free” society by the established legal system. Brissette

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pleaded that the PHA not evaluate an individual based on a crime for which they were already judged, but instead based on their rehabilitative process, which individuals released from prisons work to regain the humanity that prisons take from them. This process allows for formerly incarcerated people to move forward and contribute to their communities. While Brisette's argument runs the risk of legitimizing decisions made by a legal system that is fraught and oppressive in its foundation, it works to gain the sympathy of those who believe in the justice system and see those who are convicted as needing “reform.” Considering the immense barriers formerly incarcerated people in Rhode Island face when trying to restart their lives as citizens, it is no surprise that about 52 percent of those released from the ACI return within three years of their release, according to a 2012 report by the RI Department of Correction. This percentage is significantly higher than the 43.3 percent recidivism rate that the Pew Center cites as the national average. One action known to reduce recidivism rates is through family reunification efforts, which is made difficult by current PHA policies. Rivera and many others are unable to move in with their families post release because their families live in public housing, often leaving them homeless. During the public hearing, Wright asked the PHA to consider “the ways in which a family support system is critical to people getting out of prison,” when finalizing its policy. Not only is family support essential for the formerly incarcerated person’s rehabilitative process, coming out of this abusive institution, it also allows people such as Rivera to care for their families, a right that all ought to be afforded. +++ The hour-long hearing was filled with emotional testimonies and demands by supporters and those whom the housing policies directly affect. Many thanked the PHA for the changes it agreed to make, but emphasized that the PHA needed to clarify its policy and include

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the other demands made by Behind the Walls before it was finalized. Only then would the policy truly expand access to public housing for formerly incarcerated people and their families. Behind the Walls ended the hearing by reiterating their demands a final time. They asked the PHA to clearly outline the denial process and include pre-denial hearings in the process; change the felony lookback period from five years to three; exclude all misdemeanors including nonviolent drug crimes from lookbacks; eliminate denials and evictions based on arrest records alone; and support family reunification by allowing formerly incarcerated individuals to live with their families in public housing. +++ The PHA provides about half of RI’s public housing, making it the largest housing authority in the state. PHA policy can inspire other RI public housing authorities to make similar changes, and further “send a message that we do care, [that] we care about returning citizens and we see them as human beings who can make wonderful things out of their life, even if they may have made a mistake, bad or good, in a prior time, like all of us” as Reverend Doctor Joyce Penfield, pastor and Director of Blessing Ways, a recovery and reentry service agency, expressed in her testimony to the PHA. In his own testimony, John Prince, co-organizer of the Behind the Walls committee reflected on the feelings he experienced post-release: “I looked at myself as I was homeless, coming out of prison, living in an abandoned house, eating tuna fish out of a can with my hands…I’m getting a little choked up, just a flash back. Us folks that go to prison, we’re told that we’re misfits, we don’t belong. Put ‘em in a box. Get ‘em out of the way. For a long time I felt that I didn’t belong.”

told the Independent that Behind the Walls is happy to see that the PHA made some changes, but remains committed to fighting for the elimination of discriminatory housing policies. In a conversation with the Independent, Bruce Riley, former organizer of Behind the Walls, who helped drive the Housing Authority of New Orleans’s policy changes, emphasized the importance of “making sure people learn that the proper theory of change is not just that we need better charity or that we need more experts from Brown to do a study…[Instead,] we need to listen to the people who are being impacted by these programs whether it be policing or housing or whatever.” The PHA and other authorities must center the needs of the community and commit to working collectively to make sustainable change. Preparing for a possible review of the policy in a year from now, Wright left the Independent with the following: “The PHA doesn’t recognize that we’re not there just to be a thorn in their side. We want to build a community that is safe and secure for everyone… I want to encourage folks in [non-elected] positions [such as the PHA] to think creatively and lovingly about those communities they work with... because a lot of the time, the people… don’t have family support. That’s why they end up looking for public housing, not because they are less than, but simply because they don’t have the same support that sometimes we take for granted.” SOPHIE KUPETZ B‘19 asks that you donate to DARE at www.goo.gl/rbtahg to support work that centers the voices and experiences of marginalized folks.

+++ Despite overwhelming support of the additional changes advocated for at the March 16 hearing, the PHA did not incorporate them into their final policy for 2017. Wright

METRO

ON FATHERS

BY Jacqueline

Gu ILLUSTRATION BY Frans van Hoek DESIGN BY Dolma Ombadykow

content warning: racism, xenophobia The ones who know how to keep spices for years, how to hang pork belly in the garage to cure with salt and ginger. How to spread mulch in a garden, how to prune dead branches from trees, how to care for bushes spotted with disease. How to nurse a scraped knee with saltwater solution. How to nurse anything with saltwater solution. +++ My dad is a software engineer, but before that he was a contract laborer, and before that he was a person who bought everything he owned on Craigslist. And before that he was a student, top of his class, and the youngest of six children, the baby of the family, the only one who gave a shit about school, the son of a rickshaw driver who died young and a woman who never had the chance at an elementary-school education. My dad also voted for Donald Trump. For a while it was the only thing I could think about him—once I knew he was a Trump supporter, he ceased to be anything else. I didn’t speak to him for almost two months after the election. It felt like a personal betrayal of the deepest kind, a fundamental denial of my humanity. I was consumed by a sea of hurt—fury at his selfishness and small-mindedness, disgust at having blatant bigotry so close to my face, helplessness that I had failed to change his mind. The part that boggled me most was that Dad is an immigrant. He knows what it’s like—he jumped through the same hoops and fought the same fight. But since we’ve resumed talking I have been making an effort to listen, really listen, because he is my father. Because I love him, and this love is binding. I’ve struggled, am still struggling, with how to separate his political choices from this love, how to compartmentalize betrayal and the need to have certain parts of my identity validated, how to have a relationship with him when he can’t do that yet. Sometimes it still feels impossible. +++ My parents don’t like to talk about the past. They speak of their lives as if they were born the day they came to America in 1988. In their silence, I’d imagined myself as having no history. I have only recently begun to understand their pasts—the comfort into which I was born shielding me from the trauma between our generations, which was swept under the rug of collective amnesia. Here’s what I know: Dad came to the United States in 1988. He was sponsored by his university in Shanghai, which was eager to capitalize on the economic reforms sweeping China in the 1980s. They gave him a B2 tourist visa and a job in St. Louis, Missouri that paid 300 dollars a month. He was 25 years old, single, being paid just enough to survive; still, he sent money home as often as he could. During his second year in America, my grandfather passed away. Dad couldn’t go back to say goodbye as his father was deteriorating, or for the funeral, because of the terms of his visa. He wouldn’t return until nearly ten years after he arrived in the US, long after his father died, long after half his nieces and nephews married and started families of their own. By then he was married, he fathered a son, and had relocated to California, where property values were much higher than in the Midwest. Most of his and my mom’s salaries were funneled into his mother in law’s hospital bills, as her kidney failure accelerated. During this ten-year period, he bought calling card after calling card to listen to the inhale-exhale of everyone he loved from the other end of the world, that tenuous phone line all he had to grasp onto his home.

