essay issue six: perseverance

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essay ABOUT

essay is the Pomona College Writing Center’s yearly journal that publishes student work. The origin story of the essay as a form began in the late sixteenth century, when Michel Eyquem de Montaigne took the word from the French essayer, “to try,” to describe the writing with which he was experimenting in his retirement from political life: roaming, curious, digressive, associative, critical (most of all his own ideas and perceptions), and deeply, devotedly engaged with the self, the world, and the self in the world. Since that first volume of Essais in 1580, the essay has been defined, written, read, and redefined over and over again across the continents.

For some, it is a free, ecstatic way to explore the self; for some, it participates in describing the fabric of a nation; for some, it is an urgent intellectual and political force; for others, its critical, playful essence resists definition, and in so resisting, resists totalization. For all, it is, as the essayist Gabriel Zaid puts it, “the laboratory itself, where life is put to the test in a text.” essay is interested in engaging the ways that writing processes are necessarily diverse and messy, and is less concerned with collecting “good” writing. We want essay to showcase the parts of writing that are hidden within the final polished product: all the absurd mistakes and unexpected discoveries, the edits that bounced back and forth endlessly, the sentence that you became obsessed with and that made you cry a little when you erased it.

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Letter from the editors

“Forget talent,” Octavia Butler writes in “Furor Scribendi,” and that is what this issue of essay aims to do. As Butler goes on to say, “Continued learning is more dependable than talent. … Persistence is essential to any writer.” To focus on persistence, practice, and perseverance over talent can be a difficult task in the university setting, especially when it comes to writing. Perseverance is a slow act,

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and college writing tends to be a fast-paced, fleeting process; deadlines and extracurricular commitments often get in the way of thoughtful revision, multiple drafts, and sustained time with a single piece. In the end, those deemed to be gifted and talented writers—a narrow and privileged category—receive the most merit.

The authors in this issue of essay reflect on their methods and journeys alongside their writing, with a particular focus on how perseverance played a role in their process. For many of our authors, perseverance was a means of finding confidence and certainty in writing; Seohyeon Lee writes, “Persistence was an enchanted pot that turned scattered ideas into my voice.” Yet despite its importance for many writers, perseverance continues to be an often hidden part of the writing process. Amara Mir writes, “Progress and persistence aren’t always reflected in a changed word count.” If anything, we hope that this issue reflects the perseverance underneath all writing, when talent is forgotten.

ESSAY STAFF Editor in Chief: Adi Gandhi Managing Editor: Nasira Bilqis Watts Editors: Andrew Xu Brooke Sparks Claire Cheng Emily Zhang Jayda Delatorre Julianna Portillo-Del Valle Kate Jones Kevin Xue Soo Bin Cho Sydney Seymour

Our very best, Aditya Gandhi and Nasira Bilqis Watts

Graphic Designer: Gaby Harrison essay 06

Contents 6 Niketa Kou

9 Amara Mir

14 Bushra Mir

18 Emrys King

22 Gabe Schuhl

28 Valerie Braylovskiy

33 Devlin Orlin

36 Eliza Powers

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42 Sasha Leonard

46 Libby Harris

48 Giacomo Marazza

52 Zoe Piccirillo

57 Isabela Pardo

62 Sunny Jeong-Eimer

66 Seohyeon Lee

70 Leandre Ndisanze

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Niketa Kou Voicemail

Hi I’m Niketa. :) l love dancing, traveling, reading novels, organizing, and much more!

Sometimes you’ll see me on Martson with my picnic blanket bc I love the sun. Or you’ll see me with my boba bc I love bobaaaa.

Reflection This is my very first piece of college writing. It helped me make sense of what was happening during the first month at college, of what I was feeling.

I was introverted in high school, kept my feelings to myself, did not socialize much. Coming to college, I learned to listen and share. Conversations made me realize that a considerate amount of the feelings that I’ve kept to myself are collective—and also felt by the others around me.

The prompt of this essay was to “become lost,”and that exactly resonated with what I was feeling back then. I was living across the world from my parents, coming to college and meeting new people, and discovering new academic interests made me feel lost and

alone. We often think that we are lost and alone when we are not.

