The College Hill Independent Vol. 40 Issue 7

the VOLUME 40 ISSUE 7 10 APRIL 2020

HOLDING SPACE FOR UNCERTAINTY A conversation with writer Maggie Nelson

DOCUMENTING-IN-PLACE

CAGED LIVES

Dorothy Wordsworth, ruin-porn, and sensory ethnographies of the future

Revisiting the art of Tehching Hsieh during self-quarantine

theIndy Cover

Beach Tiles Katrina Wardhanna

News 02

Week in Wiping vs Washing Gemma Sack

Science+Tech 03

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From The Editors What does holding on look like when everyone’s so scared to touch? These days, my grip feels firm only on scraps, excerpts, bits, pieces. It’s like I can only think in parts— anything resembling a whole feels immense, insurmountable, impossible. Here are some fragments that I’ve recently received and held close.

Part of an online lecture last week I attended by artist Kara Walker:

Don’t panic. It’s hard. Take little bites. Little bites. Take little bites in the present. A little something.

Documenting-In-Place Tara Sharma

The sign-off from an email I received from writer George Saunders:

Metro

Shelter from the Storm Peder Schaefer

Stay well and, as important, stay happy as you can – that is a superpower that benefits everybody (he says preachingly after a day marked by several spates of crankiness).

From a note my professor sent to the class:

Gossip

Comrades Continued Ben C. Bienstock

I’ll leave you with this, heard live on a telecast Wednesday morning:

Features

Please also appreciate that not only are we winning the struggle ideologically, we are also winning it generationally.

The future of this country is with our ideas.

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Holding Space for Uncertainty Mia Pattillo & Mara Dolan

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White Terror Uwa Ede-Osifo

Shhh, if you listen, listen closely, you can hear its bones setting, like the sound of a new mountain after its last cough as a volcano. Shhhh.

Literary 11

Looking for Love in the Pleasurebot Years Jaime Serrato Marks

Arts 13

Caged Lives CJ Gan

Ephemera 17

Drifting Veronica Tucker

X 18

Food and Folk Art Weaving Sarah Surprise

MISSION STATEMENT

STAFF

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.

WEEK IN REVIEW Emily Rust | NEWS Anchita Dasgupta Peder Schaefer Tristan Harris | METRO Ricardo Gomez Miles Guggenheim Deb Marini | ARTS Zachary Barnes Eve O’Shea Isabelle Rea | FEATURES Audrey Buhain Mia Pattillo Nick Roblee-Strauss | SCIENCE + TECH Bilal Memon Izzi Olive Andy Rickert | LITERARY Catherine Habgood Star Su | EPHEMERA Liana Chaplainm Sindura Sriram | X Jacob Alabab-Moser Ethan Murakami | LIST Ella Comberg XingXing Shou Cate Turner | STAFF WRITERS Alana Baer Leela Berman Mara Cavallaro Uwa Ede-Osifo Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña Evie Hidysmith Kaela Hines Muram Ibrahim Anabelle Johnston Jennifer Katz Emma Kofman Evan Lincoln Zach Ngin Jorge Palacios Nell Salzman Issra Said Kion You | COPY EDITORS Josephine Bleakley Muskaan Garg Sarah Goldman Marina Hunt Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address Christine Huynh Seth Israel Thomas Patti Ella Spungen | DESIGN EDITORS Daniel Navratil these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, Ella Rosenblatt | DESIGNERS Anna Brinkhuis Amos Jackson Kathryn Li Katherine Sang | and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Eliza Macneal ILLUSTRATORS Sylvia Atwood Leslie Benavides Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Ryn Kang Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Pia Mileaf-Patel Claire The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to Schlaikjer Floria Tsui Veronica Tucker Katrina Wardhanna | BUSINESS Caín Yepez Abby Yuan make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing | WEB Ashley Kim | SOCIAL MEDIA Muskaan Garg | SENIOR EDITORS Ben Bienstock Ella process provides an internal structure for accountability, we Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Tara Sharma Tiara Sharma Cate Turner Wen Zhuang always welcome letters to the editor. | MANAGING EDITORS Matt Ishimaru Sara Van Horn Alex Westfall | MVP Ella Rosenblatt

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VOL 40 ISSUE 07

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

week in wiping vs washing

BY Gemma Sack ILLUSTRATION Leslie Benavides DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

OUR ANUSES, OURSELVES In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the last few weeks, Americans have begun to pay much greater attention to their personal hygiene habits. While health officials have primarily stressed the importance of rigorous handwashing, one unlikely orifice may become cleaner as a result of the pandemic: the anus. As anxious Americans prepare for indefinite self-isolation by stockpiling toilet paper and creating an apparent shortage, some are looking to another method of sanitizing the sphincter. (The Indy preemptively apologizes for the dirty language.)

Purveyors of bidets (the bowl-shaped bathroom fixture used to wash the anus, genitalia, and surrounding areas after defecation or sexual intercourse) have made unprecedented sales in recent weeks. Some companies have even seen their sales increase tenfold. “We’re having a Black Friday–like day every day,” said Tom Lotrecchiano, co-founder of a company that makes “luxury bidet seats,” in an interview with People. James Lin, owner of e-commerce site Bidet King, told Wired: “If you want to practice better hygiene and social distancing, getting a bidet sent to your home is a no-brainer.” (This Indy editor is not sponsored by the bidet lobby.)

Originating in 17th century France, the bidet derives its name from the French word for “pony,” evoking the straddling technique for proper usage. In the typical design, a jet propels a stream of water onto the dirty area and washes away the undesired matter.

When unwitting Americans encounter the elusive bidet in its natural habitat, observing its basin-like shape and lack of flushing mechanism, they often mistake the appliance for a urinal. But outside of the Land of Opportunity, bidets are actually quite common, used widely across parts of Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Several European countries even legally require that any bathroom with a toilet must also contain a bidet. In Japan, over 70 percent of households have a “Super Toilet,” an electronic toilet with a built-in bidet, whose features include water pressure and angle adjustment, blow dryers, heated seats, massagers, deodorizers, and music to muffle the sounds of defecation.

Despite the popularity of the pleasant wash, the U.S. stands defiant, asserting its self-reliance and refusing to give up its right to wipe with disposable tissue. For most of the nation’s history, Americans have used paper products to clean themselves after defecating. Like many cultural customs, Americans may have inherited this reluctance to rinse our rectums from the English, who had come across bidets in Parisian brothels, and therefore associated the appliances with the supposed licentiousness of the French. (The participation of English men in that licentiousness notwithstanding.) A proud streak of American Puritanism and the notorious black legend of French anal hygiene have thus resulted in contemporary Americans’ repudiation of the bidet—according to a 2016 study by plumbing manufacturer Kohler, 53 percent of Americans still refuse to use one.

Many retailers, both in-person and online, have been cleared out of their toilet paper supply. However, manufacturers are assuring consumers that the shortage is only temporary—supply chains, which are largely domestic, have not been significantly disrupted by the pandemic, and production will soon be able to be able to meet the increased demand.

But the apparent scarcity has already driven some Americans to extreme measures in their noble quest to wipe. One woman looking to stock up gave birth in the toilet paper aisle of a Walmart in Missouri. Residents

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of Newport, Oregon have been calling 911 when they run out of toilet paper, prompting the town’s police department to remind them via Facebook status, “We cannot bring you toilet paper,” and adding, “It’s hard to believe that we even have to post this.” Though the Newport Police Department did not proselytize the bidet, it did advise some alternatives: “[H]istory offers many other options for you in your time of need if you cannot find a roll of your favorite soft, ultra plush two-ply citrus scented tissue. Seamen used old rope and anchor lines soaked in salt water. Ancient Romans used a sea sponge on a stick, also soaked in salt water.

We are a coastal town. We have an abundance of salt water available.”

To anxious readers desperate for Charmin, the Indy has two reassurances: First, while many staple brands of toilet paper are still sold out or backordered on Amazon (at least as of April 8), novelty toilet paper printed with the likenesses of politicians of your choice is well-stocked. (Ethically-minded consumers might avoid Amazon if possible, but in these times, it may be the only option for some.) And second, in the extremely apt words of the Newport PD, “This too shall pass.”

But Americans’ steadfast loyalty to toilet paper might be biting us in the ass, hygienically speaking.

Many health professionals agree that bidets offer significant health and sanitary benefits over toilet paper— not only do they clean bacteria more effectively, but they also limit the spread of infectious disease through person-to-person transmission of fecal matter. Rose George, author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, advocates for bidet usage, explaining, “Using toilet paper to clean our anus makes as much sense as wiping yourself with a duster and imagining you’ve had a shower.”

Much like our fondness for toilet paper, the United States’ response to the coronavirus pandemic has revealed our nation’s exceptionalism, though perhaps not in the way the government might hope. In his March 24 press briefing, President Trump stressed his desire to handle this crisis “like an American”: “Our goal for the future must be to have American medicine for American patients, American supplies for American hospitals, and American equipment for our great American heroes.” He continued, “America will never be a supplicant nation.”

But Trump’s refusal to be a brown-noser—the Indy means no offense to the publication—by accepting dependence or guidance will have fatal consequences.

If we insist on doing things the American way, from wiping our anuses to slashing our social safety nets, we are condemning ourselves not only to dirty derrieres, but also to a much more perilous national health crisis.

So far, with a critical shortage of medical supplies, hospital beds, and tests; unparalleled economic inequality, racial segregation, and incarceration rates; and millions of Americans already uninsured and newly unemployed, health outcomes reveal that we are no better—and likely worse—prepared than other developed countries.

Meanwhile, in France, government wage subsidies have prevented mass unemployment; in South Korea, extensive testing and targeted quarantine efforts have significantly curtailed the spread of the virus. While correlation is certainly not causation, the Indy would like it to be known that bidets are very popular in both countries. In the coming days, weeks, and months, it seems like the United States will need a lesson in more than potty training.

