05 the fallacy of apolitical tech
07 a Spanish lieutenant runs out the clock
11 what the hell’s up with RI Twitter?
Volume 38 • Issue 04
March 01, 2019
the College Hill Independent
the Indy
a Brown * RISD Weekly
n*
A Brow
Weekly SD I R
The Indy Contents
From The Editors
Cover Search for Peace Daniel Chen
I’ve run into city councilwoman Kat Kerwin twice in the past week: once at Seven Stars Bakery on the West Side and once at Red Stripe on the East Side. On both occasions I thought about approaching her, but since I don’t live in Ward 12, it seemed like there was no easy way into the conversation. Kat Kerwin and I are the same age, but as it turns out, we have little in common. She calls Gina Raimondo a progressive; I do not. She has been on the cover of Teen Vogue; I have never read Teen Vogue. She holds public office; I make a $3 monthly contribution to Bernie Sanders.
News 02 Week in Jam Jacob Alabab-Moser, Gemma Sack
Kat Kerwin is barely older than the kids who Senator Dianne Feinstein accused last week of being too young to engage in politics. I actually thought Senator Feinstein raised a great point in her squabble with a room full of elementary schoolers: the people who will be most affected by the impacts of climate change didn’t even vote for her. While claiming that Senator Feinstein is too old to care about climate change is both ageist and nonsensical, I do think that 16-year-olds should vote and 21-year-olds should run for city council. Here at the Independent, we are inexperienced and we are young and we very much plan to stand up the the Senator Feinsteins of the world. Kat Kerwin: if you are reading this, we hope you do too.
03 Overdue Justice Jazmin I. Piche Cifuentes Metro 11 #BLOCKED Alina Kulman Features 07 Bad Lieutenant Cate Turner 09
- JR + LSL
Raghvi Bhatia
Arts 15 The World as Picture, Exhibition, and Target Alexis Gordon Science & Tech 05 Beyond Screens Julia Rock and Lily Meyersohn
Mission Statement
Literary 17 Llewellyn Kate Ok Ephemera 14 Four Rhode Island Birds Miles Guggenheim, Claire Schlaikjer, and Nicole Cochary
The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/ or classism.
X 13 Contacts Bee Mitchell
Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond. The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.
Week in Review Sarah Clapp Maria Gerdyman News Jacob Alabab-Moser Jessica Bram-Murphy Giacomo Sartorelli Metro Julia Rock Lucas Smolcic Larson Sara Van Horn Arts Ben Bienstock Alexis Gordon Liby Hays Features Tara Sharma Cate Turner
Shannon Kingsley Lily Meyersohn Literary Shuchi Agrawal Justin Han Isabelle Rea Ephemera Nicole Cochary Claire Schlaikjer X Jorge Palacios Alex Westfall List Ella Rosenblatt Signe Swanson Will Weatherly
Science & Tech Miles Guggenheim
Special Projects Harry August Lucas Smolcic Larson Eve Zelickson
01 MARCH 2019
VOL 38 ISSUE 04
Staff Writers Jesse Barber Jessica Dai Brionne Frazier Eduardo Gutierrez-Peña Mohannad Jabrah Nickolas Roblee-Strauss Sophie Khomtchenko Emma Kofman Alina Kulman Dana Kurniawan Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Star Su Marly Toledano Copy Editors Grace Berg Seamus Flynn Sarah Goldman Matt Ishimaru Sojeong Lim Yelena Nicolle Salvador Caroline Sprague
Design Editors Lulian Ahn Bethany Hung Designers Amos Jackson Cecile Kim Ella Rosenblatt Katherine Sang Christie Zhong Illustration Editors Pia Mileaf-Patel Eve O’Shea Ilustrators Sam Berenfield Natasha Brennan Natasha Boyko Bella Carlos Julia Illana Angie Kang Jeff Katz Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll
Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Claribel Wu Stephanie Wu
Managing Editors Ella Comberg Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang
Business Maria Gonzalez
MVP Bethany Hung
Web Ashley Kim Social Media Ben Bienstock Pia Mileaf-Patel
Signe Swanson Will Weatherly
*** The College Hill Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.
Alumni+Fundraising Katrina Northrop Senior Editors Olivia Kan-Sperling Katrina Northrop Chris Packs
@THEINDY_TWEETS
WWW.THEINDY.ORG
WEEK IN JAM
BY Jacob Alabab-Moser and Gemma Sack ILLUSTRATION Katya Lebowe-Stoll DESIGN Christie Zhong
LOST IN TRANSLATION, ONCE AGAIN Japanese language for several years and has previously Given the sacred status of fruit preserves in British Ariana Grande, America’s sweetheart as of late, gotten tattoos of cartoon characters from Pokémon culture, May’s comments have sparked fierce public continued our country’s long-standing tradition of and Spirited Away. But such a long-held appreciation debate, leaving her in a sticky situation. (After all, this getting a tattoo with a poorly translated phrase from for Japanese culture does not absolve Grande of her is the country where, when ministers proposed in a foreign language. To commemorate the release of mistranslation error; it just means that the starlet is 2013 to loosen legal regulations on jam, one MP called her new single, “7 rings,” she got a hand tattoo with also a total weeaboo. it “the end of the British breakfast as we know it.”) the two Japanese kanji symbols “shichi” and “rin,” In all fairness, Grande has tried to correct the Traditional news outlets have dipped a finger into the which mean “seven” and “rings” separately, but when translation under the guidance of her Japanese tutor. controversy, with the Daily Mirror dubbing the controcombined into “shichirin,” mean “small charcoal She seems to have taken the controversy lightheart- versy “Jamgate,” and the Washington Post wondering: grill used for cooking barbeque.” The internet, with edly, posting her updated tattoo on the ‘gram with “Theresa May reportedly scrapes the mold off jam. Is its expected ruthlessness, erupted into chaos after the accompanying caption: “rip tiny charcoal grill. this the perfect metaphor for Brexit?” Indeed, many Grande posted a picture of her new tattoo on Instagram. miss u man. i actually really liked u.” In next week’s journalists have likened May’s jam preferences to her At the time of publication, it’s currently unknown what Independent, we will consider the cultural politics and political proposals regarding Britain’s move to leave source Grande had consulted to arrive at this incorrect possible intentionality of Grande’s shoddy tattoo as a the EU. They see her attempts to push through a deal translation, though it is apparent that Google Translate form of postmodern critique in the vein of the decon- as a way to discard the unsavory bits of Brexit and, in fails even the most talented and cunning lyricists of structionist school by Jacques Derrida. Grande might the words of the Daily Mirror, “pretend it’s a sweet our generation. The Grammy winning artist joins the have intentionally tattooed “small charcoal grill” on treat for all.” Still, more commentators have used this ranks of numerous other celebrities that have received herself to comment on the distinction between text gaffe as an opportunity to compare May to Labour mistranslated tattoos. Honorable mentions include and meaning. In her seminal 1964 essay “Notes on leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is known for being an avid “strange” on Britney Spears’ hip and “ice skating” ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag writes of such questionable preserver of jam himself. When asked about Corbyn’s on Justin Timberlake’s impressively sculpted bicep, aesthetic choices: “It's good because it's awful . . . Of position on Jamgate, a Labour spokesperson said: though both date back to the mid-2000s, an era when course, one can't always say that.” But in this case, we “Jeremy’s love of both making and consuming jam is hideous tattoos were more commonplace and online definitely can. It’s so good. well known and he doesn’t ever allow it to get to the vitriol less so. scraping-off stage.” The translation error has polarized social media. -JAM Jamgate has also spread to Twitter, where Brits Some users were forgiving, like Japanese Youtuber have taken to criticizing May, not only for her eating Yuta Aoki, who said, “It’s not really illogical to think it habits but also her politics. Some, like Helen Goodman, means ‘seven rings,’” citing, for example, how “gorin” BREXIT OF CHAMPIONS have likened her to a contemporary Marie-Antoinette: means “5 rings” and it combines the characters for “five” “Let them eat [mouldy jam with their] cake,” quipped out of touch with the public and indifferent to their and “rings” in the same way. Yet most were angry or British Twitter user @HelenMGoodman, responding plight caused by her policies. @GaryDWLawrence confused: one tweet from a Japanese user read, “Didn’t to a recent revelation about British Prime Minister offered this poignant analogy: “Brexit: remove jam her staff tell Ariana that ‘shichirin’ means ‘a Japanese Theresa May’s jam preferences. On February 12, in and eat the mould.” @johnfidler further lambasted BBQ grill’ before she got the tattoo?” (Grande’s repre- a Cabinet meeting with her senior ministers, May May, adding his own spin to her words: “Theresa May: sentatives still have yet to respond to our interview admitted that instead of throwing away jam that ‘I scrape the mould off jam and appoint it Transport requests over Instagram DMs.) Meanwhile, other has developed mold on the top, she scrapes off the Minister.’” However, some Twitter users have come to users accused the singer of blatant cultural appropria- fungus and eats what is underneath. In her own May’s defense. @adamdkent invoked another British tion, saying she wanted to use Japanese characters for words, the remainder of the jam is “perfectly edible.” staple to profess his support for Brexit, saying, “What their aesthetic without having any relation to Japanese Furthermore, she suggested, presumably drawing we want after Brexit is to be free of a nanny state, language or culture. Ariana stans—i.e. stalker fans— from decades of jam-scraping experience, that where common sense prevails & political correctness have claimed that Grande has actually studied the consumers should not be overcautious when throwing is replaced by logic & empathy, we do not need to be away seemingly expired food. Instead, they should told if sausages are good for us or if toast kills! Anyone use “common sense” to determine what is still edible. ever notice that Stilton like Jam has mould. #freedom.” (This is not the only time May has invoked this phrase Finally, some have pointed out what they see as the recently: last August, she claimed it was simply utter preposterousness of the whole situation: as @ “common sense” to prepare for no deal on Brexit.) From Meep_Axel wondered, “Who keeps jam long enough the pantry to the cabinet, May’s edict for her country is for it to collect mould?” consistent. And so, much like her jam, Theresa May has no The Prime Minister allegedly divulged her jam choice but to try to salvage Brexit, something quintescustom during a discussion on food waste, offering a sentially British that she has had on her hands for far suggestion for how the British public, which produces too long. In this unpalatable position in which she finds nearly eight billion tons of food waste annually, might herself, neither tossing the past-due deal nor trying to better conserve food. Since the announcement of the preserve what remains seems particularly appealing to proposed Brexit deal, food management has become her or much of the British public. Perhaps May should a pressing issue in Britain. With preparations for the take a page out of Jeremy Corbyn’s proverbial recipe EU withdrawal disrupting agricultural production book, and try to concoct something more appetizing. and government austerity measures increasing food insecurity, May believes that the British people need to -GS make use of what they have—moldy jam included.
