The College Hill Independent Vol. 35 Issue 5 by College Hill Independent

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A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY OCT 20 2017

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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COVER

INDY

Pastel Sweetie Andrés Prince-Gonzáles

NEWS

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 35 / ISSUE 05 OCT 20 2017

Week in Review Signe Swanson, Anna Hundert, Julia Tompkins

Real Nation-State Hours, Who Up ? Neidin Hernandez

METRO

FROM THE EDITORS When I told a friend about my new job as a queer archivist this week, she noted that archives seem to be a Hot New Queer Thing. Perhaps this title is a depressing oxymoron which dooms the practice, but it’s undeniable that archives are IN. She’s not wrong, but despite my shamefully trendy aspirations I actually am more a librarian than an archivist. As such, my days are now spent largely skimming dusty boxes of queer novels double my age, professionally ‘judging by covers.’

A Sense of Relief Mariela Pichardo

Abandon Hope! SAPMC and PSO-PVD

ARTS 13

RISD's 15 Minutes Marly Toledano

FEATURES 08

These boxes contain overwhelming, gooey, sloppy, restorative camp: an epic about an alternate universe ruled by lesbian forest elves where dance is currency; tales of the undying demigod sons of Aphrodite who walk the streets of the ’70s village cruising… for prey; a story of a gay detective who teams up with his archeologist boyfriend to bust a pollution conspiracy lead by an alien CEO. There is much to be said of the value of queer camp, and after one month on the job I am not qualified to say much of it. Still, even for those of us who haven’t read Sontag or Isherwood, the radical and healing potential of not taking ourselves seriously will quickly become apparent after an hour in the company of some trans cyborgs and a queer serial killer or two. —ZK

It's Prayer Time Somewhere Sheena Raza Faisal Recess, School's Out Paula Pacheco Soto

SCIENCE

Needless Needles Nora Gosselin

METABOLICS 15

Lost in the Sauce Pia Mileaf-Patel

LITERARY

MISSION STATEMENT 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.

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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.

I Never Learned to Read Kasturi Pananjady

Middle School Medina Adrian Medina (ft. Dunnydelux)

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Ackees/Playne Around Donald Morris

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. Fall 2017

MANAGING EDITORS

ARTS

Jane Argodale Will Weatherly Robin Manley

Maya Brauer Ruby Gerber Kelton Ellis

NEWS

FEATURES

Isabel DeBre Chris Packs WEEK IN REVIEW

Eve Zelickson METRO

Jack Brook Saanya Jain Katrina Northrop

Zack Kligler Gabriela Naigeborin Julia Tompkins METABOLICS

TECH

Jonah Max OCCULT

Sheena Raza Faisal Signe Swanson LITERARY

Fadwa Ahmed Isabelle Doyle

Dominique Pariso Erin West

EPHEMERA

SCIENCE

Liz Cory Paige Parsons

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

Maya Bjornson Liby Hays

LIST

Lisa Borst 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

SOCIAL MEDIA

Eliza Chen

Fadwa Ahmed

DESIGNERS

SENIOR EDITORS

Amos Jackson Ashley Min WEB MANAGER

Alyssa McGillvery BUSINESS MANAGER

Maria Gonzalez COPY EDITOR

Miles Taylor

Lisa Borst Kelton Ellis Sophie Kasakove Will Tavlin MVP

Fadwa Ahmed THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN BITTERSWEET BITES BY Signe Swanson, Anna Hundert, & Julia Tompkins ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

his 10th record, Heaven Upside Down. For what it’s worth, these words from the pasty bard offer some salient advice to Hefner’s cadaver on ‘having it all’—“When all of your wishes are granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed.” – SS

A STAR DIES IN “HOLY WOOD” Hugh Hefner is dead. He died of chronic old age on September 27 at the Playboy Mansion, and also from several complications including sepsis, a disease also responsible for the swelling of infected augmented breast tissue. It’s safe to say that his passing shook the world for a bit (or at least Twitter)—it just couldn’t be true! Perhaps studying the masses of sheeple balking at a 91-year-old’s heart failure, we can deduce that there might be a contingent of people in the United States who, until that fateful day, assumed the Viagra’d-up Hef to be Undying. Really, responses to his death have not been so unilateral or uncritical. Memorializing Hefner calls into question whether he, as the cultivator of a literal and figurative pornographic estate, was someone worth celebrating. How should we remember a man whose celebrity required the exploitation of many women’s bodies? It’s complicated. Though his magazine objectifies the cis, conventionally attractive female form, many individual women like looking at Playboy. It could also be repressive to silence any women who were close to him, who are grieving. Ex-wife Kendra Wilkinson felt especially defensive against attacks on Hefner’s character, eulogizing, “I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks [or] says [about Hefner]. Don’t care about other perspectives. I see n’ know what I do. Fuck the rest.” A smorgasbord of other famous ladies, from Kim Kardashian to Lena Dunham, also tweeted in mourning. One woman who has not mourned Hef’s death is the late Marilyn Monroe, the iconic actress whose photo adorned the cover of Playboy’s first issue. Though the two never met, Hefner paid $75,000 for the plot next to hers at Westwood Village Memorial Park back in 1992. He never got Monroe’s consent to place her picture on his magazine, but will spend eternity lying next to her. Truly haunting. In any case, it’s pretty gross and weird to define your afterlife in relation to someone you never knew. The ostentatious gesture reeks of entitlement. Yet Hefner wouldn’t put it that way; in a 2000 interview with Jay Leno, he revealed his postmortem philosophy: “There’s something rather poetic in the fact that [Marilyn and I] will be buried in the same place.” Let it be known: the Indy does not support grave-digging (but we will not meddle in any Hollywood bonescapes). But what we will apostrophize, O Hef, is that thou should have been entombed next to a real poet named Marilyn: Marilyn Manson. It is sure that Hugh Hefner would have a fun time rocking out forever with Manson, an ideological Laveyan Satanist who, according to Wikipedia, “also likes Nietzsche.” He’s probably more relevant than Monroe right now, having recently released

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

G2G 4EVER Before there were friends or followers, there were “buddies.” Before statuses and tweets and snapchat stories, there were “away messages.” Before the smartphone generation even had cell phones, we were all sitting at desktop computers, typing ourselves into the dawn of a new era. This week, AOL announced that the AOL Instant Messaging service will go offline on December 15. AIM was the first mainstream instant messaging service, and it’s hard to imagine what social media culture would look like today without its prelapsarian predecessor leading the way. It’s also hard to imagine that AIM has sat accumulating dust on the interwebs for the last 10 years, waiting for preteens to come back and flirt in its shadows. The little yellow running man must have been getting lonely. Do you remember your username? The Indy’s was xDolphinGirl24601x. Back then, we didn’t have “personal brands,” we just had our favorite things (for example, the Indy’s favorite things were dolphins and the soundtrack from Les Misérables). Do you remember the song lyrics you pasted into your away message? “I’ll spread my wings and I’ll learn how to fly, I’ll do what it takes till I touch the sky?” “Got me hoping you’ll page me right now, your kiss got me hoping you’ll save me right now?” “It’s time to try defying gravity?” We didn’t know it then, but the rhythms of our lives were changing, and the conceptual line between speech and writing was blurring like your ninth grade smoky eye makeup. Do you remember the sound bite of a squeaky shutting door every time someone logged off? It was as though we were all in a room together, constructing our own worlds within that room, like the giant convention center where American Idol contestants wait around before the first auditions. We experimented with abbreviations (“lylas” has unfortunately fallen out of fashion), phonetics (there was always that one person in your buddy list who spelled “cool” as “kewl”) and, of course, the passive-aggressive nature of certain punctuation marks. In the spirit of AIM, we’ll end this brief eulogy with some words of wisdom from a 2003 Hilary Duff hit that may or may not have predicted the rise of Twitter: If it’s over let it go, and, Come tomorrow it will seem so yesterday So yesterday, so yesterday I’m just a bird that’s already flown away.

hacksaws, icepicks, first aid kits, portable toilets, camouflage gear, and a novel on avoiding zombie approach? Something like a doomsday prepper. ‘Preppers’ as they’re called within the survivalist community, are known for stockpiling food, weapons, and other survival gear that will ensure their survival when natural or man-made disaster strikes. Unlike survivalists who often adjust their lifestyle to suit the needs of the coming apocalypse, preppers carry on life as normal – all the while constructing bunkers and stockpiling survival supplies. Websites like DoomsdayPrep. com advertise the full suite of doomsday accessories, and blogs like “The Survival Mom” give readers advice on how to prepare with two young children and a house in American suburbia. Famous preppers like Reddit CEO Steve Huffman or former Yahoo executive Marvin Liao stock up on weapons—like guns and crossbows—and learn how to use them, if the food and water they’ve stockpiled doesn’t turn out to be enough to survive. And then there’s Joseph Badame of Medford, New Jersey. Badame and his wife Phyliss began prepping back in the 1970s, the Times Union reports. For close to one million dollars they installed kitchens, bathrooms, and a bomb shelter in their basement, and stockpiled survival books and canned food. They were, they likely believed, ready for anything. In 2005, Phyliss suffered a stroke that paralyzed her. Badame quit his job to care for her, and the couple put prepping on hold. In 2013 Phyliss died, and Badame was left with their fully-prepped basement and enormous debt. The bank wanted to foreclose his house. At an estate sale for his home, Badame met Victoria Martinez-Barber and her husband Anthony Barber. The couple was gathering money to send to their family in Puerto Rico, which was devastated by Hurricane Maria after it made landfall on September 20. When Badame met the couple and heard their story he showed them the 80 barrels of food he stockpiled over the years. Each barrel can feed 84 people for four months, or just Badame for 26,880 months (long past his death). Badame then gifted the barrels to the couple. As Badame told reporters: “Phyliss and I prepared all this for one group of people and it turns out it’s going to help another group of people.” In addition to the food, he also gave the couple $100 to help their family in Puerto Rico. The Badames’ years of prepping weren’t for naught. Cataclysm may be closer than we thought. Prep away. –JT Donate to Puerto Rico at unidosporpuertorico.com.

–AH PREPPED FOR DISASTER What do you get when you combine an underground bunker with two kitchen sinks, twenty years worth of canned food, at-home water purification systems, a bomb shelter, gas masks, hazmat suits, solar panels, knives, walkie-talkies, night vision goggles, water bags,

WEEK IN REVIEW

UNIDOS POR PUERTO RICO Puerto Rican efforts in Rhode Island after Hurricane Maria BY Mariela Pichardo ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN by Eliza Chen

Belen Florez’s phone wouldn’t stop ringing last Tuesday. Nearly every five minutes, the screen of the cordless phone of JP Foley Printing on Broad Street switched from grey to bright orange and whirred at top volume. While she attended customers at the front desk just across the threshold of her office, its sound filled the establishment, urgency ringing in each string of audio vibrations. For nearly three hours, Florez was on her feet, alternating between taking orders in the main lobby and talking trip logistics on the telephone in her office. As the vice president of the Puerto Rican Professional Association of Rhode Island (PRPARI), this day was like many she had spent over the last four weeks. However, as she prepared for the Association’s departure to Puerto Rico, there was no shortage of work to be done. Two days later, Florez along with PRPARI treasurer Edgar Moya and member Elizabeth Fernandez, flew to San Juan to distribute relief supplies to the people of Puerto Rico. PRPARI, which has quickly become the leader of Puerto Rican relief efforts in Rhode Island, immediately made it their mission to support Puerto Rico following the devastation of Hurricane Maria. Within just four days of Hurricane Maria, the founder and president of PRPARI, Ivette Solivan, organized the Association’s first donation drive and began planning subsequent events. Over mere weeks, the organization has hosted a series of donation drives to collect the island’s most needed items which include water bottles, flashlights, canned foods, and baby formula. Their work has inspired an outpouring of support for la isla del encanto and with the help of communities in both Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the Association has sent three shipping containers packed with food and goods to Puerto Rico. PRPARI emerged in November 2015 to increase both Puerto Rican visibility in Rhode Island and Puerto Rican involvement with the community. Solivan created the organization with the goal of returning “voice” to Rhode Island’s Puerto Rican community, who though present in the state since the 1920s, seemed to be largely absent from political and social life in Rhode Island. According to the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, an estimated 36,217 Puerto Ricans live in Rhode Island, accounting for at least one percent of all Puerto Ricans living in the United States. The Puerto Rican community, which makes up just under 3.4 percent of the Rhode Island population, however, is about 51.3 percent more likely to experience poverty than other