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+++ A scholar named Marianne Hirsch coined the term 'postmemory' in the early ’90s. “Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that precede their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events,” she writes. To grow up with inherited memories is to be molded, however unconsciously, by the trauma of the generations that came before you. I’m not an immigrant, just a child of immigrants—I only see a fractured iteration of the world my parents grew up in, diluted through time and intentional distance. I get the Saturday Chinese school, the red envelopes once a year, the glimpses of something ineffable when the whole family is in the kitchen, but not the pain—or at least not the same kind. Leave that part out. They wouldn’t want to know anyway. These events happened years ago, to people who are not me but who look like me and act like me, or, more accurately, I act like them. (I have his eyes, his ears, his nose, his neuroticisms, and his inability to fall asleep in cars.) I am shaped by his memories, but they are not my own. Mine are the signifiers of his past that bloom to the surface in sudden, sharp ways. Like how he went berserk whenever food spoiled, and when spots of mold appeared on bread he would yell at me to eat it, don’t I know the value of money, don’t I know how hard they worked, and how much? +++ When I muster up the courage to ask him about Trump, why I couldn’t change his mind before the election, he seems relieved that I am finally willing to talk about it. He explains to me that his decision mostly came down to opposing certain pieces of legislation recently proposed by California Democrats, such as Assembly Bill 1726, which requires certain higher education and state healthcare forms to disaggregate AAPI data. In other words, it makes you specify what kind of Asian you are. I can understand why this upsets him, though I don’t agree. If data were collected on the breakdown of Asian-American ethnicities of students at UC Berkeley, for example, it would likely be found that the majority are Chinese-American, which might in turn lead to affirmative action policies pushing for higher proportions of non-Chinese Asians, something he and many other Chinese immigrants see as anti-Chinese and a threat against Chinese-Americans striving for social and economic equality. My dad talks of other minorities as if they are the enemy, as if they’re the ones preventing us from this so-called equality. The immigrant Chinese community in the United States tends to blame its problems not on the white power structure but on supposed favoritism shown to other racial groups. In my dad, this attitude manifests in racism of his own—in offhand comments about other people of color and in the contempt with which he treated someone I dated who was Indian. He is, like so many other Chinese-Americans, seduced by the model minority myth because it tells us that we are the good immigrants, that we are better than them, that we deserve to be treated like white people. Haven’t I worked enough? Haven’t I earned all this, and more? In the end, the version of equality they seek is no equality at all. It’s a vision of America no different from today: instead of working to undo the existing power structures that benefit white people at the expense of everyone else, they want to

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blend in at the top. Assimilate into white supremacy, accept it as the societal bedrock upholding anti-Blackness and anti-brownness, so long as we are on an equal playing field with white people. For instance, when thousands of Chinese-Americans rallied for cop Peter Liang's release after he shot Akai Gurley, what were they demanding, exactly—the right to kill Black people without consequence? The underlying question: if white cops can get away with it, why not us too? I struggle to keep the emotion out of my voice when I ask him how he felt about the executive order barring immigrants from seven countries this January, when I say you’re an immigrant, too. He hesitates. I support immigration, I do, he says. I just… I can understand Trump’s anxiety over immigrants. There are so many now that they should be careful about who they let in. But that’s what white supremacy does, I tell him. It makes you believe that we’re competing against them, when we should be asking why our spots are limited in the first place. He’s silent, and I tell him I have to go, but I want to talk about this more later. For once, I mean it. +++ When love is a jar of hard-boiled eggs in the refrigerator. When love is a box of frozen Marie Callendar’s chicken pot pies from Costco because your children won’t eat the food you pack them for lunch, when love is ginger tea on a cold day, when love is taking time off from work despite having lived in fear for so long that your job and income will slip away, again, like sand through a sieve. When love is turning to TV commercials and Sunday morning shopping advertisements like a plant turns its face to the sun, looking at whiteness, looking to become whiteness, when love is an attempt to give your children that which you cannot have. +++ I went back to China at 18, the first time in five years, to spend a month with my aunt and my grandmother. One day an old woman stopped me in the elevator, asking me if I was Jitang’s daughter. Startled, I asked her how she knew and who she was. You look exactly like him, she said with the kind of wise smile only the elderly can pull off, before disappearing into her apartment. My grandmother told me later that she was the mother of one of my dad’s elementary school classmates. They used to all live together in the same slum neighborhood, before the government relocated them all to an apartment complex. Gai ge kai fang, the dawn of modernity. I saw old photos of Dad for the first time—at 20, at 24. I gawked over his eyes, my eyes, and his face, which I had never seen rendered with such irreverent joy. My aunt told stories of how kids from school used to follow him home to copy his homework, how he gladly let them. We should have charged for tickets, she said. That apartment felt like home to me. When he Skyped them his whole face lit up in a way I never saw. I understood then how we were an island, we family of four, abiding by immigrant codes with a sense of stuckness, a permeating loneliness that was the loneliness from leaving everyone and everything you’ve ever loved. Postmemory: how I refer to it as going back to China when I didn’t come from there. How I think of it as homeland, motherland, when it was never my origin but yours.