FEB 24TH: FAMILY
BY Joseph and Maria Gerdyman
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
NEWS
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OVERDUE JUSTICE BY Jazmin Piche Cifuentes ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN Katherine Sang
content warning: torture, gore, sexual abuse
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments were an infamous and unethical series of clinical studies conducted on about 800 Black men from 1932 to 1972 by the US Public Health Service. White researchers and physicians observed the effects of syphilis on their bodies while withholding verified treatment and lying about the medical tests they performed. In September 2010, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a public apology to the then-President of Guatemala Alvaro Colom regarding unearthed records of an unethical medical investigation performed on Guatemalan citizens from 1946 to 1948—conducted by the very same researchers and physicians involved with Tuskegee. US and international observers alike were horrified to learn that another egregious medical experiment had occurred without public awareness, and that only recently had a political apology been offered. The apology came seven years after Susan Reverby, a history professor at Wellesley College, discovered records detailing the studies while researching material from the 1932 to 1972 Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments. Dr. John Cutler, a US Public Health Service (USPHS) physician associated with Tuskegee and one of the head researchers for the STD Inoculation Studies in Guatemala, had donated his data to the University of Pittsburgh postmortem after serving an extensive role as its dean of the Public Health School. His data chronicled the study and included photographs of the Guatemalan victims, their individual profiles, laboratory reports, and correspondence with officials from USPHS. Despite the initiation of an investigation by the US Presidential Commission on Bioethical Issues, the USPHS STD Inoculation Studies in Guatemala from 1946-1948 remain an obscure event for the majority of the American population. This is likely due to the lack of a successful settlement after demands for the USPHS and its partners to provide accountability and reparations to the victims of the investigations went unmet. In the case of the Tuskegee experiments, a class-action lawsuit was initiated for the 600 victims used as unconsenting subjects following its revelation and termination. The plaintiffs ultimately won a $10 million settlement after three years on August 28, 1975. In comparison, the lawsuit by families of the Guatemalan victims has taken over seven years to complete. The arduous process began in 2012 after the US Presidential Commission on Bioethical Issues published their findings and confronted multiple dismissals. Nevertheless, the lawsuit was recently approved in January 2019 and reparations will finally be granted. Revisiting the STD Inoculation Studies in Guatemala, 1946-48 The inoculation studies, initiated in 1946 by US Public Health Service researchers, focused on STDs in an attempt to support the US military. Throughout World War II, soldiers would contract gonorrhea and syphilis while assigned abroad in Europe, taking them out of service for prolonged if not permanent amounts of time. In an attempt to efficiently confront the STD infection rates among American troops, the US government decided it was crucial to investigate a prophylactic, or
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preventative, medication. Despite the potential benefits that come with studying a prophylaxis, there exists a major ethical obstacle: researching a prophylaxis demands an introduction of the disease(s) in question to previously unexposed human subjects. The solution the US government chose to follow eventually led to the most egregious aspects of the STD Inoculation Studies in Guatemala. Instead of creating a study with consenting and properly compensated human subjects, USPHS exploited vulnerable Guatemalan citizens and purposely infected them with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid. The US had a powerful presence in Central America by way of the United Fruit Company from 1899 to 1975. The relationship between United Fruit Company and Central American politicians depended on two economic-political principal elements: the ability of the banana sector to generate economic stability and the strength of the labor movement in the host country. The company had demonstrated its value by constructing an export economy with efficient production and distribution networks of bananas between Central America and the US, consisting of large plantations, railways, communication lines, housing, hospitals and ports in the production regions. As a benefit to the working relationship with Central America, the United Fruit Company and the US, by extension, possessed many privileges in the region because governments were eager to attract foreign capital in order to stimulate their stagnant economies. One privilege in particular was frequent communication with each Central American country’s upper elite to protect their own interests and influence. Per this strategy, the US forged communication with Guatemalan scholars in addition to the country’s leaders so as to establish projects that benefitted the US. Guatemala was chosen as the specific site for the studies because Juan Funes, a Guatemalan physician in correspondence with Dr. John Cutler during the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, had the capacity to provide the socioeconomic resources to various institutions with vulnerable populations such as Guatemalans of indigenous descent, prisoners, and mentally ill patients that were excluded from society due to racism, ableism, or social stigma. This provided assurance that the general public would neither suspect nor question the unethical treatment. For example, prostitution was legal in Guatemala at the time, so sex workers were brought into a men’s prison by US researchers as further conduits to discreetly spread the STDs. However, due to the taboo against sex work in Guatemalan society, the communities surrounding the prison did not investigate the sudden presence of sex workers. The sex workers thus became another group of nonconsenting victims in this unethical, transcontinental study. Other victims included orphans and soldiers. As Dr. Culter explained in his proposal to the USPHS, Funes worked with the Pan-American Sanitary Bureau (now the Pan-American Health Organization) to accomodate a penitentiary, an orphanage, a mental hospital, and army barracks for the studies in order to exploit their inhabitants. The doctors employed numerous methods to
intentionally infect the Guatemalans. Aside from using sex workers to infect study participants, the doctors also inoculated orifices such as penises, urethras, and eyes, fabricated wounds on faces and limbs for additional infection sites, and introduced infectious substances into their spines. The STDs had multiple adverse effects on the Guatemalan victims. One account that the US Presidential Commission on Bioethical Issues reported in their published work, Ethically Impossible, discussed a woman named Berta. Syphilis was injected in her left arm. A month later, she developed red bumps around her injection site, and then developed lesions on her limbs. Berta was consequently given treatment three months after her injection; yet, three months later, Dr. Cutler noted that she was likely going to die. The same day he wrote the note, experimenters recorded a procedure in which they poured gonorrhea pus in her eyes and re-infected her with syphilis. Afterwards, her eyes overflowed with discharge, and she bled from her urethra. Berta’s death was recorded a few days later. Her death was not anomalous—a total of 83 deaths were reported during the course of the studies. In spite of all the information documented, neither Dr. Cutler nor the USPHS published any records of the STD Inoculation Studies in Guatemala. This is likely a consequence from the sudden halt of the investigations in 1948 which remains unexplained in Dr. Cutler’s and any other related work. It should be noted that in Dr. Cutler’s work, he alluded to plans to eventually return to Guatemala to finish the experiments. The hypothetical return likely would have harmed more Guatemalans, given that the researchers needed to replace the 83 subjects that had already died. The Current Lawsuit Despite many hurdles posed by legal proceedings, justice may be served for the now deceased victims and their families 70 years after the start of the experiments. The Office of Human Rights for the Archdiocese of Guatemala, represented by the UC Irvine School of Law International Human Rights Clinic and the City Project of Los Angeles filed a petition in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in December of 2015. Titled “Overdue Justice for Guatemalan Victims of Venereal Disease Experiments,” it stated that the Guatemalan victims and their families’ rights to life, health, freedom from torture, and crimes against humanity under both the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and the American Convention on Human Rights were violated. Jessnia Ovalle, an attorney in Guatemala working for the Office of Human Rights for the Archdiocese of Guatemala, explained on City Project’s website that the objective of this 2015 petition was to obtain “truth and justice for the Guatemalan victims’ families of these experiments through comprehensive and dignified reparations.” In an earlier attempt for reparations in March 2011, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals decided that the pleas of the victims’ families were not valid, given that the responsible governmental authorities had already left office. In September of 2016, the civil lawsuit appeared in court for the first time. It
01 MARCH 2019
Establishing adequate reparations for the victims from the U.S. Public Health Service S.T.D. inoculation experiments in Guatemala categorized victims into six separate categories: people who were infected as part of the study; the estates of deceased direct victims; spouses; first-generation descendants; subsequent generation descendants; and relatives whose deaths were caused by diseases contracted from the study. Most prominently, the lawsuit demanded $1 billion in reparations from the Johns Hopkins University, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Bristol-Myers Squibb due to their prominent roles in the STD Inoculation Studies. The lawsuit claimed Johns Hopkins University doctors held key roles on panels that reviewed and approved federal spending for the experiments; the Rockefeller Foundation assisted in developing “Department L,” a Hopkins clinic and research center focused on syphilis, and four corporate officers of Bristol-Myers Squibb’s predecessor companies, Bristol Laboratories and E.R. Squibb & Sons Inc.’s Squibb Institute for Medical Research, also undertook key roles in the development process. US District Judge Marvin J. Garbis, a federal judge in Baltimore, dismissed the lawsuit. Yet he proposed that the victims’ lawyers re-filed the case by October 14, 2016. Garbis said the suit, filed on behalf of 842 victims (nearly all deceased) and their family members, did not include the sufficient amount of detail about their cited claims. Citing the “despicable nature” of the study, Garbis said lawyers could file a revised complaint once more details about how and when victims were infected were affixed. Particularly, he said the lawsuit necessitated more information from at least one victim from each of the six categories. In the amended complaint, which appeared in court in August 2017, attorneys provided the specified details as requested by US District Judge Marvin J. Garbis, including accounts of which disease the
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
victims contracted, when, and how they realized they had been infected. One account was from a prisoner who stated he was injected with what was promoted as “vitamins.” Another recounted the story of a family member whose child was infected with the same ailments as their spouse. A few of the remaining victims were not aware they were part of the studies until President Barack Obama’s public apology to reaffirm the importance of the US relationship with Guatemala in 2012. The lawsuit was ruled to proceed and a planning meeting for the case was scheduled for September 15, 2017. At that time, the attorneys were able to move onto the discovery process. This year, the lawsuit had a momentous victory when US District Judge Theodore Chuang ruled last month that Bristol-Myers Squibb, Johns Hopkins University and the Rockefeller Foundation must face a $1 billion lawsuit over their roles, rejecting arguments from the defense that a recent Supreme Court decision protecting foreign companies from US lawsuits over human rights abuses abroad also applied to domestic firms. The details in regard to how the reparations will be overseen and distributed are not yet finalized, nor are they public.
States’ economy, culture, and politics—in turn, more significant apologies than the ones offered by Clinton and Obama are due. The harm and deaths inflicted upon Guatemalans were hidden for 64 years. In total, it has taken the Guatemalan victims 70 years to receive adequate reparations for their nonconsensual participation in a US-funded and executed study. A statement is only ever the beginning. Announcing culpability, then working with the exploited population to determine the reparations they need are the crucial subsequent steps. These actions can thus begin to address historically oppressive US-Latin American relationships, but perhaps even more importantly, prepare the US to properly address other horrifying accounts of human rights abuse that may not yet be public. JAZMIN I. PICHE CIFUENTES B‘19 wants you to ask about her earring collection.