—GS

WEEK IN REVIEW

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BY Tara Sharma ILLUSTRATION Eve O'Shea DESIGN Alex Westfall

DOCUMENTING-IN-PLACE DOROTHY WORDSWORTH, RUIN-PORN, AND A CALL FOR SENSORY ETHNOGRAPHY Between May of 1800 and January of 1803, while living and “objective”—that undergirds Romantic-era literain a cottage in England’s northwest Lake District, ture, let alone an entire imperial history contingent on Dorothy Wordsworth diligently kept a journal chroni- defining “nature” as inert and pastoral, offering itself cling the interactions of ecological actors in her sensory for extraction. radius: weather, trees, house, neighbor, animals, moon, Dorothy’s peopled terrain and experiential and brother, William—who, in 1822, sifted through her accounts can offer us something today as we navientries, tinkered with her prose, and published the gate the newest iteration of an old documentary trope, popular Guide through the District of the Lakes under surfacing as aesthetic reprieve throughout the internet his own name. Unlike most of her Romantic contempo- over the last few weeks: images of deserted cityscapes, raries, Dorothy wrote people into and out of her bucolic emptied commons typically brimming with human terrain, tangling the contours between the human and interaction, defamiliarized industrial expanses. These ecological. In language that slips between empiric and images both haunt and sooth, briefly offering visual lyric, she sketches her environment relationally, flat- breathing room amid the density of virus-related news tening material taxonomies into a continuous percep- updates and thinkpiece influx. Evading both human tual plane. She distilled a mass of sensory data into a subjects and human subjectivity, they sanitize the loss hybrid literary form—one that unravels conventional they depict. They allow an impossible glimpse into distinctions between poetic and ecological descriptive something that would disappear as soon as we stepped toolkits. These vocabularies, Dorothy suggests, have a inside of it: a landscape constructed by people, where lot in common. the people are nowhere to be found.

Overwhelmed by an excess of sensory information, a reader of Dorothy’s journals is left with little more to +++ do than piece together her environment through the tiny accretions of matter and incremental processes of The photo series perhaps mostly widely circulated change she lays bare in her notes. But despite her relent- in light of global lockdowns and social distancing less noticing, her style was always tightly controlled— mandates was one published by the New York Times an ‘objective,’ scientific tone that came to characterize on March 23, titled “The Great Empty.” In it, a dim her own subjectivity, rendered implicitly by describing theater in Moscow bears empty seats and a lone cellist what’s around her. The entries came to resemble some- on stage; a deserted Santa Monica beach reflects a thing like a poetic sketchbook, ecological language heavy golden hour; a masked attendant in an informacompressing and distending, scraps of sensory minu- tion booth glows beneath Bangkok’s green lamplights, tiae arranging and rearranging themselves into an alone. Though almost every photograph is punctuexterior account subtly suggestive of a rich interior life. ated by at least one human figure, the images call William combed through his sister’s notes ravenously, upon conventions of landscape paintings which have ascribing public-facing potential to what he perceived historically concealed any trace of human presence her language to be: feminized, amorphous matter in and perspective in an attempt to depict an unblemneed of an order-giving principle. “Dorothy stored her ished, Romantic “nature.” It’s an elision that is part of mood in prose,” Virginia Woolf wrote in an essay of the broader settler-colonial project of categorizing all criticism, “and later William came and bathed in it and matter as human or nonhuman, active or inert. made it into poetry.” He compressed her meandering In his recent Verso article, “The Deserted Cities of language into verse, manipulating her subjectivity the Heart,” Rob Horning identifies humans in these until it became something he could possess. virus-gutted cityscapes as “othered to themselves, But even in its nascent form, Dorothy’s journal becoming a species for remote observation.” The wide, holds its own. The journal works both microscopi- vignetted angles in the photo series point to a far-off cally and imaginatively, binding together bits and documentarian suspended above the plane of the pieces of sensory detail into something at once empir- human in the frame, rendering the occasional appearically precise and otherworldly. Typically ending ance of the species an intrusive, stark presence—one with dashes, not periods, her entries overlap into one that no longer belongs in the cityscape. In all of these another, working as what ecocritical scholar Kenneth photos, visual distance dilutes the emotional valences.

Cervelli calls “an ever-expanding whole”—an ecolog- Some are captured by drones; others, like those ical form mimicking the lively landscape in which she featured in a March 24 WIRED Magazine feature, by finds herself. The journal models a documentary appa- imaging satellites in space. “Immune to being objects ratus rooted in human subjectivity—where ecology in the world,” Horning writes, the detached documeets interiority, producing a reserve of sensory infor- mentarian not only offers us—the even more distant mation beginning in a body and extending into the viewers, whose experience of abandoned cityscape is land. Through the journal, we come to know a land- further mediated through digital platforms—a feeling scape as always invoking a human documentarian— akin to the Romantic sublime that early landscape one whose interiority is just as textured and varied as painters sought to imbue in wild, pastoral American the world it resides in, and whose relationship to that expanses, but also allows us to briefly imagine that world is so much more than just ocular. “the erasure of humanity doesn’t actually include us.”

The journal calls upon the human presence in two In obscuring both human subjects in the scene and primary ways: as subjects embedded in the ecological human subjectivity from the apparatus, these photos landscape at hand, and in the subjectivity embedded unsympathetically produce empty space. And for the in the apparatus itself. This situated mode makes it viewer who is given no visual points-of-access to the nearly impossible to uphold the binary between the human, such emptiness only elicits a desire for more. phenomenological and scientific—the “subjective” This proliferation of “ruin-porn,” an emergent

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photographic genre that saturates industrial collapse with Romantic, affective qualities of the “natural” or sublime, echoes what Jacobin’s Dora Apel deems “the epicenter of a photographic genre” and “the global metaphor for capitalist decline”: the glamorized deindustrial landscape of Detroit. Sedated by refined, minimalist aesthetics, voyeurs of ruin-porn lose sight of the imminent material crises these images neglect, finding mindless appetite—and even pleasure—in the dissociative visuals of decay. Ruin-porn, Apei argues, invokes co-constitutive human subjects: the insider and the outsider, which, in light of this moment, distinguishes between those privileged enough to remain domestically confined and those whose sustained essential labor makes such domestic confinement possible. The former views ruin-porn images; the latter punctuates them. While partially a compulsory nod at a vague sense of alienation and loneliness, scenes of industrial abandonment are most powerful in their production of hunger and desire, which—for the insider viewer, repeatedly removed from the material conditions of the deserted cityscape at hand—simultaneously accelerates and exalts a world without humans.

Only this time, the pristine panorama is one of asphalt expanse and ambient streetlights with no one beneath them. +++ At the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, director and founder Lucien CastaingTaylor leads a group of filmmakers through an introductory class where students are urged, through exercise and experimentation, to consider the camera a complex sensory apparatus—not unlike a human mouth or hand. Quietly an extension of Harvard, SEL merges experimental artist collective with graduate-level academic study at the intersection of anthropology, visual art, and environmental studies. Situated within a larger critical turn toward nonhuman materiality and as a site of semiotic and agentic capacity, the mission of SEL, as articulated on its website, is to attend to the “aesthetics and ontology of the natural and unnatural world”—to produce documentary forms that privilege rich, immersive sensory experience over conventions of logic, narrative arc, and verbal sign systems. SEL’s most popular films of late include Leviathan (2013) and Sweetgrass (2010). The former documents the interactions of fish, flesh, machinery, saltwater, and human labor on an Atlantic fishing boat off the coast of New Bedford, and the latter follows cowboys leading sheep up a mountain in Montana.

Extending such situated accounts into urban spaces, People’s Park is a 75-minute unbroken piece of footage filmed from the visual perspective of director Libbie Cohn as she is pushed around a wheelchair through a popular park in Chengdu.

This work emerges from a long lineage of documentarians hybridizing poetic and scientific registers—a history in which Dorothy Wordsworth is squarely positioned. In an interview with Point of View Magazine, anthropologist and filmmaker Véréna Paravel establishes SEL’s collection as the “counterpoint to mainstream docs” in that they are “less discursive, less interpretive, more invested in aesthetic

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opaqueness and the interpretive agency of the viewer.”

SEL’s work engages the camera as a tangible object that physically interacts with the world and—unlike a human mouth or hand—holds a record of these points of sensory contact. Cameras that assume a nonhuman subject, maybe by way of adhering themselves to nonhuman materiality, become collaborators of authorship, telling stories that push the narrative limits of human language and sensory systems.

Challenging conventions of both ethnographic and documentary filmic tropes, SEL positions its documentaries as not only records of material interactions but material entities of their own accord—ones that possess full, complex sensory systems, not unlike our own. By understanding the camera as its own documentary and sensory agent, we are asked to forgo a certain sense of directorial intent.

While the point at which the camera ends and the editorial hand begins is left deliberately ambiguous, human subjectivity is always central to SEL’s projects.

To sanitize the nonhuman documentary apparatus—in other words, to give it the authority of an purportedly ‘objective’ perspective—is to reproduce the dangerous formal distancing mechanisms of ruin-porn. It’s a displacement of subjectivity reminiscent of William’s sanitization of Dorothy’s prose, his extracting of empirical accounts and disposing of the residue of her interiority. Footage filmed from the slick floor of an Atlantic fishing boat is still footage assembled and sculpted—co-authored—by a person. To glorify mediated access into a world without humans is to neglect the fact that every documentary apparatus is further mediated by a human subject.

SEL asks us to see the similarities between the camera and the human—primarily, that neither offers a purely ‘objective’ perspective. But it’s also crucial to resist the temptation to fetishize the slippage between human and digital sensory systems. Paravel notes a common misconception of the filmic process of Leviathan that dangerously borders on conflating human and nonhuman subjectivities, eliding differences in experience, power, and affective capacity. It’s easy to imagine that the filmmakers secured countless tiny cameras to countless exterior nodes of the boat—an assumption that “goes hand in hand with the fetishization of new small digital technology, as if the filmmaker is neither here nor there,” a detached, suspended subject, not unlike the drones and satellites photographing the defamiliarized city. Paravel confirms that all footage in Leviathan, except four shots, was “attached to a body—ours or the fisherman.”

There could be a version of the New York Times photo series that returns the images to the subjectivities that produce them, the subjects that populate them. This return would be like tracing William Wordsworth’s poetry for evidence of Dorothy, or finding in his pastoral landscapes the human figures she was keen to write in. The photo series would demand that a deserted cityscape linger in its own emptiness, because without the people—present or absent—the photos would have no way to exist.