I wanted this piece of writing to be a piece that people could relate to, to see that they are not alone. I started this draft in a third-person point of view, but after meetings with my writing partner and my professor, I decided to switch to first-person as I wanted the readers to be able to take on the role of the speaker.

I had doubts that maybe I should take out the quotations, but after sharing the first few drafts, my friends told me that this way of writing made them feel like they were a part of the conversation.

I hope that when you read this, you might be more vulnerable to yourself and know that you are not alone on this journey.

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“But it’s okay. Because to be honest, everyone is lost.

We are all doves trying to find our voicemail.”

Voicemail Yea, so where do you call home? “... The person you are trying to reach has set up a voicemail” “I’m busy, sorry I can’t. I’m busy and we promised each other we are going to find new friends here().” *looks up at the sky. a lost dove. circling around in the sky* “Throughout this gap year, living away from my parents, I’ve drifted away from them. From everything really. Moved three times, met people, got accustomed, and left.

Even the only person I know here wants something new.” Are you okay? “Nothing really feels familiar. I thought I moved here so I could feel like I belong in a community. Living alone makes it worse. Everyone has their own little group already. I don’t belong.”

themselves, and leave.” Want to talk? “They put on a smile, and when they leave, they take it off.”

“Yea, you meet all these new people and you don’t even remember their names.” *on the porch, a dove paces back and forth* “Work, events, meetings, classes, rehearsals. Repeat. I’m always going to places and doing things.

This was what I was expecting.

Too busy, doing what I love.” How did you get here? “But I don’t know. I’m just so lost. “

“Hey! Nice to meet you guys! I’m - and I’m from -. See you guys around!”

“Same. This is not what I was expecting. Not at all. I came here wanting to socialize. But this is too much. Now I feel the pressure if I’m not socializing. I feel like I can’t even eat a meal by myself.

I always have to do things with someone else.”

“People

“I know. But it’s okay. Because to

*passes by the lounge*

say

hi,

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be honest, everyone is lost. We are all doves trying to find our voicemail.” How are you doing?

“We are all lost in the sky. I am too.”

“I came out to the lounge one weekday, drained by work. There were other people; I learned to play Poker. It was a nice break.

For all of us. I guess it wasn’t just me who needed it.” *wanders around the quad, dove comes together with the other doves* “Often we don’t realize how much we share. We come from such different backgrounds yet are such similar people. We’re here for a reason. We were brought together. We are all under the same sky. You are too. Sometimes being lost is not necessarily bad.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Waking up at five, hiking into the wild. Listening to the crickets, watching the morning mist dissolve. Appreciating how infinite nature is and how small we are. Maybe relative to the earth, we are just tiny dots navigating along a path. I read my favorite book in a hammock-” How often is it that we get lost … in time? “People emerge from their tents, it’s nine already.” … in space? “Standing in the metro station during rush hour in Shanghai and just wondering [what I was doing there].

Wondering [how people at the age of 14 are taking the subway so they could go clubbing later].

Wondering [if people know what they’re actually doing, always hurrying from one place to another]. Wondering [how much everything really mattered].”

*lies down and looks at the sky. doves circle around in the sky* So what are we here for? “Making up moves as you go, losing yourself in the movements you create.”

“We often want to know where we’re going. But that’s not really what’s important. What’s important is the process.”

“Maybe this is what we’re here for.

To be inspired and to experience creation. To learn that it is okay to not know where you are. Don’t know where you belong, don’t know what you are doing, ” Are you okay?

“Yea, and you know what?

Everything we do, we are improvising. The dove brings a message from the voicemail inside you, you record (unfold) the response. Sometimes the doves are tired. Sometimes they get lost. Some will find home, some will not. Some may be from other people, other places. Wherever they’re from, the doves will always be there, to listen to you and support you unconditionally.

They bring you your meaning…”

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Amara Mir Reflection I struggled to write this essay as soon as I read the prompt.

It was the second essay for my ID1 “On Poor Taste” class on analyzing a judgment of taste in contemporary popular media. I chose BTS as a topic since I like them and saw how perceptions shifted as their popularity grew. I thought my interest would make the research process easy, as I would be delving into topics such as commercialization, xenophobia, and fan behavior— topics that I was exploring anyway in my free time. I was wrong. I felt completely stumped by the prompt, spending hours re-reading each line and grappling with how my ideas fit into taste. Did I even understand taste?