Demanding More Than an Apology The United States has a long history of subjugating Latin America that continues to this day; the scope of this article only touches upon a fragment of this legacy. We need only to look to the US’ instituionalized policy of rejecting Latinx immigrants as opposed to European immigrants, the interventionist portrayal of the Venezuelan crisis by American media, and the deterioration of relations with Cuba to see as much. Latin America is uniquely interwoven into the United
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BEYOND SCREENS In conversation with Khiara Bridges and Virginia Eubanks content warning: maternal death "I’m literally dying,” Lashonda Hazard posted on Facebook early last month. The otherwise-healthy, pregnant 27-year-old had visited one of Providence’s premier hospitals, Women & Infants, that day, complaining of excruciating abdominal pain. Physicians checked on the pregnancy but sent Hazard home. Though she returned to the hospital the next day, she and her unborn baby died of severe preeclampsia while awaiting treatment. Providence is no exception to a national rule: in the US, Black women are 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth compared to their white counterparts. When asked how we can avert preventable maternal deaths like Hazard’s, Dr. Khiara Bridges, who studies healthcare, reproduction, and racial justice, suggested that the answer often does not lie in new legislation like the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act, which was passed into law last December as one attempt to ameliorate this pressing issue. According to Bridges, that act primarily increases information collection and data analysis as opposed to embracing more sweeping changes inside the hospital or outside its walls. “As if information will save us,” Bridges noted last week at a talk on theorizing racism in healthcare. “Information isn’t going to get us out of the racism problem.” +++ This month, we had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Bridges and Dr. Virginia Eubanks, who both visited Providence to speak at Brown University. Eubanks and Bridges consider themselves intellectual peers; they have sat on panels together and write and research in overlapping fields. Others have brought Bridges and Eubanks together before, but the following side-byside interviews allow the two to speak on their own terms. Both scholars discuss how federal, state, and local governments in the US collect and use data to make policy decisions, and how current iterations of data collection and automated decision-making have increased the surveillance of people who receive public services. Bridges and Eubanks argue this heightened surveillance disproportionately and punitively impacts already marginalized people behind a facade of “neutral” technologies. We point to Lashonda Hazard’s death, then, as a horrifying story of the ways that income inequality and structural racism operate in this country and in Providence, which cannot be amended through the tools of information and which tools of information in fact actively perpetuate and exacerbate. +++ PART I, in conversation with Dr. Khiara Bridges, a professor of law and anthropology and Associate Dean of Equity, Engagement & Justice at Boston University. The College Hill Independent: You’ve spoken about the way that anthropological ethnography, as you conduct it, can be anti-colonial, allowing you to understand “the violence of racism, classism, xenophobia, and heteronormativity.” By knowing the violences, you can share them with audiences that are unfamiliar
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with them. The violences you cover in your most recent book, The Poverty of Privacy Rights, are privacy violations. You theorize that low-income mothers don’t hold the same privacy rights as wealthy mothers for several reasons, especially because of one form of government intervention: “informational” privacy violations. Can you explain how that informational aspect functions? KB: There’s inequality with regard to the information we’re collecting that produces an unequal and unjust outcome. The information has led policy makers to believe that a particular population requires a range of services, and should be coerced to receive those services by financial officers and health educators. The information has led policy makers to believe that this population is at risk of various negative health outcomes, as well as at risk of abusing and neglecting their children. Privately-insured people enjoy more privacy. They have the latitude to keep information to themselves, so we don’t have the knowledge about those populations. It could be—and it’s likely—that privately insured are at risk for the same things that poor populations are at risk for, but we’re missing it.
The Indy: Yeah—since the ’70s now, geneticists have repeatedly proven that race is not biological. That knowledge hasn’t stuck. This repeated refusal reminds me that so many Americans similarly fail to internalize that poverty is not due to biology, pathology, or behavior. Dr. Eubanks talks about “mistaking parenting while poor for poor parenting.” KB: Because we have a moralized construction of poverty, we’re okay with penalizing for parenting while poor. I see it in my own work: a lot of the pathology that poor people are imagined to have, if it’s found, people feel comfortable imagining that it’s genetically determined. People feel comfortable in thinking that the reason that Black women are three to four times more likely to die during childbirth than white women is because there must be some genetic disposition towards…death, as opposed to interrogating a society that makes it deadly to be a person of color and then to try to reproduce. Biological race is diverting our attention from the things that are actually making people of color’s lives shorter and less healthy. We’re focused on some imagined gene that is shortening and reducing the quality of people of color’s lives.
The Indy: And how does that dynamic manifest in healthcare? The Indy: You studied the role that race plays in the differential treatment of expecting mothers within KB: If you’re not finding gonorrhea in a woman at the New York City medical setting in your first book, 36-weeks gestation because she’s insured, then you Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a don’t know the rates at which insured woman have Site of Racialization. The National Institute of Health gonorrhea or chlamydia at 36-weeks gestation. You’re sometimes mandates that race be used to group study imagining risks in the poor so you’re catching them participants, although those studies don’t define race because you’re testing for them, but you’re not imag- the same way or define it vaguely. Going forward, how ining risk in the wealthy because you’re not testing for should racial categories be used in biomedicine? them. We end up creating the world that we imagine. I talk about it in terms of a figure. There’s a figure KB: I think race certainly influences a person’s health, produced by the information that we’ve gathered but not because there’s a gene specific to certain races. from poor people, and the healthcare they receive is As Dorothy Roberts puts it, “race is a political category designed for that figure. But many people live lives that has biological consequences.” Race is important inconsistent with the figure. So it creates, essentially, in health research because we need to know how this bad healthcare. social construct is impacting people’s biology; we need to know what our society is doing to people. I The Indy: These questions about informational think the answer is having people who are trained privacy are tied to surveillance, which increasingly in critical thought—and when I say critical thought, I occurs through genomic surveillance (largely through mean people who are trained in thinking about the the collection of DNA in policing databases). How big various ways we’ve thought about race over the centudoes the problem of genomic science loom in your ries. With the track that leads into genomics research, mind? you can avoid all sorts of important classes. We have to change the curriculum so population geneticists KB: A lot of folks who are concerned with racial aren’t replicating the idea of race being in the biology justice are concerned about genomics, in part because of individuals. people who are helming genomic studies are not being steeped in critical thought. They end up recreating The Indy: In the meantime, then, what do you wish the assumptions that their research might ultimately we knew? dispute if it were done correctly. Some of this genomics research is being offered as proving the existence KB: I think what we’re all missing is a really robust of biological races. And part of the reason it’s being theory of the relationship between structural racism offered that way is because the folks conducting the and individual bias. When medical schools, for research believe in biological races. They’re looking for example, are thinking about what they can do to elimifive races; they’re dividing the data in terms of Black nate these disparities, they think in terms of individual is distinct from white is distinct from Asian is distinct bias. The hope is that we will have different outcomes from Indigenous. Then it’s taken as truth because it’s if providers are aware. It’s definitely laudable; I would performed by people who are involved in a discipline never say you shouldn’t be doing that. But it’s not all that has been constructed as the apotheosis of truth. that ought to be done. Implicit biases happen in underfunded, overburdened public hospitals; in a society in
01 MARCH 2019
BY Julia Rock and Lily Meyersohn ILLUSTRATION Mariel Solomon DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt
which people of color, because of inherited disadvantage, have a hard time getting into medical schools and law schools and colleges and even high schools relative to their white counterparts. The Indy: But do you see palpable change being enacted right now? Maybe the increased attention towards Black maternal mortality rates, for instance, is one positive development? KB: I like to remind folks that Black maternal mortality (MMR) is currently three to four times the rate of white maternal mortality, but that that rate hasn’t changed over the years. Pre-Civil Rights Movement—we’re talking about the ’50s, ’40s, ’30s—the Black MMR was that high. So we have to query what about our socio-political present has made the issue more visible. Visibility is insufficient if it’s visibility for visibility’s sake. The Indy: Why is MMR making the news, then? KB: We’re talking about pregnant women. Feminists have made this argument since time immemorial: women are only valuable and valued when they’re reproducing. When we’re faced with the fact that women are dying when they’re valuable, we care. But when a Black man has hypertension at the age of 40, that’s not a valuable person right there. Ultimately, what sort of commitments do we have to reducing [MMR]? I feel strongly in saying I doubt we’re committed to making the world a healthier place for people of color because it takes hard work—and a lot of transformation. There’s good evidence that stress has contributed to Black maternal mortality rates. It’s stressful being a person of color—being embodied as a Black woman. So are we committed to making being a Black woman less stressful? +++ PART II, in conversation with Dr. Virginia Eubanks, associate professor of political science at the University at Albany, SUNY, and founding member of the Popular Technology Workshops and Our Knowledge, Our Power, a grassroots welfare rights and anti-poverty organizing. The Indy: In your most recent book, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, you write about welfare eligibility systems, homeless services, and a predictive risk model for child abuse in Indiana, Los Angeles, and Allegheny County, PA, respectively. What led you to undertake this investigation into automated decision-making and the distribution of public services? Dr. Virginia Eubanks: I come from a background in the community media and technology movements as well as welfare rights movements. Starting in the
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
mid-’90s, I did work around building collaborative needs from access points to technology in poor and working class neighborhoods. The way I worked started to shift when I got involved in a residential YWCA in my hometown of Troy, New York—low-cost housing for 90 poor and working class women building collaborative technology tools together. At some point this incredibly generous and smart community of women sat me down and said, “All the questions you’re asking don’t have anything to do with our lives.” And so I said, “how can I do better?” And they said, “You know, you assume we don’t have any interactions with technology in our day-to-day lives, and that’s totally untrue.” They come into contact with technology in the criminal justice system and their neighborhoods and low-wage workplace and most importantly, in the public assistance office. It reshaped how I think about the relationship between technology and economic and racial justice. It upended this popular idea at the time, the digital divide: that the big problem was access to technology. And it repointed my vision to the ways that our most innovative technologies in poor and working class neighborhoods often act to exploit and punish people rather than to connect them to a new world of opportunity.
was called scientific charity. Those assumptions are deeply built into the tools we see today. It doesn’t take bad intention to reproduce those ideas. It just takes amplifying and speeding up the process we already have, which often relies on these flawed, racist, classist, and sexist assumptions about what creates poverty. The Indy: It strikes me that your critique might be applicable to issues like climate change or healthcare; issues that politicians and entrepreneurs see as innovation problems but are really political problems. Is this a useful comparison?