METRO

Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. and 41.7 percent more likely to experience poverty than those living on the island. By creating a network of Puerto Ricans within the US’s smallest state, the organization hopes to effect positive change for their community primarily by raising cultural awareness about their heritage, participating in politics, and encouraging entrepreneurship amongst Puerto Ricans. Over the course of nearly two years, the Association has brought together seven Boricuas apart from Florez and Solivan: Maria Garcia, Edgar Moya, Nestor Llanos, Grisel Lopez, and Maria L. Rivera, who all serve on the organization’s board of directors and have led its relief efforts. +++ During her interview with the Independent, Florez left to speak on the phone with a fellow member of the association talking last minute details of the trip. In her quick Spanish, Florez asked her colleague for confirmation that all members going on the trip had purchased their flights and knew the action plan following their arrival to San Juan, Puerto Rico on Thursday. The first of the shipping containers they’d sent over in late September was set to arrive the day before and their first course of action after touching ground in their native Borinquen would be to pay for the shipment and to begin unloading everything for distribution to the public. After hanging up the telephone Florez explained the many challenges of arranging such a large humanitarian trip, namely coordinating schedules and ensuring that all parties have received the proper information. She admitted that the anticipation of waiting for Thursday to arrive and not quite knowing what to expect in Puerto Rico, didn’t make planning any easier. “It’s exciting,” she said with a weak smile. “But I think everybody is a little bit nervous. We just don’t know what we’re going to find.” Pausing for a second, the vice president says slowly, almost as if reminding herself, “It’s not about us, it’s about our people, the people of Puerto Rico. It’s about those who need it most.” +++ Hurricane Maria, which was the strongest storm to hit the island in 80 years and the fifth-strongest storm ever

to hit the United States, has devastated la isla del encanto. Just two weeks after Hurricane Irma, the category 4 storm tore through Puerto Rico with winds recorded at 150 miles per hour and in some cases with over 20 inches of rain. The hurricane has severely damaged Puerto Rico’s infrastructure and electrical grid; in its wake it has left uprooted trees, washed away roads, and destroyed power lines. Many homes and businesses collapsed under the duress of the storm’s winds and islanders are scrambling to find shelter. Nearly a month after the hurricane, about 85 percent of the population remains without electricity and a third of the population without water. Despite the efforts of PRPARI and other organizations throughout the country, who have begun their own grassroots efforts to support Borinquen, the gravity of the situation in Puerto Rico seems to be lost on U.S. President Donald Trump. Last week, President Trump in his latest storm of tweets suggested that he would be removing federal relief workers from the island. As the last in a series of early morning tweets on October 12, Trump wrote, “We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. forever!” This message came just a day after the post-Maria death toll in Puerto Rico rose to 45 people. As of last week, it has increased to 48 and is expected to continue rising. Though the idea of removing US aid from Puerto Rico was unfathomable to many, few were shocked by the president’s comments. Just four days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, Trump tweeted about the island’s debt, writing, “...Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble...much of the Island was destroyed, with billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks which, sadly, must be dealt with.” The President ended his thread of tweets calling “food, water, and medical” the island’s top priorities, but his decision to focus on Borinquen’s debt rather than its dead and dying reveal his own. As emphasized by San Juan mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz in recent press conferences and interviews, President Trump’s inability to prioritize Puerto Rico will only continue to contribute to the island’s rising death toll. The President has been slow to act and has failed to provide the island with the level of support it requires. Hurricane Maria is perhaps the greatest indicator in recent history of Puerto Rico’s 21st century colonial

OCTOBER 20, 2017

status. Though other countries immediately showed an outpouring of support for Puerto Rico following the hurricane, sending shipments of water and food to the island in tons, the US delayed the process by failing to suspend the Merchant Act of 1920, otherwise known as the Jones Act. This legislation restricts the importation of goods into the island by all non-US ships. Shipments must first be sent to the US mainland and transferred to US ships in order to unload on the island. The Jones Act was temporarily waived after the government received major criticism on social media. However, it expired last Sunday and will not be renewed. +++ In the last four weeks since the natural disaster, PRPARI has held two large donation collection drives and inspired several smaller fundraising events. Just three days after Hurricane Maria hit, the association and radio station Latina 100.3 Providence held a radio marathon and collection drive at Armando’s Meat Market on Elmwood Avenue. While members of the organization collected goods and cash donations, Guatemalan radio jockey Gato Aroche reminded Rhode Islanders about the event between songs and encouraged them to make donations. In addition to taking donations at Armando’s, the Association worked in conjunction with Rosalinda Fashion in New Bedford, Massachussets and Reymond’s Brother Tailor & Laundromat in Providence and set up collection sites at both locations. From 8AM on Saturday, September 23 to 8PM that night, the members of the PRPARI waited with eager smiles to receive visitors with donations. The following weekend, the organization held a two-day Telethon and collection drive event with Telemundo Providence at Future Credit on Elmwood Avenue. The business is owned by the president of the PRPARI, Ivette Solivan, and serves as the headquarters for the organization. For this event, the organization again collected basic necessities and money for those living on the island. Telemundo Providence, which has been a large supporter of the organization’s efforts, televised the event and like Latina 100.3 Providence encouraged those at home to donate. Every few hours the association posted updates on their official Facebook page, for their followers. In each video they shouted, “Puerto Rico se

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

levanta.” Puerto Rico rises. The Elmwood neighborhood, which is today demarcated by Broad Street, Elmwood Avenue, and Interstate 95, is no stranger to Puerto Rican resiliency. In the 1920s, Rhode Island’s first Puerto Ricans arrived in Elmwood as migrant workers. From spring to late fall they cultivated and harvested Rhode Island farms, returning to Puerto Rico once they had completed their assignments. However, those who believed Rhode Island held more opportunities for them than Puerto Rico remained in Elmwood. The migrants’ initial attempts to settle in Providence failed due to the Puerto Ricans’ unfamiliarity with cold weather. However, within just a few years, a small population grew within Rhode Island’s capital. In her book, Latino History in Rhode Island, Marta Martinez, founder of Rhode Island Latino Arts, writes that following this initial settlement in Elmwood, there was an increase in Puerto Rican migration to Rhode Island. Following Elmwood, Rhode Island’s earliest Puerto Rican settlers migrated to Newport, Bristol, and South County, often to work in nurseries. Today, of the 36,217 Puerto Ricans living in Rhode Island, 32,310 live in Providence. To date, the PRPARI has raised nearly $20,000. The organization has placed its raised funds in a bank account called the Puerto Rico Hurricane Maria Relief Fund. In an effort to be as transparent as possible to contributors about the use of their donations, the association has posted pictures, totals, and receipts of each financial deposit on their Facebook page. While the association’s most recent efforts have centered Puerto Rico, in mid-September, PRPARI held a collection drive following Hurricane Harvey in solidarity with other Latinx groups in Rhode Island and the people of Texas. “When someone says there’s a drive because there’s a need, we go,” Florez said to the Independent. “We just go.”

proceeds will be donated to further Puerto Rican relief efforts. While Florez is disappointed with the federal government’s reluctance to support Puerto Rico in its time of need, she says the outpouring of support the association has received following the hurricane has been amazing. Numerous community members have contacted the association for tips on how they can help contribute to the relief efforts, and taken it upon themselves to start their own drives. While speaking to the Independent, two elementary school students, aged eight and 10, accompanied by their mother, arrived with a carload of goods for Puerto Rico. The young girls along with Florez carried boxes of diapers and bottles, among other items into Florez’s place of business. Before their departure, a tearyeyed Florez embraced their mother tightly, whispering her many thanks. “I’m going to take these on the plane with me to Puerto Rico, girls,” she said sniffling as she turned to the children. “Thank you so much for doing all this. You’re wonderful. We appreciate it. We really do.” Florez and her colleagues are expected to return to Providence on October 23. However, they say this is just the beginning of their efforts to help Puerto Rico recover. With the continued support of the Rhode Island community, Puerto Rico will rise once again.

MARIELA PICHARDO B’20 wants you to support the Puerto Rican Professional Association of Rhode Island’s efforts by donating at Federal Credit Union on Elmwood Avenue.

+++ Annually, the PRPARI organizes El Parrandon Navideno, a large fundraising Christmas party in which people eat traditional Puerto Rican dishes and dance to favorite songs from the island. This year’s festivities will be held at the Portuguese Club on December 15 in Cranston and entry will cost $65 per guest. The association has decided to dedicate the event to Puerto Rico and a portion of the

METRO

TREAT WITH RESPECT Paths towards recovery in Rhode Island's opioid epidemic

content warning: drug-related death, addiction Say you’re locked in a room with a glass of water. The water has a small amount of poison in it. Hours pass, then a day or two. Some may be able to resist their thirst for a time, but as dehydration begins to rear, most will go for the water, though they know it to be dangerous. This is the comparison Dr. Josiah Rich, a Professor at the Alpert Medical School, and Infectious Disease Specialist at Miriam Hospital, offers to describe the process of opioid withdrawal. As he told the Independent, “If you think that you’re going to die, you will do desperate things to survive.” Opioid withdrawal occurs when someone who has been regularly taking an opioid—either a prescription drug, like Vicodin or OxyContin, or an illicit one, like heroin—stops taking that drug. When opioids bind to receptors in the body, they alter the perception of pain, producing a pleasurable sensation instead. The brain begins to expect this feeling of pleasure, and stops producing as many of its own, naturally-occurring opioids. At the same time, the brain develops a tolerance for the drug, meaning that it requires more of the opioid to experience any sort of high. “Someone who uses regularly will no longer be using to get high, they will use to avoid withdrawal and craving,” Patricia Cioe, a professor in Brown’s Department of Behavior and Social Sciences, told the Independent. According to the American Addiction Center, withdrawal often begins with muscle aches, fever, insomnia, and high blood pressure. As it progresses, symptoms include nausea, diarrhea, and cravings. The brain is struggling to acclimate to the abrupt absence of opioids, and to regulate pain, which was previously altered. It is in this state of mind—this moment of neurological tailspin—that most low-level crimes related to opioid use occur, said Dr. Rich. The opioid crisis reveals the extent to which our criminal justice system prioritizes retribution over rehabilitation, and makes visible how we—as individuals and as communities—respond to basic human suffering. +++ With the third highest use of non-heroin opioids in the country in 2015, Rhode Island has been hit especially hard by the opioid crisis over the past decade. According to the state’s Department of Health, opioid overdose is the leading cause of accidental death, accounting for more fatalities each year than all homicides, suicides, and car accidents combined. Put simply, “every single community has been affected,” said Dr. Brandon Marshall, from the Brown School of Public Health, in an interview with the Independent. With this in mind, it is important to analyze the image of the typical opioid user painted by most national coverage: a younger to middle-aged white man. According to statistics from the Kaiser Family Foundation, of the 254 total opioid overdose deaths in Rhode Island in 2015, 210 were of “white, non-hispanic” individuals, 10 were of “black, non-hispanic” individuals, and 30 were of “hispanic” individuals. Although these statistics demonstrate that the majority of in-state opioid overdoses are of white people, one should not ignore the deaths of non-white Rhode Islanders by treating this as an exclusively white phenomenon. Close attention should be paid to how the different identities of an individual who uses opioids might impact their access to treatment, and their likelihood of seeking it. The portrayal of opioid use as a “white thing” is laden with racism, as Georgetown sociology professor