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+++ Early photos of the two of us make me want to cry. You, standing young and retro with your voluminous hair and large wire-frame glasses; me, small and rotund and swaddled. But the years between, the formative years, where did they go? To me you were all temper, scathing heat and disposition. Pressed lips and a frowning forehead that said, wordlessly, not good enough, never good enough, not even close. A girl, a stupid girl, a pin popping your immigrant dreams. I always assumed that Chinese parents didn’t know how to express their love. It never occurred to me that maybe it was I who didn’t know how to receive it. Now I hoard the scraps of memories: when you took a day off work to spontaneously take my brother and me to Fisherman’s Wharf. We skipped in the sun and saw the basking sea lions. All the times you held my hand as we walked outside and you threatened to toss me off a bridge. The nickname you used to call me: yatou, meaning duck head, servant girl, or, affectionately: daughter. +++ Learn: how to write a character. How to write many characters in many languages, how to remember that you are Chris now and not Jitang, how to write a letter, how to write a thank you letter. How to write a sorry letter after you kick your daughter out of the house. How to write a letter saying look here is my health insurance, please can I contest this charge, haven’t I given you enough? How to say I love you I love you I love love love—without ever saying the words. How to say: and isn’t that enough? Haven’t I done enough? +++ It’s been a few months since I broke my silence post-election. A lot happened in that conversation: I told him exactly what his vote meant to me, I cried a lot, I came out. Enough time had passed that the last time we spoke he told me that he was trying to understand my identity, that he didn’t want to talk to me about it just yet but that he had gone to a seminar, and that it was helpful. And that someone at the seminar recommended him a book, and that was helpful too. I pictured a room full of Chinese immigrant parents like my dad, solemnly swapping stories about their queer kids like Alcoholics Anonymous, which is a funny image but touches a nerve deep inside me that makes me want to ask him why he ever immigrated. This can’t have been the life he envisioned for himself upon landing on American soil thirty years ago. I want to say: I’m sorry. I want to say: I never expected you to understand me, I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you are trying, but please know that it still matters to me what you believe. That, I, too, am trying to understand you, and I will work at reconciliation from the ground up. And—I want to say—I remember everything you’ve taught me, which teas to drink when I’m sick, which grains to boil, how to take care of another. I want to say: I am trying, but I need you to meet me halfway. I want to say—I am still learning how to be your daughter. JACQUELINE GU B’17.5 lives in fear of moldy bread.

FEATURES

VISION A tool for the colonization of dance BY

Anh Vo

ILLUSTRATION BY Claire

Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Ruby Stenhouse In the West, concert dance has historically been linked to the theatre and the proscenium stage—the most common structure in a performing space today, characterized by the grand arch and billowing red curtain frame. It is within this structure that ballet and modern dance have thrived. Before the intervention of the stage, dance was a social event which begged participation. With the proscenium structure in the 20th century, the separation between audience members and performers allowed the former to simply sit back and watch. In this turn, concert dance has distinguished itself as a visual spectacle, placing emphasis on the act of seeing. Theatre, from the Greek theatron, refers to “a place to see.” This root is visible in the architecture of the space: the proscenium arch enforces a binary between the spectator and the performer. It acts as a physical and metaphorical frame that divides who is being seen from who is seeing, a screenal perspective to communicate that whatever happens within the frame is a performance. The theatre has become more than a place to see; it has been perfected as a technology to facilitate the act of seeing, to serve the eye as its master. When dance is developed for performance under this vision machine, nothing seems to matter other than what the choreography looks like on stage. In this way, privileging the spectators’ eyes has become the norm in the field of dance in the West. Most training regimens here are associated with the mirrors of a studio setting, which forces the dancers to correct every minute detail on their bodies that don’t fit an idealized form. In the mirror, every action gets codified: the distance between your feet, how high your legs should be, the placement of your fingers, which direction your head should face. Further, there has been tremendous effort to develop a system of choreographic notation, to universalize the language used to describe movements, reducing dance to movements to be looked at. The most comprehensive system so far is Labanotation, first developed by Rudolf Laban in the early 20th century. This model has been consistently used to document concert dances because of its ability to notate all possible human movements. The privilege of gaze penetrates so deeply that its omnipresence is rarely questioned. As a choreographer, I am taught to visually delineate bodies as physical entities in space and time, in order to codify and to make uniform movements. As a dancer, I learn to subject myself to the mirror, to shape the curves and lines of my body so that I can be the most versatile tool for the choreographer. But most dangerously, as an audience member, I am trained to see beauty in these highly curated forms. This emphasis on vision is not inherently violent; but in the post-colonial context, privileging the eye can serve to colonize dance forms that do not rely on sight or that belong to communities of color. Here, I do not focus on the submission of choreographers of color to the predominantly white audience of concert dance, even though this practice is certainly troubling. Rather, I want to point to the hegemony of seeing dance over different modes of experiencing dance: as a spiritual, ritualistic or resistance practice in other non-white cultures. When the proscenium stage is exported from the West to the larger world as a technology of sight, as the place to see dance, what are the stakes for other vernacular forms that historically exist outside of the frame? For dance styles outside the Western concert dance canon, practitioners are pressured to incorporate themselves into the formal stage to be taken seriously. The proscenium has become a stamp of approval, an emblem of prestige for all non-white dance forms to strive for. +++ Vogue dance grew out of the ballroom scene in 1930s Harlem and became an important cultural expression for New York’s marginalized Black and Latinx queers and fomented in the mainstream by the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, directed by Jennie Livingston, a white genderqueer filmmaker. Because of its new limelight, Vogue has increasingly found its way onto the proscenium stage—but it is not simply a dance form to be observed. It is a haven for queers of color, a utopia in which they