VE: One of the questions that comes up almost every time I’ve done a talk is, “isn’t the problem the intention of the designers or the intention of their users?” This gets to the heart of technocracy, this idea that tools carry no value. That we are completely in control of them and it’s just about our intentions. This idea that digital tools are somehow blank doesn’t make sense outside of an ideology that is about technologies being apolitical solutions to social problems. [Digital tools] evolved in a particular system, in a particular culture, to do particular things, and these tools have evolved to solve political problems. We have a tendency to reach for technological solutions to big social problems when we’re trying to avoid a political conversation The Indy: “Eugenics created the first database of the that we need to be having, and I believe that at worst poor,” you write, explaining the relationship between we use these technological tools to avoid having those the use of “scientific charity” and the eugenics move- conversations. ment. What does this historical trajectory illustrate about today’s digital poorhouse? The Indy: Does a focus on technological solutions get in the way of a conversation about political problems? VE: The first [historical] moment that is important to understand is in 1819, when there’s this huge economic VE: At their worst, the kind of tools that I write about depression. There’s organizing by poor and working [allow] us to ignore some of the most pressing problems people for their survival and their rights, which we face as a country because they produce this neutral, economic elites respond to by commissioning studies objective face. I talk to designers about two very basic that ask the question, is the problem poverty? Or is it questions to ask themselves before they start designing what they called at the time “pauperism,” dependence one of these tools. The first is, does the tool increase or on public benefits? Not surprisingly, it came back support poor and working peoples’ self-determination that the problem was not poverty, the problem was or dignity? And the second is, if it were designed for dependence on public benefits. So they invented this anyone else, besides poor and working people, would new technology to manage people’s access to public it be accepted? Would it be tolerated? I think we need resources: the actual brick-and-mortar county poor- to think very consciously and purposely about building house. This was an institution that was supposed to tools that embody all of our values, not just the values raise the barrier to receiving public benefits so high of efficiency and cost savings, or the values of accuthat nobody but the most desperate people would racy or fairness, but our deeper democratic values. We ask for assets, because to get public benefits, you assume that if tools are neutral and objective that is had to “voluntarily” enter the poorhouse. That’s the the same thing as being fair and just. But if you build a moment we decided as a nation that the first thing tool in neutral, you’re building a tool for the status quo public assistance should do is a moral diagnosis and and the status quo in the US is quite troubling. And if decide whether you’re “deserving” or “undeserving,” we don’t build what I think of as certain “equity gears” creating this punitive system. Before providing any into machines, then they will automate and reproduce kind of assistance, this new class of people called case- the kinds of inequalities we already see. workers—originally police officers, but then young, college-educated white women who lacked other employment opportunities—were used to explore every aspect of a family’s life in order to decide whether or not helping them would be “morally proper.” This
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BAD LIEUTENANT Passing, clocking, and the curious case of Catalina de Erauso
BY Cate Turner ILLUSTRATION Ella Rosenblatt DESIGN Amos Jackson
Doña Catalina de Erauso does not have much of a place in history. He is a footnote to the Spanish Baroque period, a soldier like any other in all respects but one. In short, his story goes as follows: He was born in Basque country in the late 17th century, where he was raised as a girl. As a young teenager, he escaped a convent, cut and sewed a man’s outfit from his clothes, and started a new life as a boy. His autobiography, La monja alférez (often translated as Lieutenant Nun), details his travels in Latin America as part of Spain’s colonizing army and his subsequent return to Europe. Today, he is remembered as Doña Catalina—a feminine title and a feminine name—and memorialized primarily by a 1944 film wherein he spends his entire military career in pin curls. In classic Picaresque style, La monja alférez reads like it's located halfway between a hastily jotteddown travel log and an increasingly drunken leger of misspent youth. On average, Catalina kills someone in a bar several times per chapter; he narrowly avoids being killed for an entanglement with a married woman nearly as often. His military rank and status take a decidedly secondary role to his personal exploits. Most of the dialogue included is between Catalina and men he is about to stab, usually because they have criticized Basque country specifically or Spain generally. He has the unsettling habit of following each kill he records with the phrase, “And down he went.” It’s rare that he spends more than a few paragraphs in one place, and he almost never spends more than a few paragraphs with one person. This blasé style is not unusual for a Spanish man of Catalina’s era, but it sticks out among modern narratives of “passing” as a man. Many narratives of trans experience focus on the ‘failure’ to pass and its consequences. A cultural obsession with passing as a woman, for one, appears everywhere from Some Like it Hot to The Crying Game. In these works, lapses in passing are portrayed as either a source of humor or a show of deceit—unsurprising, considering how often women are framed in media as either ridiculous or dishonest. The female-passing characters here are made side characters, first and foremost objects of laughter, contempt, or both. Male-passing characters, on the other hand, are often cast as protagonists, even in mainstream media. Their stories tend to be more sympathetically told, but their narratives, too, hinge on the failure to pass. In stories of characters passing as men, being clocked (a term meaning revealed as trans)
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is very often a death sentence; even in the instances where protagonists survive, they often return to their lives as women as though their time being perceived as a man was nothing but an unsettling dream. Such stories render passing either fatal or temporary; in either case, they cast living as a man in a body that doesn’t fit that role as a doomed enterprise. Mulan, the 1998 Disney movie, is one of the most widely-distributed narratives of trans-adjacent experience today. It dramatizes the story of Hua Mulan, a medieval Chinese woman who passed as a man in order to join the military. Like Catalina, Mulan dons men’s clothes and fights in a men’s army. Unlike Catalina, however, Mulan is expelled when a battle injury reveals her chest. After a period of penance, she manages to reenter the scene in time to win the war, this time in women’s clothes. She reunites with her former commanding officer (who fell in love with her during their time fighting side-by-side—whether or not this is perhaps a bit gay is never addressed), and Mulan II sees her back in skirts and engaged. It’s hard to call Mulan a transmasculine story, really. The movie frames Mulan’s gender presentation as totally, exclusively instrumental, a tool to fight in a war she’s barred from and escape the expectation of marriage. Being clocked is painful for Mulan, but that’s because of the treatment she receives in the event’s wake, not because being perceived as a woman is a fundamental violation of her sense of self. When she resumes life as a woman, she seems to do so without reluctance. Contemporary stories that follow people who did vocally identify as men, especially those based in some historical truth, tend to be much darker in their depictions of transmasculine passing and its failure. Boys Don’t Cry, released just a year after Mulan, exemplifies this darker approach to transmasculine passing. It is based on the life of Brandon Teena, a trans man who was raped and murdered after acquaintances found his feminine birth name in a newspaper article. In Boys Don’t Cry, the people who kill Brandon first force him to remove his clothes, to shed the layers that masculinize him in the public eye. He is rendered helpless to both them and the viewer. Teena’s assailants try to force his girlfriend, Lana, to look at his naked body, but she refuses to see him in the way he refuses to be seen, averting her eyes. One might assume that the film asks viewers to do the same—essentially, to refuse to be a spectator to the revelation of transness. But the entire narrative of Boys Don’t Cry hinges on a spectator
experience of transness defined by that moment of revelation. Viewers are presented with a chronology of life as a trans man that includes, in order, passing, clocking, violation, and death, each stage presented in technicolor. In most respects, Boys Don’t Cry and Mulan couldn’t be more different in their treatments of transmasculine passing. Mulan is a children’s movie with a happy ending; Boys Don’t Cry is a notoriously distressing adaptation of a real person’s life and brutal death. But the nadir of each story is the revelation of transness. The moment of not-passing makes the protagonist vulnerable, laid bare against their will. It renders them a victim of others’ perceptions. Like a trick of the light, those heretofore understood as men see that understanding revoked, no matter their efforts to the contrary. Fundamentally, clocking acts in these narratives as a tool of taking power from protagonists. These stories can’t seem to conceive of a world of transness defined by anything other than concealment and forced disclosure. +++ Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me that Catalina de Erauso’s autobiography includes practically no clocking episodes. There is a long documented history of female-bodied people passing as men, especially in militaries; I would guess that the undocumented history of those who were never once revealed matches it. But when I finished La monja alférez, I was still shocked. After years of absorbing stories of transmasculine people whose lives were defined or cut short by their ‘failure’ to pass, I wasn’t sure quite how to interpret the stakes of a text in which passing is a relative non-issue. At virtually no point in his autobiography does Catalina report being clocked or outed against his will. Catalina ‘comes out’—to whatever degree that phrase can really be applied—three times, and only once with any lasting consequences for his life. The first time, he finds himself with a deep wound in his left side after a fight. Before Catalina goes into surgery, a friar visits Catalina to take his confession. “Seeing as how I was about to die, I told him the truth about myself,” Catalina summarized in his autobiography. The Brother is “astonished” and absolves Catalina, who takes the last sacrament and enters surgery. After surviving surgery, Catalina mentions no repercussions—it appears that
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no one thinks to question his claim to life as a man, even the friar to whom he told the truth. The second time Catalina tells someone about his past, he’s running for his life. Cornered by the law in Perú, he seeks refuge with a local bishop. This bishop asks about Catalina’s history, and at first, he responds with anecdotes about his time in Latin America. It isn’t a wholly inaccurate portrait: after all, he has been a man running from death for his entire adult life. But midway through, Catalina stops himself, feeling suddenly “humbled before God.” He tells the bishop, “Señor, all of this that I have told you… in truth, it is not so. The truth is this: that I am a woman.” Several women “inspect” Catalina and determine that he is an “intact virgin,” which draws the admiration of all religious authorities in the vicinity. The bishop is particularly impressed: “Daughter,” he says, “I esteem you as one of the more remarkable people in this world… and [promise] to aid you in your new life in service to God.” Catalina goes through another stint in a convent— the first time since childhood, it seems, that he has lived as a woman. After this, it’s unclear when he begins dressing in men’s clothes again, but by the time he has embarked on a ship set for Spain, he finds himself “forced to cut another man’s face with a little knife.” The transition from men’s sphere to women’s the world. In both Boys Don’t Cry and Mulan, people in situations similar to Catalina’s are vulnerable at and back is written more or less seamlessly. Once back in Europe, Catalina ‘comes out’ to the every moment to the puncture of their ‘disguises.’ Pope himself, who officially pardons him, giving him But Catalina’s disguise is bulletproof, even when it “leave to pursue [his] life in men's clothing.” The Pope’s has been, by any normal logic, completely shredded. only criticism of Catalina is regarding his frequent Catalina can always return to manhood, and it will violations of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” always have a place for him. Passing is, in many ways, the nexus of La monja From the greatest moral authority in his social structure, Catalina receives censure only for doing exactly alférez, but it is taken as a set of conditions over which what was expected of Spanish armies sent to Latin Catalina has nearly total agency. It is the state of having passed, not the state of nearly failing to, that La monja America. There is a certain tragedy to Catalina’s story. He alférez dramatizes. is completely unable, at any point in his life, to stop +++ fighting, or even to stop moving. He refuses to open up to almost anyone, in almost any circumstance. More than anything else, he never reconnects with his Mulan is an easy character for elementary-age girls family, never knits his childhood as a girl and adult- with nebulously incorrect gendered behaviors to relate hood as a man together. When Catalina finally ‘comes to; Boys Don’t Cry tends to be written about most by out’ to the bishop, it is because he feels he has lived transmasculine critics with the polemical fervor of those who feel they have been made against their will dishonestly, immorally. The tragedy of Catalina’s life is not that he is to, well, cry. There is a reason the arc of passing-thenhelpless—not against his own body, and not against clocking is a popular one, and it has plenty to do with the fact that it is, in fact, resonant. For many people, being misgendered is both acutely and chronically painful, sometimes unbearably so. It can feel like being turned inside out and seen wrong; it can feel like a kind of death of the self, even when it happens over and over again. To live in a limbo of being read and misread, seemingly at random, is hard to take. So it makes sense that many narrativize the moment of having not-passed as terminal—or, at least, as a terminus. In real life, trans people are forced to develop ungodly reserves of resilience, to rebuild themselves after being torn down in a world that won’t do it for them. Stories where such resilience is unnecessary or fruitless are appealing precisely because they offer clean lines and cutoffs where actual trans experience is full of ragged edges. I write from a particularly ragged-edged place. It is utterly mysterious to me what I, personally, pass as; the answer seems to change every day. More than one stranger has called me “he” and “ma’am” in the same sentence, and friends often double back to correct themselves on my pronouns, then correct themselves again. If every time someone misunderstood me and left me feeling raw and exposed constituted the nadir of my life, I don’t think I would ever surface from
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
despair. The question, for me, is how to feel something other than helpless about it. To learn to swim in the deluge of other people’s misperceptions—or, at least, to float. That is why I find what I am about to relay perversely uplifting. It isn’t actually accurate to say that, over the course of La monja alférez, Catalina is never, ever clocked. He is, exactly once, in an episode recorded in the very last short chapter of his autobiography. At some point after his papal pardon, two women on the street call out to Catalina, “Señora Catalina, where are you going, all by your lonesome?” Catalina addresses them, “my dear harlots,” then calmly threatens to slit both their throats. They fall silent and leave immediately, while Catalina continues on his way, unperturbed. The women’s comment reads harmless, because Catalina comes away from it unharmed. Catalina de Erauso seems to have figured out the trick to fielding the world’s images of him and bending each to his will. He is never a victim, not even a victim of perception. The womens' misreading doesn’t scare him, because, as the continued life of La monja alférez proves, he writes himself. It isn’t a nadir—it isn’t even a blip.