SCIENCE

Michael Eric Dyson explores in his recent book Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America. “White brothers and sisters have been medicalized in terms of their trauma and addiction,” Professor Dyson writes. “Black and brown people have been criminalized for their trauma and addiction.” As the New York Times has reported, the city faced a surge of heroin and crack use beginning in the 1970s. This use was largely pinned on communities of color, and then demonized as causing crime and handled with harsh mandatory-minimum laws. Addicts were treated as criminals; there was no effort to portray opioid dependency as a medical condition, requiring treatment rather than punishment. +++ In today’s epidemic, most people begin using opioids with a prescription for a pharmaceutical opioid—like Vicodin or Oxycodone—given to them by a doctor to manage pain. Prior to our current understanding of opioid dependency, most prescriptions did not include warnings about their addictive nature. This narrative of this ellision of their addictive nature can be traced to a short, oft-cited letter, entitled “Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics,” which was published in a 1980 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. The authors, Jane Porter and Dr. Hershel Jick, stated that, in their study of 11,882 patients, they found “the development of addiction...[to be] rare in medical patients with no history of addiction.” Following this publication, other studies were conducted—such as one by Dr. Russell Portenoy, with a test group of just 38 patients—and the incidence of addiction was found to be low. Simultaneously, as Professor Cioe explained, a new emphasis was placed on pain management. In 1996, the well-known painkiller OxyContin came on the market, from the company Purdue Pharma, and was advertised as having few lasting health complications. Purdue circulated 15,000 copies of the promotional video “I Got My Life Back” in doctor’s offices across the country. The video chronicled the success stories of six individuals taking OxyContin. Eleven years later, in 2007, three executives from Purdue faced criminal charges that they had misled doctors and patients in downplaying the addictive nature of their product. However, by this point the market was already flooded with narcotic painkillers. Purdue eventually released an “abuse deterrent” version of OxyContin, known as Targiniq ER. However, according to a study from the New England Journal of Medicine, 66 percent of patients who abused OxyContin had moved on to another opioid by the time Targiniq ER was approved. The most common choice was heroin, which is cheaper and more accessible. The same study indicates that no OxyContin abusers were deterred from their habit by the alternative. +++ A lot of stigma emerges from the refusal to understand addiction as a disease, which contradicts our increasing awareness about the genetic nature of addiction. That is to say, if you have a history of addiction in your family, you are genetically predisposed to it, just as someone might be predisposed to cancer. If a person with the right combination of genetics and circumstances is exposed to an opioid, they can quickly run into trouble, Dr. Rich explained to the Independent. He added that many who begin with a prescription say the drug genuinely helped alleviate their pain at first. For someone who has experienced chronic pain, this relief is

incredibly significant. The seeds are sown in this way: a patient who may have a genetic predisposition to addiction, coupled with pain, is given an opioid pharmaceutical by their doctor. The patient may recall the narrative, developed over the past 40 years by big companies like Purdue, that drugs like OxyContin help people regain control of their lives. They begin to take the painkiller, which helps at first, but soon experience the symptoms of substance use disorder. While this is of course not the case for every patient prescribed an opioid by their doctor, it is the case for thousands of Americans. These thousands face a world of misconceptions, and a criminal justice system that funnels individuals with substance use disorder into prisons rather than treatment centers. “If drug use was to truly be taken as a public health concern, personal possession of drugs would have to be decriminalized,” said Diego Arene-Morley, a recent Brown graduate who now works for RICares, a non-profit focused on creating a community for individuals affected by substance abuse disorder. As it currently stands, he added, police are called again and again to deal with the same group of people, with the same motivations—getting money for drugs. This cycle indicates how ill-equipped the police are in handling the issue. +++ In Rhode Island, to address increasing use and addiction rates in the state, Governor Gina Raimondo signed the Overdose Prevention and Intervention Action Plan in 2015. This initiative was co-written by many medical and community leaders, including Dr. Marshall and Jonathan Goyer, manager of the community recovery center Anchor MORE and statewide advocate for peer recovery programs. The initiative’s goal was to reduce deaths caused by opioid overdose by one third within three years by focusing on four major areas: prevention, rescue, treatment and recovery. In terms of prevention, a push was made to enroll 100 percent of in-state prescribers in the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program, a database that previously was not well utilized. Before prescribing an opioid, Rhode Island doctors must now consult the database to see if a patient has received any prescriptions from any other doctors. This, Goyer told the Independent, helps prevent “doctor shopping.” Another aim of the initiative was to increase the prescription and use of Naloxone, an opioid antagonist that, if administered quickly, can reverse an overdose. An overdose, explained Arene-Morley to the Independent, is a respiratory phenomenon that often results from mixing substances. Naloxone reverses the depressant effects on the user’s respiratory system by crowding out opioids and binding to the receptors in their place. Most opioid overdoses that occur today in Rhode Island are due to the presence of fentanyl, a synthetic compound that is used to cut other products, including heroin, said Dr. Marshall in an interview with the Independent. Fentanyl is cheap, easy to transport, and dangerously potent. If an individual takes their typical dose of a substance, and is unaware of the presence of fentanyl— even miniscule amounts—they can overdose within minutes. Dr. Marshall is currently leading a study in which he and his team have asked 90 participants to test their drugs for the presence of fentanyl, using special test strips, and to report back their findings. If participants do find traces of fentanyl present, Dr. Marshall has instructed them to either throw away the drugs, or to use cautiously, with a friend, who is trained to use Naloxone.

OCTOBER 20, 2017

BY Nora Gosselin ILLUSTRATION BY Shirley Lau DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

Many owe their lives to Naloxone, including Goyer, who overdosed in 2013, and was saved by a peer in recovery who had the drug on hand. In Rhode Island, Naloxone can be picked up at a pharmacy, without a prescription; the closest such pharmacy to College Hill is the CVS in Wayland Square. Naloxone comes as either a nasal spray, or an injectable, which a pharmacist can show you how to use. The Good Samaritan Overdose Prevention Act of 2016 legally protects anyone who administers Naloxone to an individual experiencing an overdose. The 2015 initiative also pushed to fund the outfitting of all police departments in state with the drug, although a handful of departments still do not supply their officers with it. This hesitation around using Naloxone, despite the funding and increased awareness, stems from the same conviction that criminalizes users by saying that they deserve whatever they get. +++ The second half of the 2015 initiative focused on treatment and recovery, areas in which understanding addiction as a disease is especially important. When addiction is taken as a judgment of an individual’s character, detox is the expected solution, which means suddenly going off opioids without medical treatment. “A lot of people think detox is treatment, and it’s not,” said Dr. Rich. “90 percent of the time [after detox] people relapse. If that’s your treatment, and it fails 90 percent of the time, you’re in trouble.” Dr. Rich is a major advocate for access to medically-assisted treatment in state, especially for incarcerated individuals. Medically-assisted treatment, or MAT, combines long-term counseling and the careful administration of drugs such as Methadone, Suboxone, and Vivitrol to help individuals resist cravings and take crucial steps towards recovery. There are important differences between the different MAT drugs. For example, Methadone, which makes the brain think the opioid is still present and alleviates some of the symptoms of withdrawal, can only be administered by a federally licensed clinic. Daily trips to the clinic can be an added burden in the recovery process. Suboxone, in comparison, can be prescribed by any licensed medical professional and picked up as an over-the-counter prescription, which is a major step in providing easier access to treatment.

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These drugs, though they have the potential to be abused, allow many in recovery to return to full, self-directed lives. However, according to a recent New York Times article, less than a third of “conventional drug treatment centers” in the country currently offer MAT. Even in Rhode Island, where the 2015 initiative pledged to expand access to medically-assisted treatment, Goyer reported that there is currently not enough long-term treatment available to residents. +++ Not everyone is ready to begin treatment, often due to traumatic past experiences with medical professionals. In these instances, harm reduction practices—which include everything from clean needle exchanges to supervised injection sites—can provide spaces that are, as Dr. Rich explained, “patient-centered and non-judgmental.” Harm reduction should not be viewed as opposed to MAT; rather, the two complement each other. Supervised injection sites are considered one of the more radical harm reduction practices, and, as of now, they mostly exist in literature alone. The aim of supervised injection sites is to provide safe, clean facilities where individuals can inject their drug of choice with the supervision of a team of medical professionals. This space lessens the odds of overdose and exposes users to non-threatening, supportive environments with the hopes

of opening the door to a discussion about MAT. Insite, in Vancouver, Canada, is the first legal injection site operating in North America. “There are people sitting at their own little booths,” said Dr. Rich, describing his visit to Insite. “[It’s] almost like a hair salon.” Nurses give out clean syringes and alcohol wipes. Other medical professionals talk with clients about possible treatment options; some go right upstairs and begin their treatment. Supervised injection sites, although promising, have a long way to go before they become established in Rhode Island. “I don’t think [they] would pass in Rhode Island, because of the conservative impulse that if you invite people to a place for safe use, more people will start using,” said Arene-Morley. Here again, stigma interferes with advances in opioid dependency treatment. +++ Our state and our country must recognize that opioid addiction is a disease that continues to be penalized as a choice. To right this wrong, the voices of peer recovery coaches and individuals with experience of substance abuse disorder must be centered in conversations about addiction. This means calling out the myths sold by major pharmaceutical companies, and being frank about how incapable our criminal justice system is of handling a public health situation. Medical care—not more cages— must be the path forward in the national approach to addiction.

NORA GOSSELIN B’19 thinks you should visit the interfaith memorial tree for the lives lost to overdose at Roger Williams Park Community Garden.

SCIENCE

EMERGING

BORDERS

Independence struggles in Kurdistan and Catalonia BY Neidin Hernandez ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

In the weeks leading up to the October 1 Catalonian vote on the region’s independence, tens of thousands of people flooded the streets of Barcelona protesting efforts by the Spanish government to suppress the referendum it had deemed illegal and unconstitutional. Clashes between protesters and the Spanish Civil Guards landed more than 850 injured people in the hospital. Meanwhile, in Iraq, the Kurds in the northwest region of the country were preparing for a September 25 referendum of their own on independence. Despite pressure from the Iraqi central government and international powers to call off the referendum, it proceeded without interference. Separated by a week, both the Kurdish referendum and the Catalonian referendum, which took place one week later, yielded a 90 percent vote in favor of independence, exacerbating hostilities with their respective parent countries and casting the future of each region into political uncertainty. Catalonia and Kurdistan have incited local anxiety and global controversy. Although their desires and grievances run parallel—alongside their lack of federal and international acceptance—the geopolitical and historical differences between these ethnic groups may chart divergent courses going forward. Catalonia and Iraqi Kurdistan, each of which possesses its own flag, parliament, and representative offices in countries abroad, have strong economies relative to the larger countries of which they are a part. Due to especially strong manufacturing and tourism sectors, Catalonia has become one of Spain’s wealthiest regions. It pays more to the Spanish government in taxes than it receives in federal funding. Economic frustrations have given rise to the secessionist cry “Madrid nos roba,” a call of protest against a system through which Catalonia subsidizes the less wealthy parts of Spain. Countries depend upon a system of wealth distribution throughout various regions within their borders, under the banner of a shared national identity, in order to promote economic cooperation and collective prosperity. Catalonian economic arguments in favor of independence, whereby more prosperous regions may secede in order to protect their own financial integrity, threaten the foundations of national economic cohesion around the world. While the rest of Iraq has struggled to recover from the 2003 US invasion, Kurdistan has experienced relative political stability and consistent economic growth, particularly since it took control of Kirkuk. Just outside of the city lies five oil reserve fields containing 40 percent of Iraq’s oil and six percent of the world’s total. Since 2014, the Kurdistan Regional Government has controlled three of the five oil fields and has been selling oil independently on the global market since 2015 in order to fund its state budget. Exxon Mobil and other multinational corporations are particularly invested in this region. Catalonian and Kurdish secession would result in the loss of the most economically productive region for Spain and Iraq respectively.

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Catalonia was granted semi-autonomous status by the 1978 Spanish constitution signed into law after the death of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco. During his time in power, Franco attempted to quell desires for Catalonian independence by suppressing its culture and outlawing the Catalonian language. On the other hand, histories of oppression have influenced the current situation in Kurdistan to a much greater degree. Under Saddam Hussein, the Kurds survived forcible displacement during the Arabization campaigns of the 1970s and an attempted genocide in 1988 in which 100,000 Kurds were killed. They secured constitutional recognition of an autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq by 2005. Current estimates place the total Kurdish population of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey anywhere between 25 and 35 million, making the Kurds the largest geographically concentrated ethnic group in the world without a nationstate. Historical oppression functions in vastly different ways in Catalonia and Kurdistan, but in both cases, past historical traumas of ethnic and linguistic marginalization informs the current fight for autonomy, a fact that many international organizations, such as the EU and UN, ignore in their quest for the geopolitical status quo. While international powers, including the United States and the European Union, have spoken out against Catalonian secession, the conflict has been deemed a domestic issue; foreign countries and other international institutions are thus reluctant to intervene. The issue has been complicated by Madrid’s militant response to the protests and referendum, which included firing of rubber bullets into groups of protesters, seizing of ballot boxes, and beating voters. The EU, concerned about its own destabilization in the wake of Brexit, never explicitly condemned the government’s police crackdown. On the other hand, international powers have been much more vocal and involved in trying to dissuade the Kurds from pursuing independence. Surrounding countries—including Iran, Turkey, and Syria—each have sizable Kurdish minorities and fear that secessionist efforts in Iraq would embolden the Kurds in their own countries to accelerate their own movements for autonomy. Turkey and Iran, which have a Kurdish minority of 20 percent and 10 percent respectively, have each conducted joint military exercises with Iraq along the Kurdistan border. Turkey, which has been working to quell a 33-year insurgency by the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, has been vocal about expressing discontent with the Kurds in Iraq and their efforts toward independence. Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to cut off the flow of the pipeline which runs from Kirkuk to the Turkish city of Ceyhan should Iraqi Kurdistan continue to push for independence. The US, fearing that the secession of the most prosperous and stable region of Iraq would fragment the country and undo years of US investment in ‘nation-building,’ has staunchly opposed Kurdish secessionist efforts. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson condemned the September 25 referendum, announcing in a statement that “the vote and the results lack legitimacy and we continue to support a united, federal, democratic, and prosperous Iraq.” A statement released by the White House warned that the referendum could distract from the war with ISIS by potentially embroiling Iraq in another military conflict. Rather than seeing the fight against ISIS as an inopportune moment for independence, the Kurds see their critical role in the US coalition as potential leverage for Western reception of their demands for their own nation-state.