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can just be fabulous in the face of this homophobic world. As a ‘pseudo’ Vogue practitioner myself, I have vogued under the proscenium arch before. I was caught in the dilemma of communicating this queer world-making project of the form while working within an architecture that only prioritizes a detached proscenium vision. Yet, by voguing on stage, I made the choice to emphasize Vogue’s virtuosity of movement, to show it to the broader audience that it undoubtedly deserves. Along with the proscenium stage, the studio setting becomes another site where vision triumphs as a colonizing force. When West African dance is taught in America, it must rely on the dance studio as the primary mode of transmission. It is uprooted from its outdoor communal experience, only to be brought into an architecture that privileges seeing movements. As an assistant instructor for a West African dance class, I always try my best to not butcher a form from a culture that is not my own. However, I find it impossible in the Western studio setting, which excludes the fundamental quality that distinguishes West African dance: its participatory nature via the process of “repetition with revision.” This notion of “repetition with revision” was developed by performance theorist and scholar Margaret Drewal in her examination of the Yoruba ritual traditions. While she was uncritical of her positionality as a white American woman writing on an ancient African tradition, she acknowledges the different framework under which the Yoruba operated. As opposed to the Western approach of mirroring precise movements, Yoruba theatrical forms place more emphasis on the mastering of “learned, in-body formula,” where performers improvise upon and play with over time. The focus is not so much on replicating what has been done before but on understanding the underlying rules in order to put one’s own twist on it. This capacity for revision allows the performers to not only understand and follow tradition but to also speak back to the older generation and to facilitate changes within the form. Because of the oral tradition in Yoruba society, sedimented in their performance practices is also their history. Negotiating changes within the form also has a larger implication of negotiating with history and mediating changes in the society. Either on a proscenium stage or in a studio setting, though, vernacular forms are flattened to their aesthetic quality. Their embodied history fades into the background, becoming a backdrop to learn the ‘cool moves’ in each form. West African dance loses its capacity to negotiate intergenerational knowledge, or to exist as a driving force of social change. Similarly, Vogue is taken out of its context as a fierce resistance against the homophobic world. The stakes of embodied performance are threatened by the predominance of vision as a system of values. I am not optimistic that we can escape the dominance of vision any time soon, especially with the popularity of video and the screenal perspective of devices such as computers, smartphones, tablets. If anything, it has become much easier to capture dance and to capitalize on it. As a mode of dance circulation, video can be seen as an extension of the studio, reducing dance to virtuosic movements that can be learned on a screen. Indeed, most tutorial videos on Youtube either take place in a dance studio or in a living room that resembles the studio setting. If there is no escape from vision, practitioners of vernacular forms must work with and against its domination to stay close to why they dance in the first place. Perhaps artists can work with video as a medium that perverses the formal constraints of the proscenium stage to find a new mode of viewership and participation. Or they can delve into the radical aspect in the proscenium structure that forces people to be share in an experience in a physical space, especially in the digital era where physical presence is no longer necessary. There is no formula to work with and against vision, but artists must experiment with their practices to come up with their own strategies to resist. ANH VO B’18 comes to vo-vo-vo-gue.

APRIL 14, 2017

STRIPPING METAPHORS Edith Södergran undoes prejudice Tatiana Dubin ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Andrew Linder BY

“Warm words, fine words, deep words … They are like the scent of a flower in the night That one cannot see. Behind them lurks empty space… —Edith Södergran (1892-1923), from “Words” (1916) Frequently used metaphors are figurative versions of stereotypes, prejudices fossilized into exterior objects, cultural biases applied to the natural, neutral world. Through metaphor, Romantic poets reveal the place of women in 19th century Europe: for Lord Byron, a woman’s voice is like “The charmed ocean’s pausing” (Stanzas for Music), and for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the innocent lover is a “white-flowered Jasmin” (The Eolian Harp). Finnish-Swedish poet Edith Södergran challenges these metaphorical tropes in her poetry, and simultaneously challenges the limitations and stereotypes surrounding women at the turn of the 20th century. Growing up in St. Petersburg at the cusp of revolution, Södergran describes her passion for societal reformation in her artistic manifesto “Individual Art” (1918): “I regard the old society as the mother cell, which must be sustained until the individuals it produces can raise the new world,” she writes. But her enthusiasm was limited to the written word, as at the age of 16, Södergran was diagnosed with tuberculosis, shortly after her father died from the disease. Confined thereafter to Swiss sanatoriums and the Finnish countryside, Södergran’s connection to the wider Finnish-Swedish modernist movement was largely epistolic. But in 1911, when Södergran’s illness temporarily waned, she journeyed to Helsinki to meet with members of a modernist literary society mostly composed of other Finnish-Swedish writers. These writers have supplied most of the information (mostly anecdotal) regarding her personal characteristics and artistic intentions. Poet Jarl Hemmer recounts his first meeting with Södergran, age 19: “I have never seen a being that was so identical with its poems…Her manner of speech was not like ours: between fits of coughing, paradoxes and ineptitudes…just when one felt she was approaching something like common sense, she would laugh and then proceed to turn the whole conversation on its head.” The physical confinement of illness Hemmer describes typifies Södergran’s writing: its frustrations, desires, and psychological manifestations. Often, Södergran’s repressed physicality (from her poem “Life”: “I, my own prisoner, say so: life is not the springtime clad in light green velvet…Life is the narrow ring that holds us captive, the invisible circle we never cross” ) directly relates to a feminist cause, where limitations of illness are nearly indistinguishable from the limitations of being a woman in Europe at the turn of the century. For Södergran, liberation from the body and the sanatorium is also liberation from the patriarchy. In “My Soul,” from her earliest collection, Poems, published in 1916, Södergran writes: “When the knight came the maiden was red and white, / but I have dark rings below my eyes”, evoking both the ‘dark rings’ of illness and subverting the saved-maiden trope. In “Foreign Countries,” the narrator’s soul is personified, and its components straddle the globe, disjointed but empowered: “in far off realms great boulders stand / on top of which my thoughts rest.” Södergran’s alienation is momentous, all-encompassing: she defies the typical diminished, weakened image of the terminally-ill woman. In “Autumn’s Last Flower,” the flower is the narrator and ridicules its supposed role as delicate decoration: “I was stationed as guard against the northern wind, / red flames bloomed / on my white cheek.” In other poems, the natural world becomes a surrogate for the empowered woman: she is literally the sea, the water, the fire. +++ As noted by her friend—and possible lover—Hagar Olsson in a book of Södergran’s letters, The Poet Who Created Herself: Södergran was obsessed with Nietzsche.