CATE TURNER B’21 was really into Joan of Arc as a kid.
FEATURES
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BY Raghvi Bhatia ILLUSTRATION Raghvi Bhatia DESIGN Lulian Ahn
is an effort to translate zellige patterns into poetry. The poems are titled to reference the star shape that is central to each zellige pattern, the name of which is “( ” متاخkhātim) which translates to ring.
was given a name (which can range from “The Turtle” to “The Forehead of the Kiln Candle”) still remains unknown. Some names are given in purely phonetic form and in spite of intensive research by linguists and historians who attempted to trace the names to Arabic In January 2018, I participated in a study abroad word roots, no semantics relating to the syllables have program in Morocco, where art and design students been found. Despite the probability that Zellige tileworked alongside Moroccan craftspeople. 1500 years work is produced without the intention of creative before that, the Moroccan zellige craft was developed. narratives or poetic verse, I attempt, through translaZellige tilework, one of the most important features tion, to uncover stories that might be told by the zellige. of Moroccan architecture, is made from individually Thus, this body of work is at its heart a translation chiseled geometric tiles that fit together perfectly and project, from Zellige to English, through Arabic. are set in a plaster base.
Translations, as much as the original work in question, rely on a common-held field of reference between the writer and the reader, which at its most basic is an understanding of how modern languages operate by stringing together words or letters to create sentences. This relationship is made more tenuous as translations cross not only geographical and linguistic frontiers, but also syntactical ones. When I create translated tile poetry based on the radial organization of zellige, sentence structure ceases to be linear—and through this breakage, I hope to pay homage to the visual language these tiles were built into, instead becoming The craftspeople who work with Zellige when radial and kaleidoscopic. arranging the tiles do not intend to form narratives. The tiles are arranged to form patterns based on basic The words that are direct translations of the tile names principles of Islamic geometry. How and why each tile are italicized.
Zellige patterns adorn Moroccan buildings from floor to ceiling. These patterns are made of a library of over 300 distinct shapes of zellige tiles, each shape with a specific name. During my time in Morocco, I obtained a list of about half of these names through conversations with and writings by the craftspeople I was working with. This lexicon was used as a dictionary to aid in reading, translating and interpreting the architectural zellige patterns—to give birth to this project of writing tile poems.
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01 MARCH 2019
There is a correct way to sit in order to make zellige. That was the first thing the zellige master taught me. It numbs my limbs. I sit correctly next to him as I attempt, wholeheartedly but unsuccessfully, to chip away at the glaze and ceramic to craft an eight-pointed star tile. The craftsman says, I can make 900 of those in a day. I’ve been working on the same one for over an hour. He chisels one within a minute and hands it to me. Khatim, he says. I ask him what that means. Nothing. I’ve seen restaurants and stores in the medina named after that word, I wonder if they are all named after an eight-pointed star. Oh, no. ‘khatim’ means ring. I hold up the tile, and ask – so this shape means ring? No. It means nothing.
I wake to the early sun I could never fold my eyes to light
The art history professor that accompanied my cohort gi es us a lecture on Museums and Craft and Ornament and Orientalism. She outlines what is expected of us. A student voices her concerns. She says she is uncomfortable working with Moroccan craft and Islamic patterns when she knows so little about them. The professor dismisses her concern. Don't worry about it. The patterns mean nothing to them.
new moon in the doorway skin reflecting lanterns new moon appears out of the blue but he is just the same old one
ﺷﻮﻥ ﻗﻤﺮ Qamar Shoun The Moon 'Shoun'
ﺍﻟﻘﻨﺪﻳﻞ Al-Qandeel The Lantern
ﺍﻟﻤﻄﻮﻯ Al-Matwi The Folded
ﺷﻮﻥ ﻗﻤﺮ Qamar Shoun Qamar Shoun The Moon 'Shoun' The Moon 'Shoun' ﺍﻟﻘﻨﺪﻳﻞ Al-Qandeel Al-Qandeel The Lantern The Lantern ﺍﻟﻤﻄﻮﻯ Al-Matwi Al-Matwi The Folded The Folded
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
FEATURES
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#BLOCKED Rhode Island politicians keep their constituents in the dark
BY Alina Kulman ILLUSTRATION Stephanie Wu DESIGN Cecile Kim
Rhode Island politicians often struggle to keep their reputations clean, so maybe it isn’t surprising that when officials take to Twitter, they don’t always follow best practices. RI Problems (@RIProbz), a Twitter account with 125,000 followers, started a thread on February 16 to ask how its followers would describe Rhode Island in one word. The most common response: “Corruption.” For Lindsay Crudele, a native of Cranston, Rhode Island, interacting with her hometown mayor on Twitter was riddled with contradictions. She had questions about what Allan Fung, the mayor of Cranston and also the Republican candidate for governor in the 2018 race, envisioned for health care policy in the state. Although Crudele now lives in Boston, her parents still live in Cranston, and her mother has multiple sclerosis. “I wanted to know what I might expect for my mother should he become the governor,” Crudele told the Independent. Crudele is a seasoned Twitter user. She works as a digital consultant, and has helped governments, including the City of Boston, develop their social media presence. So, she decided to tweet at Fung (@MayorFung)—a very active Twitter user—numerous times during his campaign to ask about his health care policy. She got no response, even as Fung engaged with numerous other constituents on the site, answering questions about trash removal and posting emergency weather updates. In September, Crudele saw that Fung had tweeted criticizing Governor Gina Raimondo for a TV campaign ad asserting that Cranston was in distress under Fung’s leadership. Clapping back, Fung wrote that the footage mistakenly showed Providence streets. The tweet reminded Crudele of one of Fung’s own campaign mishaps during his 2014 run for governor, when one of his advertisements featured a diner in Ohio, not Rhode Island. “I wrote back to him [on Twitter], and I said, ‘Well let us know when you get
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back from Ohio,’ and that’s the moment I was blocked,” she said. “I was ignored for months, but when I made that joke I was blocked.” Crudele could no longer retweet or reply to Fung’s tweets, and was barred from seeing all of the public information he was sharing on his timeline. Crudele found her experience was not unique: others on Twitter, including Cranston residents, said they had been blocked by Fung’s account. Wellversed in local government, she decided to file a public records request to see the list of accounts that Fung was blocking. Cranston’s city solicitor, Chris Rawson, replied to her in an email: “This Twitter account is not associated with the City of Cranston.” Even though Fung has roughly 8,000 Twitter followers and regularly posts about his actions as mayor, along with weather and traffic-related updates, Rawson claimed that Fung’s account was not associated in any official capacity with the city. Some city governments in Rhode Island, like Pawtucket, have official Twitter accounts that post regular updates about the town. Cranston, however, does not have an official account, so many updates about local governance happen on Fung’s Twitter instead. “It’s not a private account if he’s having all these conversations on social media, if he’s sharing all sorts of more robust communication around weather, and discussing business development,” Crudele said. Crudele continued to tweet about Fung blocking her on her personal account, and the story was picked up by local outlets, including the Providence Journal. Fung’s campaign spokesperson, Andrew Augustus, told the ProJo in September that Fung had blocked 24 people on Twitter, all engaged in “either profanity or nuisance posting.” Fast forward four months and although Fung has taken out the official mayoral title from his Twitter handle, changing it from @ MayorFung to @AllanFungRI, Crudele is still blocked.
Blocking, according to Crudele, “is an amazing way to silence your opponents. He didn’t have to have a backand-forth conversation with me, but I should be able to see publicly posted information.” +++ It seems almost gratuitous to point out that the sense of Rhode Island as a small state where everyone knows each other is replicated on Twitter, as local politicians and journalists are easily reachable on the site. Rhode Islanders often tweet at their representatives about traffic and infrastructure problems, and receive information about how to accurately report their issues. Twitter is an increasingly important site of engagement between citizens and their government, as people turn there first when looking for an immediate response from their elected officials. The political conversation on Rhode Island Twitter also includes direct confrontations between elected officials. In January, Democratic State Representative from Providence Marcia Ranglin-Vassell tweeted about education reform and involved herself in a Twitter back-and-forth with Republican Representative from North Smithfield Brian Newberry about what qualifies someone to speak on issues around education. She ultimately tweeted at him to “Stop trolling and trying to cyber bully me with your racist attitudes.” When politicians block constituents, this also means preventing them from from taking part in debates over local politics that only happen on Twitter, and from seeing their stances on issues they may not release formal press releases about. Free speech issues arise when politicians claim their accounts are their private property (as they ran the same accounts, sometimes with the same handles, as private citizens), even as they engage in political discussion on the site. The legal question of whether becoming a politician fundamentally changes the nature of one’s speech on Twitter has not been resolved. Fung is not the only Rhode Island politician known to block people on Twitter. Democratic US Representative David Cicilline has blocked users, although his spokesman told the ProJo that the option is reserved only for cases of repeated harassment. One of the Rhode Islanders who claims to be blocked by Cicilline, @NewportLost, has a Twitter bio full of references to right-wing conspiracy theories: “#America1st Illegal isn't a race, it is a crime. #1A Do your own research. -FACTS OVER FEELZ- #Immigrate to #Assimilate - #NoMoreWar - #wg1wga #QAnon.” Former Rhode Island House Minority Leader Patricia Morgan blocked a group of firefighters on Twitter, after introducing and passing legislation that dealt with the bankruptcy of the Central Coventry Fire District (CCFD) budget in 2016. Firefighters tweeted at her criticizing her leadership, referencing the CCFD debacle, even when tweeting about other actions her office was undertaking. The Twitter account for the East Greenwich Fire Fighters Association (@ IAFFLocal3328), one town over from Coventry, criticized her for her poor leadership numerous times, calling out her alleged “union breaking” practices. In July 2016, they wrote, “@repmorgan blocked us so we couldn't call her out on her lies.” Other firefighters who spoke out against Morgan’s policy alleged that she blocked them as well.