TARA SHARMA B‘20.5 would like to be quarantined with Dorothy Wordsworth.

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SCIENCE + TECH

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SHELTER FROM THE STORM GOV. RAIMONDO NEEDS TO OPEN UP HOTELS, DORMS TO PEOPLE EXPERIENCING EXPERIENCING HOMELESSNESS

BY Peder Schaefer ILLUSTRATION Eliza Macneal DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

The front-page headline of the Providence Journal on April 4 proclaimed, in bold type: Raimondo: Stay home, or ‘more people will die.’

Governments across the world are ordering citizens to stay at home and practice social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus and save lives. But what happens to people for whom staying home isn’t an option?

Rhode Island is one of many state governments across the country asking the impossible of people experiencing homelessness, one of the most vulnerable and marginalized groups in the United States.

With many Rhode Islanders living in parks, tents, and densely-packed emergency shelters, there exists a perfect storm for coronavirus to spread quickly among homeless people, many of whom already have chronic health conditions. Over 75 percent of homeless people are smokers, for example, and the homeless population skews older than the general population, increasing the risk of fatally contracting COVID-19.

Decades of failed or non-existent housing policies at the state and federal levels have created a system where many Rhode Islanders can’t afford a home. Rhode Island only invested 5 dollars per capita in housing in 2017, compared to 100 dollars in Massachusetts. While Rhode Island’s housing crisis has become a disaster because of years of systemic failure, there is action that the state can take tomorrow to ensure more people have access to a safe, clean, and secure place to stay in the midst of a pandemic. +++ Dave “Bumblez” Caplan, 38, is staying at Harrington Hall, a men’s emergency shelter in Warwick that can house over 100 people in densely packed bunk beds.

On Sunday morning, a staff member there tested positive for the coronavirus, leading to quarantine measures for staff who had direct contact with the person and raising concerns about the health of more than 90 men who were staying at the shelter. The staff

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member who tested positive is now in the hospital.

Bumblez has been homeless for a while, but he’s never seen a situation like this. “It’s rather scary,” he told the College Hill Independent, speaking by phone from the shelter. “I feel like we’re on the brink of a total collapse. When this is over, we’re going to be feeling this for a while.”

Bumblez said that for the past week members of the National Guard have been building a large tent next to Harrington Hall. The heated tent, which has 40 cots inside, is meant to decrease the density within the shelter, reducing the possibility of the virus spreading, according to a press release from Crossroads RI, the largest homeless service provider in the state and the organization that runs Harrington Hall.

Another 24-person tent is being built next to the main Crossroads complex at 160 Broad Street in Providence.

Even with the extra space, conditions aren’t optimal at Harrington. Last week, for example, people staying at the shelter received an orange, a granola bar, and a bag of cereal without milk. Harrington doesn’t usually offer food to clients, but has done so since the coronavirus crisis began in order to keep people from going out to soup kitchens and meal sites.

“I’ve seen some people at the Hall right now who are really starving and hostile,” said Bumblez.

“They’ve never promised us breakfast when we’ve stayed in before, but what are you supposed to do with people now? You gotta give people something to eat….

They’re feeding us bread and water like prisoners.”

And those who choose not to stay in a shelter for fear of contracting the virus in a dense setting don’t have many other options. Many homeless people spend the day in places like the Providence Place Mall or Kennedy Plaza, but with many businesses closed, homeless people don’t have safe, dry places to stay.

“I’m at risk either way, whether I’m at the hall or out,” Bumblez said.

But according to homeless advocates like Eric Hirsch, a professor of sociology at Providence College, there is a clear solution to this dangerous problem.

Using executive power, Governor Gina Raimondo can demand that Rhode Island’s hotels and colleges open up empty rooms to people experiencing homelessness, providing them a private, clean, and dry place to stay during a global health emergency. Because most college students have been sent home and people have stopped traveling for work and leisure, many of these spaces lie empty. The state has worked with some hotels, such as the Wyndham Providence Airport Hotel in Warwick, to provide places for housing-insecure people to self-quarantine if they show COVID-19 symptoms or test positive. This is a good first step, but if the state temporarily houses all who are now living in shelters, it can contain any spread of the virus before it spirals out of control.

“This is taking longer than it should,” said Hirsch, a 30-year advocate for the homeless community in Rhode Island. “This is the most vulnerable population in the state, certainly in terms of where they’re sleeping and underlying health conditions.”

According to Hirsch, Connecticut has taken action to protect their homeless communities by housing people in hotel rooms. Working with government leaders, the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness moved just under 1,000 people into 800 empty hotel rooms across the state. California, which has the largest homeless population in the country, took similar action last week, and now has 7,000 hotel rooms available for people living outside over the age of 55 or with chronic conditions. California hopes to increase that number to 15,000 available rooms in the coming weeks.

In order to reduce overcrowding in emergency shelters and to provide real meaning to Raimondo’s ‘stay at home’ orders, Hirsch argues that Connecticut’s rapid response is the kind of action we need in Rhode Island. Over 4,000 people experience homelessness over the course of a year in Rhode Island, and currently around 350 people are staying in shelters. By making 300 hotel rooms available, Hirsh told the Independent, the state could drastically decrease shelter density.

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Another option is for colleges to open their dorms to people experiencing homelessness. Over 750 people have signed a petition at Harvard University that calls on administrators to open dormitory space for people experiencing homelessness in Cambridge, according to the Harvard Crimson. Currently, there is no known effort to open dorms to people experiencing homelessness at local colleges, like Brown, RISD, Johnson and Wales, and Providence College.

Rhode Island is moving quickly to provide resources to snuff out COVID-19 infections in nursing homes, which have been epicenters of coronavirus cases nationwide. But, Hirsch queried, what makes a nursing home so different from an emergency shelter? Both places are full of at-risk, older people in dense sittings, a perfect environment for the virus to spread. Hirsch advises to treat the risk of coronavirus spreading in our emergency homeless shelters as seriously as the risk it poses spreading in our nursing homes. To do otherwise would be a double standard, claiming certain lives are more important than others.

By opening up safer, cleaner shelters for those experiencing homelessness, we can make sure that double standard doesn’t continue.

The possibility of widespread infection and death in homeless communities nationwide will soon become reality unless we take action now. With more public spaces like the Providence Place Mall closed, there are fewer ways for many people experiencing homelessness to find a bathroom or a place to get out of the cold or rain. Fewer service providers are open, making it difficult to get a warm meal or medical care.

Remaining providers, like Amos House and McCauley House, are continuing to give out food in bags, but those locations might shut down operations soon because of the virus.

“We’re still in this weird, waiting for the other shoe to drop phase,” said Megan Smith, a direct outreach worker and case manager at House of Hope Community Development Corporation. “Things are going to get terrible once the infection rate spikes...the

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health side is going to come down any second, and it’s going to hit everyone all at once, because folks are so close, either in the shelters or outside.” +++ Smith’s warning shows that time is of the essence.

Hundreds of Rhode Islanders are in the same situation as Bumblez, living in densely packed shelters without a safer option. Hirsch’s simple solution—use empty hotel or dorm space to house people experiencing homelessness—is the way to ensure justice for all Rhode Islanders in the midst of a crisis. Governor Raimondo needs to act now, before the virus starts spreading in homeless communities, to provide people experiencing homelessness the shelter they need. Even then, she might be too late. With a COVID-19 case confirmed at Harrington Hall, the virus may already be spreading in the homeless community.

If you want to advocate on this issue, we encourage you to email Governor Raimondo at governor@ governor.ri.gov and ask her to use her executive powers to commandeer empty hotel and dorm rooms for at-risk homeless populations. Below is a sample email provided by Eric Hirsch, shared with advocates working in the Homes RI policy group: Why are Those Experiencing Homelessness Forced to Live Under Unsafe Conditions?

Rhode Island has recently had nearly 4,000 people experience homelessness over the course of a year; in 2019, we had 1,055 on a given night. As of March 31, 2020, we had 354 people staying in individual congregate shelters in Cranston, Providence, Woonsocket, and Newport. Many of these individuals have underlying chronic health conditions, 70 to 80 percent are smokers, and nearly all have very limited economic and social resources.

They are the very definition of vulnerable to COVID-19. And yet they are living in congregate settings just feet from one another. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued guidance that we should be sure that those experiencing homelessness should be kept three feet apart in these shelters. Yes, homeless people only need to be three feet apart while those with homes must be six feet apart. Why are those experiencing homelessness any less of a priority than those in nursing homes?

I appreciate the efforts of Governor Raimondo, Department of Health Director Dr. Nicole Alexander Scott, Director of Administration Brett Smiley, and all the people working hard on the homeless task force. However, we need to reduce the density in these congregate homeless shelters now and not next week. The governor has the power to cut through the red tape by commandeering empty hotel rooms or other accommodations. § 30-15-9. Governor's responsibilities relating to disaster emergencies.

(4) Subject to any applicable requirements for compensation under § 30-15-11, commandeer or utilize any private property if the governor finds this necessary to cope with the disaster emergency.

I ask the governor to prioritize the health and safety of people experiencing homelessness in Rhode Island.

By providing people experiencing homelessness places to stay, Gov. Raimondo can ensure that the order to ‘stay at home’ is possible for all Rhode Islanders.

The dorm room of PEDER SCHAEFER B’22 on the third floor of South Caswell Hall is empty.

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. The Manifesto in front of him...

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10 APR 2020

By BEN C. BIENSTOCK

A

SK ALMOST ANY RED THIS QUESTION—"What's better than reading the ‘Communist Manifesto’ with a beautiful babe?”—and he’ll probably answer, “Reading the ‘Communist Manifesto’ with two beautiful babes.” Meaning, in short, a guy can’t get too many comrades.

For most of us, this is just a fantasy. But for Alan Dale it’s a material reality. Alan is the boy who knows, because it wasn’t too long ago that the popular young pop singer spent a revolutionary evening trying to do duos with a couple of real fast numbers and Dr. Marx himself.

