The College Hill Independent Vol. 35 Issue 4 by College Hill Independent

THE

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY OCT 06 2017

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THE

COVER

INDY

Woodcut 3 Paridhi Mundra

NEWS

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 35 / ISSUE 04 OCT 06 2017

Week in Review Katrina Korthrop, Sydney Anderson, Julia Petrini

Dispatch from Derveni Tal Frieden

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FROM THE EDITORS c. 20:30 on Wednesday night I had intended to fulfill a longstanding obligation to paint a plaster, fist-sized bust of Wolfgang A. Mozart some shade of green. I’ve been carrying around this bust for about a month now, an inescapable, tawdry specter in my day-to-day life. I purchased the bust with the intent of destroying it that same day on the sidewalk. I suppose this urge stemmed from some mix of the vulnerable material of the bust and animosity towards the art form writ large.

Stay Safe Julia Rock

Cubby Hole Rudy Kai

ARTS 15

...Too Much? Lisa Borst

FEATURES

Unfortunately (and a bit predictably), as a double Pisces, my nonsensical romanticism got the best of me and I kept it. After all, why did this bust deserve such a harsh end just because it is made of a fragile material? I’ve been thinking about sentimental hierarchies in relation to material construction recently, and maybe it’s just time to abandon all ethics and come to the conclusion that it is now time to paint the bust then smash it into sacrilegious, bite-sized pieces. Mozart will not be a martyr, and I still will not listen to classical music.

After María Sebastián Otero, Soraya Ferdman, AnaSofía Velázquez, Ella Scholz Minsk-y Fresh Signe Swanson

OCCULT

— CP

09 MISSION STATEMENT

Have a Good Cry Neidin Hernandez

METABOLICS

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. 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.

Lars and the Fake Girl Maya Brauer

LITERARY 12

EPHEMERA

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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.

Definitionz Jokichi Matsubara Middle Skool Medina Adrian Medina Morphologies Liby Hays

Fall 2017

MANAGING EDITORS

Jane Argodale Will Weatherly Robin Manley

ARTS

Maya Brauer Ruby Gerber FEATURES

Isabel DeBre Chris Packs

Zack Kligler Gabriela Naigeborin Julia Tompkins

WEEK IN REVIEW

METABOLICS

NEWS

Eve Zelickson METRO

Jack Brook Saanya Jain Katrina Northrop

Dominique Pariso Erin West SCIENCE

Liz Cory Paige Parsons

The Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

TECH

Jonah Max OCCULT

Sheena Raza Faisal Signe Swanson LITERARY

Fadwa Ahmed Isabelle Doyle EPHEMERA

Maya Bjornson X

Liby Hays

LIST

Sophie Kasakove Fadwa Ahmed STAFF WRITERS

Mara Dolan Soraya Ferdman Nora Gosselin Neidin Hernandez Anna Hundert Mariela Pichardo Paula Pacheco Soto Marly Toledano Kion You ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

Gabriel Matesanz

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS

Anzia Anderson Julie Benbassat Alexandra Hanesworth Frans van Hoek Kela Johnson Teri Minogue Pia Mileaf-Patel Isabelle Rea Ivan Ríos-Fetchko Claire Schlaikjer Kelly Wang Dorothy Windham Sophia Meng

DESIGN EDITOR

Eliza Chen

DESIGNERS

Amos Jackson Ashley Min Theia Flynn Grace Attanasio WEB MANAGER

Alyssa McGillvery BUSINESS MANAGER

Maria Gonzalez

SENIOR EDITORS

Lisa Borst Kelton Ellis Sophie Kasakove Will Tavlin MVP

Lisa Borst THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

SOCIAL MEDIA COPY EDITOR

Miles Taylor

Fadwa Ahmed

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN SAD DEVELOPMENTS BY Katrina Northrop, Sydney Anderson, and Julia Petrini ILLUSTRATION BY Isabelle Rea DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

LOCK THEM UP!

DIY Helicopters

Remember last year when the words ‘email’ and ‘scandal’ were inseparable? When your friend mentioned emails over lunch, she most likely wasn’t referring to her overflowing Gmail inbox, and instead to the ever unfolding drama over Hillary Clinton’s private server. This week, ‘email’ and ‘scandal’ are due for a reunion. At least five Trump aides, including Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn, have used private email accounts to conduct government business in the past few months. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? In the last iteration of the email scandal, Trump responded by yelling “Lock her up!” But this time Trump (or rather, one of his cronies), is at risk of being locked up. Over the summer, former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus called a meeting encouraging administration members to limit their use of personal cellular devices in the West Wing. Aware that he was dealing with middle schoolers, Priebus installed lockers throughout the West Wing to make the storage of personal devices more convenient and the use of personal accounts less widespread. The locker strategy proved ineffective, perhaps because the lockers filled up with other personal items. Former Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price likely used his locker to store receipts from his private plane rides, while Jared Kushner hid illegal communications with the Russian government. In the end, no one heeded the ex-Chief of Staff’s advice, not even Priebus himself. Maybe Ivanka didn’t like the appearance of a .gov email address, preferring instead to use her private domain, IJKFamily.com, which has an undeniable ring to it. But after going through an election that seemed to hinge on Hillary’s decision to use a private server, and Comey’s subsequent judgement about that decision, it is equally audacious and hypocritical to repeat the same mistake. White House lawyers, Breitbart news, and a few other news commentators who don’t seem to understand the concept of hypocrisy have rushed to Trump’s defence in the past few days, asserting that the conflation of the current controversy with the investigation into Hillary’s emails is misleading. Those defending Trump claim that Trump’s advisors did not exclusively use private email accounts, as Hillary did when she worked at the State Department. They also claim it is not yet clear if Trump advisors were using private emails to discuss classified information. Nevertheless, the use of private email accounts fits into a broader trend of the Trump administration criticizing others for breaking laws that they break themselves. Upon first hearing about this controversy, it is hard to know how to react. Should we laugh? Should we cry? Should we finally get around to fulfilling our 2005 New Year’s resolution and start meditating? Perhaps the most reasonable reaction is to acknowledge that American politics is like watching the YouTube video of a cat falling off a treadmill on repeat— it’s funny the first time, and it’s completely sickening every time after that.

This week, a small Floridian dog cowered in fear when a loud crash resounded off the roof. The Tampa pup was the only witness to 51-year-old Bradley Bates’ crash in his homemade helicopter. Bates built the small aircraft from a make-your-own-helicopter-kit. He crashed not long after taking off into the roof of a home about two miles from the takeoff site. Tim Peterson, a next-door neighbor, recalls hearing the crash, “I heard a spluttering noise and a loud slam.” Peterson told the press it “didn’t sound right,” but taking a cursory glance out the window he didn’t see anything. Luckily, Peterson went to investigate and saw “a tail rotor hanging out of the house.” Bates was brought to the hospital shortly after the crash and is in stable condition. According to his friends, Bates loves to fly and has flown the chopper several times. The National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the crash, and the helicopter will remain on the roof as a crucial piece of evidence until the investigation has concluded. But now you’re thinking, where does a one buy a helicopter kit? Target? Toys“R”Us? Ace Hardware? Amazon Prime? Are we missing out? Could all of us be flying these helicopters to the nearest coffee shop? Has the future the Jetsons envisioned been right under our noses this whole time? The answer is yes, if you have 700 hours to spare and can “shim a rotor assembly within 0.001 of an inch,” according to Air and Space Magazine. For a wee hundred grand, you too can build your own copter. The Indy predicts the DIY helicopter will soon debut on Pinterest alongside Mason jar flower vases and articles titled “14 Things You Can Do With Those Leftover Plastic Cups.” Instructional books and DVDs will guide you through your months of building. As the product’s advertisement so poorly put it, “if you can ride a bike, you can build a helicopter.” It may not be that simple, but luckily there is a large community of helicopter-hobbyists, and consultants you can hire to help complete your project. Helicopter enthusiast Homer Bell has made a career out of helicopter kit consulting after teaching himself to fly in his own homemade aircraft. The Indy feels soaring through the air in a handcrafted machine is both terrifying and empowering. However, we are pleased it is now easy to do with four months to spare and a hundred thousand dollars!

— KN

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

— SA NO SIGHT AND SORE EYES If white eyeballs just aren’t edgy enough for you, there is a dramatic, albeit dangerous, body modification for you. Scleral tattooing or staining is a procedure that involves injecting ink between two layers of the eye, covering the scleras’ white hue with an unconventional color. This week, Canadian model Catt Gallinger lost sight in her right eye after a botched sclera stain. In addition to partial blindness, Gallinger is experiencing pain, purple discharge, and internal and external swelling. According to Gallinger, this was caused by undiluted ink, over-injection, and injection sites that were both too few and too large. The first documented scleral tattoos on sighted

human eyes were performed on three volunteers by artist Luna Cobra in 2007. The idea originated from one of the volunteers, Shannon Larratt, who was fascinated with the characters in the science-fiction novel Dune. Larratt photoshopped the whites of his eyes blue to look like the characters in the novel; he wanted to see if it was possible to bring his vision to life without obstructing his vision. Larratt worked with Cobra to develop procedures to permanently color his eyes blue. After a failed attempt of coating a needle with ink and puncturing the eye, they tried injecting the ink. The injections worked; Larratt and the other volunteers reported only minor side effects of pain, bruising, and discomfort. On his website, Cobra says he has refined the technique over the years and his clients “are all still okay,” but he warns against uneducated copycat practitioners. Cobra travels the world to perform scleral tattooing, “nullo,” or removal of tissues such as belly buttons or nipples, scarification, ear pointing, cartilage removal and other mods. Despite Cobra’s worldwide availability, some budget-body modders have turned to artists who lack the expertise necessary to not blind their clients. Gallinger has described her experience and current medical treatment in updates on Facebook. She has been placed on several medications and is scheduled for surgery to remove the ink. A study in the American Journal of Ophthalmology Case Reports found that the procedure can cause untreatable eye infections, loss of vision, and loss of the eye. The pigment must be injected precisely under the bulbar conjunctiva. The Indy doesn’t know much about ophthalmology, but “bulbar conjunctiva” sounds like something you should refrain from piercing multiple times under non-surgical conditions. There is no standardized certification program for the procedure and the eye is a delicate organ whose intricacies are not studied by tattoo artists. Philip Rizzuto, MD, a professor of Ophthalmology at the Alpert Medical School, warned, “Putting any kind of needle on the eye is very dangerous. We do that all the time, but we’re trained for 12 to 18 years how to go about treating the eye.” There are a few things the Indy advises you spend the extra buck on: a mattress, a good pair of boots, a cast-iron pan, and sclera tattoos.