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While dealing with critics, or even trolls, on Twitter can make the site a less pleasant experience, other Rhode Island politicians have made it their social media policy to not block or mute anyone, including Governor Gina Raimondo and Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza. Emily Crowell, Elorza’s chief of communications and senior adviser, told the ProJo that the issue “has not come up, nor is it our policy to block users.” There is yet to be a settled legal standard for whether politicians can block people. In May 2018, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that it is unconstitutional for the President (@ RealDonaldTrump) to block people from his account. In her decision, Buchwald wrote that Twitter is a “designated public forum” since the President uses it for government speech, and that he is violating people’s First Amendment rights by blocking them for critical tweets. Trump has filed an appeal in the Second Circuit; his lawyers wrote that Trump’s account is his private property, which he uses “not to provide a platform for public discussion, but to disseminate his own views to the world.” While Buchwald’s decision is under appeal, politicians around the country continue to block thousands of Twitter users, including their constituents. A ProPublica report in 2017 found that governors and elected officials had blocked around 1,300 Twitter users. Some of those blocked by elected officials have since filed cases with the ACLU, including in Kentucky against Governor Matt Bevin (who blocked over 600 people on Twitter, according to a ProPublica report), in Ohio against State Senator Joe Uecker, and in Alabama against Secretary of State John Merrill. The verdicts have been mixed—no one has yet defined the difference between personal and official government accounts.
society, and Twitter, Facebook and other social media are simply 21st Century [sic] ways of doing that.” Brown’s letter emphasized that RIDOT’s account is necessarily a government account because it’s speaking for an official government agency, not any individual politician, so information shared to its Twitter must be publicly accessible. Now unblocked, “smokin blunts” is back to regular criticism of RIDOT. On January 20, he wrote: “Hey @RIDOTNews instead of stupid slogans and bad commercials why don't you #DoYourJob and put some salt down 295 is like a skating rink.”
+++ Twitter is not known, of course, for always being a place of insightful discourse—it’s difficult to fit intelligent commentary in the 140-turned-280 character limit. And Rhode Island Twitter, like all of Twitter, is not necessarily the most civil place. But people blocked from elected representatives’ Twitter accounts lose the opportunity participate in larger discussions with politicians and fellow citizens, even if officials consider them to be “nuisance posting.” Twitter can be a place of accessible communication with politicians—people have an opportunity to feel like they’re hearing directly from (or being heard by) their elected representatives, instead of just leaving a note with an assistant after a phone call. On Twitter, people have the opportunity to share their political grievances in a public forum, potentially drawing more attention to the issue they’re raising and growing consensus amongst their neighbors and people from around the state. Crudele isn’t sure Fung will ever unblock her from his Twitter account, though she has found a go-around to see his tweets. She started an account, @MayorOfCranston, that mirrors Fung’s account by automatically reposting everything he tweets. It +++ currently has 12 followers — that is, 12 more people who will never be excluded from seeing posts and interWhat does seem clearer, at least according to the acting with the powers that be. Rhode Island ACLU, is that government agencies’ official Twitter accounts should not be able to block people. ALINA KULMAN B’21 wants more people to get on In October 2017, “smokin blunts” (@bluntz401), an Rhody Twitter. anonymous account with a yellow smiley face giving the middle finger as a profile photo, first posted on Twitter about being blocked by the Rhode Island Department of Transportation: “Transparency in @ rigov doesn't exist especially at @RIDOTNews.” He continued to post criticism of RIDOT, even though they could no longer see his tweets. He wrote about the department’s failure to take care of Rhode Island roads and bridges, as well as about a RIDOT worker seen smoking a cigarette while shoveling a storm drain, among other complaints. In October 2018, Steven Brown, the executive director of the Rhode Island ACLU, sent a letter to the Rhode Island Department of Transportation, demanding that “smokin blunts” be unblocked from @ RIDOTNews. Brown wrote that since the department posts updates with essential information on Twitter, they do not have “the authority to censor or otherwise block individuals from access to, or participation in, this forum because it disagrees with the viewpoints they express.” Brown added, “The ability of constituents to be able to express their views to both elected and appointed officials is crucial in a democratic
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Common Birds of Rhode Island A Clarifying Note to Begin: Ornithology is a disruptive and elusive discipline. Like any branch of critical theory, it examines an artifice and either challenges or redeems its existence in nature. What I know, from years of experience in the field, is that I am but one eyeball in a kaleidoscopic field of many varying perspectives. Yes, many is the time I have mistakenly confused a White-eared Hummingbird for a Broad-billed Hummingbird, and then realized through the circular frame of my spotting scope that the fauna I am observing is actually hybrid of the two. As birders the only thing we truly know is that perspective works like a dog on a track: a greyhound making a mad, ravenous dash for something they think is a rabbit, which is really a dirty washcloth soaked in pig blood. At the end of the day, we cannot be sure of what we know, but for that very reason we can be certain that our voices and perspectives are worth something. In Russia, during the golden age of Bolshevism, scientist wanted to test whether winter minks found pleasure in recognition. Siberian Weasels were placed in cages and given buttons, sort of like those pens you see on Jeopardy. If pressed mild a dose of MDMA was released into their bloodstream. In a random sequence of images, perhaps something like: insect → lamp → burrow → Prussia → STOP, or berry → daisy → musket → chimney → STOP, different images where offered to the weasel. If the weasel resonated, the idea was it would hit the button. What shocked scientists was that in every case, the weasel hit the button. It did not discriminate familiar object or concept from non-familiar object or concept. Simply the act of perceiving a thing in its thingness was moving enough. Perhaps this is the long way around saying that when I am in the field, I emulate that same reptilian mindset. When in a flash I catch the field marking on a fleeing pair of wings and I scream out loud to no one but myself, “Pachyramphus aglaiae!” I am just like that weasel in a cage, mainlining hot euphoria through to my right ventricle.
Herring Gull Larus argentatus l
25”
ws
58”
wt
2.5lb (1150g) ♂>♀
voice: A crisp, sailing cry. Not to be confused
with measured bugling of the Lesser Blackbacked Gull. Black-backed gulls are thinner and frailer in stature.
Black-capped Chickadee Poecile atricapillus l
5.25”
ws
8”
.39oz (11g)
wt
voice:
Quite simply, chickadee-dee-dee-dee, although in distress a stinging, chik-tsik. A low, somber feebee, every now and then, on long, overcast days. Lovely, plump, Black-capped Chickadees group in medium-to-small sized “shit cliques,” which rove in and around northeastern suburban yardscapes murdering caterpillars and fireflies. Mournful undulating flight patterns. Fresh adults, mostly in the east, possess a white kinch near the secondary feathers. Gossipy in thick pine tree and fur groves. Always check for a white nape, then a silver streak carving at a medium across the bill.
Common on beaches and blue skies in and around coastal suburbs, look for a red tab strapped to lower bill and blackbands on upper tail coverts. Roosting occurs in shallow sand dimples usually obscured in beach grass. Operates in uncollaborative flocks. The flock works in as far as the sweeping search of shallow dwelling mollusks and crustaceans. Upon identification and seizure of food, sense of flock usually abandoned: various examples of infighting, coup d’etats, limb breaking, et cetera. Victor claims sustenance. Sustenance lifted high into the air then dropped on firm ground: pavement, peebles, jetties, et cetera. Upon contact with surace a rebirth of conflict. More fighting, cawing, et cetera. New champion or defending champion succeeds, gobbles into the open wound of the shell-creature, repeat, repeat, repeat.
Red-bellied Woodpecker Melanerpes carolinus l
9.5”
ws
16”
wt
2.2oz (63g) ♂>♀
voice:
Earthy hacking and a low rising nuk-nuk. Also, a quick, saturated thin-thin-thin three times in succession before a frantic, beating laugh composed over the course of a few seconds, then rhythmic pecks at regular speed. Red, sloping mantel, and slighter red nape. More pronounced napes spread among the northern population. At home bouncing through wood patches, but frisky and less easy-going around birch trees and cedars. Rare visitors of Newfoundland, normally sticking to the American side. Ruthless with bugs. Slaps bark hard, as though observing a sincerely enriching moment in time. Self-conscious bathing habits. Mutters happy holidays to self when Christmas music feels overtly consumerist.
European Starling Sturnus vulgaris l
8.5”
voice:
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ws
16”
wt
2.9oz (82g) ♂>♀
A ceaseless sha sha sha, baby, sha sha sha.