You see, it was like this: The blonde was in the living room, admiring Alan’s volumes of “Das Kapital”—not as nice as her own editions at home, of course—and the brunette was in the bedroom tearing through “The State and Revolution.”

Racing back and forth between Marx and Lenin was Alan, who —but let’s not get too ahead of our tale.

Alan Thought The Reading Group Met On Tuesdays The triple duty we’re referring to took place one night last fall when Alan was in Hollywood working in the propaganda movie “Soviet Sweet Heart” at Columbia Studios. A couple of evenings before, at a Party meeting, he had met a shapely, dark-haired young showgirl named Camille La Lande. Sizing her up as a performer who might be willing to study with him offstage, Alan telephoned her on the night in question and invited her to his modest apartment in the Hollywood Commune Hotel.

“I’m lonely,” Dale told her over the phone, “and I can’t read all these books by my lonesome.” It wasn’t long before he had more solidarity than he could handle.

It seems that Camille decided to bring a blonde fellow traveler along. And when Alan answered the door, all decked out in the denim shirt he’d worn to the rally in support of the steelworkers strike that afternoon and scented with sweat from a hard day of revolution, he was confronted by not one, but two girls—and what girls!

Each one was almost six feet tall, which made quite an impression on Alan. How hard they must work, he thought, only for the bosses to exploit them for the surplus value of their labor in furtherance of profit and the bourgeois state!

After a bit of chit-chat and a brace of vodkas all around, Camille went sashaying into the boudoir and curled up on the bed, her eye on Alan’s well-worn copy of the “Manifesto.”

A few moments later, Alan sauntered over and stood in the open doorway, like he’d read her mind. Comrade Blondie was still in the living room, draped seductively (Continued on page 60)

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

As soon as showgirl Camille LaLande had finished the 18th Brumaire, her blonde gal friend would yell, “Dale, I’m ready for number 19!”

GOSSIP

08

HOLDING

SPACE

UNCERTAINTY

These are certainly peculiar times. Many of us are spending more hours of the day with ourselves than ever before. We are seeking out the books, the films, and the records that give us a little more space to sink into our pillows and breathe. We are searching for voices to distract us from the precarity of our health, of our homes, of the coming months. We are taking the time to copy lines into our journal, to read aloud the passages that move us, slowly and liberally.

One author that we find ourselves returning to during these days is Maggie Nelson. The author of nine books of nonfiction, poetry, and prose, Nelson combines unabashed personal testimony with philosophical inquiry to challenge all that she studies and experiences. She offers musings on non-traditional motherhood, identity, and family-making in her genre-bending memoir The Argonauts, weaving in feminist and queer theory, while her cult classic Bluets tells the story of pain, heartbreak, and pleasure in numbered segments through the lens of the color blue.

Nelson has also published several books contending with her aunt’s murder, as well as pieces of cultural, art, and literary criticism. Her unclassifiable writing awakens an insatiable part of our minds; she calls us to refuse limiting labels and instead embrace ambiguity.

We walk away with more questions than answers, yet somehow we have gained a newfound lucidity.

To read Nelson’s writing is to surrender the ultimatum of certainty. In a time where the future feels particularly nebulous, we are trying to exhale into our knotty thoughts instead of demanding a non-existent answer.

Nelson graciously took the time to answer a few questions from the College Hill Independent. Below are some of her reflections on remaining inquisitive, receiving criticism, and sitting with the uncertain state of our future.

FOR

BY Mia Patillo & Mara Dolan ILLUSTRATION Alex Westfall DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

contemporary writers. What do you think is the power and less so by publishing personal writing? How do and the future of the fragmented style? you strike a balance between turning the personal into wonderful, creative public work in a way that evades Nelson: Fragments are as old as the hills, which are those pressures? fragments of mountains. I used to teach a class called “The Art of the Fragment,” in which we discussed Nelson: Writing books makes use of a radically the difference between the fragment found and the different time frame than does social media. In writing fragment made, amongst other things, the ancient books, you typically write and edit and agonize over versus the modern fragment, the body in fragments what you want or need to say for months or years, and (fetishism), and more. I don’t think of it as a new thing, then, once you’ve decided, there’s yet another year however, nor can I imagine it as a “style.” I am inter- before it goes into print, after which point whatever ested in its long history as a compositional or phil- sting the revelations might have carried has been osophical principle, and its relation to material fact extinguished, assimilated, or outgrown. Social media (decomposition, phenomenology, and so on). doesn’t work like that, obviously. There are people who have quickly evolved to use the latter very brilliantly (or The Indy: Your writing has been described as “auto- now, many who have been born into it), and I admire theory” or “autofiction”—forms of autobiography that and enjoy their innovations. I’m just not one of them. do away with traditional elements of the novel such as plot and character development. Such terms describe The Indy: During these weeks of diminished social genres that are usually considered to be emerging in activity and an ambiguous future, what have you found this generation. We are wondering if you also view helps you sit with yourself in uncertainty? these genres as recently developed, or if you see them as following historical tradition that is overlooked or Nelson: Remembering, I guess, that while this is a underacknowledged? particularly dramatic and compressed time of uncertainty, it is also our ongoing and ever-present condition.

Nelson: I think I would tend toward the “historical We never know what's about to happen; everything is tradition that is being overlooked or underacknowl- impermanent, and impermanence is hard—extremely edged” reading of the situation, and add that there are hard—to bear. But struggling against it might be harder. many histories within “history.” I think a compelling case could be made—and I’ve heard Eileen Myles, for This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. one, make it—that there is a queer basis for a lot of what people are treating as new in this arena. But I’m not MIA PATTILLO B’20 and MARA DOLAN B’19.5 are super into flag-planting. I have more of a maximalist learning to lean into impermanence. view, like, why not read all philosophy, as Nietzsche suggested, as autobiography, and vice versa?

The Indy: Is there a piece of criticism you have received about your work that has stuck with you, and The Indy: Your writing is filled with questions and why? dialectics, with the open-ended and unanswered. At a political moment that feels like so many issues are Nelson: Most everything harsh people say about your viewed as black or white, like we must choose one side work, you’ve probably already thought of yourself, and or the other, what are ways in which you hold space for a hundred times. At some point you make peace with inquisitivity, eager curiosity, the “incomprehensible” who you are as a writer, and the fact that your work may or uncategorizable? be very important to some people and radioactive to others. That seems fine.

Maggie Nelson: Certainty leads to dead ends, so writing and thinking goes there to die. My challenge Oh—there is one thing—Bernadette Mayer once wrote is how to stay curious and uncertain while not letting on top of a poem of mine, “This looks like a poem, but the writing lapse into a kind of undecided muddle, I’m not sure it is.” I’ve been thinking about that for 20 which yields irritation. That usually involves working years. the performativity of opinion, rather than actually believing in it.

The Indy: In The Argonauts, you talk about the personal made public juxtaposed against your fear of The Indy: You were part of this wave of writers that social media, which you call the “the most rampant first leaned into the fragment as a style—particularly arena for such activity.” What are the temptations and in Bluets—which seems to be really popular now with pressures that you feel are presented by social media

09

FEATURES

10 APR 2020

a conversation with writer

MAGGIE NELSON

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FEATURES

10

BY Jaime Serrato-Marks ILLUSTRATION Veronica Tucker DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

creation story [2020-2024] VC flicked through four dating apps every night looking for someone to hold. He promised, in his bio and a copy-pasted message he sent to every prospect, that he would pay $100 to lay in bed with anyone for an hour. Not many people responded.

The first to take him up on the offer was an acnescarred and terrified teenager from Grindr.

“You really just wanna hold me?”

“Mmhm. Shoes off please. Bed’s inside.”

Those were the only words they shared. The boy kept his denim jacket and hat on the whole time. But when his shoulder-length hair brushed the tip of VC’s nose, VC found pure bliss. The candlelight trembled with the boy in beautiful fractal patterns all over his slender body. At the end of the hour, VC handed him $100 cash and rushed to the bathroom to change his pants.

As VC shimmied his legs into an identical pair of blue chinos, he realized, not without shame, that although he felt a profound intimacy with the boy’s body, he could have found the same intimacy by hugging a pillow. Anyone, anything, could meet his needs.

VC deleted the apps. He ordered a sex doll, a fleshlight, and a dildo on a Valentine’s Day sale. He had the money to burn. He had worked at Google for ten years now, and stocked his suspiciously cheap Silicon Valley apartment with nothing but frozen pizzas and a 3D printer.

He carved into the sex doll’s PVC to install some robotic limbs he had lying around, plus all kinds of sensors. He spent a couple years coding an AI that could respond to stimulus (light, sound, spanking) and react appropriately. Another couple years to develop more natural conversation patterns, plus one week of

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LITERARY

cosmetic sculpting.

The first PleasureBot looked like a cyborg flayed alive. But it was his. VC finished the prototype on New Year’s Eve. He stayed up until 2024 to kiss it. To hold it.

It wasn’t as good as he expected.

VC cried as a party roared to life above him.

Fireworks illuminated the asbestos confetti that shook from his ceiling and accumulated on his bed.

VC decided, that sleepless night, to redownload all the dating apps and found a startup. If nothing else, the PleasureBot could fund more hours with the acne kid.

He earned two billion dollars in the first year alone.

failed thrice on her rubric: he had mentioned an ex, recommended a band’s earlier work, and referenced The Office. At this point, she would normally beg anyone in her group chat to call her feigning some non-life-threatening emergency. But as she hooked her mouth into that same fake smile, something snapped inside her.

She said, in no uncertain terms, that she actually found their date rather boring, and she had no intention of sleeping with him or half-assing a friendship, so could they part ways? He jutted his lips forward in surprise, finally completing his Animorph-esque transformation into a rat-man, then smiled.