In both situations, bottom-up nationalism from politically, economically, and culturally autonomous regions have been repressed in the interest of the state and foreign interests. However, while Catalonia has been viewed largely as a domestic Spanish issue, Kurdish independence has assumed an international significance. Beyond the legacy of the 2003 Iraq War, Kurdish independence operates within the historical context of genocide, imperialism, and the racism undergirding US military interventionism which has opposed self-determination in the Middle East. In a sense, an independent Kurdish state is a much stronger socio-political statement, considering legacies of Western supremacy, than Catalonian independence. Catalonian separatists are facing police violence and immense suppression from the Crown, but histories of foreign intervention and racial hierarchies influence the struggle in Kurdistan to a larger degree, making it an object of foreign interests and reducing the agency of local activists continuing the fight for autonomy. In the wake of the referenda, both Spain and Iraq have made efforts to take back control of the semi-autonomous regions that voted for independence. The government in Madrid is currently preparing to take control of Catalonia by invoking Article 155 of the country’s 1978 constitution, which will bring the region back under direct rule of the Spanish government. Methods could involve drastic measures including the declaration of martial law, the suspension of the Catalonian police force, and the prosecution of Catalan secessionist leaders. Two leaders of the separatist movement, Jordi Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart, have been taken into custody by the Spanish national court while under investigation for sedition. Their detention has sparked a new wave of protests by Catalonians calling for their release. Meanwhile, Iraqi soldiers and Kurdish Peshmerga forces entered into an armed standoff on October 14 over the oil rich province of Kirkuk, which, while not officially part of Iraqi Kurdistan, has been under Kurdish control since 2014 when Peshmerga forces reclaimed the territory from ISIS’s control. On October 16, Iraqi forces took back the region, leaving 30 dead and dozens wounded. While Iraq and the KRG may have narrowly avoided a civil war, it seems as though Kurdish and Catalan dreams of independence will have to wait. While Catalan President Puigdemont was desperate to bring Madrid to the negotiating table, his requests were denied. The Spanish government gave him a mid-October ultimatum to abandon plans for independence. While the futures of these two regions remain uncertain, the shared struggles of Kurdistan and Catalonia reveal the problem of simultaneously striving toward and rebelling against the fixed borders of a modern nation-state.

NEIDIN HERNANDEZ B’19 is invested in national self-determination.

OCTOBER 20, 2017

SOUND AND THEN FURY The azaan in the Islamophobic West BY Sheena Raza Faisal ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Robin Manley In a video posted on Twitter on September 13, White Woman A stares wide-eyed into her selfie-cam. The azaan plays loudly behind her, marking prayer time for the Muslims in the area. She mouths “What the fuck?” as a hijabi walks past her, then glances quickly behind to make sure the family has gone. She lifts her puffy black coat up to her eyes as if to crudely mimic a niqab, wiggling her eyebrows expressively. “What’s going on? This is Brooklyn!” she whispers, swiveling with the camera to show us her surroundings. The caption reads, “The intolerable & intrusive sound of #Islamic imperialism in Brooklyn, New York. I thought the USA was a #Secular nation…” 4,104 retweets. 7,136 likes. +++ The azaan, or call to prayer, is proclaimed from mosques five times a day, once for each of the five prayers that make up one of the main tenets of Islam. The content of the azaan announcement is quite utilitarian. I don’t speak Arabic so I cannot provide an exact translation, but here is the gist as I was taught it: God is the greatest, there is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet. Come to pray. In the old days before megaphones and microphones, the muezzin would climb to the highest point of the minaret five times a day, and perform the call to prayer at the top of their voice. At dawn, for fajr. At noon, for zuhr. In the afternoon, for asr. After sunset, for maghrib. At nightime, for isha. The first muezzin in recorded history was Bilal ibn Ribah, in Mecca at some point around 600 AD, long before even the minarets. So he walked through the town, calling out to the believers that it was time for prayer. They say he had a beautiful voice, chosen personally by the Prophet Muhammad himself. Bilal was from Abyssinia, and they say he did not know how to pronounce the Arabic letter ‫ ;ش‬he instead pronounced it as ‫س‬. Some argued that Bilal’s azaan was incorrect because of his mispronunciation, but the Prophet insisted that Bilal’s ‫ س‬sounds like ‫ ش‬in the hearing of Allah. In 1930, the mosques began installing loudspeakers the tops of minarets, so the muezzins now sit at a microphone five times a day to sing. They are chosen for good character but also for their singing voices, and the position often runs in families. Rahim Moazzen Zadeh Ardabili was featured on radio stations across Tehran in the 1940s. Ali Ahmed Mulla’s rendition sold thousands of tapes in the 1980s. My grandfather has two rows on his bookshelf dedicated to his favorite muezzin CDs. Even I, the type of Muslim who prays only in a crisis and who doesn’t speak enough Arabic to know what the azaan means without a Google translation, can say that it sounds beautiful. I don’t get to hear it much anymore. There are only two or three mosques in Providence, and the aesthetic homogeneity of New England’s architecture does not allow for minarets. +++ In a video posted on Twitter on September 18, White Woman B records a man perched on the boot of a yellow taxicab. He is kneeling on a prayer rug, head bowed and turned towards Mecca. As he stands up on the boot to finish his prayer, another cab advertising West Side Story drives past. Other New Yorkers walk past into the subway station, some turning to gawk. Her caption reads,

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

“I’m so ANGRY and SICKENED by This! THEY stop ANYWHERE and dare police to arrest them!! This is OUR country!” 1,785 retweets. 5,466 likes. +++ In recent years, countries across the world have been curbing the presence of the azaan. Germany, France, the UK, and many other European nations have either completely banned the azaan, or placed restrictions to limit the occurrence. This is part of a long legacy of legalized Islamophobia in Europe—France banned the niqab in 2011 and the burkini (modest swimwear) in 2016, Germany called for a similar ban in 2016, and just this year the European Court of Justice ruled that employers can ban their staff from wearing any kind of headscarf. Simultaneously, there has been a sharp increase of hate crimes that target Muslim women wearing the headscarf in London, Vienna, and Barcelona. Earlier this year, Israel’s legislative body approved a bill that bans the use of loudspeakers from religious establishments. This was widely inferred to be targeting mosques specifically, and as a protest a group of hackers took control of an Israeli news channel to play the azaan right in the middle of the evening broadcast. But even after protests, Israeli troops raided a Palestinian village that is close to the occupied West Bank to enforce the ban on speakers. In the US, not all mosques have the infrastructure, capability, or legal permission to broadcast the azaan even once a day, let alone five times. Most mosques only broadcast on Eid days, which occur twice a year. But the country is seeing regular spikes in hate crimes over the last two years, one of which occurred in June 2015 after Donald Trump announced his candidacy, and another that December after he proposed to indefinitely ban all Muslims from entering the country. A large number of these hate crimes target mosques specifically—85 bias incidents targeting mosques (including property damage, harassment, intimidating, and refusals to permit building) were recorded in the first half of this year alone. A mosque was burned down in Texas. A mosque was bombed during morning prayers in Minnesota. A mosque near Providence, my ‘nice liberal college town,’ was vandalized in DayGlo orange. With this vicious and calculated targeting of mosques and Islamic centers, I am surprised that muezzins still perform the azaan at all. Maybe this is my own fear talking—the fear that has followed me not just since Trump was elected, but long before, when I heard a white TSA agent pronounce my father’s name for the first time and mouth turned bitter. I cannot imagine ever being brave enough to climb the floors of a tower and sing out to a country spread out below that I know hates me, that I am here, come find me, I am here. +++ In the past two years, Islamophobia in the U.S. has grown to its highest intensity since the aftermath of 9/11. In this political climate of hatred, the azaan is an easy target for vitriol. It is loud, yes. If you are near one of the limited number of mosques that broadcast its call, it is hard to ignore. The sound fills the sky, tinny and echoing from the loudspeaker, suggesting some imagined chorus of singers hiding out of sight. It is an attention-grabbing

and unwavering display of Islam—we see this in the way it has been used as a form of protest in the past. So I am completely unsurprised to see that it has been adopted by Islamophobes to stand as evidence for the alleged intrusiveness of Islam. To even have to hear the presence of Muslims in one’s neighborhood is seen as an imposition, as “#Islamic imperialism.” The intolerance towards the azaan as a cultural symbol is a natural extension of the larger project of Islamophobia in this country. And all this, under the guise of #secularism, because the last thing we want is for one religious group to shove their beliefs down all our throats. So from the beginning of November to the beginning of January, the streets around me explode with red and gold and Christmas cheer and Nativity scenes. I live near a church with a very large bell, and the air is always ringing with the sound of copper against copper. And all the schools and offices and banks and even government buildings shut down, because it is the joy of Christ. Secularism is a wonderful word to throw around. Secularism means the government is separated from any and all religious forces, that it cannot force religious rule upon its people. It does not have much to do with controlling how private institutions or people carry out their religious practices. But when government policy and police forces and state institutions privilege one religious identity over all others, the word secularism begins to buckle under heat and warp to mean something very different. What secularism now means: ‘We have normalized the cultural power of white Christianity to such a degree that it is invisible, part of the landscape of this world. We aren’t intrusive, we are the default. Do you even know why the week ends on Sunday? You’ll have to email your professor to request special permission if you want a day off for one of your holy days. One nation, under one God. Now, you stick out like a sore thumb with your foreign religion and your strange language and your customs. We are quiet. You are invasive and unwelcome and much, much too loud.’ +++ I understand that in majority-Muslim countries the azaan may seem omnipresent, and holds a vastly different cultural and political significance. But I have never lived in a country that does not hate Muslims. The closest I came was one summer in Istanbul. The city was fasting, so before dinner my mother takes me for a walk in Eminonu. The sun began to set, and we waited for it in the growing cold. At the water’s edge, teenagers laughed with selfie-sticks and older men huddled around, smoking. We checked the time, but we knew it was coming soon. And then it started. First, a deep slow voice from the Süleymaniye Mosque, then another calling out from the New Mosque, and then from further away and softer the Rüstem Pasha Mosque. And joining in the chorus last, all the smaller mosques spread out over the city. The azaan rings out, and for once I know what it means. The prayer that is also a song. The song that is also a salve. The air grows thick with voices so strong that if I had only reached an arm out, they would have pulled me into the sky.

SHEENA RAZA FAISAL B’18 is looking for the words to sing fearlessly.

FEATURES

MT. HOPE IS POKANOKET BY Students and Alumni for Po Metacom Camp and the Progressive Student Organization ILLUSTRATION BY Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN BY Ashley Min The Independent received this joint statement by Students and Alumni for Po Metacom Camp (SAPMC) and the Providence chapter of the Progressive Student Organization (PSO-PVD) and are reprinting an abridged version here. For a link to the full, unedited statement, please visit our website at theindy.org. content warning: genocide, colonial violence

Part I: Introduction and Background On Sunday, August 20, members of the Pokanoket Nation established the Po Metacom Camp in order to hold and reclaim Potumtuk, their sacred land, also known as “Mt. Hope” or the “Mt. Hope lands.” About a month later, on September 21, the Pokanoket and Brown University signed an agreement that led to the closing of the Po Metacom Camp. The agreement signed by the tribe and by Brown is not the conclusion of this struggle by any means; rather, it is just one step in a longer process. While the Pokanoket Tribe has now officially ended their encampment, many of the details of the transfer of land to them have been left ambiguous. The amount of land Brown is willing to repatriate is yet to be determined and no clear timeframe has been established. While this agreement is a positive step in that it commits Brown to transfer some amount of land, we feel that the University’s requirement that the Pokanoket abandon their encampment is a clear expression of the University’s intention to continue business as usual. We cannot allow Brown to dictate the direction of these negotiations. We demand that Brown turn over all 375 acres of Potumtuk immediately. Mt. Hope is still Pokanoket land. As organizations that believe in the right for all oppressed nations to self determine their own future, PSO and SAPMC enthusiastically express our support for the Pokanoket Tribe of the Pokanoket Nation, who are fearlessly taking back what has always been theirs. Our goal is to reignite support for the Pokanoket Tribe among students and alumni, cutting through the fog of misinformation and distortion that have pacified support for the encampment. On the day the Po Metacom Camp was established, Brown University released a statement on their website commenting on the encampment. In it, the University states its support for the “right of individuals to assemble peaceably to express their views, provided that their actions do not infringe upon the rights of others… or interfere with the rights of others to take part in the activities of Brown’s academic community and campus life.” We categorically reject the University’s deceptive framing of this dispute as one between two parties with equally legitimate concerns. Brown University is an elite institution that rests on the exploitation of workers and nationally oppressed people. The Pokanoket Tribe is composed of dispossessed people who are taking back their land. These two interests are not equal and they should not be treated as such. The title that Brown claims to this land originates from a royal grant awarded by King Charles II of England to the Plymouth Colony following the massacre of Pokanoket and other indigenous people and the murder of Metacomet during King Phillip’s War by forces led by the British government. The land then passed through

METRO

the hands of English loyalists, slaveholders, prominent politicians, and industrialists, before a portion of it was donated to Brown. These are the origins and the legacy that Brown University claims when it asserts a “clear legal title” to this land. Brown’s hypocrisy in claiming to uphold “peaceful assembly” was exposed with its militarized response to the Pokanoket-led march on the university. On September 5, 2017, members of the Pokanoket Tribe and their indigenous and non-indigenous allies marched to Brown University to demand for the repatriation of Potumtuk to the Pokanokets. Although both the tribal leaders and their allies declared that it would be a peaceful march, they were met with the intimidation of armed patrols from both the Brown Department of Public Safety and the Providence Police Department. President Christina Paxson gave a rosy convocation speech on the Main Green about the peaceful exchange of ideas while a band of cops with guns at their holsters lined the Van Wickle Gates preventing Black and brown Pokanoket members from entering. When veteran organizers from Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE) and elders with disabilities from the Pokanoket Tribe tried to enter the main campus to get water and use the bathroom, they were denied entry by the officers, causing one elder to faint and be rushed to the hospital.