— JP

WEEK IN REVIEW

GUARDING SAFETY The contentious implementation of the Providence Community Safety Act

BY Julia Rock DESIGN & ILLUSTRATION BY Eliza Chen

“The community of Providence won this campaign, not the politicians and not the police, but us. We worked on this ordinance for more than four years and now we have a lot of work to do in terms of implementation,” said Linda Heng, the Youth Coordinator for the Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM). She has been a student activist at PrYSM ever since her freshman year of high school. After spending the past four years advocating for the Community Safety Act (CSA), Heng knows that the act’s passage in June doesn’t mean the fight is over. The CSA was initially introduced in the Providence City Council in June 2014 by the Step-Up Network, a coalition of local organizations who joined forces to address concerns that minorities, immigrants, and youth in Providence were being racially profiled and harassed by police officers. Last April, in the first of two votes that the CSA needed to be enacted, the City Council voted 12-0 in favor of the legislation. The legislation was expected to pass the second vote and Mayor Jorge Elorza publicly stated that he planned to sign the bill after it passed. However, days before the second vote, the Providence Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), Lodge #3, released a statement voicing its opposition to the act: “The title of the ordinance itself, the ‘Community Safety Act,’ is offensive. Its content implies that the community needs to protect itself from the police. Imagine that for a minute. The citizens of Providence having to protect themselves from a nationally recognized, nationally accredited, 21st century community policing agency. The city council should know better.” The letter pointed to a few components of the CSA which concerned the FOP. Most of the concerns revolved around the premise of the CSA was to protect the community from police officers, and that the CSA misunderstood the need for police officers to exercise discretion. Moreover, the FOP letter defended the police as having a better understanding of what was required to ensure safety than the architects of the CSA. For example, the FOP was concerned that the CSA would give the Providence External Review Authority (PERA), a citizen’s council that oversees the police department, the authority to review labor agreements between the FOP and the police department. Additionally, the FOP opposed the measure in the CSA which required individuals to be removed from the city’s gang database if

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they have no convictions in a two-year period. The FOP and Chief of Police Clements also pushed back against the amount of paperwork that police officers would be required to file after pedestrian and traffic stops. On the day of the second vote, city councillors met with members of the Providence Police Department behind closed doors. When the councillors emerged to commence the meeting, the council voted 9-5 to delay a vote on the CSA. City Council members who had stated they would vote in favor of the CSA for its second vote instead recommended that the legislation be sent to a working group to gain the support of the Providence Police. The four councillors who voted against the delay told the audience at the meeting that the delay was a result of pressure from the Providence FOP to revise the legislation. The City Council established the CSA Working Group and appointed 12 individuals, including advocates, police officers, city councillors, and city staffers to amend the legislation in order to gain the support of the Providence Police. The CSA Working Group made minor technical changes to the ordinance in order to gain the unanimous support of the group for passage of the new act. Revisions included a change to the language of the bill so that individual officers sued for violating the act could only be held liable if they “knowingly and willfully” acted against the ordinance. This was a change advocated by police officers who were concerned about the new liabilities officers would face under the ordinance. The most significant change to the legislation produced by the working group was a new name for the act: the Providence Community-Police Relations Act (PCPRA). President of the FOP Robert Boehm told the CSA Working Group, in regards to the name Community Safety Act, “It makes it sound, in our eyes, that the community needs this to be safe from the police, which I find insulting.” The name change reflected police officers’ concerns about the implied antagonism between the police and the community in the original name. However, advocates still refer to the act by its original name, the CSA, which illustrates the continued intent of the act: to protect marginalized communities in Providence from police harassment and brutality. The revised ordinance passed the City Council on June 1 with only one dissenting vote, and was signed by

Mayor Jorge Elorza one week later. Victor Morente, a spokesman from the Mayor’s office, told the Independent in an email: “It was a collaborative process that took diligent and thoughtful compromise by participating parties.” Advocates of the legislation celebrated its passage, but were ultimately left frustrated over the terms under which it was revised in April and May, and the lack of support from City Council and Mayor Elorza throughout the process. Vanessa Flores-Maldonado, the campaign coordinator for the CSA coalition, described the second April vote to the Independent: “The way that the act passed was not great for us... the fact that it took so long to get there is really upsetting and heartbreaking because we thought we had city councillors who were here supporting the community.” The PCPRA prohibits racial profiling by police officers, allows individuals to request and receive a report on their traffic or pedestrian stops by police officers, and prohibits certain factors, such as race, from being used as criteria for adding individuals to the city’s gang database. The PCPRA also vests additional power in the Providence External Review Authority (PERA), a council which was established by ordinance in 2002 to provide citizen oversight over the police department, but is currently inactive. In order to prepare for the act to go into effect on January 1, 2018, the City Council needs to re-establish PERA, and the police department must rewrite its policies and train its officers on their new responsibilities under the act. Members of the Providence community who spent the last four years passing the legislation intend to work with the city on the implementation process in order to ensure that the ordinance accomplishes its intended goals. The impact of the PCPRA will be largely dependent on who decides the terms of its execution, and which voices are invited to engage in conversations about PERA’s membership and powers, as well as the new policies of the police departments. Advocates such as Heng, who have dedicated a significant portion of their lives for the past few years to the legislation, do not plan to back off until the PCPRA is in action. The community members and advocates who fought for the act’s passage are prepared to work with the city and the police department to engage in the process of implementation. As Heng told the Independent: “The

OCTOBER 06, 2017

community of Providence won this campaign, not the politicians and not the police but us. We worked on this ordinance for more than four years and now we have a lot of work to do in terms of implementation.” Heng explains that the advocates from PrYSM and other organizations currently have three working groups directed towards the CSA: one is working on implementing the law and reviving PERA, one is focused on educating the community about the way the PCPRA will affect policing, and one is focused on the coalition’s relationship with the media. Last week, Heng and other advocates from the coalition met with Councilwoman Harris and Councilman Aponte to express the community’s desire to provide a list of names to the City Council from which the City Council will appoint five members of PERA, thus enabling community members to hold a simple majority on the nine-member board. However, Heng acknowledges that it will ultimately be left to the City Council to decide who it nominates. Flores-Maldonado expressed the importance of appointments to PERA: “We want people who come from the community—who are from Providence—who are not just a bunch of suits and bureaucrats but people who are actually community members, who will feel the impact of the CSA because they are harassed by cops every day.” Another crucial component of the implementation process involves rewriting policies and retraining police

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

officers in order to ensure that the Providence Police Department is compliant with the PCPRA by January 1, 2018. Right now, this process is being conducted internally by the Department of Public Safety. Fred Ordoñez, Executive Director of Direction Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), and a member of the Step-Up Network, told the Independent, “There’s a group that is now meeting internally, but members of the CSA Coalition want to be part of that program.” Ordoñez was one of the individuals who worked to pass the original PERA ordinance, and knows firsthand the importance of staying involved in the process of implementing legislation. “We have to continue to campaign at the same pace, with the same amount of pressure... whenever we pass anything... it’s just a piece of paper that gets signed….” However, city officials are currently unwilling to involve community members in the policy-writing process. Cyd McKenna, Chief of Staff of the City Council, explained that the policy-writing process in the police department “is an administrative function undertaken by the directors of that department.” According to McKenna, it is the responsibility of the department to ensure their compliance with the PCPRA, and the policy-writing process is not a public process. Flores-Maldonado said that CSA advocates were surprised to learn that the police department had started rewriting policies before PERA had been set up. She is concerned that this process is happening without public

input, and is fighting for community members to keep their seat at the table throughout the implementation process. “They’re taking advantage of the fact that we are working on establishing PERA so they can write the policies so they can have policies that are more convenient to them.” Ultimately, members of the CSA coalition want to finish what they started four years ago. They aren’t willing to leave it up to the City Council, the Mayor’s office, and the Department of Public Safety to implement the legislation, which they only passed under significant public pressure. As Flores-Maldonado told the Independent: “...we are trying to make sure that we are a part of every single conversation because to have a conversation without us there is to not be listening to the community, it’s to be shutting us out again and stabbing us in the back again.”

JULIA ROCK B’19 wishes that bills to prevent police violence were considered necessary, not progressive.

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MI PUERTO RICO Reflections in María’s wake BY Sebastián Otero, Soraya Ferdman, AnaSofía Velázquez,

& Ella Scholz ILLUSTRATION BY Alex Hanesworth DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

The Cuban writer and revolutionary José Martí coined the term “patria es humanidad”––homeland is humanity. After Hurricane María hit my island, I kept coming back to this definition. More than symbols, anthems, political parties, and geography... faces and community are undoubtedly the firmest ground we have on which to build a new nation, to give birth to a better Puerto Rico. A Puerto Rico that will no longer be a colony of the USA; a Puerto Rico where we will be better at listening to one another; a Puerto Rico that will value the power of love and solidarity; a Puerto Rico that will have full sovereignty over its new, unforeseeable future. We Puerto Ricans have not received proper aid from the US government, in spite of our official citizenship status. We know that our American citizenship will never guarantee us the ‘same’ help, resources, or boots on the ground. The USA has always occupied the dominant position in this far-too-long relationship of economic and political subordination, and must be held accountable for reconstruction and disaster relief efforts in the wake of this disaster. The passing of Hurricane María has rendered the unjust and precarious economic situation of Puerto Rico as evident as the fury of its winds. Last week I went to a packing and collecting drive for hurricane relief organized by the Puerto Rican Professional Group of Rhode Island. I found myself thinking that I had never seen so many Puerto Ricans in one place in Providence before, and I was reminded: we are everywhere, and we are hurt, and we are strong, and we will overcome this. –SEBASTIÁN OTERO B’18 Growing up, I was always witnessing destruction: destruction of memories, of time, of past. In this way, life is painful, because every day you’re given is a day you lose. With María, it was so sudden. I tried jotting down my emotions after it happened, but what came instead were scattered memories. When I walk out of the airport, the humidity gripped me desperately. My skin, hair, hands, armpits, stomach, and feet breathe differently because of it. I suppose I’ve grown gills because I breathe easiest in watery air. Some mornings I’d wake up to the freshest breeze I ever breathed or would breathe. I’d sit in my human silence and listen to nature rise. Shadows rise up the palm trees and tickle their leaves, still until a red-legged thrush pops upward to sing, to squeak. Blue sky escaping pink sky escaping orange bed. And then all gray. Everything howling. The hurricane swallowed my home and spit out something else. A friend I talked to afterwards said it looked like winter because all the trees were bare. Imagine that: a rainforest without green. The winds blew off my grandmother’s windows, her bedroom open to the elements. My dad was able to get inside after the sand was cleared away and took pictures. Seeing them was painful. You can smell the mold. There’s a saying in Puerto Rico, “pa’lante.” It means to move forward or to continue. After a period of grief, which I go back to when needed, I started thinking more deeply about that idea of forwardness. The term is useful but also numbing. It requires a certain blindness to the past and even to the present. My feelings after María have been in continual oscillation between this numbness and an overwhelming sadness.