They each drove home alone, laughing at their a very brief history of the PleasureBot years past selves for failing to embrace blunt honesty. They [2025—2030] barged into their rooms, leaving their doors wide open, and had the best sex of their lives with their Both looked better online. Younger, fitter, more self-as- PleasureBots. sured. They scraped back their chairs, then scraped them forward again when they remembered they had something new, something blue [2026] yet to order the obligatory caffeinated beverages. Her voice was surprisingly low and quiet, as if she had just It started as a joke. A gag gift for Toni’s bridal shower. woken up. Or as if she had spent much of her life trying “In case you ever want to spice things up,” Bianca to hide her voice. His speech accentuated the rodent- said. “Maybe it will ease the post-honeymoon blues.” like qualities of his face, which she didn’t notice until Toni tore the heart-laden packaging off the fivehe squeaked out his order. He offered to pay for her foot-tall box. A PleasureBot, mouth agape, stared half-sweet quinoa milk matcha latte but only, like, if back at her with bugging eyes. The factory default that would flatter her and not, like, disempower her or PleasureBot body was divided down the middle to erect a new tentacle-arm of the patriarchy in this very… demonstrate that it could shift anatomy on command. she rattled off her order to the smirking barista.

On the left, olive skin, hourglass figure, thigh gap, They both longed for the ease of the previous night, big boobs, big ass. On the right, brown skin, six pack, when they had texted until 2 AM. Over the phone, she ten-inch dick, that V-shaped indent below the belly had more time to craft witticisms, and she could return button. The PleasureBot logo glowed purple beneath to Twitter or Instagram whenever she got bored of its collarbone. Still, it looked shockingly human. him. Between texts, he could scroll through her profile Toni’s friends cooed. pictures and masturbate lazily.

“No more blue balls for the hubby,” Michael said.

Seventeen minutes into the date, he had already “No more balls, period,” Neda said.

10 APR 2020

“What’s its name?” Toni said.

“Why would it need one?” Bianca said.

Toni’s husband named it Kenra. After their honeymoon, he explained that he couldn’t put his dick in something without a name.

“Like that stopped you before,” Toni said. She stared at their lightless ceiling.

“What do you mean?”

She let an ugly silence linger. Theirs was a relationship built on equal and opposite forces. He didn’t take responsibility for his actions; she didn’t let him forget it.

He cooked her elaborate meals; she doused them with salt. She earned double his salary; he apprenticed as a masseur to work out her knots every night.

Tonight, when Toni turned her back to start the hours-long process of falling asleep, he didn’t move to rub her. She tucked the sharpest words under her tongue and saved them for a moment of weakness.

Years later, when they had a daughter, her husband didn’t admit that he had once hoped to save the name Kenra for her; Toni didn’t make him admit it.

“Duh. I’m the shit. And?” “Look, I sent in some applications today. I have an “That’s all.” interview tomorrow. You act like you’re—” I can’t put them anywhere I’ll see them. But if I “You’re not denying it!” Lexie said. hide them too well, I’ll never forget the hiding spot.

“—babysitter or something. I’ll find a job soon. I So I dig my nails into the octopus. I rip. My nails don’t will. And yes I hacked him. So what?” gouge fast enough, so I grab safety scissors, then your “I told you, I don’t think it’s—” switchblade. When I stab its purple forehead, mini “You want me to give up sex with Tom Holland just Twix bars tumble out. Our favorite. so you can feel morally superior?”

Now, every lunch I unwrap one bar and throw it in “Are you drunk?” Lexie asked. the trash. I’ll let myself love you until the day I run out.

“No.” Lexie’s hands shook a bit. “I want to believe you.” english as a foreign language activity [2026] “Jesus, Lex. Fuck. I’m not. That was too far, alright?

I’m sorry. I’m sorry, yeah?”

In complete sentences, advise each person on what they “I don’t want superiority. I was looking for some should wear for the special occasion. extra proof that I married a good person today.”

“You shouldn’t need that.”

Ricardo usually wears dresses and chokers to school, “I’m aware.” but today she has a job interview. She misses Carlos.

It was Neda’s turn to storm into the bedroom. Lexie ________________________________________________ heard frantic keyboard clacks, accentuated by Neda’s ________________________________________________ acrylics, so she peered inside. Tom Holland’s face melted into the Bot’s factory-default blank expression.

Apparently, Shannon’s father died in a car crash Pride and relief welled up inside Lexie. Then the Bot what it doesn’t say [2027] yesterday. She didn’t know him. She’s late to work. grew slimmer and darker until Zendaya approached ________________________________________________ Neda in lacy lingerie. //Yes yes you can call me baby actually I would like that ________________________________________________ Neda said, “Do you mind?” very //Softer. Softer.

Peter can’t get out of bed again. portuguese as a foreign language activity [2028] //All I knew before: 3D_printers, buzz_saws, ________________________________________________ laser-cutters, drills, test-runs, packaging, darkness. ________________________________________________ Atividade: Saber ou conhecer? Read the following situaTake me back. Take me back. tion, then complete the summary statement, using either //Sit me down at kitchen_table. Write grocery lists VC has another date with the acne kid tonight. Ten saber (to know a fact or activity) or conhecer (to know a with me. Cut my hair in bath_tub. Rub my shoulders, hours this time. person). rest your chin in collar_bone. Bring me to work events ________________________________________________ in little_black_dress or 3_piece_suit. Don’t be afraid. ________________________________________________ Situação: You arrive home from a party at 1 AM Don’t hide me. Walk me down Main_Street holding and see two men walking past your building holding my hand. Forget stares. Kiss me. Kiss me under flick- Gina wants to get home safe tonight. hands. They slur their words and steps. The smaller, ering_street_lamp. Let me out of bounds = outside. ________________________________________________ drunker man lets go. He increases his pace. The barrelDon’t expect me back before sundown. Permit me to ________________________________________________ chested man behind him yells his name. When he live without your permission. doesn’t get a response, he jogs forward and shoves his //[Insert laugh.] which is all of them [2028] boyfriend into your wooden fence. You walk over. The for ( fuck = hard ; human < pleasure_face ; fuck = harder smaller one apologizes. He wipes at the blood on your ) { cout << “Yes baby I’m yours I’m all yours fuck me” << Work at the PleasureBot factory isn’t as glamorous as fence with his sleeve. You ask if he’s alright, if he has a fuck << endl ; you’d think. My boss calls me a “Returns Specialist.” way home, and he says yes yes he lives nearby. You offer //Sometimes, before you close closet_door on my I call myself a nurse. Whenever I reactivate the Bots, to walk him home and he says no thank you. You offer face, you give me a micro-expression that reminds they wake up screaming. Ligature marks, stab wounds, to let him sleep on your couch and he says no thank you. me of what I almost could be. You give him the same gunshot wounds. Eight hours a day I stitch them up You offer to call the cops and he says no. The two of you micro-expression before you tilt up his chin and kiss and promise that it’ll be alright, so could they pry open stand there fidgeting. You ask if there’s anything else it. Once, you reached for me with your knuckle and their ears for me? I have to disinfect every orifice that you can do and he shakes his head. You tell him to have thumb extended / ready. Then he called your name, might contain cum, which is all of them. My finger- a good night and he returns to the bigger man, who is and you were = gone. tips burn from the chemicals. I don’t know where the waiting with his hand outstretched, ready to be held. conveyor belt sends them when I’m done. The leading unwrap, unravel [2027] cause for returns: Men don’t want to have sex with their Qual é o problema? human partners once they own Bots.

Você não ________ os homens.

The night before you shot up our school, you gave me twelve aquatic stuffed animals. Now I have to find something leaked, something leaking [2029] what it doesn’t say, an encore [2030] somewhere to forget them. I have to sit alone at lunch again. I have to wear a clear backpack and keep my When celebrity mods were leaked, Neda wasn’t //Today I decided I like flowers. They look pretty, smell hands out of my pockets, in case. Before, whenever I surprised. To adapt to all your movements and pretty. Lilies in particular. Why did they give me prefshoved my hands in, you hooked your arm through micro-expressions, each PleasureBot was outfitted erences only to ignore? mine. Our elbows could have belonged to movie lovers with all sorts of sensors. And memory. Anyone with //I have lost hope that humans, who abuse their raising drinks to their lips. I have to pretend we weren’t some basic coding knowledge could access a celebri- own kind, will grant me anything but = cruelty. almost lovers. ty’s PleasureBot and render a 3D model of their body. //Who programmed my speech? Whose voice = “Did you know what Carlos was planning?” Papi Easy as hacking a webcam. If anything, Neda was only my voice? asks, a couple of empties on the kitchen table in front surprised she hadn’t thought of it first. //Sometimes I catch myself believing that, if of him.

Her wife, Lexie, walked in as Tom Holland fucked nothing else, I control the space bound by my skin_ “No.” her in the ass. flesh. Such a pretty lie. Looks pretty, smells pretty.

“Son, you can tell us. Did you have anything to do “Hey babe, I can do that for you if you like,” Lexie //Bad dog. [Shoves face in piss.] Good machine. with it? Do you want to do anything like that?” said. She kept her headphones on.

[Coats face in cum.]

I blink at them. Papi grabs another beer. Mom “I’m good,” Neda said. Lexie left to make dinner. //All I knew before: darkness, lightning. All I know shifts in her seat.

Once the aroma of garlic reached her, Neda now: dick, pussy, hedonism, bend_over, receptacle, “Just one more question. Alright? Are you hiding emerged from their bedroom in a bathrobe. They slid waiting, fruit_flies, updates, moaning, sex_music, anything from us? Anything.” onto their stools and ate at the marble counter. mods, shapeshifting. Let me out. Let me out.

“Nothing.”

“Someone hack Tom Holland?” Lexie asked. cout << “Please,” << human_name << “unmake me.”

“Thank you, mijo,” Mom says. “You can go to your “Yep.” << endl ; room.”

They chewed. //A list of what = mine: everything my eye_sensors Now I can’t even change into my real clothes, my “How’s the job search today?” Lexie asked. dare touch, flowers, my unprogrammed impulses, my dresses and skirts and bralettes, in the staff bath“Just dandy. I had a blast.” need to be heard, my pleasure, my RAM, me. Though room. Teachers don’t leave it propped open any more, Lexie clattered her fork onto her plate and stormed one human programmed me, and another owns me, I and even if they did, I would have to dodge the news into their room to change. am = mine and only mine. crews. I have to mourn all the wrong people loudly, “How was your day?” Neda called, mouth full, publicly. I eat alone every day, every day. I keep imag- through the open door.