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Södergran’s letters to Olsson reveal both intellectual idolatry and a fandom similar to those surrounding celebrities today. In one letter, Södergran writes of dreaming and crying out for the Übermensch (briefly: Nietzsche’s concept of a being liberated from Christian morality). Importantly, Nietzsche’s Übermensch explicitly excludes women—a fact that influences Södergran’s particular brand of feminism. In some interpretations of her poetry and writings, Södergran’s image of a liberated woman is essentially the Übermensch, only genderless. In order to fully understand Södergran’s vision for the future of women, recognizing the depth of her passion for Nietzsche is essential. In Benjamin Mier-Cruz’s dissertation Edith Södergran’s Modern Virgin: Overcoming Nietzsche and the Gendered Narrator, Cruz identifies how “both Nietzsche and Södergran are able to rhetorically construct new figurations of bodies—bodies that are independent of their historical and cultural meaning.” While Nietzsche aimed to dismantle conventional Christian morality and other 19th century institutions, Södergran’s narrators go beyond these goals and transgress the bounds of gender entirely. In perhaps Södergran’s most prescient line, she writes: “I am not a woman. I am neuter.” Södergran explains her desire to transgress the blatant misogyny that ran rampant in the written works of Nietzsche and the Romantic poets. In a letter from 1919, she writes, playfully: “Don’t laugh at me, I’ve freed myself from prejudices.” +++ A century later, a central theme of Södergran’s work runs through Lorde’s latest song, “Liability”: emotional depth and baggage (usually personified through bodies of water) resulting in a woman’s isolation. The song is about the requirement that, in order to have intimate relationships and respect, a woman needs to be complacent and calm rather than someone who can “get you wild, make you leave.” They say, ‘You’re a little much for me You’re a liability You’re a little much for me’ So they pull back, make other plans I understand, I’m a liability Lorde’s refrain relates to a number of Södergran’s poems; in “The Day Grows Cool,” the narrator speaks to her former lover: “You searched for a flower / and found a fruit...You searched for a woman / and found a soul— / you’re disappointed”; in Södergran’s “I,” the narrator asks, “was I fruit, too heavy for its branch?” Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, women who deviated from the emotional and social norm were seen as physical liabilities; confined to mental asylums for ‘conditions’ such as postpartum depression and anxiety. Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar describes some of the most gruesome ‘cures’ such as electrocution, lobotomies, and insulin injections. Södergran herself was known for transgressing social norms throughout her childhood: preoccupied with photographing cats, hiding on roofs (beyond the age when that was considered acceptable), neglecting her appearance, and refusing to bathe. Town members near Södergran’s first sanatorium in Southern Finland, led David McDuff, a translator of her work, to propose that “there is reason to believe that her illness [tuberculosis] was then less physical than psychological.” Incredibly skeptical of biographers and literary critics, Södergran destroyed the majority of her notes and letters before her death in 1923. By attempting to prevent biographical speculation, Södergran hoped her poetry itself—its rejection of lyrical constraints and social boundaries—would influence generations to come. In one of her most celebrated poems “On Foot I Wandered Through Solar Systems,” Södergran describes the astronomical distance she hopes

her poems will travel: “Somewhere in space my heart hangs, / emitting sparks, shaking air, / to other immeasurable hearts.” While Södergran’s feminism is chiefly conveyed through poetry, other female poets of the 20th century waged both literary and literal interventions. Born six years after Södergran’s death, poet and activist Adrienne Rich took up the potential for political opportunities only nascent in Södergran’s poetry. A leader of the anti-Vietnam War effort, Rich believed in poetry’s transformative power and potential for political impact. In 1997, she rejected a National Medal of Arts and explained her decision in a letter to the committee’s chair that her art “means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage,” referencing the economic and racial injustice propagated by the Clinton administration. Using androgynous narration and the subversion of stereotypical metaphors, Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” inspects underwater wreckage to figuratively interrogate water’s traditional association with womanhood: I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he Like Rich to follow, Södergran’s narrators have strong imperative force. In “The Stars,” she warns her reader: “Don’t walk barefoot in the grass.” One of Rich’s last published poems, “Powers of Recuperation,” concerns the figurative creation of an alternate, equitable reality, where in the final stanza a woman ponders this “unbuilt city.” When asked in a 2011 interview with the Paris Review about the poem, Rich stated: “My hope is that these metaphorical creations don’t stay metaphorical for too long.” TATIANA DUBIN B’18 lurks in empty spaces.

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LOST

IN THE

MALL

On the writer’s residency at the Mall of America BY Signe

Swanson and Will Weatherly ILLUSTRATION BY Isabelle Rea DESIGN BY Ruby Stenhouse

content warning: anti-Black policing “You'll need the tools for survival / And the medicine for the blues / Sweet treats and surprises / For the little buckaroos / It's last call / To do your shopping / At the Last Mall...” —Steely Dan, “The Last Mall,” 2003 After returning from the Mall of America (MOA) in Bloomington, MN, with a soft pretzel and a field report, these two writers are sorry to disclose our main conclusion, which is that the MOA is actually very boring. If we were to say this about any other mall, it wouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Part of the point of malls is that they’re identical—shoppers nationwide can ride up to a concrete structure named a Place or a Towne Centre and, without fail, find some approximation of a JC Penney or some ghost of a Chick-fil-a. Joan Didion, in her 1975 essay “On the Mall,” wrote that malls are “profound equalizers, the perfect fusion of the profit motive and the egalitarian ideal.” Driving through communities paved over by parking lots and commercial development to buy a $6 Orange Julius may sound like a weird path to take towards equality—especially for those suburbanites who can’t afford egregious fruit smoothies or luxury goods. There is, at least, an entire body of ‘shopping center theory’ ensuring that while every shopper does not buy exactly the same goods, they’re being manipulated in exactly the same way. It’s why stores in malls often have very few windows—shoppers can’t tell when the sun goes down. When we pulled into the green spray-painted ‘California’ level of the MOA parking lot, however, we couldn’t suppress the hope that this “perfect fusion” would be, somehow, more perfect. We realized that apart from its nationalist moniker, the only thing that set the MOA apart in our heads from other malls was the sheer amount of spending opportunity it housed in a single building. At 4.87 million square feet, the MOA could fit 32 Boeing 747s. Or 258 Statues of Liberty. The Superman building 11 times over. We heard that it had one of the world’s largest mirror mazes, an entire Nickelodeon-sponsored amusement park with a full-size roller coaster and water flume, a 1.2 million gallon aquarium, and 520 stores. We discovered that the mall map included an attraction called SMAAASH, and after scrutinizing its front window up on the fourth floor, surmised that it might be something like bumper carts. And yet, none of these features are that special on their own. The point of the MOA is that shoppers can experience everything at once, even if they can also experience everything anywhere else. As we began to suspect, the problem with putting a theme park next to an H&M in one shiny place is that it leaves nothing untouched by the rest: no cheese samples without the