Starlings were shipped to New York from England, because a common belief among bird enthusiasts then was that every bird ever recorded in a Shakespeare play belonged to the American wilderness. Sixty were released into Central Park in 1890 along with forty more that same year. Although successfully spanning the country coast to coast, Starlings have, to some degree, always stationed themselves near centers of human development. Every now and then, here and there, for no reason, a hundred starlings will lift up all at once in the sky. Neck to neck, belly to back, they make a shifting void-like bolus, which sweeps and trips across the open sky, just above our roofs. EPHEMERA 14
BY Alexis Gordon DESIGN Bethany Hung
THE WORLD AS PICTURE, EXHIBITION,
I want to talk about some phenomena in the violence against Southeast Asian peoples, both historically and today, and the modes of this violence. I’ve been trying to parse it through the framework of three big theories, to see what it is that decolonial action on behalf of the West must look like. Let me take you through them, and then maybe we can get somewhere useful. Three probably seems excessive, but bear with me. But first I’m going to cheat and add one more, because we need to get the World Picture out of the way in order to get to the other stuff. So, we’ll start there. Ironically enough, it was Martin Heidegger, a Nazi, who first theorized the world-as-picture in the 1930s. The world picture described the way people were coming to see the world itself as a plan, an image, a map. Here, the weapons take the form of the representation, an optical tool. Political theorist Timothy Mitchell was the first to apply the notion of the World Picture to colonialism. Under colonialism, Mitchell wrote, the world is not just a picture, but an exhibit to be displayed and, most importantly, known, learned, and ordered. This is what we might understand as the colonial optic, where the weapon is total vision and taxonomy of the colonized. Later, Rey Chow recognized that something was missing in this line of theory—namely, that today, when the world is a picture, it’s because the world is a target. In this formulation, the World Picture is seen in order to be destroyed. Martinican Édouard Glissant’s intervention into Chow's work formulates a politics of opacity as the oppressed’s weapon of resistance. This opacity serves as the ability to remain illegible
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architects, this pavilion was supposedly true to form. In fact, and visitors to other French ‘Oriental’ pavilions, made similarly, often said that even after visiting the real ‘Orient,’ it was the French pavilions that were most authentically ‘Oriental.’ The pavilion was intended to educate the masses about Cambodians and the archeological value of the site, a didactic but entertaining version of the museum meant to more actively draw visitors from all socioeconomic classes and expose them to cultured knowledge. And while the pavilion was certainly not true to form, it was this act, the making of the pavilion, and the sincere belief of the vision created, that is so relevant. This act was not just to image from CardCow map and formally illustrate the world through the colonial exhibition, but to produce the picture of the world in to hegemonic power, which reduces and delimits ‘the order to exhibit it, display it, and learn it. The world Other’s’ identity, history, and being. Through the lens was rendered legible not just as an image, but as a of these thinkers, the ramifications of seeing the world taxonomy, with the West ordering races and colonies as exhibit and target congeal most prominently at along vectors of civilization. Angkor Wat, one of the most famous sites in Southeast In this way, the colonized ‘Other’ was not just Asia. It is through this archeological epicenter that made totally visible as a picture and displayed object, we might find some understanding about a way out of but totally knowable through a museological producthese paradigms and what opacity has to offer. tion of knowledge by way of reduction and classifiAngkor Wat has occupied the Orientalist imagi- cation. The French excelled at this. In fact, through nary for hundreds of years now. As a nationalist monu- their art historical practice, they constructed first the ment, religious site, and archeological object, the site categorization of “Indochina”—i.e. Indian-Chinese has come to represent the Kingdom of Cambodia, and even sits at the center of the Cambodian flag. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Angkor Wat became the gem of French colonialism and is today a nationalist symbol for the Kingdom. As part of the colonial Indochina, Cambodia has its own pavilion in each of the Exposition Coloniales France hosted, and it is the 1931 Exposition Coloniale that is of particular interest.
Postcard for the Angkor Wat Pavilion, 1931 For the exposition, French architects built a massive replica of Angkor Wat in the center of Paris, using molds taken from the original site to build the exterior and featuring “authentic” Cambodian dancers and Cambodian nationals paid to work at the pavilion. The replica was hailed as the real thing, a reality that matched the original site, such that visitors need not visit Cambodia to see Angkor Wat. While previous versions of the Angkor Wat pavilion had involved massive leaps of design on behalf of the French
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AND TARGET land—and then of a homogenous, non-Cambodian Khmer ethnic identity as the builders of Angkor Wat. Some French went so far as to claim that these Khmer people were Aryans, and thus European relatives. In all cases, the French were sure that these Khmer people were dead, vanished, and long gone, while the new Cambodian people were inherently inferior to both the Khmers and Europeans. It was this history that France sought to teach at its colonial exhibit. The world-as-exhibit paradigm, then, is helpful for understanding not only colonial France’s view of Cambodia and its people as something to display but also how, as France enacted the categorical work of the museum exhibit, it produced a colonial schema and an entirely reductive, incorrect account of the Cambodian and Khmer people. Of course, the ethnically heterogeneous Cambodian people, counter to this narrative, are descendants of the equally heterogeneous Khmer builders. Using the World Picture in the study of colonialism is a clarifying framework, but under neo-colonialism, it is Rey Chow’s world-as-target that proves most helpful for unpacking the continued cultural and physical violence that plays out within Cambodia and Angkor Wat. In looking at this violence today, it is urgent to remember that while colonial France’s violence often manifested in the outright massacring, displacement, and imprisonment of Cambodian peoples, it was also symbolic: France’s museological practices determined who an authentic Khmer and Cambodian was, erasing heritage and identities. Angkor Wat was one of France’s great tools for determining authenticity, and France even named itself the legitimate heir to the Angkor
Angkor Wat, neo-colonialism, and opacity
civilization. Interestingly, at the 1931 Exposition, the French projected the colors of the French flag onto the replica, claiming the site as theirs—a form of violence itself. But after Cambodia gained independence from France’s colonial power, Western violence toward the East took myriad forms. From 1965 to 1973, the United States engaged in President Nixon’s goal of a “massive bombing campaign,” later called the Cambodia Campaign. The US Air Force dropped at least 500,000 in the 1950s. In this way, the tons of bombs throughout the nation, killing as many West continues to supervise as 150,000 people. and render Cambodia totally knowable, examinable, and seeable under a rubric of area Locations of US Bombing Points During studies. In the neo-colonial Cambodia Campaign world of drones, landmines, area studies, and Western Later, when the US offered supply and diplomatic hegemonic archeological support to the Khmer Rouge, the communist guerilla practices, we have to ask, who party, seeking freedom from the very conditions the benefits from this hypervisiWest produced in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos bility, the Iconem model, and (previously Indochina), would enable genocide. Today, the West’s otherizing study of there are as many as 8-10 million landmines left in the East? What are the stakes Cambodian soil—landmines that were either produced in demanding total visibility in the West or modelled from US designs. The from Cambodia? In the blurframework of the world-as-target clarifies President ring of the boundaries of war, Nixon’s Cambodia Campaign in many ways. The how can the West see the visual ephemera of the violence make clear that the ‘Other’ outside of the target war was waged through the production of represen- field? Here, Glissant saves tations—maps, helicopter footage, and visual data. the day. The subversion of the These images overexposed and rendered visible the world-as-exhibit and target hidden indigenous resistance, just as the world-as-pic- lies, at least partly, in opacity. ture and exhibit did for the “lost” and “undiscovered” These Western paradigms Khmer civilization and the Orientalized Cambodia. seek to make the ‘Other’ The neo-colonial optic, then, is perhaps best summa- totally visible and knowable. rized by the words of a former United States Under Opacity, illegibility, and the agency of the ‘Other’ to Secretary of Defense, “Once you can see the target, determine visual fields offer a potential method of you can expect to destroy it.” In this same vein, Henry conceptualizing the relation between colonial powers Kissinger encouraged the troops of the Cambodia and the colonized without resorting to the inequality Campaign to put “anything that flies on anything that embedded in knowledge production. What opacity moves.” can the West cede and respect? What illegibility can Cambodia, and the East, generally, attain? How can Drone Footage from Iconem Western academia treat the study of colonized subjects without reducing, generalizing, or controlling peoples This hypervisibility, this lack of opacity, also emerges and histories? Glissant’s opacity might take the form from the phenomenon of drone footage in Cambodia, of pedagogy, policy, or new museum methodology, where archeologists use the weapons of Western but this notion of opacity should serve as touchstone domination to continue to see and know Cambodia. A for the West. Without this, we should be aware of the recent talk at the Joukowsky Institute for Archeology at violent consequences. In Cambodia, the weapons are Brown University by Iconem, a French startup founded already there. in 2013, spoke on the “role for new technologies in the protection of cultural heritage.” They pride them- ALEXIS GORDON ‘20 wants you to question more selves on “photorealistic 3D models” for archeolog- things they’re showing at the Joukowsky. ical research, and are one of many Western research groups that uses drones to surveil Angkor Wat, a site now regulated by Paris-based UNESCO. Likewise, tourists in Cambodia occasionally illegally fly drones over the landmark, posting their videos on YouTube. These models for knowledge production and categorization blur the line between wartime and peacetime representation and technology. With this in mind, it is unsurprising that the first area studies in Cambodia were conducted by the Far Eastern Association, founded toward the end of World War II and remade as the Association for Asian Studies
image from Yale University Genocide Studies Program
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LLEWELLYN I thought Llewellyn was the most beautiful name in the English language. At least, that’s what I told my mother at seven o’clock on a Tuesday night after I got my teeth cleaned. I always managed to wind up at the dentist when I visited California during breaks. I was laying there, fluoride over my lips and breathing through my nose, or attempting to. My mouth, limp and open for so long, felt detached from my face. I became aware of my tongue, that slug-like piece of pink, dormant in the cave of my face, and all at once I didn’t know where to put it. Do I keep it stuck to the top of my mouth? Or do I let it press the back of my bottom front teeth, against the fluoride retainer? All these movements, all this swimming through the concoction of saliva, fluoride, and the vague tastes of bubblegum tooth-cleaner, felt very linguistic, if that makes sense. I sat on the green vinyl of the dentist’s chair, forever staring into the fluorescent harshness above, and silent sounds of syllables of la and wa and in and ar tumbled through my mouth. I choked on a bit of fluoride, and my eyes watered. It all seemed very natural, these sounds, these words, and I moved on to read off a mental rolodex of names I liked. I paused on Llewellyn—Lawellen Lewallen Lewilin Llewillin Llewhelyn—and it sounds weird and self-obsessed, but I likened it to my own name, Katharine— Kathryne Katherine Katheryn Catherine. Catheter. Nine letters, three syllables, and a particular lengthiness. I was pulled to the waiting room by an invisible string double-knotted around my waist—I had to tell my mother. I just needed to share the name. I had to say this really glamorous, Tinseltown name out loud. I wanted to write it with chemtrails in the sky. Looking back, I wish I had scribbled it down on some real estate notepad and passed it to her instead. You need to see the sorta smooth double L’s and the wild, zig-zag W and the crooked weirdness of the Y. The craziest part is the N, I was thinking, and it’s my favorite. Writing the name down lassoed the wild edges into simultaneous smoothness, and the repetitive loop-motions of the hand were almost meditative. I asked my mother if she liked the name.
BY Kate Ok ILLUSTRATION Julia Illana DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt
When walking past converted lofts, he never looked in to see what his neighbor’s brother was watching on the TV. He didn’t hesitate about the blinking oil-change light on his dashboard, didn’t cover it up with a Bart Simpson sticker either, and he never lingered where he wasn’t wanted. Llewellyn kept his dreams from last night to himself, unless that topic was relevant, and he would smile kindly and repeat his name after that secretary asked, so how many L’s and E’s? He smelled like patchouli, bergamot, and sandalwood, naturally. He was deliberate, sensible, genuine. On a Saturday, I will write down ‘Llewellyn’ on rich-boy parchment paper to mail to his Halifax house, but I know that he’s long gone. A Mormon family lives there now, and they’re planning to remodel Llewellyn’s pink-tiled bathroom. It’s the bathroom that we would all wow and ooh at when Llewellyn showed us the Craigslist pictures. These plants hung from the bathroom ceiling; his journalist colleague gifted him monsteras and peace lilies after he married that ex-countess from his liberal arts college. I don’t know if Llewellyn threw away the plants when he disappeared or left them browning for the next residents to find. But the way that Llewellyn would forever play worn-down Neil Young tapes, even reeling demos and slow b-sides, in that old car, it makes me think he brought the plants with him.