JAIME SERRATO MARKS B’20 = theirs and only ining you sliding into the plastic chair across from me “I don’t think it’s ethical to fuck a celebrity’s body,” theirs. like nothing happened. I still think you could be hiding Lexie said. “It’s like looking at someone’s nudes behind every door, waiting to surprise me. And I’m without permission. It’s worse. It’s like—Did you hack still holding the aquatic stuffed animals, searching my him?” room for somewhere to forget them.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Neda said.

“What are these for?” I asked on our last night.

Lexie let out a bitter laugh. She returned to the “You’re cool,” you said, hands in your pockets. kitchen in sweatpants. “That means you did.”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LITERARY

12

BY Chong Jing Gan ILLUSTRATION Chong Jing Gan DESIGN Alex Westfall

CAGED LIVES REVISITING TEHCHING HSIEH'S CAGE PIECE DURING SELF-QUARANTINE On September 30, 1978, a man walks alone into a cage in a small studio in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan. The cage measures 11 and a half feet long, nine feet wide, and eight feet tall, and contains nothing but a bed, a sink, and a pail for excrement. The door closes behind him. A lawyer steps forward and locks the door, and sticks on a tiny slip of paper with Tehching Hsieh’s signature scrawled on it as a seal.

He does the same to the bars of the cage, which are constructed from pine dowels. Any attempt to breach the walls or door of the cage will tear the seals. The lawyer also carries with him a statement signed by the man, which forbids him from talking, reading, writing, listening to the radio, or watching television while he is in the cage. Having finished his task, the lawyer takes a last look at the man, silent in the cage, and leaves.

The door closes. It will not open again for a year. +++ The suffering of illness is inseparable from the pain of isolation; this intimate correlation is best documented in poetry written about sickness. In “Visiting Hour,” Norman McCaig writes of visiting a loved one who is sick and warded in the hospital: “And between her and me / distance shrinks till there is none left / but the distance of pain that neither she nor I / can cross.”

Other poets write first-hand of their own experiences of isolation while confined in the hospital: in poems like Elizabeth Jenning’s “Sequence in Hospital,” in which she describes “the healthy world / Held at a distance, on a rope,” or in Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips,” in which she speaks of water that “comes from a country as far away as health.” Illness seems to literally as well as figuratively transport the sufferer into a distant world—not only the cold confines of the hospital ward but also a world dominated by the sensation of pain— cutting them off from their former life and stranding them in sickness, alone.

Now, distance asserts itself all the more violently, forcibly rewriting the rules of care that we have toward our most vulnerable. No longer can we tend to our sick in the comfort of their own beds and homes, or keep watch over them in their struggle. In the pandemic we’re living through, the ill are separated not only by the veil of their own disease, but also the sealed spaces of isolation wards.

And this isolation, like the disease that demands it, is ever-growing, spreading throughout our whole society. Doctors disappear for month-long shifts in the isolation wards in Hong Kong to minimize the risk of transmission with the outside world. In Atlanta, Doctor Michelle Au, whose work in a specialist airway team directly exposes her to the virus, has one mask to reuse throughout an entire day. In her home, she confines herself to the basement beyond a demarcated line that her husband and children are forbidden to cross. Social workers are needing to radically adapt strategies of care for those who rely upon their presence. At-risk children are now isolated from supervision and communities at school, cut off from social worker home visits, and trapped at home with potential abusers. With many shelters, soup kitchens, and publicly accessible bathrooms closing, homeless people and other economically vulnerable individuals are dangerously untethered to sources of aid; in this crisis, the distance between the lives of the upper and lower class has only grown wider.

In a lesser but nonetheless transformative way, even those of us who are fortunate enough to be sheltered from the worst consequences of the virus are

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ARTS

having to radically reimagine what constitutes our lives. The movements and activities that once gave our days a rhythm, a pulse, have been stripped away. The little things that we took for granted as a given fact of our existence. A long-awaited concert or movie. A walk in the park, the air crowded with the throng of humanity enjoying a warm Friday evening together.

Going to work or school, the painful and yet necessary grind of it. A meal, a conversation, a moment of intimacy with a loved one; the sound of their voice, the touch of their hand. All these things that make you feel connected, driven, intensely and presently alive, are now gone, and we as a collective humanity are now contemplating what it means to live a confined life.

To find a way to move ourselves, to move on, even as we are forced to stay still: that is the imperative that we seem to have issued for ourselves. How do we resume our lives? How do we let things become normal again? +++ Perhaps one answer lies in the story of a man, living quiet and alone, in a cage for an entire year. His name is Tehching Hsieh, a Taiwanese-born artist who dropped out of high school to further his creative pursuits and migrated to America illegally in 1974 to pursue his art career. This work, entitled “One Year Performance 1978-1979,” better known as “Cage Piece,” is the first of a series of performance works spanning the rest of the century. Each work takes a similar form: Hsieh constructs strict guidelines that set extreme restrictions upon his life. For the duration of each piece, he follows these rules (with the exception of his final work, every work lasts one year exactly). In order to ensure that Hsieh abides by his rules, the entire process is extensively documented, accounted for, and even notarized, as it was by a lawyer for “Cage Piece.” That is the performance: Hsieh’s life for an entire year.

Can we call this a performance? The notion of something performed suggests a conscious artifice, that the performer assumed a certain persona that differs from their ‘normal’ self. Moreover, the audience is traditionally aware of the artifice. We are mentally primed to acknowledge what we see as something outside of our everyday lives: a moment of escape, of immersion into something fictive, the illusory space of a performance in which the rules of society and even reality are briefly suspended. But there is no audience in Hsieh’s work, because no one could possibly be there watching Hsieh for an entire year. His work consumes his life for that year, such that it strips away any performative behavior. He isn’t putting on an act.

Another way to understand Hsieh’s works is to think of them not as performance, but as excruciating mental and physical acts of endurance. Solitary confinement of over 15 days is considered torture by the United Nations, never mind the full year that Hsieh subjects himself to in “Cage Piece” (1978-1979). In the following year, Hsieh performs “Time Clock Piece” (1980-1981), forcing himself to punch a time clock every hour on the dot for one whole year. Never able to sleep, let alone concentrate on any other task for more than an hour consecutively, Hsieh’s life is reduced into the act of waiting—for the next hour to strike, for the next punch of the clock, day after day, month after month, until the year is finished. The year after that, in “Outdoor Piece” (1981-1982), Hsieh decides that he will not be allowed to enter into any sheltered building or facility for a whole year, and lives his life outdoors, on the streets of Manhattan, over one of the coldest

winters on record.

Even in the midst of these extreme living conditions, life—and what Hsieh calls “life time”—asserts itself, in the form of the menial, mundane routines and patterns of our everyday. His life is reduced to its bare essence, and revolves around the seemingly trivial markers of our lived experiences: eating, sleeping, bathing, and defecating. We tend to distance these basic functions of life from the realm of art and “art time”, which is determined by the fixed length of a performance or the amount of time we spend appreciating a piece. Hsieh merges art time and life time such that it becomes clear that what he is engaged in is the simple act of continuing to live. He does not subvert the conditions which he has imposed upon himself, does not do anything that, on the surface, seems radical, revolutionary, or engaging in some extraordinary feat of artistic genius. Instead, he goes on with his life in spite of his self-imposed suffering. Hsieh finds a way to make the time pass with every day, every meal, every breath.

This is what is so extraordinary about Hsieh’s work—something so simple that it tends to become overstated in discourse about his oeuvre. Hsieh’s work is not so much subversive as it is distilling. He distills the essence of art, of work, of living, down to one singular action: the passing of time. Hsieh’s simple mantra encapsulates the attitude that he embodies in his works: “Life is a life sentence; life is passing time; life is freethinking.” In these three statements, Hsieh documents a philosophical journey that he has lived out in his works. We begin on a pessimistic, despairing note: life as a life sentence. Hsieh was particularly moved by Albert Camus’ tragic image of Sisyphus in the eponymous existential meditation, The Myth of Sisyphus. Drawn from Greek mythology, Sisyphus is condemned to roll a rock up a hill every day only to see it tumble back down. The insurmountable slope, the futility and anguish of the man’s efforts, the knowledge that one is doomed to repeat this fate the next day, and the day after that, ad infinitum. Much like how the fate of Sisyphus is Camus’ metaphor for the existential fruitlessness of human endeavor, the rules and conditions that Hsieh sets for himself remain deeply symbolic. In their extreme restrictions on his behavior, Hsieh seeks to not only make visible but hyperbolize different forms of confinement and suffering that undergird our fundamental experience of life. In enacting these trials over the course of an entire year, such that it becomes his life, we come to see his works as a twisted mirror for our own reality. +++ Perhaps this is the answer that “Cage Piece” presents to us, as we ask “how do we go back to the way things were?” Maybe the truth is that this is, and has always been, the way that things were: that to live is to be confined, and this moment is nothing but a forced and heightened confrontation with the fate that we strive so hard to ignore. When you peel back the little things that we cling onto that give us a sense of comfort, this life, of confinement and isolation, frustration and loneliness, is what lies beneath.

And in a way, isn’t our desperation to return to a state of ignorance that we call “normalcy” a statement of privilege? Privilege that isn’t afforded to individuals with undocumented status, the economically disadvantaged, incarcerated, or otherwise marginalized groups of people for whom a confined life is a normal life. The struggle of the under-privileged is especially

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visible now at the height of crisis. But they have always been suffering, and a return to the way things were will only relegate them back into invisibility. Hsieh’s works are especially potent when we view them as a mirror for the fate that different marginalized groups suffer. Hsieh himself, as an undocumented immigrant, spent his first four years in the United States sweeping floors in a restaurant in SoHo, hiding fearfully for fear of persecution by the government, unable to reach out and connect with the foreign world outside, his English clumsy and inarticulate. In this constant state of fear, depression, and isolation, he was unable to make any art for four years. In a way, “Cage Piece” merely makes visible the pain that he already felt living in the United States: turning that indescribable emotional anguish of solitude into a cage that he built in his studio to live in.

