M O N D A Y MARCH 15, 2004
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD Volume CXXXIX, No. 32
An independent newspaper serving the Brown community since 1891
R.I. secretary of state tells about work to improve voting procedure
Chiu discusses significance of homeland, memories behind her poetry BY KATE GORMAN
The concept of a homeland is not entirely tangible and depends on family, heart and loyalty, said TaiwaneseAmerican performance poet Chia-Ti Chiu during a Sunday afternoon lecture. Chiu interspersed her lecture, titled “Identifying Marks: Shaping ‘Homelands’ Through a Personal and Political Perspective,” with readings of her own poems. The lecture, in Salomon 101, drew about 60 people and was presented as part of Taiwanese Cultural Week. Chiu said an eight-month stay in China, when she studied Mandarin at the University of Beijing during her last year of college, helped her understand her identity. “I am Taiwanese because of my genetics, but also because I choose to personally and politically claim myself as Taiwanese,” Chiu said. “Homeland is not a physical place — it resides inside, it is innate.” “Most people in China are very passionate about not giving Taiwan independence. But their arguments are all the same — people just regurgitate the party line, ‘We are all of the same blood,’” she said. Chiu said she uses some Taiwanese words in her poetry because she likes the cadences they create and because it’s difficult to translate the emotional resonance some Taiwanese words have. Chiu began the lecture with the reading of a poem about growing up in the United States with Taiwanese roots. The poem describes her struggle to balance “these skewed sides” of herself. Chiu said she was not aware as a child of being different until it was pointed out to her by other children. “Kids would point and say, ‘What’s that in your lunchbox?’” she said. “I grew up in a conservative Connecticut suburb. We ate rice where other families ate bread. We spoke Taiwanese in the house and English outside.” As a teenager Chiu said she was “the Asian kid trying to pass as white by going to parties and football games,” but she later blamed whites for stripping her of her ethnic identity. “Blossoms,” the second poem Chiu read, addressed political issues as they related to her childhood. She spoke about having a “strange” name and wanting to change it because she desperately wanted to fit in. Chiu currently teaches yoga at a Bronx high school and art at a middle school, where her pupils don’t face the same racism she did when she was growing up, she said. “They stand up for their heritage in school and proudly yell, “‘I’m Puerto see IRAN, page 4
BY SARA PERKINS
University in 2001 he decided to follow through on the policy. “‘This is a neat program, but it’s not being implemented,’” Armstrong said he remembers thinking at the time. “We should enforce requirements, especially when they’re good like this one.” Despite frequent memos and reminders, faculty members are still not checking off the boxes, Armstrong said. “I’m not sure whether that is a reflection of Brown student writing or whether faculty just aren’t aware,” he said. Flaxman said few faculty members use the deficiency column. “These numbers are not indicative of writing in the University as a whole,” she said. Professor of English Kevin McLaughlin said he is “skeptical” about the requirement and has never checked the box, preferring instead to deal with students’ writing problems individually. “You don’t know when you tell someone that they have a writing problem what that will mean for them,” he said. “There are
Rhode Island Secretary of State Matt Brown outlined his program for encouraging voting and improving poll access in the state for a small group in C.V. Starr Auditorium Sunday night. The first-term secretary of state, elected in November 2002, came to state government from voting rights and volunteerism groups. Brown’s first goal, he said, was to institute a centralized voter database for the state using funding from the federal Help America Vote Act. Currently, all cities and towns maintain independent, usually paper-based voter rolls, allowing for extensive fraud and error. The Central Voter Registry should be in place by the end of the year, he said. Plans for the immediate future do not include electronic voting machines, Brown said. ATM-style terminal voting, or Direct Recording Electronic voting, has come under fire from advocacy groups that allege that the lack of paper trail and susceptibility to fraud or external hacking make electronic voting machines a threat to democratic elections. “I made a decision a year ago,” Brown said. “I’m going to let other states make their mistakes with that.” He said he hopes to have electronic voting in place by elections in 2006, since touch-button machines will increase access among blind and otherwise disabled voters. “There is a constitutional right to a private vote,” he said, and blind and disabled people must often rely on the aid of poll workers. Brown said elderly, unhelpful poll workers, political appointees and “local, corrupt, cynical elected offi-
see WRITING, page 4
see BROWN, page 5
Nick Neely / Herald
Performance poet Chia-Ti Chui spoke in Salomon 101 on Sunday as part of Taiwanese Cultural Week. Chui performed some of her original poetry during her lecture.
Writing requirement, previously ignored, is now enforced BY GABRIELLA DOOB
Brown is renowned as a university without rigid academic requirements, but if Dean of the College Paul Armstrong and Director of College Writing Programs Rhoda Flaxman have their way, at least one traditional requirement will be strictly enforced. The University’s writing requirement — specified in the Course Announcement Bulletin — demands that all students demonstrate competence in writing in order to graduate. But according to Flaxman, though the requirement has “been on the books forever,” it has only begun to receive proper attention during the last three semesters. Professors can check a box when submitting grades to indicate that a student’s writing needs improvement. The system gradually “fell through the cracks,” Armstrong said. Professors neglected to check the box when students had writing problems, and even when they did, the registrar never informed students that they had received checks, Flaxman said. Armstrong said when he came to the
Panel participants say creative women encounter uphill struggle in Iran BY KATE GORMAN
With nearly every action, Iranian women fight the status quo and political structure of their country, said Shahrnush Parsipur, an Iranian-born novelist and the University’s first International Writing Fellow. Parsipur spoke Friday during a panel discussion titled “The Ethics of Speaking: First Person Accounts from Women Writers and Artists from Islamic Societies,” part of a week of events sponsored by Brown’s International Writers Project. The five-member panel — made up of writers and filmmakers — drew about 50 people Friday afternoon to the Joukowsky Forum at the Thomas J. Watson Institute
for International Studies. One of the newest obstacles Iranian writers have come across is the United States’ “editing embargo.” “As a publisher it is a fragile time, because there is a lot of conflict in the world today,” said Livia Tenzer, editorial director for Feminist Press in New York. The Office of Foreign Assets Control, which is part of the U.S. Treasury, oversees textual interactions, Tenzer said. “It’s not illegal to publish works from embargoed countries, but it is illegal to provide the services of editing,” she said. But the embargo has not deterred women writers and artists from producing work, nor Tenzer from publishing it, she said.
Terrorism in Spain hits too close for comfort, writes Emily Nemens ’05 column, page 7
Brown’s tuition increases are justified, according to Nate Goralnik ’06 column, page 7
Filmmaker Rabeah Gharrafri, who was born in Iran and grew up in the United States, said she struggles to find a common ground between American and Iranian cultures in her work. “I find that using humor and pathos in storytelling is cross-cultural and defies any language barriers. In my films, I want the audience to feel for the culture they are coming in contact with,” Gharrafri said. But she said she still finds subtitles helpful. “I don’t make films about living in Iran — it will fail on some levels because there is no translation for me,” she said. “I grew up in the U.S. I succeed if I’m true to my own see IRAN, page 3
W E AT H E R F O R E C A S T
I N S I D E M O N D AY, M A RC H 1 5 , 2 0 0 4 Professor of English Robert Creeley shares anti-war poetry in Friday reading campus news, page 3
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W. ice hockey sweeps Princeton University in ECAC quarterfinal competition sports, page 8
M. ice hockey loses to Harvard University, ending playoff run sports, page 8
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