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What’s interesting is that moment of transition from grief to pa’lante. Sometimes it starts with a laugh, an odd memory. Like getting home after a long flight and my mom not wanting to hug me because I smell. Leather seat and air-conditioner, car door closes. Sweat dripping down my long-sleeved shirt—my mom told me I smelled like a truck driver—but who cares, I was home. Or how lucky I am that my family is safe. I don’t know if I’m still supposed to call this home. I’m undecided. I stare outside the window at the familiar route: Carolina, San Juan, Guaynabo. Drive home, home to dogs, home to breeze, home to bed. My home is still there, I know that. I’m trying really hard to remember that. And slowly, so incredibly slowly, I’ve accepted that the pictures are real. –SORAYA FERDMAN B’18 Aún Así Cuando una madre Con la voz entrecortada Tragando lagrimas Ocultando la desesperación Cuando un padre Con la voz firme de esperanza Protegiendo la familia Ocultando el miedo Cuando una abuela Con la voz positiva Esperando Milagros Ocultando la realidad Cuando tu isla Con la voz a gritos Matando, robando, muriendo Sobreviviendo la destrucción Cuando yo Sin voz Aguantando frustración Viendo desde afuera Sintiendo el dolor de la madre, el padre, la abuela, la isla sin poder Cuando un pueblo con la voz alegre pensando en el futuro amando, ayudando, cooperando mi madre triste mi padre nervioso mi abuela ansiosa mi isla en ruinas y yo enojada. Aun así, Mi pueblo feliz, Mi pueblo orgulloso, Mi pueblo, mi Puerto rico, me dueles, le dueles, te dueles. Aun así, me amas, los amas, te amas. –ANASOFÍA VELÁZQUEZ B’20

Discrepancias Despierto a las nueve y me hago un té chai, en específico mi roommate sigue dormida el día está soleado el verde brilla en los árboles de afuera me visto con traje de azul cielo con florecitas que fluyen mi roommate se despierta le doy una bienvenida al día las dos estamos de buen humor ella prende las bocinas escuchamos canciones de los Beatles me llega un texto recordándome: tengo planes de almuerzo son con amigas salgo al día el sol me abraza camino a mi clase, sonriente me llega una llamada es mi mamá conversamos la llamada me recuerda de las imágenes devastadoras de mi abuela sin insulina de mi hermana sin escuela del dolor, la tristeza los cuales duelen más porque no se dirigen a nadie huracanes no son falla del sistema son parte del ecosistema la tragedia lo parece ser también me siento lloro en San Juan la música sigue tocando y sé que su futuro brilla pero lloro por mi olvido por el de todos, siempre lloro por los números de muertos en la tele que siempre uno los ve e ignora por lo fácil que es ser feliz cuando el sol brilla y cuando me pongo trajes que fluyen y cuando amigas me invitan al almuerzo lloro por todos los días como hoy todas las personas como yo las que pueden olvidar a las circunstancias del otro lloro por la discrepancia que siempre estuvo y temo que –ELLA SCHOLZ B’20 The Indy urges those who are able to donate to relief efforts for Hurricane María at unidosporpuertorico.com, dominicarelief.org, and cfvi.net/donate/hurricanerelief.

OCTOBER 06, 2017

HIDING PLACES WRITING & PHOTOGRAPHS BY Rudy Kai

DESIGN BY Robin Manley

In Providence, since it’s such a small city, there are places, pockets in the city where you can be alone despite being in public. My first memory of such a place was when I was six and my father took my sister and I to explore the train bridge (I assume as some sort of rite of passage), when my sister and I refused to walk out over the water (like sensible 4 and 6 year olds) we began to explore the nearby woods. Next to a stream we found a camp that someone had set up. A sleeping bag was lain out across from a painting. I found this public yet private space tranquil and mesmerizing. Over time I’ve found similar places in the city. As a kid my mom would take me to the park on Blackstone Boulevard. I would hide in the evergreen bushes so I wouldn’t have to go home. I was 8 and my friend Sarah and I would make fairy houses, iguring that they would be safer with so much cover. (Fairy houses are small shelters made of rocks, sticks, and moss). We would pretend the bush was our house too.

Under a bush on Blackstone Boulevard.

+++ Every fall Providence holds Pronk, a festival and parade with our city’s best marching bands. One year the parade ended underneath I-95 right next to the hurricane barrier on South Water Street (now Bridge Street). People began climbing up along the barrier, trying to find more space for drinking and dancing. On a different day I saw out onto the water, I got a weird sense of protection; I was surrounded by cement on all sides yet I was still able to see the expansive water and sky. I went through a Gothic Lolita phase as a teenager and I would walk through Waterplace Park on my way to the Providence Place Hot Topic, and angst-out on the Cianci-era cobblestone. There’s a space between the staircase up to Francis Street and the street itself. A maybe 15 by 15 foot space with gum crusted cement and a fluctuating level of pee smell.

The harbor from up on the barrier.

+++ In memoriam. Many of these places are still there, though probably different from my memories. There is one place that no longer exists. In the Providence Place mall, where the Zara is, a Restoration Hardware once was. Our mall’s particular restoration hardware had a mostly open layout with different displays of mock rooms, similar to Ikea. Aside from the open layout, there was back room set up like a living room with a couch facing a window looking down on the city. I liked to think of it as my living room away from my living room. Last year on a field trip I was sad to discover that it’s now the baby clothes section of Zara.

The power plant from across the river.

Rudy Kai RISD’18 is hiding in plain sight.

Waterplace Park.

Under the bridge on Francis Street.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

METRO

THE BORDERS IN THE CAMP How the UN and NGOs are neglecting African refugees BY Tal Frieden IMAGES ADAPTED FROM PHOTOGRAPHY BY Tal Frieden DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

I stepped into the Mediterranean sun outside Thessaloniki’s international airport to meet Maurizio, a curt Italian man. He leads the Firdaus Quick Response Team, which is responsible for improving the quality of life in Greece’s overcrowded, underfunded, and monotonous refugee camps. During our drive, Maurizio outlined the way things work in Derveni, our destination. “You must act like a doctor,” he said. Volunteers in the camp are forbidden from bonding with residents: “If you’re their friend, that’s a type of favoritism.” I was helping with photography and videography, teaching English, and serving as an extra set of hands. In my time with Firdaus, which means ‘paradise’ in Arabic, I observed a reality in which volunteers perform nearly all functions of the camp beyond the bare necessities of sustenance and shelter. Other than food, water, and shelter, Firdaus manages everything in Derveni. The organization is one of the few allowed to work inside camps by the Greek government, due to its history of effective management, camp beautification, and social planning. Looking around Derveni, it’s easy to see Firdaus’ influence—colorful paint covers the cement, potted flowers dot the perimeter of the camp, and the metal hangar home to the camp’s families contains a trampoline and small playground. Derveni’s six metal hangars are home to about 220 asylum seekers (people requesting refugee status in Greece) and official refugees (who have UN-issued ID cards and work permits). The residents of this camp are predominantly young, single, cisgender men. The population is around one third Arab (from Syria and Iraq mainly); one third sub-Saharan African (mainly Eritrea and some from the Democratic Republic of Congo); and the rest from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and other regions. While EU member nations process their applications, Derveni residents face inhumane conditions and discrimination. NGOs, flocking to the camps, are often unable to coordinate and fulfill service commitments. Certain populations, namely sub-Saharan Africans, are often structurally excluded. Amplified by a lack of

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resources, the social and institutional dynamics of the camp produce a microcosm of the racial inequalities that exist outside the camp’s borders. +++ At Derveni, the center of Firdaus’ activity, the residents were preparing water bottles, snacks, and signs for a protest against conditions in the camp. Multicolored banners made out of bedsheets declare “The camp not good for human life,” “Water is unclean and smelly,” “Food is not decent.” The residents leading the protest started by walking through the camp, rallying around the chant “Close Derveni, Close Derveni.” Protests are not uncommon in these camps. The week prior, Diavata’s residents rallied around similar issues, as have asylum seekers across Greece, France, Bulgaria, and other European countries. In general, protests focus on living conditions and lack of opportunities for gainful employment. The EU has funnelled over $803 million to the Greek government for refugee resettlement, according to the Guardian. The same report notes that due to a lack of “extensive strategic planning,” Greece has not been able to make good use of the money, noting, “One senior aid official estimated that as much as $70 out of every $100 spent had been wasted.” Fourteen different organizations are tasked with providing all of the needs of the residents, from security, enforced by Greek police, to shelter maintenance and improvement provided by institutions like Firdaus; to psychosocial support administered by organizations like Terre des Hommes, Caritas Ellas, and Doctors without Borders. The IOM is responsible for accommodations (tents, beds, linen kits), and the Red Cross provides a 90 Euro monthly stipend, while the Greek army provides two meals per day. Each of these tasks are broken down into hours within the week for which each group is responsible. While NGOs jostle for the ability to claim services, few follow through with their full commitments. In my time at Derveni, Doctors Without Borders never set foot

in the camp, Caritas came to celebrate a birthday on only one day, and Terre des Hommes provided mostly translation services. Of a similar chart in Diavata, Maurizio said, “It’s just for show... just so other NGOs will see it.” Under a canopy of multicolored sheets made by former volunteers, Firdaus volunteers set up a café each morning and afternoon. The shaded area, enclosed by a fence painted all colors of the rainbow, includes benches and tables built by residents of the camp from repurposed wooden pallets used for food and water deliveries. While the café is in session, at least a quarter of the residents stream by to fill their plastic mugs with sugar, milk, and instant coffee. This small oasis of color fills with the sound of residents speaking Arabic, laughter, and a lot of energy as the unemployed twenty-somethings who fled violence and poverty to reach Europe sip the coffee-flavored sugarwater. There’s a consistent group of about 10 Syrian and Iraqi residents who spend most of their mornings and afternoons in this makeshift veranda, listening to Umm Kulthum and Fairouz with their morning coffee and cigarettes. A handful of Africans alongside a few Afghanis and Pakistanis join the mostly Arab crowd, filling their cups halfway with sugar and sharing a few English words with the volunteers rationing instant coffee and milk. One day, Jojo, a 28-year-old political refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, was set to meet with the UNHCR about leaving the camp due to a medical condition after three months there. He pulled me aside and asked me to translate his French. UNHCR caseworkers spoke English and had Arabic translators, and were sometimes able to bring in Farsi translators. For camp residents from sub-Saharan and West Africa, who speak mostly French and a multitude of African languages, no formal translation services exist in the camps. We walked to the line outside the trailer office, waiting for about half an hour. Leaving the meeting after his appeal was deferred, Jojo looked dejected: “Every time I go to them, they say that this week I will hear back, this week I will leave.”