Part II: Debunking Brown’s “positive stewardship” In its August 20 statement, Brown University justified its claim to Potumtuk by claiming that Brown is a “positive steward” of the land. Yet when the Pokanoket started the camp, they found that under Brown’s stewardship, the trees were not being taken care of, there was trash on the shoreline, and several graves had been desecrated. Brown has a long history of treating this land as a disposable bargaining chip, with its tenure as a steward being marked by militarism, profiteering, environmental damage, and neglect. When the university received its first donation of Mount Hope property from the Haffenreffer family, much of it was quickly designated to be made into a housing development tentatively called “King Philip Farm.” By July of 1957, 15 housing units were ready for sale, and four to five hundred units were planned in total, each with a minimum sale price of $25,000. This translates to an expensive rate of roughly $200,000 per unit, accounting for inflation. In addition to Brown’s efforts to make a buck off of housing developments, the property was being used to facilitate US militarism during the Cold War. When Brown accepted the first donation from the Haffenreffer family in 1955, the land had already been selected by the US military as a site for a Nike Ajax missile installation, according to articles published by the Bristol Phoenix the following year. The US Army quickly moved into Bristol in 1956 to construct missile base PR-38. The Radar Control Area for this base was sited at the top of Mount Hope—a sacred site for the Pokanoket—on the property acquired by Brown University. Later, between 1959 and 1960, the missiles at PR-38 were upgraded to Hercules missiles, which were designed to carry nuclear warheads. This Cold War missile base was in operation until April 1974, when PR-38 was decommissioned and abandoned

by the Army. Following the decommissioning of the missile installation, the town of Bristol expressed interest in buying some of “Brown’s property” in order to convert it into recreational space. Brown pressed for the town to grant the university certain financial and political concessions, like paying for a sewer system covering the Mount Hope property and rezoning the entire property so that Brown would have the option to build condos on the land. In July of 1995, Brown University was cited by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (RIDEM) for having a deficient septic system that was leading to sewage runoff into the soil and water. After they couldn’t get the town of Bristol to pay for sewage system coverage back in the 1980s, Brown neglected the issue. However, because Brown didn’t want to pay the $25,000 for the necessary renovations, they resorted to tearing down one of the property’s historical buildings and evicting a museum employee on short notice. Following this incident, Brown announced that it was making plans to move the Haffenreffer Museum from Bristol to Providence starting in 1998. This initial plan was postponed and then abandoned for various reasons, including lack of funding. It wasn’t until 2007, after a new set of violations were uncovered (including the museum building’s noncompliance with the fire code, its poor environmental conditions, and Brown’s failure to bring it up to the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act) that Brown finally moved a portion of its collections to its Providence campus. Meanwhile, the tribe has been required to pay fees, get insurance waivers, and ask permission from Brown University through the Mount Hope Trust (an organization that Brown hired to manage the Mount Hope land) in order to use their land for sacred tribal ceremonies—a financial burden that has, for some members of the tribe, proven to be an insurmountable barrier. Even the executive director of the Trust Jennifer Bristol admitted that this policy was “awkward,” in a 2008 interview with the Bristol Phoenix. We would go further: to force indigenous people to pay fees, ask for permission, and go through regulations in order to access their own land and practice their religion has been an exploitative and racist practice designed to naturalize Brown’s unjust occupation.

Part III: On the Pokanoket being an “unrecognized tribe” On August 24, 2017, members from the Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) steering committee released a statement regarding the encampment, which was emailed to the entire Brown student body, faculty, and staff. In the statement, the Committee claimed not only that the Pokanoket are not recognized by the federal government, but also that they are not recognized by local “federally recognized tribes.” The next day, on August 25, Professor Adrienne Keene wrote an article on her blog, Native Appropriations, supporting the arguments by the NAIS steering committee against the legitimacy of the Pokanoket land claim. We want to respond in some detail to various claims regarding the Pokanokets’ nationhood status and their claims to Potumtuk. In many ways, this is the crux of the university’s ideological assault against the Pokanoket Tribe. Nationhood cannot be dismissed as an entirely

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subjective construct or reduced to a legal definition. While one cannot simply quantify and neatly categorize a nation, we believe that there are elements of lived experience, such as language, culture, connection to land, and economy, that mark the development of a group of people into a historically constituted nation. On the other hand, the federal system of national recognition, both in the US and elsewhere in the world, ignores and excludes various peoples from the category of “nation” whose histories and political legacies give them a clear basis to claim nationhood, and globally, most indigenous peoples are not recognized by federal governments. Furthermore, it is very possible for people to have lineage to multiple nations of people. For example, Black Cherokee Indians are on one hand indigenous, but also, because they are descendants of runaway enslaved people, have access and connections to the Black nation in the US. Thus, it is conceivable for someone to have Mashpee ancestry and also claim Pokanoket nationhood. NAIS elided this nuance in their statement: “However, according to historical records used by Mashpee for their language revitalization, the Pokanoket families were taken in by Mashpee after the war, and became a part of their community.” It continues: “There is a delicate yet important technical difference between holding Native ancestry and holding nation status, and that is at the heart of the issue here.” This passage implies that the Pokanoket dissolved into the Mashpee and stopped being a distinct tribe, a description of assimilation which is ahistorical, to say the least. During King Phillip’s War, the Pokanoket Nation, under the leadership of Metacomet, waged a heroic struggle against settler encroachment. The colonial government defeated them in battle and instituted a generalized climate of repression against indigenous people across the region, even targeting tribes that had sided with the English during the war (for example, the Natick Praying Indians). However, the Pokanoket Nation, as the group that had made a final stand against the colonists, faced the most brutal repression, with Pokanoket being brutally slaughtered and enslaved en masse. In this context of genocidal warfare, and with the colonial state criminalizing the existence of Pokanoket male captives above the age of 14, many Pokanoket families dispersed throughout the Northeast. Even if some of the Pokanoket had in fact been taken in by the Mashpee, this does not mean that they lost their lineage or were eliminated as a distinct nation. These arguments were further elaborated in an article by Professor Adrienne Keene in her blog post. Unlike NAIS, Professor Keene does acknowledge the history of dispossession related to federal recognition. However, she argued: “I can’t collect up my similarly dispossessed family members and start our own new nation—even if we have historic and community ties to an existing nation… dispossession doesn’t mean that one can form their own nation.” We strongly disagree with this argument, and we believe that the Pokanokets’ history of dispossession and current lack of federal recognition do not negate the validity of their claims to hold Native title to Potumtuk. They are not “forming their own nation,” they are an existing nation with a historical and cultural genealogy. Neither the NAIS statement nor Professor Keene’s article actually engage with the Pokanokets’ own claims to nation status using their own methods. In a statement

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published on September 6, the Pokanoket Tribe re-asserted their distinct lineage—which has been passed down in their oral tradition—in order to refute the claims that they had fully integrated into the Mashpee after King Philip’s War. They have maintained a distinct political structure, an oral tradition, and cultural practices. In addition, they have joined the Federation of Aboriginal Nations of America (FANA), a confederation of pre-colonial American Aborigine tribes and nations that are ancestral inhabitants to the lands known as the US. As FANA states in its August 24 response to Brown University, "all FANA member nations are required to demonstrate lineage and heritage that predates the occupation of the US." NAIS’s claim that the Pokanoket are unrecognized by other tribes is also misleading and false. The Pocasset Tribe in southern Massachusetts wrote in support of the Pokanoket encampment on August 27. The Pocasset are part of the Alliance of Colonial Era Tribes, an intertribal league of historic Aboriginal nations of the eastern and southern seaboard of the continental United States. The Alliance has played an important role in defending the rights of non-federally recognized tribes to maintain voting rights in the National Congress of American Indians. Finally, even if recognition by colonial institutions were to be taken as a barometer of legitimacy, the case is not so simple: the Pokanoket have been recognized by various US municipalities, including the town of Bristol. By ignoring the process used by the Pokanoket and by FANA, Brown and its supporters erase and ignore the legitimacy of indigenous methods of self-recognition.

Part IV: On the Pokanokets’ supposed antagonism toward other tribes After the first round of negotiations between Brown University and the Pokanoket collapsed, Brown University released a statement on August 31 in which they recognize the Pokanoket as a tribe, but blame them for the stalling of negotiations. Brown writes in this statement that the Pokanoket "are not concerned about the claims of other tribes and [are saying] that such claims are ‘totally wrong.’” According to the statement, Brown has been attempting to balance multiple indigenous group’s claim to the land “for years” by ensuring that “any Native person, including Pokanoket, can use the land for spiritual ceremonies or community needs.” Contrary to what Brown has claimed about the Pokanoket being unwilling to entertain and discuss with other tribes claims in the area, the Pokanoket have in fact repeatedly requested for Brown University to facilitate a meeting between all tribes claiming an interest in Potumtuk, according to a statement released on the Po Metacom Camp Facebook page. As of now, the only public statement on the encampment published by another local tribe was the aforementioned statement of support from the Pocasset Tribe. The Pokanoket have always been open to meeting with other tribes; Brown’s accusation that they have been unwilling to do this is a strategic fabrication meant to discredit the Pokanoket. True and concrete intertribal unity can only happen when indigenous nations are able to control the future of their land without the colonial interference of institutions like Brown.

Part V: Conclusion Following the signing of an agreement between Brown University and the Pokanoket Tribe on September 21, Brown released a statement congratulating itself for its “productive working relationships” with local indigenous nations and its commitment to “conservation, preservation, and sustainable access” to the land. Although Brown’s stated concern for ensuring that multiple tribes have access to this land may seem progressive, it insidiously reframes the issues at stake—decolonization and indigenous sovereignty—as too difficult, something better managed by a friendly colonial power that benevolently grants “access” to its indigenous subjects. Brown has never addressed the question of why it should have any agency over Potumtuk in the first place. However, for many students who are interested in supporting indigenous rights and decolonization, the tension between the Pokanoket and the other tribes has been a source of confusion that has led many to take a stance of neutrality or passivity when it comes to the encampment. These community members often frame their lack of support as an acknowledgment of their status as non-indigenous people, particularly in light of two prominent indigenous faculty members—Professors Elizabeth Hoover and Adrienne Keene—publicly refusing to support the encampment. If this neutrality is an attempt on the part of non-indigenous people at Brown to respect indigenous voices, it is a misapplied one. We feel that this narrow focus on prominent academic indigenous voices ignores and invalidates the broad base of indigenous support and organizing that went into developing this encampment. These efforts include the organizing of the Pokanoket themselves, the support of various tribes like the Pocasset and the Rappahannock who visited the encampment, and expressions of solidarity from indigenous communities on social media and in organizations like FANG, DARE, and PrYSM. In the face of this concrete attempt by the Pokanoket to repatriate their land from Brown, passively waiting in hopes of a perfect resistance—in which all the interested tribes present a unified, joint declaration to Brown—is tantamount to complicity in the University’s oppression. The Pokanoket, in initiating the encampment, have made the question of land into a public debate, calling for broad support against Brown in the name of indigenous rights. This is a declaration that non-indigenous people should take a side. To choose neutrality or passivity is to choose the status quo, to choose Brown, to choose colonialism. SAPMC is building a movement to support the immediate repatriation of all 375 acres of Potumtuk, using a combination of education and direct action. Contact us through our Facebook page or email us at sapemcee@gmail.com.