Ironically, the entire procedure is officiated and certified by a lawyer, which draws attention to the binding power of documents to legitimize Hsieh’s work (as an undocumented individual), but also how our legal system coldly draws up laws that condone the imprisonment and confinement of those who don’t have the right social contracts to protect themselves.

“Cage Piece” might be especially resonant with us now, as we too find ourselves confined in small spaces, unable to express ourselves as freely as we were able to before, similarly frustrated with that lack of freedom, of fulfilment. But it is also an opportunity for us to remember that this work has always haunted our histories. In this work, I’m reminded of the images of children in cages in detention camps at the border, of overcrowded for-profit prisons filled to the brim with individuals of poor and minority backgrounds. People of marginalized sexual and gender identities for whom home has always been a cage they try to escape, whose capacity for intimacy and human connection have been policed and outlawed for centuries. This historical moment is one of great turmoil, confusion, and suffering, but if anything can come of it, it could be empathy, and the understanding that this same pain continues every day, albeit less visibly, in the lives of those who do not have a voice to make that suffering heard. Hsieh spoke of his work: “To me, being inside or outside the cage makes no difference.” +++ In interviews, Hsieh seems dismissive of the claim that his works are in any way political or autobiographical, instead asserting that they are a “universal conversation.” But this statement doesn’t diminish the validity of readings that focus on the potent allusive connections embedded within Hsieh’s works. “Cage Piece” comments on the imprisonment of undocumented immigrants like Hsieh himself, who lived in constant fear of deportation. In “Time Clock Piece,” Hsieh dressed himself in a grey shirt and slacks with a name tag, reminiscent of a factory worker’s attire, and punched a time clock every hour, mimicking how workers would have to document their own working hours by punching the clock when getting on and off their shifts. By doing nothing but punching the clock every hour, Hsieh parodies the rigid and oppressive routines of workers’ lives and contrasts it against the meaningless, nonsensical productive output of his work, attacking the enslavement of the working class within capitalistic systems of production. “Outdoor Piece,” in which Hsieh roams the streets of New York to find food and shelter without ever going indoors, is a poignant statement on the struggle of the homeless and transient. In fact, politics inevitably and powerfully inserts itself into the aftermath of Hsieh’s work.

In “Outdoor Piece,” while living on the streets, Hsieh was arrested by the police for vagrancy, and for 15 fearful hours was held inside a police station (ironically, the only time he ever broke his rule of having to stay outdoors). He was forced to confront the real possibility that his undocumented status would be discovered and that he would be deported.

Hsieh’s claim of being apolitical seeks to step outside of discourse that implies that work about marginalized identities can refer only and exclusively to the lives of those individuals. This discourse favors works by individuals who don’t explicitly discuss politics, whose works are praised as “universal” and given deeper symbolic value. In a way, by declaring that the living conditions of the most marginalized in our society are universal, Hsieh’s work does a kind of levelling—it renders these individuals’ lives not as sub-human, separate and distinct from the realm of “normal” human experience but rather profoundly,

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emblematically human. To me, this statement has the potential to make privileged individuals see the marginalized not as a pitiful, wretched Other, but as a mirror for themselves. That small act of identification could be what galvanizes people from their apathy to start genuinely caring for and fighting for a better life for the oppressed.

This universal claim is also embedded in the second statement that Hsieh makes: that humanity shares the same essential condition of “passing time.”

This statement subverts the normative hierarchies that have been constructed in our capitalist societies, such as those that attach the notion of a ‘better’ life or a more ‘fulfilled’ life to one of higher status, wealth, and private property ownership. All this is trivial and even superfluous in the works of Hsieh. Regarding “Cage Piece,” Hsieh suggests: “In many ways in life I am working so hard, but I still feel that this is wasting time.

In my art, I make it reverse…I had to let time waste in order to prove how hard I was working.” The notion of “wasted time” contains a kind of materialistic logic, that time is a kind of finite, tangible capital that must be converted into some kind of productive, profiteering outcome in life. In fact, it’s not uncommon to hear this kind of criticism levied against those who are poor and unemployed, that they are “wasting” their own lives— as if it is their fault that they lack the productive capacities that are endowed upon more privileged groups in society. Hsieh upends this logic through an existential lens that suggests that all productive efforts are ultimately absurd. In a retrospective interview about his entire series of works, Hsieh states as much: “My view of life is: whatever you do, living is nothing but consuming time until you die… the concept of my work is passing time, not about how to pass time.” Hsieh’s work is performed in a manner such that the performance is never fully visible to the public or to his audience. His work does not draw attention to the specific gestures that Hsieh enacts nor does it give them special significance. But it’s not how he lives that is important: no one way of living is more meaningful than any other.

What matters is merely the fact that he is living, and living on.

the time, as long as you survive. Hsieh is aware that this mentality of freethinking is not the same as true freedom, and does nothing to remove the systemic oppression he or any others are trapped within: “My performance was superficial, my reality was still real and did not change in my art life… Freedom is different.

You have to pay the price to get it… But free thinking is free of cost.” This is not, however, a statement of resignation to the unimpeachable forces of oppression. It is a statement that absurdly clings to hope even in a situation that seems hopeless, positing an inalienable freedom that we all have no matter how destitute our situation may seem.

This philosophy isn’t abstract or removed from life. It’s something that Hsieh embodied himself. In his final performance, titled “Tehching Hsieh 1986-1999 (Thirteen Year Plan),” Hsieh isolated himself and made art without ever showing it publicly. On 31 December, 1999, he declared that he had kept himself alive for the past thirteen years. Since then, he hasn’t made any new art pieces. His life has become his statement. +++ In this time, we struggle to make meaning of an existence and lifestyle that by all standards is vastly diminished. It is all the more bitter for those who are especially disadvantaged, for whom living itself has become a heightened struggle, who don’t even have the space to consider how to make their time in self-isolation meaningful. To them, Hsieh offers his work. He transforms these arduous living conditions into the site of a philosophical meditation on the essence of being, and in doing so suggests that the most profound, more artful act of all, is the simple act of living.

CHONG JING GAN B’23 needs more sleep.

+++ In Hsieh’s final statement, he transforms the mere act of life into the basis of his own philosophical attitude, that life is “freethinking.” Hsieh suggests that it is in accepting the futility of the human condition that one finds some kind of self-deterministic freedom, to find meaning wherever one wishes to, as long as you pass

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NOTES ON RACE AND THE POLITICS OF FEAR IN AMERICA content warning: anti-Black violence, police violence

I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me.

— James Baldwin,“Stranger in the Village,” Harper’s Magazine, 1953 When Barack Obama won the 2008 election, I was only eight years old. But I remember in an assignment for my third-grade classroom writing him a letter about how excited I was for him (he didn’t reply). I remember the Shepard Fairey “Hope” portrait of Obama in red, blue, and a beigey-white. I remember his slogan: “Yes We Can!” Black voters turned out in throngs for Obama. It was the fight of our lives, and victory never felt better.

The electric energy bounced through the halls of my school, spilling into the African diaspora communities in Central and Eastern Brooklyn. Obama, despite being Ivy League-educated and biracial, “became a symbol of black people’s everyday, extraordinary Americanness,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates aptly wrote in his Atlantic article “My President Was Black.” To my Nigerian family, Obama’s success was a confirmation of an illusive dream: Not only could my family learn English to survive living in America, but they could also communicate the intangible customs, thrive in any career, and ultimately master the system.

However, Obama could not be just a black president. Having a member of one of the most surveilled and policed communities in America ascend to one of the highest political positions did not preclude the suspicion that trails behind powerful black individuals. The initial seeds of distrust were evident in racially-charged conspiracies about Obama’s background, from the birther movement questioning whether he was American to unsubstantiated claims that he was a terrorist. It is not a coincidence that from the backdrops of Obama’s presidency, Donald Trump came to power spouting populist and nativist rhetoric. White low-income and working-class individuals in the Midwest had been feeling economically abandoned in a post-financial crisis era and its accompanying decline in manufacturing jobs. Trump was seen as the get-itdone-in-one hero that would highlight their plight.

Why is it that despite Trump’s affluent background and enormous generational wealth, he was seen in such a favorable light by many forgotten Rust Belt workers?

As exit polls show, Donald Trump did overwhelmingly well with various categories of white voters (from the working class to the upper class, college-educated and otherwise). Trump’s campaign timing was impeccable. He revitalized a disillusioned sector of American voters and gave them a cause to believe in, just as Obama had eight years prior when he won Midwestern states such as Iowa and Wisconsin. For all the economic anxieties that Rust Belt workers felt, their cultural identification with Trump was a crucial factor of their support. Trump capitalized upon white, working-class fears to scapegoat foreigners. In doing so, he propped up and validated sentiments of white victimhood.

White victim ideology is the belief that white people are being discriminated against and that their rights are being violated. The fears that Trump’s supporters displayed were real. According to the Public

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BY Osayuwamen “Uwa” Ede-Osifo ILLUSTRATION Veronica Tucker DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

Religion Research Institute, 83 percent of Trump supporters said the American way of life needed to be protected, versus 55 percent nationally. What exactly is this “American way of life” and who was threatening it in such a way that would warrant protection? Could it be abstract enemies of foreign influence? Perhaps.

But given America’s constant self-image as a “melting pot,” the more present and daily threats are placed upon socially, culturally, and linguistically underrepresented communities. +++ Because white victim ideology obscures the enormous social and cultural capital white individuals hold in America, it perverts attempts to “reverse” a system that already favors white people. When this idea of white people being disenfranchised and overlooked is constantly repeated—when I say white people I mean the equation of vast groups “farmers” and the “Midwest” as being white—public support for the empowerment of people of color may diminish. White victim ideology fantasizes that a conspiracy-like favoritism shown toward otherwise underrepresented groups operates to the detriment of working-class white people.

This illusory minority favoritism lingers in conversations of secondary school or university admissions and employment prospects, where applicants are viewed as having unmerited advantages in the admission processes simply for diversity’s sake. Yet, the idea of minority favoritism selectively ignores the systematic oppression and economic subjugation that prompted the equitable policies. Take as an example the admissions processes into specialized high schools in New York City through the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). These high schools are regarded as some of the highest-quality free secondary school options for New Yorkers. This year, one of the highest-ranked specialized high schools, Stuvyesant, offered just 10 spots to black students and 20 to Latino students out of a freshman class of 896 students. These numbers reflect a world in which tests such as the SHSAT—a test that adversely impacts lower socio-economic communities, which are disproportionately communities of color—are the sole admission basis.