OCTOBER 06, 2017

+++ Alongside this stark lack of suitable translators, African residents of the camp generally receive fewer goods and services than Arab residents. The café, for example, caters primarily to Arab residents: Arabic music plays on portable speakers and Arabic is spoken across the chess boards and benches. When nurses from Firdaus set up medical examinations, only one sub-Saharan African resident, out of hundreds, arrived. In a staff briefing a nurse from Switzerland broached the issue of unequal distribution of resources. Maurizio responded, “We cannot force the Eritreans to show up—if they decide not to come to the cafe, that is their choice.” While Arab residents relaxed and chatted under the colorful canopy, Africans remained in the cramped metal hangars, exposed to the extreme heat and cold of the days. While basic goods are distributed so that almost everyone receives them, interpersonal services are only available to those within the ethnic groups which are socially dominant in the camp. People from Arab countries hold a near monopoly on the leisure spaces of the camp, and maintain strong relationships with leaders of NGOs, while those from Sub-Saharan African countries (among others) are left behind. Of course resource shortages mean that no camp residents enjoy a high standard of living, but within the current system Arab refugees nonetheless possess a number of privileges denied to their African counterparts. This was made evident on Eid al-Adha, when Firdaus and a British organization called ‘The Get Shit Done Team’ distributed meat and vegetables for a celebration feast. While Arabs cooked outside and played music from a loudspeaker, the roughly 10 percent Afghani minority remained in their hangar. Another volunteer and I asked why they were not celebrating with the others. “We were not invited—Maurizio never told us this event was happening. In our culture, we cannot go unless we have

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

been invited,” explained a 26-year-old from Afghanistan. “This is not the first time we have had this problem. The Pakistanis also have this problem, and they complain, but nothing happens.” Later, we saw Pakistani residents cooking food on a stove made of recycled hubcaps, around the corner from where the main festivities took place. Two Congolese residents took food from the barbeque the Arab residents had prepared and ate off to the side. With this in mind, while recruiting for our English lessons, a fellow volunteer and I attempted to reach out to all of the residents. We were able to attract a classroom population nearly representative of the camp demographics. When we asked the residents to download the language learning app Duolingo, however, we realized that courses were available in French and Arabic, but not in the many African languages spoken in the camp. We were reminded that these ethnic exclusions do not start or end with Derveni, but are symptomatic of more widespread inequalities that no group of volunteers can rectify. +++ Non-Arab residents of Derveni perceive unequal access to services as endemic to the ecosystem of refugee-oriented NGOs. “There is a lot of bias [against Africans],” explained Majesty, a 29-year-old refugee from Eritrea. Majesty’s perceptions of bias in favor of Arab refugees are not unfounded. In June, the EU Trust Fund allocated 275 million Euros specifically for aid to Syrian refugees in Europe. A similar monetary package for refugees fleeing forced labor and political persecution in sub-Saharan Africa has not been discussed. Instead, the EU Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development has delivered over $200 million of development aid to the Eritrean dictatorship—which uses compulsory military conscription to produce an unpaid labor force—in hopes of stemming the flow of refugees. Instead of supporting refugees, the EU subsidizes the violent dictatorship displacing people to begin with. Journalist Roshini Nair argues that accepting refugees is a “process of nation-building…immigration is always about us,” a way for Western countries to construct their own national identities. Nair argues that the types and numbers of refugees accepted by the Canadian government form a pathway by which Canada to enact its own self-conception as (selectively) liberal and inviting. While Syrian refugees have access to a fast-tracked application

in Canada, a coalition of Canadian NGOs recently called for speeding up the excessively slow application process for African refugees. The global inequalities that produce ethnic hierarchies among refugee populations are not random, but symptomatic of antiblackness. Daniel Tsegay, an Eritrean refugee quoted in Nair’s article, writes that endemic in the contemporary refugee crisis is "a focus on some groups of people at the expense of others." Those ‘others’ are Black people from Eritrea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and elsewhere, fleeing violence and political persecution. In 2015, Eritreans fled the country at a rate of about 5,000 people per month—over five percent of the country had fled as of 2015. While the number of refugees from Syria accepted to the EU rose over the past few years, other African countries in intense protracted crises did not benefit from this uptick in global asylum acceptance, according to the European Stability Initiative. Organizations that provide direct relief to refugees are part of the mechanism that create, censor, and control the process of refugee integration in Western societies. When NGOs, the EU, and media exclude Black refugees, they are complicit in a history of global antiblackness rooted in colonial hierarchies.

TAL FRIEDEN B’19 is still at Derveni.

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LA LEYENDA DE Folkloric tales of the weeping woman and her wails

content warning: racial violence In the beginning, we sleep on the hot tongue inside some tropical animal. The sky blooms open like a giant cactus flower, pink and shameless. We live tucked inside a drum note, bare feet on black asphalt and the weatherman says the heatwave will last until Thursday. Fallen fruit pulses open on the sidewalk, tender flesh beating still. The days are metal screen doors, roots from the guava trees pushing up through red stone tiles, a wooden bus stop beyond the chain link fence that form the perimeters of our world. We pluck tiny peppers growing from the vines near the alleyway and pop them in our mouths like pomegranate seeds. At night, we sit with our faces awash in the blue light of the television screen, closing our teeth around the red of mango skin and microwaved hot dog wieners. We share a bed like our mothers had, spend the twilight hours growing drunk on the small heat of each other’s breath exchanged through a series of stories about the things that scared us most. We talk about our parents having sex, our cats getting cancer, but mostly we talk about her, la llorona, wandering through the streets of the city, her white dress illuminated by headlights and brake lights, wailing with the sirens walking past. We fear she that she will come looking for us, a trail of lost children in tow. We fear that she will call us by name, ready to lead us into another time. But most of all, we fear that we would follow. What she would like to say is that she is sorry. What she would like to say is that she made a mistake, that she would do it over again if she could. Oh, won’t we let her do it over? What she would like to say is that she has thought of us every day since her city fell and hasn’t she paid the penance for what she has done? Before she was a mother, she was a girl in love with a man to whom land and flesh were one and his. She knelt by his side with her hair across his feet, singing him sacred songs about hummingbird hearts and floodwaters that turned the world into silver. She cleaned the white of his teeth with her heavy tongue and hid the cosmic origins of his breath beneath her ribs. She disentangled her limbs from her body and offered them up to him as sacrament, offered the whole broad of her back and wide expanse of her stomach, a rolling landscape of olive brown. He pressed a hand between her breasts and felt the space between her hips swell like the lungs of a bird preparing for flight. My mother has four siblings and of those four she is the only one who marries someone darker than she is: trigueno, moreno, prieto. My mother sighs, unaware at

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the time that he would one day make lloronas out of all of us. No sabes que hay que mejorar la raza, her father tells her. Marry light, better the race, breed el indio out of the bloodline, but I was born light and he did not hesitate to recognize me as one of his own. La llorona wasn’t ashamed of her children until she looked up at him and saw that he was. “When the child was born,” writes the poet Alicia Gaspar de Alba, “he opened his eyes Aztec black/his skin shone café-conleche…His father cursed the native seed in that/first mixed son.” What she saw was that she loved him and he hated her, hated what they had made together, a bastard son, a new race he could not claim for the shame of it. He turned away from her and it was like losing the sun. She ran cold with fear, fear that he would leave, fear that her children would grow up, fatherless and despised. She took them to the river by the quiet of moonlight and dipped their black heads beneath the surface of the pleading waters, the whole world a crown. Their bodies went limp beneath her hands. She fell to her knees and cried until she couldn’t tell water from oxygen. I want to tell her that I too know what it’s like to keep loving someone through the violence, to have a heartheld thing ripped away and still want to give with both palms open and full of everything good inside you and the wailing can’t be heard for the wind in your mouth. I felt the shame turn to love and the love into shame and then abstract into something else altogether. La llorona, mother of los mestizos, was the first one to love us, the first one also to teach us hate for our brown skin, our round noses, our coarse black hair. She was the first one who taught us to want to kill that part in us, trigueno, moreno, prieto, our own mother and who were we to doubt her? Rejected by her people, by the lover she tried so hard to please, by death herself, she inhabits the liminal space between here and there, the living and the dead, the us and the other. She taught us how to exist in the spaces in between, make a home for ourselves in the forgotten margins of other people’s stories. She is someone who feels too much and all too deeply, someone open and aching for acceptance but met with nothing but rejection, somehow too much and never enough. She is the unforgiven, daughter of Eve, daughter of earth, solid, here and unholy. She becomes the voice of every long-suffering woman marked as irredeemable for their sins: the sin of loving too much or loving all wrong or loving someone before loving oneself, all inexcusable.