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EL PUEBLO UNIDO Lessons from the Chilean student movement BY Paula Pacheco Soto ILLUSTRATION BY Dorothy Windham DESIGN BY Ashley Min

content warning: police brutality

Santiago de Chile, 2013. I clearly remember the first time I was arrested: it was a day after the night our school had been evicted. A referendum among the student body days before had resulted in a toma, a takeover of the school as a form of protest. The night before, students were detained and beaten in the dark once the TV cameras were gone. The next day, we reconvened in an assembly which resulted in a second occupation. We decided to continue the takeover as an act of solidarity with our classmates who had been harmed. Two hundred and twenty-five students, most of us barely 16 years old, were arrested that day. The police station did not have enough space to hold us all, so we were kept for around 10 hours in a cage meant for motorcycle storage. Looking back, this punishment does not seem remotely as relevant as everything that led me to resist that day. I was dragged by two policewomen out of my school and the TV cameras recorded it all. I had seen police brutality before. I had the tear gas burn my eyes. I had ran from them in fear. I walked home soaking wet from the toxic water that the water cannon truck relentlessly shot at us. But I had also felt the adrenaline. I felt happiness, mixed with anger and conviction, as my friends and I walked down the main avenue singing protest chants. I felt a renewed understanding about my country's reality, about my family struggle, as I walked to the subway from school. The first time I spoke up in an assembly, my voice felt tremorous but strong to have found something to fight for. Something that felt like it was mine. That first arrest was no isolated incident. 2011 had seen the biggest wave of protest in Chile since the end of the dictatorship in 1990, and it was led entirely by high school and college students. I attended El Carmela, an all-girls public high school in Providencia, an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Chile’s capital. Like a few others, El Carmela was known as a path for low-income folks to access university, a beacon of social mobility. The nine-month-long occupation in 2011 shook the foundations of this system. Just like other prestigious institutions such as Instituto Nacional (the oldest secondary school in the country), and the main university, Universidad de Chile, El Carmela mobilized for a radical change in the mercantilist Chilean educational system. It had originally began with marches in early April 2011, when students and teachers gathered in Plaza Italia and marched down to the presidential palace. Similar acts took place across the country in a political process that dragged on until late November that year, and marches modeled around these actions continue today. Student federations led the marches, many of whose leaders became prominent political activists that year. While it may have seemed that little but our experience as students brought us together—marches were made of low, middle, and even high income folks of various ages— we were all unified under a single, structural demand: the constitutionally-guaranteed right to a universal education at all levels, based on a public, democratic, pluralistic, free, and efficacious system, oriented towards the needs of Chile and its peoples. It was the radicalism of this demand that turned us into a “doomed generation,” as posed by right-wing

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mayor Pedro Zabat back then. We were stubborn, confrontational, awake. While trying to battle the intransigence of our school’s administration, ordinary student council meetings turned into unauthorized assemblies of over a thousand students. Classes were disrupted by the need to respond to our country’s political moment. We improvised teach-ins on the Constitution and education policy. We discussed our own solutions and wrote our own petitions to the municipality. But the government was not listening. And the more we learned, the angrier we became. La toma was the most radical method for stating our demands. It meant a disruption of the system that could not be overlooked by the authorities. As schools are funded proportionally to student attendance, a takeover of school activities put dirct pressure on the municipality to respond by freezing government funding. The hope was that this message would translate into authorities pressuring the government to act.

Y va a caer, Y va a caer, la educación de Pinochet In April 2011, a delay on government scholarships left hundreds of low-income students food-insecure and unable to pay tuition. The student protests began with a statement from the Chilean Student Confederation (CONFECH) responding to this issue. But almost overnight, what started as a narrow protest spread across the nation, gathering the Chilean people behind three main demands: high-quality free education, de-municipalization of secondary schools, and an end to the for-profit education system. “The theories of Milton Friedman gave him the Nobel Prize; they gave Chile General Pinochet,” says Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano. The rise of the Unidad Popular in 1969 was a political breakthrough for the Chilean people. The UP was a leftist coalition that proposed a proletariat struggle through institutional change, and that successfully established the first democratically-elected socialist government led by Salvador Allende in 1970. This political revolution was short-lived, particularly under President Nixon’s orders to undermine the economic progress of Chile during Allende's leadership. On September 11, 1973, Chilean armed forces (supported by the CIA) bombarded the presidential palace, ushering a military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet that lasted until 1990. Reports suggest that this violent repression tortured and incarcerated 28,259 Chileans, assassinated 2,298, and disappeared 1,209. Of those disappeared, only 104 have been found and identified. Before the transition to democracy after the 1988 plebiscite, Pinochet had successfully implemented a new Constitution, which carved a path for a new free-market economy and an amnesty law, both of which remain today. He held a seat in parliament for four years after the return to democracy, and died in 2006, unpunished. In Chile, a free-market approach rules the education system—as it does for everything else. While often praised as an economic miracle by the international media, Chile’s economic growth has been sustained by the violent policies imposed in the 1980s under the military dictatorship. Economic reforms enacted by the Pinochet regime—under instruction of US economist Milton Friedman—privatized natural resources, including water, as well as the educational, health, and pension system

to a degree unseen anywhere else in the world. This dynamic remained largely unchanged through the aided democratic transition of the 1990s. The recent student movements, led by the grandchildren of the dictatorship, have unraveled a crisis of legitimacy within this inherited undemocratic political system, unconcerned with the demands of the people. +++ Chile’s rate of income inequality is one of the highest in the world, and the education system is this inequality’s backbone. The limited state involvement in the strengthening of public education deepens the inequalities every Chilean inherits from their families and the neighborhoods that they are born in. Public resources injected into education are distributed to public and private institutions alike. In this context, while private institutions’ enrollments increase, public institutions’ enrollments decrease proportionally, as the popularity of charter schools is boosted through the promise of better infrastructure and higher quality education. Public schools then are proportionally underfunded, directly affecting the learning and opportunities of the most vulnerable children and youth. Primary education, schools, and funds are administered by municipalities, creating a cycle where poor neighborhoods have the least access to quality instruction. This further draws middle income families into voucher programs and private schools. Public spending on higher education is among the lowest in the world at 0.5 percent of the country’s GDP. There is not a single public university in Chile, and the system allows for higher education institutions to profit without limits. These sky-rocketing costs and lack of quality in education translate into an almost 50 percent drop-out rate, particularly impacting first-generation and low income students. It was anger at this injustice that brought students into the streets. It was a duty to reclaim the hope our parents had lost decades earlier. As the movement dragged on, repression got worse. On days of protest, anyone wearing a black and white school uniform was targeted by police. There was tear gas attacks and beatings in Santiago’s main avenue, La Alameda, at least twice a month. Human rights abuses, particularly against high school students, were denounced by international organizations like Human Rights Watch and UNICEF. But it was clear that the students carried dreams larger than just their own. After two months of mobilization, 82 percent of the population supported the protests, while approval of the government was at 26 percent, a historical low.

La toma no se vende, se defiende It is not only the Chilean student movement's popularity that is exceptional.. The structures of political organizing that arose in 2011 marked a point of rupture within bipartisan politics. It was a time for street politics. It was a sixteen-year-old student, the spokespersons for the National Coordinator of Secondary Students (CONES), sitting at a table with the president, bargaining over education policy. It was people living inside schools and universities across the country, keeping the movement alive. It was turning the streets, public transport, any available space into a space for discussion and critique of this inherited political and economic system. More than appealing to a greater power, students

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throughout the country appealed to the solidarity of their peers and of the people. The movement needed to be resourceful because we were working with so little. As the intransigence of the government increased and its complicit media turned against us, our spaces were limited. During the nine months my school was occupied, the grey building became the hub for so much more than a petition on free, quality, universal education. It was a space for collective freedom. We had workshops on sexual health, indigenous medicine, and art techniques. We prepared for police brutality in the community. In the mornings there were assemblies to set the agenda for the day. Some folks were up before that making breakfast with whatever was left in the school’s kitchen, and to feed those who had slept over in the empty building the night before. The winter was unforgiving as we stood in the cold going over updates on the political climate: assemblies, arrests, threats, disagreements, events. We would set up committees to revise government policy, and edit the petition that was presented on behalf of the movement. We had people in charge of fundraising to

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sustain the occupation, as well as outreach, cultural, and security committees. I was a freshman back then and my politics were not yet solidified, but I didn’t need them to be in order to understand that this was a crucial moment for me and for the country. It was a process of claiming a dignity that we had never experienced before. As put by one student activist back then: “The issue is not just with education. It’s with politics, with the institutions, with the culture.” It felt like a generation asserting the sovereignty that had been stolen from us decades before. The communitarian nature of the student movement disrupted the ideas of guarded democracy and political unaccountability the dictatorship had forcibly built into the country. For months, it was a horizontal dialogue between the government and the students: from universities, as well as voucher and municipal schools across the country. Government policy proposals that were negotiated with representatives of the movement were brought into regional and local assemblies for discussion and evaluation. No political party was involved. This

was a reminder that democratic governance is meant to be a conversation between the people and their representatives. It is hard to translate this story into a different language. More than a cohesive historical moment, for me it is a feeling. I speak to my from classmate back then on the phone and she tells me: “Education is the place where we can understand ourselves as equals. 2011 was a thing because we made that happen.” PAULA PACHECO SOTO B’20 prefers street politics.

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AFTER WARHOL Expanding curating practices at the RISD Museum BY Marly Toledano ILLUSTRATION BY Eve O’Shea DESIGN BY Amos Jackson In contemporary depictions of museum, galleries are often conceived of as sterile spaces. Manicured white walls like those at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) come to mind. There is this sense of exclusivity; “Do Not Touch,” read the signs on the wall. The viewer gets the sense that high art is worthy of admiration, but only from behind the line on the floor. This archetypal image of the museum stems from the tradition of the ‘White Box,’ the popular style of displaying art in the 20th century. In creating these very impersonal, sparse interiors, museums focused the viewer’s attention on the works of art themselves. In the late 19th century, museums maintained an even stuffier model. During this time, the Académie des Beaux Arts worked with an established set of standards for which pieces would gain entrance into the acclaimed Paris Salon. Back then, the standards of high art were clear—only pieces that reflected their conservative tastes would have been displayed in the museum. When the Académie rejected the more radical works of artists like Manet and the early impressionists, those artists created an experimental salon—the Salon des Refusés. Suddenly, the works rejected by the establishment rose to the forefront of conversation in the art world. Viewers had a place to access landscapes that emphasized feeling over technical ability, or portraits that featured women in repose—content that hardly seems surprising today, but at the time transformed how people thought about art. From that point forward, the distinction between high art and low art, or good versus bad, has become more complicated. Without the same guidelines for technique and content, the museum still makes judgments about what a sensible collection of works looks like. And curators’ decisions about what to make visible to the general public guides society’s perception of ‘good art.’ The RISD Museum dismantled its 19th century salon-style main gallery only a year ago, but they preserve a hierarchal structure in the tradition of the White Box. In the changing curatorial practices at the RISD Museum, viewers encounter the museum’s struggle to balance consistency and its desire to keep pace with the fluctuating contemporary art world. Once in a while, museums like RISD’s take steps to intentionally critique conventional curating. The RISD Museum aims to do exactly that in an exhibition planned for the Fall of 2019. Raid the Icebox aims to take a novel approach to curating, but it is also within a tradition of experimentation—which began with a visit Andy Warhol made to Providence almost 50 years ago. +++ In 1969, RISD Museum Director Daniel Robbins took collectors Jean and Dominique de Menil for a tour of the RISD Museum’s storage. Walking through the series of disorganized rooms, Robbins expressed frustration with an extensive collection that remained hidden from visitors. The de Menils offered a suggestion: send an artist to do some digging. For the project, the de Menils recommended their friend, artist and socialite Andy Warhol. The results, known as Raid the Icebox, proved a blaring revolutionary display that reworked popular conceptions of the museum. The show, which ran between the fall of 1969 and spring of 1970, travelled from Rice University’s Institute for the Arts to the Isaac Delgado Museum in New Orleans before returning to the RISD Museum, the home of its featured works. Raid the Icebox has become known as the first exhibition curated by an artist, forming