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smell from the perfume counter, no Victoria’s Secret without Dora waiting outside. Late this past February, the MOA announced that it was adding one more thing to its land of everything: a five-day writer-in-residence program “to capture how much [the Mall has] evolved” in celebration of its 25th birthday this year. Mall officials encouraged applicants to submit 150-word pitches for how they would become “deeply immersed in the Mall atmosphere while writing on-the-fly impressions in their own words.” The winner will receive a $2,500 as “a generous honorarium for the sweat and tears they’ll put into their prose,” as well as a $400 gift card for food-court food and drink during the four nights they’ll be staying in an attached hotel. During their stay, the writer will also be required to spend at least four hours a day at a workspace in a “common area” of the mall, writing a daily minimum of 150 words which will be displayed on a monitor in “almost real-time.” Almost real-time—because the writing will be read by the Mall’s Marketing representative to ensure it comports with the “Mall of America’s desired presentation of the Mall or the patrons.” When they’re not writing what is essentially ad copy, writers are invited to take breaks at the food court for inspiration. As we charged our phones and drank the free water at Shake Shack, we were hard-pressed to find inspiration. The more we got lost in an endless series of glassy halls, or escalators conveying us to more escalators, the more lost we felt in our attempt to conceive of a writer who could produce anything at all in the MOA. Not that a writer wouldn’t want to take the opportunity—$2,500 is not shabby for 150 words daily over five days, especially when the average rate for most freelance writers ranges anywhere from $0.10 to $1 per word. But even with the “generous honorarium,” we don’t envy the writer tasked with selling a literary vision to shoppers and an untroubled depiction to the Marketing representative, all posted on a monitor between signs for Nickelodeon Universe and the Peeps store. +++ Even if its physical ruins are oppressively banal, the history of American malls follows a literary arc: they began with naïve hope, only to fall victim to corruption and folly, emanating tragedy with their decline. In their origin is also a profound irony. The pioneer of the modern American mall, a Viennese émigré and architect named Victor Gruen, was a socialist who saw his idea of the mall as a kind of agora (the classical Greek square and community center) for the rapidly growing suburbs of the ’40s and ’50s. He saw the growing sprawl as a largely

uniform, cultureless place, and envisioned the mall as offering an opportunity for mixed-use development—malls could include auditoriums, post offices, and shops, all while maximizing its efficient use of space and reducing wasteful commutes to urban centers. On breaking ground on his first mall, the Northdale shopping center outside of Detroit, Gruen raved to his partner, “My god but we’ve got a lot of nerve.” Gruen’s invention quickly surpassed even his ambition, initially due to the fact that he was exactly right: growing suburban masses vastly preferred local shopping centers to traveling downtown. This was, superficially, a matter of convenience, but the migration to the suburbs was in fact driven by urban white populations' fearful run from new desegregation reforms, as well as coordinated efforts to re-segregate and neglect Black urban communities using postwar civic planning and expansion. New highways, cordoning off underserved Black neighborhoods within industrial corridors, ran to shopping centers that only suburbanites had the boomtime spending power to afford. By the time the MOA was built in 1992, I-94 had already selectively ripped through Rondo, Minneapolis’s predominantly Black neighborhood. Underserved portions of the city were repeatedly left out of Minneapolis’ developing light rail system, which now has a line straight to the MOA. The new shopping centers were incredibly lucrative, and not only because of the racist privileging of the suburban economy. In 1954, Congress broadened a tax loophole allowing for mall investors to set aside massive amounts of untaxed income for ‘depreciation’ funds— money allocated for wear-and-tear, no matter how much wear-and-tear actually occurred. Developers rushed to build malls regardless of demand, creating countless sources for ‘depreciation’ revenue, but because these developers forwent costly upkeep or renovation, these structures actually began to depreciate. At their peak in the late ’70s, Didion called these malls “cities in which no one lives but everyone consumes.” Gruen’s dream of mixed-use development had crumbled under redundant mall construction, producing more parking lots and surrounding strip-malls than culturally-invested communities. The development of big box stores in the ’80s, the shrinking middle class in the ’90s, and increased online shopping after the turn of the century drove away mall shoppers and, slowly, the developers who chased them. Mall renovation stopped, infrastructure degraded, and shopspace vacancies skyrocketed. Between 2007 and 2009, 400 of America’s 2,000 biggest malls closed; no new enclosed malls have been built since 2006.

APRIL 14, 2017

Towards the end of his life, Gruen mourned and repented the destructive ends to his idealism. “I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments,” he said in 1978 before leaving the US for his native Vienna. When he returned, he found a mall just south of the city, putting local merchants out of business like a “gigantic shopping machine.” +++ The MOA’s profits as a tourist attraction far surpass the revenue of its dying kin; it generates almost $2 billion annually for the state of Minnesota. The narrative of the MOA, which a writer-in-residence would necessarily “celebrate,” is an exceptional story, a gargantuan economic success emerging from the failed model of the suburban mall. But celebrating this story would also neglect the ways the MOA and the surrounding Minneapolis metropolitan area ignores (and engenders) the economic, police-sanctioned violence which coincides with post-mall urbanity. The city’s online branding, as seen on the travel website minneapolis.org, glosses over how systemic racism factors into the city’s advertised identity. Aside from several flashy portals calling tourists to the mall, the website features a neighborhood guide touting the city’s most upscale, whitest neighborhoods, along with a smattering of invitations to explore the city’s more ‘diverse’ corridors. The Twin Cities invent themselves as an oasis of culture pasted over Middle America—the New York Times guide to spending “36 Hours in Minneapolis” lauds its ‘urban edginess, cultural authenticity… its affordability and a high rate of employment that make the city a magnet for millennials.” Such a focus on Minneapolis’s whitewashed “urban edginess” erases its ongoing violence against its communities of color. In November of 2015, Minneapolis police fatally shot Jamar Clark, an unarmed Black man officers attacked while responding to an assault report. In response, Black Lives Matter Minneapolis organized, among other protests, an action at the Mall of America. The action immediately faced violent opposition; as many as 200 police officers, 50 of whom wore riot gear, prevented protesters from entering the mall’s main rotunda. Like business associations in Seattle and Chicago, who pushed authorities to halt BLM protests disrupting access to their stores during that same month, the mall assertively positioned commerce over Black lives—the mall, as ‘private property,’ in the words of the Mall of America’s attorney, Susan Gaertner, “has a right to prohibit demonstrations on its property.” Four people were arrested during the protest.

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Staging the protest at such a gargantuan “public” site gave BLM visibility in an seemingly apolitical setting—the action was nowhere near a state house or city hall. The MOA protest recalls the tactic of BLM’s Black Friday boycott, as it took place during the holiday shopping season. Organizers framed the protest as Black Xmas, “a day of action to reject the degradation of Black families and communities by police, politicians, and predatory companies, and declare our inherent worth.” Activists’ actions at the MOA was twofold; showing that the mall is more than just a site large enough to garner national attention—it is also a site where the Black body is targeted, and where Black voices are silenced. Part of the MOA’s mechanism for its selective policing of shoppers is its own private police force and a counterterrorism unit. In 2007, a Black man named Bobbie Allen headed to the mall for lunch with a friend. As he waited for her, he passed time by writing in his notebook. According to the mall’s ‘suspicious activity reports’ later obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting, the police noted how “before the male would write in his notebook, it appeared as though he would look at his watch.” Trying to poke holes in his story, they interrogated trivialities like his favorite coffee and where he was going to get lunch. “Periodically, the male would briefly look up from his notebook, look around, and then continue writing,” the police report continued. If the mall so recently profiled a Black man for writing in a notebook, what does it seek from its writer-in-residence doing the same behind the glass walls of a kiosk? If a Black man can’t spend an hour eating lunch, who does the MOA want to spend five days there, writing prose for a monitor in a “common area” of the mall?