OCTOBER 06, 2017

LA LLORONA BY Neidin Hernandez ILLUSTRATION BY Dorothy Windham DESIGN BY Robin Manley

La llorona was the sixth omen, predating her own story, wandering the streets of the capital bemoaning the coming death of her children and the conquest that was to come. She cried out in Nahuatl, “O my children, where am I to take you. O my children, we are about to go forever.” But she did not go, she faded into the background of the lives of her mestizo children, emerging in our times of sorrow, that ever-present howl coming through the wind above blue-black streams now polluted with Pampers and old Coke cans, now hiding in the shrieks of telephone wires running over alleyways and empty parking lots. Her tale has crossed borders, taken on new lives and deaths, morphed into exactly what it needed to be with each retelling. An oral tradition passed down through generations, la llorona has found her way into poems, songs, short stories, and novels. Writers and artists have attempted to fill in the gaps in her story, answer the how and the why, cull truth from her past suffering that resonates with the present. “The official version was a lie,” writes Cherrie Moraga. “I knew that from the same bone that first held the memory of the cuento.” What is it about a woman’s sin that requires eternal penance? Moraga argues that the story of la llorona has been inscribed into patriarchal narratives about woman’s inherent and irredeemable sinfulness, providing an analogous figure to the Eve and the Judeo-Christian story of her original sin in the Garden of Eden. So was la llorona blamed for the downfall of her people, the beginning of total conquest by the Spanish. Writers like Alicia Gaspar de Alba have revisited the tale and turned it on its head, complicating the traditional narrative of love, betrayal, and madness, imagining alternatives where her actions were signs of agency rather than victimhood. “The woman shrieking along the littered bank of the/Rio Grande is not sorry. She is looking for revenge,” writes Gaspar de Alba in “Malinchista, a Myth Revisited.” “Centuries she has been blamed for the murder of her/child, the loss of her people, as if Tenochtitlan/would not have fallen without her sin.” New interpretations of the tale seek to vindicate la llorona, to show how heavy it must be to carry the weight of the sins of her mestiza progeny, how tiring it must be to mourn without ceasing so as to ensure her continued presence in our collective consciousness. She will not be forgotten. Moraga reframes her action as the sole possible expression of agency in a captive relationship with a white conqueror who would bring about the destruction of her people.

La llorona has been adopted as the mother of the borderlands, that space between the U.S. and Mexico marked by cultural hybridity and complex national identities, the subaltern site of exclusion from the nation-state inhabited by los mestizos. She is the voice of those who will not be forgotten. Pat Mora writes: Maybe La Llorona is el Rio Grande who carries voices wherever she flows, the voices of women who speak only Spanish who hold their breath, fluttering like a new bird. She is a figure of hope for these women holding their breath, preparing to cross the border into a new country. She is everyone who came before them, both those who made it and those who did not, their voices immortalized in her cries. “To me, la llorona is the border,” writes Gapsar de Alba. She is not the symbol of crossing but the crossing itself, the act of inhabiting multiple planes of existence at once, physical, spiritual, and psychic. In Helena Maria Viramonetes’s short story “The Cariboo Cafe,” a washerwoman living in the borderlands sends her son out to the store at night only to find out later that he died at the hands of la migra. While crying out into the night in search of her dead child, her voice becomes one with that of la llorona, with the voices of the women who have suffered incalculable loss along the US-Mexico border. La llorona cries for us, her drowned children, lost again with each new generation, drifting downriver, farther from the home of her body. From her we learn about mourning, about how to suffer without letting go, how to hold true to our pasts, the sins and the triumph of our foremothers reverberating still through our lives like a drum note. We dance on the asphalt in summer, rest tangled up in hammocks and each others’ limbs. The first time we look in the mirror and squish our noses into fine points or try to scrub the brown from our skin like dirt she is there, weeping for us and everything we’ve lost. She will cry with us when our love is not enough and when the self-hate threatens to overwhelm. She is there—won’t we learn from her mistakes—but she will never judge, knowing what it is like to be known only for one’s sins. When we mourn, she mourns with us. She is the voice of our past, teaching us how to remember. Her cry, a comfort in the hot of night, a lament, a scream, a freedom song. NEIDIN HERNANDEZ B’19 hears the cries of la llorona.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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SYNTHETIC LOVERS Love Dolls in companionship and subjugation BY Maya Brauer ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

The supple texture of its simulated flesh yields to my fingers of flesh and blood. Gaze fixated upon something in the distance yet encompassing my presence, its doe-eyes are molten taffy beckoning to instincts hidden away. Internal logic peppered with contradictions, I encounter the finesse of this object in front of me. Not she, but it is a Love Doll. I exit the exhibition with newfound zeal, glad to have stumbled upon “Erotopia: Japan.” It was July 2016, and intrigued by its posters, I had entered Atsukobarouh gallery in Tokyo. With walls full of photos from derelict love hotels and floors with sex museum statuary, the vibrant cultural scene from before Japan’s economic bubble burst seemed to reverberate within the room. Perusing Orient Industry’s website, the multitude of fabricated faces peer out of each profile box. Riri, Dream, Melon, Mari—these are all meticulous imitations crafted by the Japanese ‘body manufacturer.’ Founded in 1977 in Tokyo, the firm has long stood by its mission statement to “develop the female idol that would always be close by, bringing warmth and offering ‘serenity to the heart.’” With a starting price of JPY200,000 ($1,800 USD), and up to JPY800,000 ($7,000 USD), the ‘female idol’ in question is a high-end good born of silicone, Thermoplastic Elastomers, steel, and occasionally human hair. Apart from Orient, nine Japanese manufacturers sell dolls in various materials, including soft vinyl, fabric, polyurethane, TPE, and silicone. Sizes are customizable; weights go from approximately 40 to 90 pounds and heights from 4’2 to 5’2 for full sized dolls. Lower and upper halves of torsos and mouths are also sold. Representation of love dolls in the mainstream media, including TLC’s show My Strange Addiction and a BBC documentary Guys and Dolls, as well as the film Lars and the Real Girl have brought the dolls into the public eye. Some may scratch their heads in the face of such Frankenstein-esque creations, yet the phenomenon of emotional transference is undeniable. In a world where cars are kicked, furniture is yelled at, and smartphones are argued with, objects enable us to project symbolic consciousness on the inanimate. Love Dolls, called by many monikers (sex dolls, ‘dutch wives,’ MLDs), are more than mere masturbatory objects. To some they represent something much more—a real companion. +++ “It is unprecedented happiness time. Girls are waiting for you! Let’s take a look at daily life with very important person,” croons Orient under its ‘Life’ tab. Testimonials from pleased customers illustrate a life with the new bodily presence. One user professes the amount of investment spent on his artificial partner: “The things you can and must do: go shopping for her, taking care of her, dressing her up, kissing her, caressing her, cuddle her, laying next to her, holding her hand, brushing her wig, too much to mention.” The example situations displayed on the website construct extensive imaginary lives for the dolls outside of the bedroom, endowing them with human characteristics. A purchase is deemed a ‘marriage’ and the complementary wedding ring marks felicitous beginnings, while a doll is said to ‘return home’ when away for repairs. And when the user decides to depart with a doll, a Shinto shrine will purify the body via ‘Oharai,’ a Shinto rite to purify the body of sin, guilt, and disease. Because

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a tenet of Shintoism called Animism establishes that all objects animate and inanimate harbor spirits, dolls must naturally exit the world free of impurities. By creating ‘rites of passage’ for the doll and its user, Orient Industry invents its product as a real companion. The firm’s narrative lays the foundation for emotional content, and leaves the rest to the client’s imagination. The female-bodied doll may have existed for European sailors in the 17th century in the form of dames de voyage, but the dames were only surrogates for wives absent temporarily from the sea. Oskar Kokoschka, a prominent Expressionist painter from Austria, is said to have owned a soft, life-sized replica of his late wife, Alma Mahler, whom he painted ardently. Japan’s cultural roots and social etiquette, however, have undoubtedly created a fertile breeding ground for these Love Dolls. These new objects house far more potential in Japanese tradition. A natural progression is the word ‘moe’ in Japanese that describes the phenomenon of falling in love with a fictional character. Virtual characters inhabiting dating games are the love interests of 30 percent of single women and 15 percent of single men between the ages of 20 and 29, according to studies by the Japanese government. In 2016, the Guardian called attention to the relationship crisis that has dawned upon the younger generations of the nation, who have lost interest in ‘real’ relationships. Foregoing the mess of human reaction and strict social obligations, many have opted for one-sided love that will never disappoint. Within a culture that normalizes romances with imaginary figures, dolls provide the imagination a step up to the physical world. To those with an extra dime to spend, dolls may certainly be a fulfilling option. Japan’s population seems to be advancing into its autumn years at a rapid pace. Social isolation is prominent across all groups as manic work hours consume the shrinking population, with predictions placing a third of the nation’s inhabitants above the age of 65 by the year 2050. Without new generations to uphold the inverted triangle of the aging population, those in need lack familial love. The crisis of Japan’s dwindling populace extends into a future of existential uncertainty for the nation and its people, but such dire straits are also ripe for business opportunities. Although the category of love dolls is marked by sexual function, sociologists suggest that they also hold the potential to rehabilitate and comfort those in neglect. In fact, Japan Today reported in 2008 that the two largest demographics of Orient’s clientele are people with disabilities and the elderly. Love Dolls are created with three orifices and marketed as sexual objects, but in many cases occupy a much larger space of emotional healing and support. These objects pull into question the meaning of human companionship, and the complex web of personal needs both physical and psychological. But a market attempting to address public health issues knows few ethical boundaries.

are simulations of cisgender female bodies that cater to the needs of straight men, who make up roughly 95 percent of the user base. Nevertheless, male love dolls do exist,at a ratio of 3:10, male to female, as well as customizable dolls for fetishes and sexual minorities. The concept of a team with a male head working to birth the ‘ideal’ woman is jarring to say the least—a contemporary revival of the Pygmalion myth. Rolling Stone describes Abyss’s brainstorming process as “trying to figure out what makes a woman: break her down and then reconstruct her with their own imaginations.” In the production of the new robotic sex doll, CEO Matt McMullen and his cohorts “mulled over a woman’s personality, and emerged with traits like, ‘moody,’ ’innocent,’ and ‘unpredictable.’” Reductive and childish, these words aim to flavor the simulacra of the sexualized ‘Woman,’ devoid of humanity. As Deborah Orr, writing in The Guardian, argued, “It’s not overly optimistic to believe that the argument that women have complete autonomy over their own bodies is getting through. But… automated bodies, designed to look and feel like women—it feels like an enormous refutation.” Dolls legitimize sexual objectification as an expense peddled as a necessity for happiness. With the new horizon of robotized RealDolls (a line of dolls with a robotic head), Abyss delivers talking mouths, blinking eyes, and unconditional love. The dolls have hurdled into the Uncanny Valley—roboticist Masahiro Mori’s theory that near-human objects evoke repulsion in a viewer. What is creepy, though, may not be so much about the aesthetic existence of the dolls as much as what they represent. Childish fantasies seem real only until they are proven false by the external world. Dolls, then, can be seen as manifestations of the desire to return to the insular, ego-centric comfort of a child. Exiting the “Erotopia” exhibition in Tokyo, I had been seduced by the Love Doll’s craft and its breathtaking beauty. What I failed to recognize then, in my blissful oblivion, may be the same thing that doll makers and users alike fail to see. As an art object existing in a social void, Orient’s doll succeeds in emulating a fictional beauty that pop culture presents as ideal. To create a aesthetic object with visual allure, while also simulating human flesh, is impressive to say the least. But the power of beauty is too often blinding. Will artificial ‘humans’ continue to reinforce oppressive ideals, or will they become new beings that can support us wholeheartedly? It’s unclear, but don’t let its supple skin fool you—for now, it’s just an illusion. MAYA BRAUER RISD’19 is in a love-hate relationship with all objects.