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a foundation for similar projects today, Dominic Molon, Curator of Contemporary Art at the RISD Museum, told the Independent. Andy Warhol, widely known for his prints of soup cans and celebrities, did not fail to maintain his eccentric personality in his curatorial efforts. He found a painting by the acclaimed French painter Cézanne and announced he would prefer a fake. He proclaimed he detested “old art.” He chose to display works exactly as they had been stored, granted equal status to shelving and Seurat as art objects. Not only had Warhol chosen art that did not exactly belong in the Paris Salon, but he had organized it with the childish genius he became known for in the advent of pop art. There had been no historical precedent underlying Warhol’s qualifications for works to display. Many of the pieces he chose had been in storage for a reason, said Molon. “You had… great paintings by Cézanne next to… things that were being kept out of public view because they weren’t maybe critically very good or interesting,” he added. Andy Warhol liked the shoes on the RISD Museum’s storage shelves. He liked the sideways paintings and the harpsichords. And in the sculpture garden, he stated simply, “I want that tree.” Warhol did not have to comply with the image promoted by the larger museum. Raid the Icebox did not attempt any chronological display, any predetermined concept of canon, nor does it hesitate to echo the haphazardness of the storage rooms where Warhol found the pieces. There’s a fascination with lines and rows of anything that Warhol liked, without clear academic reasoning. At the time Raid the Icebox went up, the RISD Museum itself had become a point of controversy amongst students. The museum seemed to enforce the elitist tendencies of the art world by largely ignoring social issues. When they commissioned Andy Warhol to reimagine the display of the collection, they, in fact, perpetuated the very elitism that students took issue with. Although Robbins’ decision to host this artist-curated exhibit had been groundbreaking within the context of museology, the student reception reflected that their choice of art only reinforced the school’s failure to make space for people of color and different socioeconomic classes. As the exhibition roughly coincided with the shooting of unarmed Vietnam protesters at Kent State, “students and the world’s attention were elsewhere— not on a famous contemporary artist working in this collection,” said Sarah Ganz Blythe, Deputy Director of Exhibitions, Education, and Programs at the RISD Museum, in an interview with the Indy. Despite initial reactions, the show has since become known as a significant moment in the history of art. “Ever since then it’s been… a touchpoint for this idea of what does it mean when an institution allows an artist to curate from their collection” said Blythe. Since Raid the Icebox

first presented the concept of an artist acting as a curator in 1970, artist-curated exhibits have become commonplace in museums. The practice has been repeated by artists like Glenn Ligon, who curated the exhibition Blue Black at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis last month. “An artist curated exhibition can be freer,” said Blythe. “It’s allowed to…challenge conventions and normal practices and do the unexpected.” +++ Now, nearing the 50th anniversary of Raid the Icebox, the RISD Museum plans to rework the idea in a contemporary context. A team at the museum has invited 10 artists, including alumni, to come into museum storage and create a second iteration of the project in its original setting. The show will open in fall of 2019. The artists will rework the museum gallery by gallery through the spring of 2020. The project will not only impact the organization of the museum, but also give each artist an opportunity to engage with research that may impact their own work, Blythe said. In considering Raid the Icebox, she wonders “How can we constantly hold and cultivate and expand the number of voices within this place and the number of perspectives on the collection?”Artists invited to curate for the second Raid the Icebox include Adam Pendleton, Pablo Helguera, and Nicole Eisenman, a RISD grad. The artists involved in the second iteration of Raid the Icebox come from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines, exemplifying how the museum has changed in the past 50 years. The publication printed for the original exhibition, which has become a popular item for sale on Ebay, will be reprinted for the 50th anniversary of the event. In addition, the museum will develop a new publication documenting the upcoming exhibit. Blythe hopes that when the galleries curated by the 10 artists close in 2020, the legacy of revitalizing the museum through new and relevant voices will remain. In the first Raid the Icebox, the project with Warhol took steps to drastically shift the framework of museum practice, giving the individual artist space to personalize these institutions. His work, however, only impacted the very insular and often elitist field of museology. Hopefully RISD’s reimagining of Raid the Icebox will further the work that Warhol began and strive towards larger ideals of inclusion and conscious curation. MARLY TOLEDANO B’20 has an empty icebox.

OCTOBER 20, 2017

SPAGHETTI MASALA Learning (from) recipes

BY Pia Mileaf-Patel ILLUSTRATION BY Julie Benbassat DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

I’m planning to make a batch of dal this weekend. The fall weather in Providence makes me want to stir something over a stove. Dal: inexpensive, vegetarian, reheatable, easy. It also tastes great, with garam masala, turmeric, and cardamom pods to flavor earthy lentils. It is my Indian answer—the Patel part of me speaking—to how to feed yourself in college. I’ve cooked with my dad my whole life. I have an early memory of sitting on the kitchen counter next to a big pot on the stove filled with deep pink beet liquid. He’d remove the beets and grate them, then toss that with punchy olive oil, salty anchovies, and linguini for this magnificent, magenta pasta. He would hold up a spoon of the dark stain until it cooled enough for me to stick my toddler finger in and apply it like lipstick. Though he is Indian, he cooks mostly Italian food, which he learned both while in school in Italy, and later from my mom’s mom, a true Italian-American kitchen idol. I absorbed his recipes, but never learned them. My phone calls home are rooted in questions like “How long do I cook the onions?” and are met with answers like “Well, first of all, I use shallots.” Over the summer, my dad carved out an afternoon to teach me to make dal. It was what he ate most of his early-cooking years. “I’d make a batch and eat it for a week,” he told me. I make that dish a lot now, but I don’t always know where to source ingredients in Rhode Island supermarkets. I often drift reluctantly to the “ethnic foods” aisle. In a recent article on Epicurious, a prominent food and recipe website, questioning the position of the ethnic food aisle in a current American supermarket, the president and CEO of Goya revealed that the company relies on the existence of an ethnic foods section to ensure their products are placed in two locations of the supermarket—both by ingredient and by region. Goya, a grocery company based in Jersey City, offers 2,000 products including an impressive selection of canned and dried beans, some considered ethnic, some domestic, some indigenous to the US. In general, Goya’s products are grown within the US with a few imported exceptions like coconut water from Thailand, and yucca from Costa Rica. The example of double placement in supermarkets he offered was the potential for organic olive oil to be considered both “strange ethnic” and “nonethnic,” drawing on Goya’s roots as a Spanish importing company

METABOLICS

while trusting that many Americans today consider olive oil a kitchen staple. Therefore, Goya’s olive oil gets put in the ethnic aisle and the section with oils and condiments, getting twice as much shelf space as a comparable cooking oil without foreign connotations. It is also worth noting that supermarket-brand canned beans are slightly more expensive than the ‘ethnic’ version on offer, especially when offering low-sodium or ‘natural’ versions. This is not always the case, but it has even been noted anecdotally that the same canned beans from Goya will be more expensive in a vegetarian section of the store

than they are in an ethnic section. I buy chickpeas in the ethnic foods section of the Warwick Stop and Shop. I eat them on toast in a recipe which isn’t out of any one tradition, because I made it up. I also eat them in chana masala, an Indian stew that my Staten-Island-Sicilian-Catholic-Lower-East-SideJewish mother makes from a cookbook called American Masala by Suvir Saran, an Indian-American dude who was born in Delhi and now lives on a farm in Upstate New York. Masala means mixture, after all.

+++ In Providence, the food-filled Federal Hill neighborhood was established during an 1870s Irish Italian conflict. After the turn of the century and another wave of immigration from southern Italy, Federal Hill became the more formal “Little Italy” of Providence. Eventually, Little Italies across the US transitioned from ethnic enclaves to culinary, grocery destinations as the perception of Italian Americans were assimilated. In Federal Hill, I can get the right brand of roma tomatoes (my nonna would be horrified if I admitted I usually just buy them at any old supermarket). In Federal Hill, Constantino’s Italian specialty store is often referred to as “Venda Ravioli,” which is inscribed below the shop’s name on its green awning and roughly translates to “we sell ravioli.” Inside, there are several brilliant jars of Buddy Cianci brand marinara sauce, a testament to Providence’s Italian-American history. Constantino’s entices its customers with a huge glass case of Italian American specialty snacks: marinated beans, 20 types of olives, hanging salamis, cheese of all textures and origins, anchovies, sardines, garlic, parmesan—now part of a cuisine having a second fine dining renaissance. Garlic might be on every kitchen counter now, but anti-immigration articles and advertisements in the early 20th century condemned its consumption, claiming it was too spicy and therefore had the potential to increase sex drive to an unmanageable level. Garlic ended up as an unlucky vehicle for a condemnation of a people. Indian food is having its own restaurant renaissance, edging its way into American high-end dining for the first time. More expensive restaurants are transcending the connotation of greasy take-out that New York, my other home, has associated with Indian food. Indian Accent, a spin-off of Delhi’s hottest reservation, opened in The Parker Meridian Hotel in midtown Manhattan with a $120 tasting menu, and an $85 wine pairing to match. Curry will always be deliciously un-photogenic, but we are learning that you can use tweezers to put Indian food on a plate as well as you can French food. By no means will a handful of expensive Indian restaurants in cosmopolitan areas erase the long-standing disrespect of Indian food in the US, or its perception as quick and unhealthy. Why, then, do we have such a

OCTOBER 20, 2017

double standard about “ethnic foods?” We want to enjoy them, and have accessible authentic versions, but we don’t want to spend enough money to allow chefs from marginalized traditions to achieve that level of authenticity. Krishnendu Ray, the chair of NYU’s food studies program, said in an interview with NPR that “Our culinary hunt for ‘authentic ethnic’ food can be a doubleedged sword.” He elaborated that our idea of authenticity from a celebrated French chef is “his signature,” and considered worth the entrance price—authentic fine dining is an art. For ethnic food, however, we have specific, myopic expectations of what authenticity should taste like, and we don’t want to pay. +++ I don’t have fresh fenugreek leaves in my kitchen, but baby spinach will match the texture if I want to make something resembling methi chicken. Smoked bacon usually stands in for salt-cured pancetta when I make pasta—and in certain dishes, although untraditional, I prefer it. Many dishes we would consider authentically Italian, or Indian were invented this way. Not to mention, the cost that importing fenugreek and location-specific ingredients in general would make it impossible to have any foreign food in the US. Perhaps that is why the most authentic—in the sense of being prepared verbatim to the original recipe—Indian food is found at such impressively fancy restaurants. In Providence, there are four Indian restaurants I know that can curb your take-out cravings: Kabob and Curry on Thayer Street, India on Hope Street, Not Just Snacks (also on Hope Street), and Taste of India on Wickenden Street. Not one of these restaurants, however, offers food from just one region. India has disparate geographical traditions that are actualized in region-specific cooking, often influenced by religion and terrain. For example, Gujarati food is mostly vegetarian while Mughlai dishes, descended from the wealthy, Northern, Muslim Mogul Empire, feature meat (chicken and lamb) and many more spices, as well as breads commonly associated with Indian food, like naan. Goan food is fishheavy due to Goa’s proximity to the ocean, and eaten with rice. Their curries are often coconut-based, and in a Goan restaurant, you might even find pork due to the area’s Portuguese and Burmese immigrant population. At Kabob and Curry, you can get a dish with a dollop of fish curry (Goan), a smattering of chana masala (Gujarati), and some chicken tikka masala (which was invented in the UK and is still super delicious). This plate can all too easily be scarfed down without one thought about how its geographically transcending scoops over basmati rice

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

map out the British imperialist unification of India. The Indian food I cook at home differs from food in India as much as it differs from something from the 24/7 Indian take-away counter around the corner from my parents’ apartment. Similarly, the Italian food I make myself differs from the Sicilian-American dishes my grandmother prepares at holidays as much as it differs from a traditional Neapolitan pizza. But in cooking myself dinner, I do not take on the responsibility of publicity and exposure. Andy Ricker, on the other hand, has received public criticism for cooking food that is not his at his restaurant Pok Pok—a well-reviewed, upscale Thai restaurant with locations in Brooklyn and Portland, which prides itself on importing ingredients and respecting recipes Ricker was taught while conducting research in Thailand. He has also been defended publicly by several chefs of color, like David Chang, who own restaurants comparable in status to Pok Pok. There seems to be more leeway regarding adaptation in the food industry, but no consensus. Jonathan Gold, a restaurant critic at the Los Angeles Times, concluded his review of the Noma pop-up in Tulum, Mexico (a new project by the chef of Noma in Copenhagen, which is considered by many to be the best restaurant in the world) with the sentence, “Beauty and conflict are often intertwined.” Chefs don’t simply prepare recipes; they also imbue them with their signature style and personality. The means to research a cuisine, practice a signature, and select an experience to present elaborately require an amount of privilege. The question lies in adaptation: it is a different scenario when considering who is allowed to adapt a cuisine and not simply prepare it. Personally, I would bristle at an Indian restaurant menu including beef by a non-Indian chef. An identical menu dreamed up by an Indian chef seems cool and innovative—almost punk rock, rejecting tradition. Italian food, on the other hand, is cooked and adapted by Americans from many backgrounds with few objections. The CEO of Darden Restaurants, which owns Olive Garden (the fast-casual beacon of Italian food to most states across the US), is a bald white dude named Gene. There seem to be no objections to cooks of all backgrounds cooking Italian food in a corporate sprawl. That being said, nobody is trying to convince the American public that Olive Garden is authentic by any means. Adapting Italian food as a non-Italian chef is a non-issue compared to adapting cuisines considered ethnic. Perhaps because adapting Italian food now doesn’t take creative license and artistic credibility away from immigrants preparing their own food. David Bouhadana notoriously co-opts tradition at his restaurant, Sushi by Bou. Bouhadana, who is white, trained with sushi chefs

in Japan for three years and was considered an expert on preparing traditional omakase meals New York—that is, until he was repeatedly caught mocking a Japanese accent to customers at his sushi bar. His restaurant is still open, but was condemned by reigning food media, including Vox’s site, Eater, which ran the article “David Bouhadana Has a Problem, and We Need To Talk About It” earlier this year, condemning such extreme racism in the food industry as well as his own racist practices. A few summers ago in Wellfleet, Massachusetts— where foreign food means fish tacos after mini-golf at Arnold’s Clam Shack—my father was making tomato sauce when a neighbor came by, chatted, and then commented on the smell spreading to his own cottage. “We really don’t like your food,” he said. Too spicy. He’d mistaken garlic browning in olive oil for cumin and coriander, stuff often hated on principle, but not by virtue of its taste—cumin isn’t strange when it shows up in Paula Deen’s chocolate chili recipe. My calm father offered him a bowl of spaghetti and refrained from having a fit about racism. Not today. Tonight, frankly, I have not assembled a dinner. I had half a mozzarella stick. I’ll probably have an apple later, and maybe there’s some more cheese around. (Perhaps eating solid meals and writing on a deadline do not go hand in hand for me). My parents worry that I eat like this all the time and sent me back to school last weekend with a three-pound jar of stewed eggplant—caponata— my dad had cooked. I teased them, defended my pseudo-independence, but I am not-so-secretly stoked about the eggplant. While I’m learning to cook the way my parents taught me, and melting it into my own style and habits, there is nothing better than when someone makes food for you.