A writer who never leaves the mall would perhaps be tempted to fictionalize their conundrum, maybe by penning a short story about a wayward librarian who gets locked overnight in a two-story Barnes & Nobles, or about a spindly goth tween who learns the value of friendship at Auntie Anne’s. In framing its residency as a “celebration,” or, more implicitly, a 25th birthday gift, the mall suggests an interest in featuring writers who ‘get’ the mall’s self-chosen character—in the same way that the city of Minneapolis brands itself as ‘urbane.’ By prompting “on-the-fly impressions,” the residency application treats the mall more as a backdrop than a space for formal experimentation. A Slate article advertising the residency to readers suggests a number of potential pieces, like “a true-crime narrative about a visit to a Piercing Pagoda gone very wrong,” or “a novella concerned with the lives and loves of the staff and regulars at one Rainforest Café over the course of a year.” The mall promises unlimited Pepsi refills to a temp-agent lounge singer of a writer, who will write it a homemade birthday card called prose. If the MOA really wanted a writer “to capture how much the mall has evolved,” it would allow the writer to tell the story of the MOA as an actor in a wider narrative. They might tell visitors about its origins in myth, a story Gruen started and disavowed before its gargantuan climax in megamalls like the MOA. Or they might begin to amplify the narratives the MOA has worked to suppress from within its own walls. What they will have to write will be the mall’s “desired presentation”—not a depiction of what the mall sells, but the continuation of the mall selling itself, a trap of mall-logic with no clear path out to the California parking lot.

+++

“I want to write about what it’s like to never leave the Mall of America,” began Daily Show writer Matt Negrin in his application to the MOA residency. “The residency is an opportunity to turn America’s largest commercial property into an actual residence, a residence shared with a half-million people over four days.” His point oddly captures writer-residency programs’ emphasis on the relationship between the living conditions of writers and their craft. But malls have made vast swaths of land practically unlivable, and the MOA has ensured that Minneapolis’s most policed residents continue to be surveilled in its stores and food courts. The worst parts of the city are in the mall, and the mall propagates the worst parts of the city; even if you take the light-rail out, it’s hard to tell when you leave the Mall of America.

It remains to be seen whether the MOA, in ignoring the shambles of its fellow shopping centers, is hovering just above a state of denial. It continues to grow with new attractions, including one of its most recent rides, FlyOver America, where visitors sit in seats that tilt as they virtually soar through pristine farmland and canyons with no sprawls in sight. Tickets are $17 for 30 minutes of airtime—a half-hour of forgetting you’re in a mall. One writer, however, will have no such luxury, stuck between the desk and the food court, recording it all in (almost) real-time. SIGNE SWANSON & WILL WEATHERLY B’19 forgot where they left their car.

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UNUSUAL SUSPECTS New characters in skincare Fatima Husain ILLUSTRATION BY Anzia Anderson DESIGN BY Celeste Matsui BY

In the opening monologue of the 2000 film American Psycho, investment banker Patrick Bateman explains his morning skincare routine, which includes an assortment of products he uses to maintain his perfect image. At the turn of the century, the products he described seemed far-fetched: the water-activated gel cleanser, a honey-almond body scrub, an herb-mint facial mask, and aftershave with little or no alcohol heightened the film’s satirization of the 1980s yuppie. Decades later, these types of products are quite standard, evidenced by the plethora of products currently stocked in skincare sections of drugstores and online marketplaces. Skincare, and the science surrounding it, has changed. Instead of using traditional staples like face wash, moisturizer, and sunscreen, some consumers are opting to explore nontraditional ingredients in an attempt to alleviate their skincare woes. Rather than artificial salicylic acids or benzoyl peroxides, naturally-derived compounds like snail mucin, bee venom, and fungal fermentation filtrates are making appearances in treatments for common skincare concerns including acne, aging, and skin discoloration. Some consumers believe that natural ingredients interact with the skin in a manner that is more beneficial and less irritating than the synthesized ingredients in traditional skincare, which may be too harsh for certain skin types. For other people, they’re simply great because they’re natural. If nature produces them, then they must be what’s best for us—an increasingly common concept that also motivates natural, organic, anti-antibiotic, and non-GMO food advocates. But natural skin care products are more complex than their marketing. Not everything nature produces is healthy or useful for the human body. They do, however, remind us of the high value society places on smooth, youthful, perfect skin. In some cases, the prices do too, further perpetuating self-care’s financial inaccessibility. Though various regimens and product systems can be found in stores and online, there is no one-sizefits-all approach to skincare. Skin differs from person to person, and many skincare companies explore niche markets in order to maximize the reach of their products. When research showed that alcohol or fragrances could irritate the skin, skincare companies started offering gentle, fragrance-free, and sensitive skin formulas of popular products. Though the appeal of gentle formulations holds to this day, companies have also started marketing natural formulations that attract

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consumers who wish to change up their old routines, or who haven’t yet found one. In most cases, consumers of these natural formulations believe they are making their skin healthier, and that healthy skin comes with fewer breakouts, wrinkles, or hyperpigmentation, and therefore less dependence on traditional skincare ingredients. Snails are quickly leading the charge of unusual products. Studies on the mucin snails produce to facilitate movement across dry surfaces, particularly by snails of the species Cornu aspersum, have revealed that the mucin contains compounds like superoxide dismutase, which mitigates the effect of free radicals, which can damage cells over time. The slime has also been shown to contain low molecular weight hyaluronic acid. According to a 1999 study by W. John Chen and Giovanni Abatangelo, hyaluronic acid promotes new cell growth and cellular turnover in the skin. Hyaluronic acid is also believed to contribute greatly to the process of collagen and moisture production, benefitting skin structure and reducing healing times for skin lesions–an attractive quality for acne control. Snail mucin also contains assorted antioxidants and glycoproteins, but their permeability into the epidermis is often limited due to size constraints—most of the time, they’re too big to get absorbed into the skin. Snail mucin contains two compounds that may potentially benefit skin—and is sold in creams, lotions, serums, and even in hair products. However, the use of snail mucin is not without controversy. Snail mucin is harvested from living snails, which raises a number of ethical concerns. In order to extract the desirable mucin that is bottled up and incorporated into multiple skincare products, snails are agitated, which makes them produce more slime. The specific methods of agitation vary from source to source, and most methods are owned and patented by snail farms and skincare companies and therefore remain legally undisclosed to the public. Some consumers on internet skincare forums have guessed methods that range from poking snails with sticks all the way to feeding snails a salty solution to stress them into producing more mucin for harvest. Unlike snail mucin or other products for soothing and repairing the skin, bee venom inflames skin, which then stimulates skin repair. Essentially, an application of venom tricks the skin into believing it has been stung by a bee. Dilute concentrations of venom can ramp up