+++ The production of human simulacra, dominated by males, is a dangerous path that reeks of a regressive view of cisgendered female beauty standards. On the American side of the Pacific, Abyss Creations LLC, has generated a market of dolls similar in price, material quality, and craft to Orient’s products. The majority of dolls in production

OCTOBER 06, 2017

BREAKING, BREAD How tradition dictates Russia's relationship to Belarus BY Signe Swanson ILLUSTRATION BY Teri Minogue DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

In Saint Petersburg, Russia, the words ‘traditional cuisine’ stand guard on so many restaurant signs. They are so pervasive that to long-term residents of the city, I figured, they seem ambient. But as a foreigner, still working to understand the culture that manifests on signs, they struck me whenever they met me. Down the street from my place, this red-white-and-blue-colored phrase announced a café that peeked out from under a tall metal scaffold, on which construction workers climbed and breathed in dust. Clinking hammers corresponded. The words appear silently too, resisting signage. The chain store across the street from me sells ten brands of pel’meni, two domestic types of hard white cheese. Traditional cuisine looks like an embrace of staple foods when imports from the rest of the world are forbidden. This lack exists in my plans to expedite a friend some Reese’s cups at the UPS store; she hasn’t seen them on Russian shelves since 2014. Three years ago, the United States and European Union issued economic sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Crimea and its backing of separatist rebels in Eastern Ukraine. In response, Russia banned American and EU food imports; hence, the hegemony of East-Slavic dairy products, the dearth of peanut butter candy. Traditional cuisine is equally a lack and a presence—cheerleading for your country’s traditions when globalization’s luxuries disappear. I lived in St. Petersburg this summer, three years after the sanctions were issued. Upon learning where to buy produce, I found that root vegetables and cabbages were king. They were the most affordable, least rotten vegetables in the Admiralteyskiy District, a site considerably more cosmopolitan than the rest of the ex-Soviet Union. More curious to me than costly dead lettuce is the representation of choice in this economy. No market is equipped to provide variety under the sanctions. Shops try to differentiate themselves nonetheless, decorating their windows in superlatives like “best,” “tastiest,” “freshest,” and “Belarusian.” Belarusian. The word “Belarusian” appears in a white knit font reserved otherwise for the glorification of words like “homemade,” “folk,” and “cottage cheese.” Sometimes the words come with a cartoon of the perfect countryside, with straw-patch cottages, with rolling fields and a fat yellow sun. Or the store-front’s graphic design might look like a hand-stitched tablecloth, as if one could just rotate the store 90 degrees west about the axis of the street and eat off it. I call ‘Belarusian’ a superlative because it is, like ‘traditional cuisine,’ an advertising ploy, a form of ventriloquism. Belarusian imports line the grocery aisles of every grocery store in Russia: this ‘import store’ is no different from anywhere else. +++ Belarus and Russia maintain a tighter bond than any other ex-Soviet states. The two countries share an open border; any foreign national crossing another border risks detainment upon entering the Russian Federation. Ex-Soviet populations from the Caucasus and Central Asia are denied the same right of entry and pathologized as non-white and as undocumented immigrants. As the Soviet rhetoric of communist cosmopolitanism has been

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replaced by Putin’s nationalist, Russia-first rhetoric, Belarusians are able to live within Russia on the merit of percieved common values, a Slavic ‘brotherhood’ predating the Soviet Union. It’s helpful to view this reality as the legacy of failed Soviet ethnic policy. While the USSR was founded upon Marxist theory that considered national identity regressive, Lenin felt that it was necessary to promote national identity, citing concerns over the ‘oppressed nation.’ He felt that colonized people of the Russian Empire, and thus the Soviet Union, were valid reclaiming their identity as Kazakh, Uzbek, Georgian. This meant that the Soviet government initially encouraged its republics to speak their own languages, to interrogate their specific class structures, and ‘modernize.’ However noble, this notion of progress implicitly placed Russia at the top of its vision of ‘development.’ Only ethnic Russians were discouraged from celebrating their ‘narodny’ (folk) identity. Why would the Soviet government discourage Russians from embracing their heritage, but encourage Belarusians and Ukrainians—two ethnic groups whose peasant communities shared a common Slavic culture with Russians—to embrace their own? Lenin’s support for ‘colonized people’ really meant that he considered non-Russians ‘backwards’ in the context of inevitable Russian political dominance. The revolution took place in Russian. The capital spoke Russian and always would. Sure enough, by the 1940s, any ethnic policy attempting to uphold ‘colonized people’ exhausted itself as Russian became the USSR’s official language. The complex history of this ethnic policy continues to play out in the post-Soviet era. Lenin’s ethnic policy demarcated the borders between Soviet republics that exist to this day as national borders. And, as Russian became the language of communist, cosmopolitan assimilation, today’s ex-Soviet states must assimilate into Russia’s vision of the former empire. A ‘good’ relationship with Russia is still vital throughout the ex-Soviet world, manifesting in large part through trade deals that prioritize Russia’s economy. +++ The goods for sale right now in Russia persist as they do because Russia’s stable trade deals are a sort of necropolis: skeletal, grand, retrospective. The ideal to which Russia aspires is a free trade zone across the former USSR. In 1995, Russia took its first step towards amassing such a zone, signing the Customs Union Agreement (CUA) with Belarus. The 2000s saw the birth and death of the Eurasian Economic Community between full-members Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan as well as ‘observers’ Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine. Today, the original CU persists as the CU/SES (Customs Union/ Single Economic Space) between Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia. The current state of Ukraine shows what happens when an ex-Soviet state tries to break away from Russia. Though Ukraine never belonged to the Customs Union, it had always supplied Russia with arable agricultural lands in exchange for Russian oil. Ukraine’s pro-EU revolutions of 2013 sent its Russian-allied president, Viktor Yanukovych, into exile in the southern Russian city of

Rostov-on-Don. Ukraine’s civil war continues between pro-EU, pro-Russian, and Ukrainian white nationalist factions. Belarus shows no such signs of revolution. The country has not seen a new president since its first and only ‘free and fair election’ in 1994, when popular support determined Alexander Lukashenko Belarus’ president. Lukashenko campaigned on a rhetoric of ‘better times’ under the Soviet Union, making him a sort of maverick in the genre of ‘good old days’ politicians, if only for decorating a history that had been daily life just three years prior. +++ Between 1989 and 1999, 81,000 more Belarusians died than were born. The life expectancy in 1998 was 68.5, the lowest it had been since 1959. During this decade, the suicide rate among men quadrupled. In a 2004 report titled “An Almost Doomed Country,” economist Mikhal Zaleski attributes the nation’s population decline and social problems, like rampant drug use and alcoholism, to its continued reliance on Sovietstyle collective farms (the kolkhoz). This, he states, led to a youth exodus from the rural countryside, as young Belarusians were not afforded the promises of perestroika, the set of policies reforming the now more liberal Russian state after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990. In English, I’ve often heard Belarus referred to as “Europe’s last dictatorship,” in reference to Lukashenko’s 23-year-long presidency. But this phrase wrongly assumes Belarus as European, with all the implications of liberalism that an association with the EU connotes. President Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in office since 1994, has spent all of those 23 years upholding Soviet infrastructure and ensuring a tight relationship with Russia. Yet Belarus’ persistent Soviet structure is not matched in Russia. The Russian kolkhoz system vanished by 1993, when President Boris Yeltsin issued an edict that split collective farms into shares of equal portions. Each member of the former collective was suddenly allowed to run their share independently. Russia’s departure from communism brought it slowly into the sphere of the globalized free market. Yeltsin’s presidency, supported by Ronald Reagan, allowed for the introduction of goods, such as mangos, avocados, and lemons, that were once considered as luxurious and bourgeois as rock music and jeans. Meanwhile, the regressive Belarusian kolkhoz feeds Russia, through agricultural exports the Belarusian economy depends on. A World Bank Group report revealed that “57 percent of Belarus’s merchandise trade and 67 percent of non-oil exports depend on the market sentiments in the Russian and other CIS economies.” Here, Belarusian trade sits within the necropolis of Russia’s trade networks. Belarus cannot afford to turn away from Russia —it depends on Russia for natural resources. Tradition dictates the relationship between Belarus and Russia, but affects each nation differently. In Belarus, tradition means a regression towards Soviet systems that no longer work because, under the dominance of Russia’s new economy, regression means the subjugation of non-Russian neighbors, a maintenance of empire.