PIA MILEAF-PATEL B’20 wants to teach you how to make dal.

METABOLICS

READING COMPREHENSION Inspired by Arundhati Roy

BY Kasturi Pananjady DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

content warning: sexual harassment A Note to a Safety Presentation by a Commissariat de Police de Paris If you are being stalked or harassed by anyone who looks like they could be from the same racial community as you, Parisians will likely assume you are together and will go out of their way not to intervene, even if you are visibly uncomfortable and trying to catch the eye of anyone else in the carriage. If this happens to you, it turns out that the recommended course of action is to approach a French person, state loudly and clearly that you are uncomfortable with stalking and harassment, and ask to be escorted to the nearest conductor or gendarme. Free response: Is Kasturi Pananjady telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? (150 words) Did Kasturi Pananjady wear something revealing? a) Yes. b) No. One star: Americans, don’t buy oeuf-fromage crepes from Sherlock Holmes (even if they are cheap). He kept asking my friend questions (“Hey you, yes, you—are you Indian? Tamil?”) and didn’t pay enough attention to a) the structural integrity of the crepe or b) whether he had found the optimal oeuf-fromage ratio. I don’t know where his mind was (“Allow me to use this information to correctly deduce your caste, subcaste, socioeconomic class and religious sub-denomination”). But I know his heart certainly wasn’t into making those crepes. Did Kasturi Pananjady wear something revealing? a) Yes. b) No. A Barebones Re-Enactment of the Pananjady Family WhatsApp Group, Featuring the Worst Stage Directions in the World MOTHER shares a photo of Dussherra celebrations. FATHER-OF-MINE launches into a slightly unprovoked and tangential feminist rant about the way Indian women are portrayed in Hindu mythology, which sounds like something his daughter would say, and in fact, probably did say once. MOTHER: (wry bemusement, mild annoyance). Using the information above, answer the following question for the benefit of Parisian well-wishers: Is a young woman being followed on a train by men normal in Indian culture? a) Yes. b) No. A Screenshot of a To-Do List -Do laundry -Groceries • From Gare du Nord: dal, turmeric, coriander, mustard seeds • Instead, from Carrefour: penne, tomatoes, basil, broccoli Does Kasturi Pananjady hate Indian people? a) Don’t all non-resident Indians? b) Don’t all resident Indians? ‘The Way Things Were,’ Aatish Taseer “This attitude—his aloofness—made him for all the wrong reasons attractive to people of a certain class in India. They

LITERARY

confused his distance... with their own deracination... The members of this class, who were already set apart from the rest of the country by the loss of language, by privilege, of course, and by what had come to seem almost like racial differences, had no desire to shed their distinctiveness. They clung to it, in fact, wanting nothing so much as to remain inviolable and distinct, foreigners in their own country. “And yet—strange as it must seem—they had a corresponding desire to make a great show of their Indianness... To throw in the odd precious word of Hindustani, to upstage their social rivals with a little bit of exotica so obscure that no one could be expected to know it. India was their supreme affectation!”

A French history student at a party lets loose a bark as he tries to explain the expression ‘C’est comme le chinois pour moi’ (It’s like Chinese to me), but it turns out that he also knows a surprising amount about the 1962 Indo-China war. An Indian comparative literature student on an American exchange program in Paris tells him about the Doklam standoff from two months ago and the interview she transcribed for a newspaper about how it all went down, and for the first time since she came to Paris, she doesn’t feel like she’s pimping herself—or her country—out when asked to talk about India.

Is Aatish Taseer talking about himself? a) Who is Aatish Taseer? He has a column in the New York Times, but that might not actually answer your question. b) Yes. Or a version of himself that he once was. c) No, he’s talking about the class of person he grew up with. Which at once implicates him and does not. It’s complicated. d) He isn’t talking at all.

How many great stories start that way? a) Whoa there, kid. b) Probably none. c) That isn’t even really a title.

Could Aatish Taseer also just possibly be talking about Kasturi Pananjady, who is decidedly not from the class of person he grew up with? a) He isn’t talking at all. The Time a Mildly Curious Kamila Shamsie Let Another Desi Woman in Paris with an Odd Accent Keep Her Story to Herself HOME FIRE Shakespeare and Company Kilometre Zero Paris For Swathi, All the best. Kamila Shamsie • Thank you. Goodnight. • Thank you for coming. Why is it important to walk away feeling like one hasn’t bared one’s soul? a) Because no one wants to deal with that. b) It allows one to entertain the possibility that one is more interesting than one really is, which makes it so easy to be alone and not lonely. c) What soul? How to Order in an Indian Restaurant as a Strasbourgeois • Could I have chai, and a lesson from the young lady seated next to me on what constitutes moksha (salvation is such a poor translation) according to the Bhagavad Gita—the lady who appears to be Indian, and might have read an illustrated comic book version of the Gita when twelve, and perhaps took an 800 level course in the Classics department at Brown and read maybe 55 percent of the commentaries and understood far fewer—who, more importantly is Indian? You don’t even care to venture an opinion? How about if I put my hand on your shoulder again? How disappointing. Why would Kasturi Pananjady go to Strasbourg and eat Indian food in the first place? a) Look, the heart wants what it wants. b) She forgot to pack MTR Ready-to-Eat Bisibelebath Mix. c) There’s nothing in the Gita that says you can’t. Take my word for it.

Kailash Éditions: Open Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays For a French Sanskritist to talk about the pain of feeling alienated from one’s mother tongue and everything that comes with that when one studies (in) another language for a living—what living, pfffff! can you eat paper?—and what he would give to be taking French literature classes at the Sorbonne too—it’s important to go back, when you can So come again come again come again How will Kasturi Pananjady feel every time she doesn’t stop to look up a word this semester? a) Very guilty b) Somewhat guilty c) Completely indifferent d) Somewhat fine e) Very fine Glossary of terms • shaayar (Urdu): poet; not necessarily a profession so much as a sensibility. • beta (Hindi): son, child, little one. • Ways to sign off in French: • À toute de suite!: See you very, very soon. • À tout à l’heure!: See you very soon. • À bientôt!: See you soon. • Au revoir: Until we see each other again, whenever that is. About the shaayar He stands by the metro Saint-Germain-des-Prés and exhibits his work on the park grill. In three different languages, he sketches out a life, perhaps not in the right chronological order—rubbing shoulders with Kaifi Azmi in some fancy Mumbai literati joint, marrying a Tamilian woman from Pondicherry, poring over doodles and verses that hang in homes that “Picasso will likely never enter,” receiving a signed letter from Anne Hidalgo urging artists like him to keep the morale of the city up after the 2015 terrorist attacks on Paris. He writes in French riddled with errors when he writes his own verse (occasionally other people correct them, beta). He shrugs when asked why he doesn’t stick to Urdu, the language of the Mohammed Rafi songs he hums to himself. (You tell him you can only write in English. So write in English, he says. You’re not satisfied, but he doesn’t pick up on your stiff body language when he punctuates his sentences by curling his fingers around your elbow every now and then, so you leave. Goodbye.) Extra credit rhetorical question But didn’t she actually mean au revoir?

OCTOBER 20, 2017

FRIDAY 10 ∫ 20 SACRED HARP SINGING SCHOOL

Aquinas Hall at Providence College 5 PM ————— Have you ever been to a Sacred Harp singing? This musical tradition is just about the most beautiful thing I have ever seen or heard. This event will include an hour of singing school for beginners, then a regular singing. If you go, you should request that someone lead a singing of the Sacred Harp tune “Green Street,” which is this List writer’s favorite song in the whole wide world! LIVE SCREENPRINTING

LIST !

AS220 7 PM ————— BYOB fabric/clothes/paper to screenprint onto. Designs include Ian Cozzens’ Black Lives Matter image, plus more.

THE HOROSCOPE ∫ CAPRICORN Good luck running away from change with this week’s new moon, ya fish-tailed goat! There are also like 3 planets other than the sun moving through Scorpio (the scariest sign) this week, and you are already so scared all the time! If only you knew how to cry ha ha... Since you’re going to be stuck and scared anyway, go to a haunted corn maze to try and make this scary week as fun as it’s going to be for you.

SATURDAY 10 ∫ 21 FALL VINTAGE BAZAAR

The Arcade Westminster Street 10 AM ————— I went to this one time and honestly thought everything was way too expensive and precious. Also something about the whole idea of the Arcade gives me the willies...might be the luxury microlofts overlooking the whole thing from the second floor. idk, maybe you will find the perfect sweater? Or you could just go to Thrift Bargains. HALLOWEEN IRON POUR

The Steel Yard 5 PM ————— $10 in advance, $15 day of The Iron Pour is a really special PVD tradition. Super spooky and cool. Money goes toward maintaining the Steel Yard’s facilities and programming, which are totally worth supporting, IMO. 14 YEAR ANNIVERSARY SALE

The Time Capsule Cranston All Day Sat. thru Wed. ————— Check out Cranston’s finest comics and record shop for a five-day-long sale. TRUNK OR TREAT

The Rustic Drive-In North Smithfield 5:30pm

————— The Rustic Tri-View Drive-In is Rhode Island’s only remaining drive-in movie theater! One time I saw a truly terrible movie there (the Alice in Wonderland sequel, in case u were wondering) but had a charming time anyway because I felt like I was in the 50s. On Saturday, kids 12 and under are invited to come in costume, and everyone else should bring candy to hand out before the movie (TBA) begins. A pro tip: you get charged per vehicle, so if you want to go, squeeze as many friends as possible into your car so you can split the entry fee among more people!

THE PRICE IS RIGHT LIVE

SUNDAY 10 ∫ 22

SOUND IDEAS: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SOUND, LIVE!

TUESDAY 10 ∫ 24

Providence Performing Arts Center 4 PM ————— Apparently The Price is Right is America’s longest-running game show. The facebook page for this event says: “If you enjoy the rush of emotions experienced while watching the show on television, just imagine the possibilities if you were actually in the audience watching it live!,” which is honestly just a pretty good reason to do stuff beyond your TV in general. NEW YORK DOG FILM FESTIVAL

Granoff Center Brown University 7 PM ————— “The World According to Sound” co-founders and hosts Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff bring their “spectacle entirely for the ears” to Providence. Again we might say: If you enjoy the rush of emotions experienced while watching hearing the show on television the radio, just imagine the possibilities if you were actually in the audience watching hearing it live! On Monday, the hosts will join several other podcasters for a panel discussion about radio.

BINGO, HOSTED BY THE LADY J

Aurora 8 PM $1 or FREE with a drink at the bar ————— I put this on the List the last time this happened, sort of skeptical about who it was for. Then like all my coolest friends went and had a great time! So you should too.

Haunted History Warwick Public Library 7 PM ————— A lecture about significant hauntings, ghost sightings, and other spooky events said to have occurred around New England, hosted by an organization called Ocean State Paranormal—which bills itself as “a specialized group of uniquely trained and highly dedicated investigators of paranormal and non-paranormal activity.”

WEDNESDAY 10 ∫ 25

The Cable Car Cinema and Cafe 3 PM ————— Wowow! “A celebration of the love between dogs and their people,” co-hosted by the Providence Animal Rescue League. Unclear if every movie is about a dog in New York, or what.

MONDAY 10 ∫ 23

THE LAST PROVIDENCE SYNTH PETTING ZOO

Aurora 5:30 PM ————— Play with synths, then hear music made by those same synths by people who know what they’re doing!

THURSDAY 10 ∫ 26

SPOOKY STATE HOUSE TREASURE HUNT

RI State House 5 PM ————— A Halloween-themed treasure hunt hosted by the RI Department of State. What?