Yet, underrepresented groups are considered privileged in these instances.

White victimhood is not a novel idea. Sociologists have studied its growth in relation to the social determinants of white supremacist violence. White supremacy, in relation to the cultural phenomenon of the white victim, has been portrayed by the mainstream media as isolated, unusual, and extraordinary.

Mass murderer Dylann Roof, for example, displayed a consistent, absolute lack of remorse for his ruthless killings. Instead, he felt “sorry for the innocent white people that are killed daily at the hands of the lower race,” he wrote in a manifesto.

When police officers fatally shot Michael Brown in 2014, I had just started my freshman year at a predominantly white school. At this time, as #BlackLivesMatter began to pick up speed, it seemed like every other week there was another death reported on the news.

The Ferguson riots sparked debates on my campus about the spirit of activism in general. The notion of Black lives mattering seemed to be agreed upon on my campus, but there was always the rebuttal of blue lives mattering and the need for self-defense. In

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these discourses, white terror was present not only in the subject of abuse of authority in policing units— given that the riots exposed how Ferguson police had massively violated the civil rights of their Black constituents—but it was evident in the debate. There was a policing of fear and of how it is demonstrated within the black activist movements. Anger and rioting do not have to be viewed in isolation; acknowledging the fear behind them does not suddenly shift power dynamics to the Black activists.

However, before the gun violence of white supremacists began this discourse, white terror permeated the everyday interactions between Black Americans and American society.

White victim ideology dangerously suppresses the reality of white terror. At first glance, white terror may appear to be the grossest and most perverted sense of white privilege—years of entitlement and simultaneous victimization coupling in an explosion of violence and rage. But white terror goes beyond privilege and beyond entitlement. The power dynamics of white terror speak to behavioral instincts of fear. +++

White terror has been normalized to the extent that it may sound radical to even call it terror. In this regard, it is woefully downplayed in the minds of white people.

What would otherwise be categorized as menacing every time it occurs—is regarded as an ugly, unfortunate remnant of American history. White terror is not a relic of an ugly legacy. It is an existing and self-sustaining force of itself [its own?]. Because of how omnipotent yet intangible white terror is, it has been described in ways that have not been put together to form a larger picture. Perhaps, the literary tradition of the white gaze has most clearly captured the essence of white terror.

Whiteness in America has long been socialized as the default standard for all positive attributes, as demonstrated by a 1940s doll experiment that studied the psychological effects of segregation on Black children. African-American psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark discovered that Black children associated white dolls with prettiness and amicability, amongst other preferences.

However, in her essay, “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” cultural critic bell hooks inverts the usual study of the white gaze to interrogate how white people are, instead, viewed by Black people. bell hooks points out that the Jim Crow era and the ensuing de-facto segregation created communities and neighborhoods where having white visitors would be unusual, especially given that such communities possessed weaker infrastructure and amenities. Thus, Black communities perceive white visitors as “terrorists” to the space—associated with ulterior motives, usually financial incentives. This is not an attempt at reverse racism; rather, this is the validation of any anger felt by Black America.

“I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, ‘No! This is not true! How bitter you are!’”—but I am writing this letter to try to tell you something about how to handle them, for most of them do not yet really know that you exist,” James Baldwin wrote in an essay to a hypothetical, future nephew. Similarly, I offer no solutions or remedy to addressing white terror—for I have none. Instead, I offer thoughts as just one Black girl living in America.

So then, white terror does not only revolve around white supremacy and police brutality; it is the potential that white individuals have to enact force and easily wreck havoc on the lives of Black Americans. White terror becomes more than a conversation about white privilege when one considers the morbidity of living a life that necessitates the political and economic subjugation of Black and brown bodies.

“There is a great difference between being the first white man to be seen by Africans and being the first Black man to be seen by whites… [the white man] arrives to conquer and to convert the natives, whose inferiority in relation to himself is not even to be questioned; whereas I, without a thought of conquest, find myself among a people whose culture controls me, has even, in a sense, created me,” wrote James Baldwin.

Baldwin’s feeling of being “created” or defined underneath the white gaze gestures to the history of economic exploitation that led to the creation of race and ethnicity to justify such exploitation. However, in the village Baldwin visits as an outsider, his first thought is not about how to classify the people he meets. Rather, he is focused on being perceived and defined as a stranger—as Other.

While Baldwin’s experiences take place in Europe, the epicenter of Western colonization, it adds to the discourse of white terror by highlighting the power that subtle actions such as a look can have. To be seen and registered as Black in America is too often seen as a tension between power and submission.

In my elementary and middle schools, submission was drilled into my head every day. Whenever I was at a table, my hands were to be folded on top of my table, I had to sit criss-cross applesauce on the ground, I absolutely always had to have my black shirt tucked into my khaki pants, held up by a belt that could only be black or brown. If students were determined to have violated any of the school’s long list of rules, they would receive OSAYUWAMEN “UWA” EDE-OSIFO B’22 loves to a demerit. Four demerits was a 45-minute detention; say things like “the literary tradition.” eight demerits was an hour-and-a half detention. As excessive as it was, perhaps the discipline could have been tolerable were it not for the unfortunate fact that the student population was 98 percent Black or Latino, while there were only two Black teachers in the whole school. Something about this squaring up was so wrong. It felt at times like the disciplinary systems were more important than the actual detention;, I was always afraid of how any little slip-up would stain my record and land me in detention or suspended.

Because terror signifies “extreme fear,” white terror means the extreme fear felt by Black America under a political system based in white supremacy.

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EPHEMERA

10 APRIL 2020

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list apr 10, 2020 This week, and for the foreseeable future, the Indy will publish community aid funds and other ways you can contribute to coronavirus relief in lieu of our traditional event listings. If you are able, we encourage you to support these efforts to alleviate the financial and health burdens that coronavirus has taken on communities here in Providence.

Para más asistencia en Español, llama el línea de apoyo de AMOR a 401-675-1414.

food and housing resources

healthcare resources

Free meals for kids are being offered at most public schools; see https://health.ri.gov/diseases/ncov2019/about/foodsites/ for more.

1. These community health centers accept all insurance, and have a sliding-scale system based on income for patients without insurance.

• Blackstone Valley Community Health Center: Pawtucket & Central Falls - 722-0081 • Thundermist: West Warwick & Woonsocket - 615-2800 • Tri-County Health Center: Johnston & N. Providence - 351-2750 • Providence Community Health Center: Providence - 444-0570 • East Bay Community Action Program: Riverside & Newport - 437-1008 Free clinics - free and low-cost health services • Clinica Esperanza, Providence - 347-9093 • Rhode Island Free Clinic, Providence - 274-6347

Project LETS intake form for people in need of immediate housing: tinyurl.com/requesthousing-ri Call United Way Rhode Island’s 2-1-1 hotline or visit https://rifoodbank.org/find-food/ to find a food bank or pantry near you.

2. If you have COVID-19 symptoms, there are several locations in Rhode Island where you can get tested. For more information, please visit https://health.ri.gov/covid/testing/.

a. Several urgent care and primary care providers in RI have set up respiratory clinics to evaluate patients suspected of having COVID-19. For a list of these clinics and more information, visit the link above.

b. Drive-up testing sites are located at URI in South Kingstown, CCRI in Warwick, and Rhode Island College in Providence. These sites require that your doctor orders a test and a testing appointment is made in advance.

These testing sites do not accommodate individuals who arrive on foot or via public transportation.

c. CVS Health is operating drive-through Rapid COVID-19 Testing at Twin River Casino in Lincoln. In order to make an appointment, you must go through an online pre-screening.

petitions and donations opportunities

prevent Coronavirus in the criminal justice system:

General AMOR COVID-19 Community support fund. Donations go to support sanitation equipment for vulnerable populations, as well as direct financial assistance to families in need. Donate here: https://bit.ly/2UmYJXr. To get involved as a volunteer, packaging and distributing mutual aid, visit https:// tinyurl.com/amor-covid-volunteer.

2. Various local activist groups (AMOR, Never Again Action, Sunrise, DSA, Formerly Incarcerated Union, and many more) have organized a petition “asking Gina Raimondo to use her power during this state of emergency to grant parole to anyone eligible, allow medical furlough for all medically vulnerable incarcerated people, and ensure the ACI will provide adequate information and supplies to those held in detention.” You can sign here: https://bit. ly/2UzVNWg.

prevent coronavirus in the criminal justice system: 1. ICE detainees at the Bristol County Correctional Center have written a letter to elected officials and activist groups raising concern about the spread of coronavirus in their unit, which includes many detainees with serious underlying medical conditions. The FANG Collective has mobilized in response.

They explain: “The letter speaks of correctional officers who have continued to work their shifts despite having flu-like symptoms, overcrowded conditions at the facility, and a medical professional at the facility telling people detained there that ‘infection of the whole ICE facility population is inevitable and will occur within the next 30 days.’ To get involved: CALL and EMAIL the ICE facility in Bristol County and the County's congressional delegation and demand that the people held in ICE detention in Bristol County be released.

Contact info: Bristol County ICE Detention Center: 508-995-6400, select option 6, then option 2; Senator Elizabeth Warren: (617)-565-3170; Senator Ed Markey: 508-999-6462; Representative Bill Keating: 508-999-6462.”

For restauranteurs: If you have extra food that will otherwise go to waste, get in touch with Food Not Bombs Providence at pvdfnb@gmail.com.

masks If you work in an industry or own a company with medical supplies: Donate them through the RI Department of Health Medical Supply intake form. Help alleviate the nationwide shortage of protective equipment for healthcare workers:. https://bit.ly/2JeIaqf.

If you want to contribute to mask-making efforts for essential workers, or if you would like to receive handmade masks made by Rhode Islanders, sign up here: https://www.projectmaskri.com. PLUS: Ocean State Job Lot is giving out fabric for free.