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+++ In 2017, I am reading a post on the anonymous P_Sutkin’s LiveJournal blog “The History of Russian Cuisine;” the website’s wallpaper is a blown-up, big-pixeled oil painting of an Orthodox feast in what appears to be Kievan Rus, an ancient Slavic federation encompassing modern Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. This particular post’s headline reads: “Belarusian Guava Imports Have Fallen by 69%.” “On Unity Day, we root for our Slavic brothers,” P_Sutkin writes. “And there is reason to be worried for them.” Rooting for one’s “Slavic brothers” by purchasing sickly northern guavas does not accomplish any pan-Slavic goal, but the gesture speaks for itself. Right after Russia banned Western imports, it began importing mangos, avocados, and other tropical fruits from Belarusian communal farms. Here, Russia’s advantageous relationship with Belarus supplemented its own inability to produce these geographically unorthodox fruits. Belarus, whose subordinate relationship to Russia finds validation in ‘tradition’—be that Soviet or Slavic—suddenly had to provide goods once considered ‘luxurious’ by both metrics of tradition. The Soviet-style kolkhoz, in order to be profitable, relies on Russian markets. In 2015, Moscow grew suspicious of Minsk; Belarus had not joined Russia in sanctioning European or American goods. A Belarus Digest report dated from August 18, 2015 calls Belarus the “primary beneficiary of the food embargo.” The piece cites smuggling, above all, as the reason for Belarus's gain—Belarusians serving as middlemen in the illicit movement of European potatoes, tomatoes, pork, and other goods into Russia. A brief trade war, from November to December of 2014, saw Russia banning 23 Belarusian meat producers from importing products. They also banned the movement of

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all non-Russian-approved goods into Kazakhstan, the third member of the CU/SES. Again, Russia calls the shots within this three-nation trade zone. The trade war is over, but Belarus is still exporting 69 percent fewer guavas to Russia. These fruits are tricky to produce in Belarusian greenhouses. They are not a staple food; they did not exist in Russia prior to 1991, when the country began importing goods previously deemed bourgeois. It is hypocritical that Russia would punish Belarus for engaging with European markets, when its evolution over the past 30 years has been defined by an embrace of Western-style free market goods. Sanctions have hurt Russian people. Consumer prices rose 26 percent from 2013–15, as the ruble devalued. Regrettably, the reactions to this economic instability do not engage with its root causes (Russian economic violence, Russian empire-building). Instead, backlash appears in two major ways: as P_Sutkin’s populist Slavic nationalism, or as the aspirational adoption of Western European values so popular among young people, restless in their unchanging Russia. +++ Like young people during perestroika, my friends in Russia don’t care for traditional anything. They want Russia to be more like Western Europe, or they want to get out. On the day of a naval parade, we got lunch at a Chinese restaurant with tofu on the menu. I told a friend some things that suck about America; he told me that he’s dodging the draft. This conversation continued until a family of three chased us from our booth, ordering us to “leave Russia, if we don’t like it.” None of my Russian friends have left the country—a visa is too expensive.

+++ Leaving Russia, I spent two nights in Warsaw waiting for a plane. I sat in a hostel kitchen eating European cheese. A Russian man named Sasha stood by with a silent woman whose name I never caught. We talked. He told me that she was from Ukraine, and that they got along great. The unnamed woman laid plain steaks in tin foil over a hot pan and cooked them. Sasha cackled and drank beer from a plastic bottle and she did not. Sasha told me that he’d be leaving Warsaw soon, then visiting Minsk, then going home. He told me that Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia are natural-born friends: historically, three brothers. The ‘three brothers’ comment reminded me of P_Sutkin’s blog post. I wanted to know his real allegiances—with Ukrainian independence? With white nationalism? With the Soviet Union? And why bother engaging, I thought—these categories are not mutually exclusive. I knew that, as a traveler on a visa to an EU country, Sasha was unlike the average Russian. He later emailed me an invitation to his home in Nizhny Novgorod, citing ‘nice cafés, parks, bookstores.’ I already knew that Belarus doesn’t look like it does at the import store. And I knew what Minsk looks like: World War II memorials, streets named after Lenin, an occasional McDonald’s. “Do you like Belarus?” I asked. Sasha laughed again, drinking more beer from the plastic bottle. He kept laughing. “What is it like in Minsk?” He cackled harder. “Minsk is shit.”

SIGNE

SWANSON

B’19 does love root

vegetables.

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WHAT A MESS!

On the stakes of the personal essay BY Lisa Borst ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

GAITSKILL

The personal essay, according to some, is in a tough spot. Last spring, Jia Tolentino wrote in the New Yorker that “the personal-essay boom is over,” pointing to the election of Trump as a catalyst for the end of a certain brand of overly personal “solo acts of sensational disclosure” that had found a home on the internet of the early 2010s. After the election, she writes, “many favored personal-essay subjects—relationships, self-image, intimate struggle—seemed to hit a new low in broader social relevance.” Tolentino’s argument presumes that individual-scale narratives like these have little to say about the wider systemic traumas brought into view by Trump’s election. In fact, a set of overlapping factors has left us primed to receive the personal essay as one of the most interesting contemporary sites for social and political critique. The personal essay, as we know it today, hit its stride as the result of a combination of an explosive boom in trade memoir production in the 1990s and early 2000s (think everything from The Liar’s Club to Eat Pray Love) with the kinds of confessional writing enabled by social media. Cemented as a marketable trend in recent years by websites and magazines like Teen Vogue, Rookie, The Rumpus, and Lenny Letter, a specific kind of confessional, often literary first-person writing, has also seen a newfound degree of interest from academia: a growing number of universities, including Brown, have substituted undergraduate degrees in journalism for programs in ‘nonfiction writing,’ or have added tracks in creative nonfiction to existing MFA programs. This is all to say that although the personal essay has existed since at least Montaigne, the form has undergone a kind of unprecedented institutional recognition over the past decade or so—and, contrary to Tolentino’s argument, the election has done little to change that. But as personal essays continue to find cultural purchase across online venues, trade-paperback markets, and creative writing departments, the genre—if we can call it that— has been met with backlash as well. This summer, an article published in Boston Review called “Two Paths for the Personal Essay” ignited a heated debate, largely unfolding on Twitter. The piece, written by McGill professor of English Merv Emre, reviewed two books published this year, both written by women and both using the personal essay form to explore a hybrid space between memoir and cultural critique: Too Much and Not the Mood, a collection of essays by the young, social media-famous writer Durga Chew-Bose; and Somebody with a Little Hammer, an anthology of work by the established novelist and critic Mary Gaitskill. The joint review contends that recent first-person essaywriting might be grouped into two camps, represented

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by Chew-Bose and Gaitskill, respectively: on one hand, we have a spate of exploratory, “messy,” often somewhat self-indulgent first-person narratives, which might generally be grouped under the rubric of “creative nonfiction,” and which is having a moment among younger women writers especially; on the other, a brand of more “serious,” perhaps more traditional public intellectual-style essays, which generally take as their subjects artistic, literary, or political artifacts and which incorporate a first-person voice only as a kind of scaffolding. Emre’s issue with the Chew-Bose camp is its tendency—“premised,” she writes, “on the depressing notion that words are always insufficient to the task at hand and so we may as well stop trying to choose the clearest or most precise ones”—to celebrate its own “messiness” at the expense of saying all that much. “Messy feelings, messy reality, messy relationships, the messy unfiltered stuff of life,” Emre writes: “the personal essayist evacuates all in one, big messy outpouring of repurposed clichés about love and life and pain and joy and men and women and whatever other themes readers of these essayists are, by now, primed to receive as universal human concerns.” The intention of all this self-reflexive mess, in Emre’s assessment, is to communicate a sense of the writer’s ethical standing. Many “personal essayists today,” she writes, presumably alluding not just to Chew-Bose but to a whole class of young writers of her same ilk, tend to “elide aesthetic judgments—judgments about the formal or stylistic features of prose—with ethical and subjective ones that assess the character of the human being who would produce such prose.” That messy writing would necessarily be the output of an ethical writer is Emre’s major sticking point, and as an alternative she points us to Gaitskill’s more precise, less interior project—with which, she says, “we can begin to separate the notion of the ‘personal’ from the adjectives that have clung to and muddied its coattails—not only ‘messy,’ but also ‘warm,’ ‘caring,’ ‘confessional,’ ‘emotional,’ ‘empathetic,’ and ‘sentimental.’” What if, she wonders, “personal writing were not a manifestation of intimacy or interiority? What if art were a dish best served cold?” The truth is, I don’t much care for Too Much and Not the Mood. It’s evident from both Chew-Bose’s essays and from her bookish Instagram that she is sharply intelligent and widely read, but Emre’s lacerating critiques of her prose do, I think, capture some of the more tiresome aspects of Chew-Bose’s writing and of much contemporary creative nonfiction writ large. To Chew-Bose’s inscrutable assessments that writing is “a closed pistachio shell” and “a doubled-up glove,” for example, Emre responds: “Writing is losing yourself, finding yourself, falling in love, having your heart broken, getting drunk, having sex, thinking about some stuff then thinking about

some other stuff that kind of relates to the original stuff you were thinking about but not really.” But one can find grating a given writer’s individual use of stylistic elements like messiness and sentimentality without calling for a total removal of those elements from the world of letters. What’s ultimately at stake in Emre’s polemic, I would argue, are the changing terms of who gets to claim interiority and all its attendant “messiness,” and the subtext of her argument is, by default, gendered and racialized, not to mention ageist: ChewBose, a 31-year-old Indian-Canadian, is pitted against not just the 62-year-old Gaitskill, who is white, but also against the cadre of 20th-century women writers profiled in Deborah Nelson’s 2017 book Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil—a stunningly homogenous list of women who broke ground by writing, supposedly, like men. A caveat here: it seems ridiculous to essentialize the particular formal or affective qualities of ‘women’s writing.” But what’s true is that even as acclaimed writers like Susan Sontag and Hannah Arendt penned ‘tough,’ authoritative, and unsentimental work that was therefore read as ‘masculine,’ for a large part of the 20th century, confessional poetry and prose were integral to feminist politics—and popular conceptions of personal writing today refuse to decouple gender from genre. That whiteness would be bound up with a lasting anti-confessional understanding of ‘good’ writing is unsurprising, and Emre’s critique implicitly echoes ongoing debates about race, identity, and the role of voice in literary production. Here’s Cathy Park Hong, in a well-known essay, critiquing claims made by many avant-garde and Conceptual poets that poetry should be “post-subject” and therefore “post-identity”: “The avant-garde’s ‘delusion of whiteness,’” she writes, “is the specious belief that renouncing subject and voice is anti-authoritarian, when in fact such wholesale pronouncements are clueless that the disenfranchised need such bourgeois niceties like voice to alter conditions forged in history.” We might apply Hong’s argument to nonfiction, too. Evacuate the “warmth,” the “confessional,” and the “empathetic” from personal writing, as Emre instructs, and see what’s left: an anti-identitarian and all-but-voiceless perspective from which any possibility of “altering conditions forged in history” has been emptied. +++ As is unsurprising for a proposal about “two paths” for anything, Emre’s essay mistakes a spectrum for a duality. There are compromises available here, and both ChewBose and Gaitskill seem to know this; later this month, the two essayists will join each other at the Vancouver