Yeah, but no one could spell it, she said. He would be bullied. Talking about Llewellyn so much—and it’s not that I’m in love with him, or something—naturally makes I paused, envisioning a disheveled, feral me with me think of you. Before you and I divorced, we split up mythic son Llewellyn in a Babybjörn. our book collection. I took Franny and Zooey, which you had never returned to the Gardner stacks, and Now, I am looking for a Llewellyn, and I’m wondering you took my water-stained Jane Eyre. I don’t know if if you still know him. The last time I saw him, he was I am just being crazy, but I swear that Jane Eyre was walking down the 5, at the Orange Crush interchange, Llewellyn’s. I haven’t even finished it. I only remember walking with a click click click of his boots. He is quiet Jane hitting rock bottom, sobbing at the side of the and tall and looks older than he is, but he is not scary, in road, before she’s taken in by that family. I rememthe way men can be. Llewellyn’s got this tragic-senti- bered one morning, walking to the supermarket, that if mental-folk character look—maybe a bastard, born-in- you opened the front cover of that book, you would see the-desert child of Joan of Arc and Harry Dean Stanton. the double L’s, the ‘ewe,’ the ‘well,’ and that shocking, That analogy was sacrilege. The bones in his face are final N in fancy fountain pen ink. hard and delicate; sometimes, in a light, he looks like he takes himself seriously. And he wore that coat you You also took the Eames chair, the fake one. I tried hated so much because God, it is so blue, you said, and to scrub out the mark it left on the floor, but I ended I leaned back into the crook between the car-seat and up just covering it with an IKEA rug when my older glass window. brother Robby and his girlfriend came over for dinner. The plans and night were all very complicated, but Llewellyn, supposedly, was devoid of any mumbly, somehow twenty other people and then you were there, self-conscious practices that hit us mid-twenties. too (Llewellyn was not). I spent the entire evening
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losing my mind over how you were going to get a J.D., and I was still the same, at my apartment, no Llewellyn, etc. I felt nervous looking at you in the eye, like I had some horrible zit on my face. By the time I stepped outside, my ears and ego felt as thin and fragile as salted potato chips in the cold December air. And for a really long time, I haven’t known what to do with my hands. It has been a shaky, tenuous line between discomfort and lethargy. Sometimes, in pictures, I’m thinking of that specific one in the bronze frame on top of my mantelpiece, I would hold my own hand, knotted like a Christmas ribbon. My fingertips red, stray pen marks on my right knuckle. My hands insecure and almost prayer-like. One night, though, I was looking at this photograph, the one where you were in the distance walking through snow, and I was sitting on that park bench, and I saw that my left hand was open. It was still on my left side, lying there, not anticipating anything, but just free. I turned the picture frame over, and this vision of Llewellyn came to my head—it might have been just me, fading in and out of sleep on my creaky sofa, closing my eyes to one quiet song and waking to another—but I swear his hand unfurled in front of me. This image totally conquered my mind, this disembodied, single hand that was so recognizably Llewellyn’s. I looked at the wrinkly dryness of flesh all evening, as if some adored film was being projected onto his palm. And I fell asleep with my hands open that night; I must have looked like I was dreaming about holding very light dumbbells. The next day, I walked to work with my hands free. I didn’t cling on to a canvas tote or secure them in my coat pockets, but I just let them swing by my side. I imagined each palm, flashing and turning back and forth to the rest of the street as I walked down 14th street, to be my and Llewellyn’s own secret code. My palms were dots and my knuckles were dashes, and this secret scrawl swam through the trees. It was in high school, after I split the skin of my knee wide open by falling on a curb, that I sat in the nurse’s office for an hour-and-a-half because they forgot about me. I kept looking into my stretched out, ridiculous reflection in the chrome bars of the nurse’s flimsy cot, and I saw Llewellyn in the corner, glancing back out at me with a hard stare. Was this guy Llewellyn, though? Or was it Willem? Or Forrest? Or was it just me, mixed up with all of them? At the time, I thought he would not have lingered in that office, hoping to skip biology. Looking back, though, I can’t remember the figure. It’s
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blurry and watery, and it is tiring to keep questioning, so I tell myself it was Llewellyn. He even sat right next to me, age six, as I was being filmed for a Skippy peanut butter commercial. By the time the gaffer-taped camera rolled around, hesitating for me to espouse the joys of Skippy peanut butter, I stared into the blue screen and decided memorizing lines was not for me. I didn’t walk out, but I was walked out after looking at the cameraman all wall-eyed. Llewellyn stayed in the recording room, and I crossed my fingers he said my peanut butter lines for me. The point of all of this, all of what I’m divulging to you, is that I was back then, and still am looking for Llewellyn. I guess it drove me kind of crazy, juggling thoughts of Llewellyn and everyone else. I remember switching on the kitchen light after coming home from work and being so struck with how domesticated my life was. I had a pots and pans set, and a family heirloom piano stood demurely in the corner of the living room. I owned a vanity table for the first time in my life. I thought Llewellyn was there, talking, happy, when I looked at you. The whole thing, me being unfamiliarly still, unmoving, and in effect, Llewellyn being harder to reach, was like walking barefoot on hot pavement. I had two feet, each of which were burning, and I frantically looked for shade. I peered up and couldn’t recognize myself. I am now sitting in the driver’s seat of a 2007 Subaru Outback. I’m at the gas station thirty minutes off the 5, the one you threw up at post-tuna sub because you were nervous about the toast you needed to make at that tacky Richard Nixon Library wedding. It’s dry out, it’s earthquake-nosebleed-fire-rattlesnake weather, but as I go back on the barren, lonely part of the freeway, it starts raining real quiet. And I even see that Llewellyn’s over there, right there, past that tree and to the left of that sign. He’s where I pridefully play blind man's bluff, where I can hear the click click click of his boots, where I can shakily draw the cobalt line between awake and asleep. He’s crouching really primitively there, his spine showing through his back, catching the rain on a highway with one of those Georgia O'Keeffe cow skulls. And as my hands clench both sides of the steering wheel, I can feel the top of my spine in the back of my neck, but I think, I can’t understand him the same way I know you, my mother, or even anyone else. He’s rambling in my head, but at the same time, I like to completely and wholly believe that I can see Llewellyn in my rearview mirror, standing very still, completely silent.
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Providence French Film Festival Presents: At War (2018) Granoff Center for the Arts (154 Angell Street) 3/1, 4:30–6:30PM $7 for students / $9 gen admission At War (En Guerre) follows a (not-so) fictional labor conflict between 1,000 laid-off factory workers and the shitty new managers who put them all out of a job. This Cannes and Palme d’Or-nominated film offers a strangely prescient look at inequality in France, precipitating the Yellow Vests, this (^) special tweet by Pamela Anderson, and a Jacobin interview with Pamela Anderson about her radical politics! Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Portsmouth High School (120 Education Lane, Portsmouth) 3/1, 7-10PM Something sinister is brewing over at Portsmouth High School, where a small team of actors and technical crew are working tirelessly to put on a production of Edward Albee’s award-winning play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The play, originally published in 1962, features a middle aged couple who invite guests to their home for one exhilarating night of inebriation, sadistic games, and spilled secrets. Suggested donation of $5. Murder Mystery Dinner - Totally 80's! Totally Murder! Whites of Westport (66 State Road, Westport, MA) 3/2, 6-9PM $45 “Poison Ratenstein is in town for a killer concert, but his fans may be looking for a refund after this twisted tour turns tragic with a murder and a mystery to solve.” Perhaps the most chintzy, offensive-to-my-tastes pastiche of entertainment genres to coalesce as a singular event in New England this weekend. Contestants will enjoy a yummy three-course dinner (caesar salad, chicken marsala w/ seasonal veg. & garlic mashed potatoes, carrot cake) before larping a game of Clue that’s styled after ’80s hair metal kitsch. Malassada Sale St Francis Xavier Catholic Church (81 North Carpenter Street, East Providence) 3/3, 7AM-1PM Malassadas are a Mardi Gras treat native to the Madeira islands. Better stock up on them now because, come Lent, these pastries will no longer occupy the shelves of various Portuguese bakeries all around PVD! Income Inequality & Social Mobility: Data & Policy in Providence Granoff Center for the Arts (154 Angell Street) 3/4. 4-5:30PM In conversation here: professor John Friedman, founder of the cool-seeming data research and policy group Opportunity Insights, and none other than Mayor Jorge Elorza! This should be an interesting look into how policy makers might respond to new models of economic disparity in the city. Tasteberries! Brown Science Center (201 Thayer Street) 3/5, 4-6PM This List Writer (LW) did a quick Google for “tasteberries,” and nothing came up, but what did appear was “miracle berries,” which are native to West Africa and cause anything you eat to taste extremely sweet after consumption. Eating these, apparently, is called “flavor tripping,” but if you call it that I’m going to assume you own a signed copy of Action Bronson’s VICE cookbook. Who Doesn’t Love Friendly’s? Charlton Public Library (40 Main Street, Charlton, MA) 3/5, 6:30-8PM Let us be clear: this is a rhetorical question. This talk is an hour away from Providence, but if you’re willing to take a flavor trip, you can meet what I think is the OFFICIAL FRIENDLY’S HISTORIAN(???) as well as receive “new ice cream products and coupons.” Also up for discussion: Friendly’s “influence on the state”? Decolonizing the Museum: A Teach-In Center for Contemporary South Asia (111 Thayer Street) 3/6, 3-7PM This roundtable is in response to a report (one of the first of its kind!) which advised the French government to permanently repatriate African art, currently in the possession of French cultural institutions, which was looted under French colonial control. The report represented a new push against a far from new problem—public museums around the world are stocked with the legacy of imperial power—and this discussion should be an interesting view into what might come next. South Side: Where Providence Begins Providence City Council (25 Dorrance Street) 3/7, 8:30-4:30PM, through April 12 This ongoing exhibit, featured in City Hall as a part of Black History Month, is a great opportunity to see aspects of the city’s documentation of Black experience and history on the South Side. It’s always a great idea to go take a look at PVD’s archival exhibitions when you can (City Hall always has something up on its walls!), but especially when it’s for a part of the city that is memorialized far less than Federal Hill or the East Side.