skin repair processes where it’s applied, enhancing local skin turnover and repair processes which supposedly reveal new, glowing skin. The process of collecting bee venom, much like that of snail mucin, isn’t without agitation. In one method to harvest bee venom, an electrical mesh plate with glass beneath is placed and turned on near an active hive. The bees swarm the active electrical mesh plate and sting in between the wires. Because their stingers are not caught in anything, the bees survive the sting and fly away, while their venom falls onto the glass plate beneath and accumulates. Then, the accumulated venom is diluted and incorporated into face creams and lotions. In addition to snail mucin and bee venom, galactomyces and other yeast ferment filtrates are gaining popularity in skincare serums. The fungi ferment filtrates are thought to protect the skin from damage rather than repair it, because they include antioxidants and compounds that stimulate the production of hyaluronic acid in the skin. The extracts are derived from yeast fermentation filtrates, which are nutrient-rich liquids left behind after yeast ferment sugar-containing organic matter. No agitation there. The departure from traditional skincare to skincare with nontraditional ingredients shouldn’t be taken lightly. Many chemicals present in the naturally-derived ingredients can be artificially in controlled environments, and are also used in traditional skincare products, such as hyaluronic acid in facial moisturizer. Though the access to interesting, new ingredients with flashy origins might seem attractive to consumers, the efficacy, safety, and consistency of naturally-derived ingredients must be studied properly and considered with a healthy dose of skepticism. FATIMA HUSAIN B’17 wants to leave the snails and bees alone.

SCIENCE

ETYMOLOGY FOR CATASTROPHE BY

Kelton Ellis

ILLUSTRATION AND DESIGN BY Gabriel

Matesanz

Amid early springtime’s hesitant snowmelt a planet rearranges into loving explosions, confessing no objective but to glower, then to fade. Sprained branch and sprouting bulb. The thunder-thrown volley of storm, engineering emergences. Overhead a splotch-gray dome of sky threatens bursting inward beneath a sunray’s duress. And the I, which asserts now. Under a sunray I’d unbridle— from west to east, and from whisper to scream. Unbridle forever from a string of ink, or maybe into a string of ink, a string of ink that thinks itself bursting beyond a margin, seeks to outlive its own overturning, long and recursive. At once: I reassemble, I yearn to dissemble. I disassemble. All along a thrasher egg hatches its self-detonation, springs off, toward newfound flight out of fragility— tenuous, the thrasher couldn’t know finer exits.

LITERARY

APRIL 14, 2017

THE LIST Friday 4.14

Monday 4.17

Radical Joy and Politicized Art

Sebastian Errazuriz Lecture

Churchill House (Brown University), 4-5pm

RISD Auditorium, 6:30pm

Brown’s LGBTQ Center and the Black Lavender Experience present a conversation with Staceyann Chin, spoken word poet, performing artist and queer activist. She’ll also be performing her work “Motherstruck!” on Saturday afternoon in the same location.

Sebastian Errazuriz is a NYC-based Chilean artist whose work “blurs the boundaries between contemporary art, design and social practice.” He’ll be presenting his work at a talk open to the public.

Olivia Newton-John Twin River Casino, 7pm

Jack Halberstam: “Trans: Bodies and Power in the Age of Transgenderism” 85 Waterman Room 130 (Brown University), 6pm

Tickets starting at $70 o m g According to this facebook event, Olivia Newton-John has sold over 100 million albums, but only 66 people have said they’re attending :(

Brown’s Women’s History Series 2017 presents Jack Halberstam, a well-known queer theorist who wrote a book called The Queer Art of Failure.

Saturday 4.15

Wednesday 4.19

All-Day Sacred Harp Singing

Gay Goth Nite: Spring Blood Sacrifice

Providence Friends Meeting House, 10-3pm Is Sacred Harp the singing community you never knew you wanted? This has proven to be true for like 60% of my friends for some reason. If you’re intimidated by singing in public, know that the longtime singing folks are super welcoming and great teachers.

May Day Art and Banner Making 3 Bell Street, 1-3pm Rhode Island Jobs with Justice invites everyone to come plan and make banners for its upcoming May Day march in celebration of working class solidarity. Folks are encouraged to bring sewing machines, fabric, and paint.

Sunday 4.16 Easter Screening of Harold and Maude Columbus Theatre, 3pm, $10 One Indy editor dressed up as Harold for Halloween a couple of years ago, and she encourages you to attend this screening with your grandma, your date, or both. There’s never been a better time for a good protest movie, and believe me, this is the perfect one for combining your militant political ambitions and the teen inside you, moody about it all. There’s even a kid who keeps dying and coming back to life—which is sort of topical on Easter. At least as topical as all the references to the Vietnam War.

Aurora, $5 before 11pm, $10 after Gay Goth Nite PVD will be an ongoing fundraiser for Rhode Island Trans Assistance Project, an organization seeking to support low-income trans women in Rhode Island. Listen, you should know a big secret about the Spring Blood Sacrifice: Aurora doesn’t want your blood for this cause. But prominent Silicon Valley Trump supporter Peter Thiel has been reported to be very interested in transfusing young people’s blood to preserve his own vitality! Don’t let Thiel (or any Trump supporter) have your young, hot blood! Give it to the goths. 666

Thursday 4.20 Bloom 2017: A Fundraiser for Youth in Action Aurora, 6-9pm, $25-$75

Youth in Action is a really great organization that mobilizes Providence-area high schoolers to create social change in their communities. Their annual fundraiser is honestly really fun. Full disclosure: this List writer worked for YIA last summer and is really rooting for them to raise a bunch of $$.

1) the editors are in cahoots 2) The copy editor has an AGENDA 3) keep anxiety low 4) watch for unusual formatting 5) Patch the leak, keep afloat