OCTOBER 06, 2017

RANKINE

KOESTENBAUM

NELSON

Writers’ Fest in a conversation about writing nonfiction. But I want to argue that a perhaps more interesting and generative path for the personal essay—one, of course, of an infinite number, but one that can find particular political utility in the use of the confessional mode—might be found by looking beyond the domain of either ChewBose or Gaitskill, and looking, instead, toward an abbreviated history of two literary market trends from the past two decades. If the early 20th century gave us the so-called ‘novel of ideas’ in its fullest form, then by the turn of the millennium the genre had contracted in scope to what critic Nicholas Dames calls the “Theory Generation novel.” In a 2012 essay, Dames anatomizes a corpus of recent realist fiction that found success in certain engagements with the kinds of postwar continental philosophy and critical/literary theory that had had achieved tenure in US academia by about the 1980s. Rather than formally or ideologically incorporating the teachings of this academic theory, these texts took up theory as a plot device—often in the superficial form of something like a Marx text on a bookshelf, doing little but gesturing toward a kind of cultural capital that a reader is meant to feel included in. Beginning around the publication of Don Delillo’s White Noise (which concerns a group of “pop culture studies” professors at a midwestern college), these books stand as one particularly douchey iteration of that larger class of ‘campus novels‘—one that seems to have reached its arguable apotheosis in 2011 with Jeffrey Eugenides’ Brown University-set The Marriage Plot and, thankfully, petered out since. But what the theory novel signified—and what, I think, has not been fully scrubbed from certain niche US literary market interests—is a standing fascination with what ‘theory’ can do when plucked from its ivory-tower origins and dropped into trade paperbacks marketed to a reading public who put down their Freud when they left college five or 10 or 25 years ago. I think that perhaps, in recent years, this lingering interest has coincided with the ensemble of dramatic personal memoirs published around the same time. And the collision of these twin turn-of-the-millennium trends has inaugurated the widespread proliferation of a curious form that, until not long ago, existed only at the margins of trade markets: the hybrid work of theory-memoir. Nonfiction texts by authors like Maggie Nelson, Hilton Als, Paul Preciado, Claudia Rankine, Chris Kraus (whose theory-informed 1997 autofiction I Love Dick has seen renewed interest, climaxing in a recent television adaptation), Fred Moten, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eve Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, Eula Biss, Christina Crosby, and Brian Blanchfield have in the past decade or so shaped ongoing conversations about the relationships between trade nonfiction and academic

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

theory, and about what the first-person voice can do for critique. Little unites these authors but a shared tendency to be labelled as ‘genre-bending’ in reviews of their works and a commitment to intertwining theory and lived experience in a variety of ways. Some, like Preciado’s Testo Junkie (translated into English in 2013), Nelson’s The Argonauts (published in 2015), and Crosby’s A Body, Undone (2016), take up their authors’ bodies as sites for theoretical inquiry, doing what Koestenbaum—another practitioner—calls, in his essay collection My 1980s (2013), “self-ethnography.” Others, like Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (2017) and various works by Sedgwick (like the essays posthumously collected in 2011’s The Weather in Proust), incorporate a first-person voice into what are primarily academic texts. Many have found utility in the brevity and capaciousness of the personal essay. And like the personal essay writ large, these forms of theory-memoir aren’t so much new—we might look to essays by writers from Roland Barthes to Audre Lorde, bell hooks to Gloria Anzaldúa, for confirmation of the form’s longevity—as newly visible, newly marketable in trade circuits, and newly institutionalized. (At Brown, I’ve been assigned Maggie Nelson’s books in five different classes.) But texts of this particular, hardto-classify sort—which Nelson, following Preciado, calls “autotheory”—have offered a recently legible alternative to the two directions for the personal essay proposed by Emre and other critics, as well as to the surfacelevel treatment of theory in novels like The Marriage Plot. In fusing claims to ethical subjectivity supposedly embedded in the first-person form with the kinds of textual engagement and precision of language typically associated with critique, many of these essays, I think, offer something better and more interesting than the sum of their parts: the best of them are invested with more warmth and interiority than much traditional theory, but are more engaged with substantive theoretical ideas than many theory-generation novels; in their reliance on self-exploration and autobiography, they avoid asserting the subjectless, unsentimental authority that Emre seems to admire in Gaitskill and her 20th-century forebears, but are less caught up with stylishly forfeiting precision than the Chew-Bose camp of creative nonfiction.

from—the “theory generation novel,” many of the writers practicing what is in many ways that novel’s nonfiction corollary are those best poised to use theory to critique their own marginalization: queer people, trans people, people of color. After all, it wasn’t until the interventions of feminist, queer, postcolonial, and affect studies into the academy in the ’70s and ’80s that the old ‘personal is political’ adage really took hold in theoretical circles, and we might read these recent explorations of autotheoretical modes—many of which are deeply identitarian, and as invested in collective liberation as they are in individual self-expression—as perhaps that aphorism’s most elaborate articulation. Last spring, I asked the essayist Wayne Koestenbaum—whose writing occupies an exciting position at the nexus of personal narrative, art criticism, and queer theory—why hybrid-form nonfiction seems to be so important to contemporary queer writers. “If we could imagine a parallel conversation to ours taking place in 1970, and you were a young poet and I was a woman and an older poet, and you might have asked me the question: why, at least in the United States right now, and on campuses, why are feminism and poetry linked?” Koestenbaum responded. “And I would say something like, well, part of what it means to come to a feminist consciousness is, you have to take back yourself in some way. The forms of self-declaration and carving of inner space—that’s taking possession of a voice. And so the act of poetry becomes a metaphor and an enabler of feminist consciousness. And in the same way, I think there’s some kind of queer formation where complexities of living are found through theory, and through self-ethnography. It’s a similar sort of feedback loop. Between the books, the theory, the literary artifacts, the movies, the performances, and the living.”

LISA BORST B’17.5 studies Nonfiction Writing.

+++ This alternative path for the personal essay, as the above list of its practitioners might suggest, carries particular political promise for writers holding marginalized identities. In sharp contrast to the kinds of white, mostly male, MFA-darling authors who tended to write—and get rich

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LIBRA APPRECIATION DAY

FRIDAY 10 ∫ 06

SATURDAY 10 ∫ 07

Frerichs Farm 43 Kinnicutt Ave. Warren 9 PM — 5 PM ————— A day full of giant pumpkins and gourds! The event organizers warn: “Last year we had the largest Pumpkin ever grown in North America...what will this year bring.” Without a question mark. Seems serious.

SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND GIANT PUMPKIN GROWERS WEIGH OFF

Roger Williams Park Botanical Center 11 AM — 3 PM ————— Have you ever been to the Roger Williams Park Botanical Center? It’s totally incredible! They have an agave plant the size of, like, a monster truck. The List highly recommends.

FREE FIRST SATURDAY OF THE MONTH AT THE BOTANICAL CENTER

Aurora 276 Westminster St. 10 PM —————

This will be the last astrology dance party at Aurora EVER! It would be a mistake not to go. (Moon is square Pluto on Thursday so you’re going to be feeling all kinds of garbage things that you will need to dance off!) I, The Indy’s own horoscope expert, will be there if you need astrological counseling/support—I’m sure you’ll find me if you need me. FACTORY OF TERROR

3 Bridal Ave. West Warwick 6 — 9 PM ————— Many haunted attractions, including a 4D blackout. I don’t really get the physics of that but I’d like to find out! Locations also in Fall River and Worcester.

THE

SUNDAY 10 ∫ 08

Cable Car Cinema 204 S Main 5 PM ————— A film about the relationship between infestation and economic inequity in

RAT FILM — PROVIDENCE PREMIERE

South Water Street 2 PM ————— Pronk! The literal best day of the whole year! Me and my partner got together at Pronk 3 years ago, dancing to some incredible brass band or another. Maybe you, too, will fall in love at this year’s Pronk! You’d better go just in case.

PRONK

MONDAY 10 ∫ 09

class, though I’ll probably keep going to class in mesh and chains. Hope to get my chains caught in your fishnet shirt while we dance next to each other at this function!

LIST!

INDIGENOUS PEOPLE’S DAY SOCIAL

Sayles Hall Brown University 2 PM ————— Join Native Americans at Brown, the Native American Heritage Series, and the Tomaquag Museum for the second annual Indigenous Peoples’ Day Celebration and Social. Catering by Wampanoag Chef, Sherry Pocknett, serving traditional Indigenous foods, and dancing. Prior to the social, there will be a screening and discussion of “Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock.” GOTH INDUSTRIAL NEWWAVE, DARKWAVE, ETC.

Alchemy 71 Richmond St. 9 PM ————— Yeow! This will be a much more appropriate context for all my black mesh clothing and chain accessories than

Baltimore. Showing from Oct 7th–12th at Cable Car.

WEDNESDAY 10 ∫ 11

BEACH FOSSILS W/ SNAIL MAIL AND RAENER

TUESDAY 10 ∫ 10 The Met 8 PM ALL IN: OUR LEARNING SPACES $15 ————— PHASE 1 WORKSHOP I’ve never listened to Beach FT. JORGE ELORZA Fossils (they have one of Hope High School those indistinguishably 5:30 PM boring indie-rock————— from-2009 names) but I Elorza recently announced luv Snail Mail! If you don’t Providence’s commitment go you should still listen to to investing up to $400 their record. million in school buildings over the next 10 years. Phase PUBLICK OCCURRENCES 1 will include two identical DCYF: CHILDREN IN CRISIS Workshop Sessions on Rhode Island College October 10th and October 6 PM 12th to discuss the city’s ————— plan. Spanish-language Leadership Rhode Island, interpretation, refreshments, The Providence Journal, and childcare will be provided and Rhode Island College during all gatherings. (RIC) present the seventh year of a conference by the hosted RI Press Association for community outreach. This year’s panels explore the operations of the RI Department of Children, Youth, and Families.

THURSDAY 10 ∫ 12

ROZ & THE RICECAKES RELEASE PARTY

AS220 115 Empire St 9 PM ————— One time Roz Raskin posted on Facebook that she randomly met someone named Raz Roskin or something like that. Weird!

HOROSCOPE ∫ SAGITTARIUS

Your floaty Sagittarius ass is going to have a weird time floating with everything that Moon, Venus, Mars, and (fucking) Pluto are doing. You’re going to want to flaunt all weekend and then you’re going to want to settle—which, you know, you’ve got some issues with. To channel all of Pluto’s Death and Sex energy, go to Alchemy’s Goth/industrial/ darkwave event (and try not to make eye contact with anyone you might like).