I felt like I didn’t know what my argument was, and my professor’s feedback reflected that. He highlighted lines of my writing with comments like “I’m still a little confused about your argument. I get how you read [the author], but what are you claiming?” He said that my voice was getting lost in the data. So, he encouraged me to find my own argument and articulate it with my voice.

Before this essay, I was never really a fan of drafts—I would go all-in on a day and maybe do a few revisions.

This started similarly, but worse: I dreaded writing it, and even thinking about how to stressed me out. One night culminated in tears. I ultimately wrote the essay in various bouts over the span of a month, where I even got sick a week before the due date. It was nights of not writing anything, trying to brainstorm alone and with my sister, and staring at a Google Doc, feeling lost— and through these nights, I saw that progress and persistence aren’t always reflected in a changed word count. Ultimately, I finished with a paper I was proud of and, more importantly, with memorable advice from my professor when I expressed how worried I was: “Papers are never really finished anyway. We just stop working Right: Etiam on them at some point.” This essay followed me through egestas, dui some tears, sickness, stress, and endless drafts. It was vel facilisis consequat, massa easy for me to get stuck in the details, but I relished nibh ultrices nisl, knowing there was no finite end. sed sollicitudin diam odio non ante

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Amara Mir is a first year at Pomona. She is half Bangladeshi and half Turkish-Cypriot and grew up at international schools in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is interested in majoring in sociology and economics and enjoys eating, sleeping, and consuming BTS content in her free time.

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“ Prog re s s a n d p er s is te n ce a re n’ t al wa y s re f l e c te d in a c han g e d wo rd co u nt ”

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The Plight of Commercialization: BTS

With a dedicated fanbase, overpowering social media presence, and repeated broken sales and streaming records, the boy band BTS has transformed into a staple act in popular media.

But, until recently, they were “outliers” in the American music market.1 As they have become popular in the western sphere, their recent releases were incessantly criticized for fitting into the “pop” genre. Music critic, Carl Wilson, found that this disapproval is common in pop music due to the perception that pop music is “disposable.”2 One reason BTS, specifically, are being so harshly critiqued is that their recent releases have been in English, rather than their native Korean. Thus, fan groups have questioned whether BTS are losing their impact as potential ambassadors for Korean culture.3 In this paper, I will subvert this judgment to argue instead that the increased consumerism around their music increases their cultural impact.

Hiatt, Brian. 2021. “The Triumph of BTS.” Rolling Stone, no. 1352 (June): 28–35. https://search.ebscohost.com/ login.aspx?direct=true&AuthTyp e=sso&db=aph&AN=150439850&site =ehost-live&scope=site.

Wilson, Carl, and Ann Powers.

“Why We Fight about Pop Music.” NPR, April 15, 2014, sec. The Record. https:// www.npr.org/sections/ herecord/2014/04/15/301440765/ why-we-fight-about-pop-music.

Nu, Tram Anh Ton, More Articles, and 2020 Published on July 28. “Fans Have Mixed Feelings about BTS’s next Single Being in English.”

Showbiz Cheat Sheet, July 28, 2020. https://www.cheatsheet. com/entertainment/fans-havemixed-feelings-about-bts-nextsingle-being-in-english.html/.

Kim, Ju Oak. “BTS as Method: A Counter-Hegemonic Culture in the Network Society.”

Media, Culture & Society 43, no. 6 (September 2021): 1061–77. https://doi. org/10.1177/0163443720986029.

To do this, I will claim more consumerism leads to greater exposure, leading to greater opportunities, and ultimately a larger cultural impact. To support this, I will analyze the judgment that the consumerism around BTS is promoting counter-hegemonic culture and opening possibilities in the non-western sphere found in Ju Oak Kim’s study of BTS. I will use her study as a scholarly example of how BTS’s commercial activities create transcultural impacts. To show a counterargument, I will refer to a music review stating their recent releases are too commercialized, linking these ideas with the concept of Greenberg’s kitsch and Bordieu’s middle-brow. I will demonstrate the limitations of this position through Kim, the concept of avant-garde, and Hall’s theories of cultural order to ultimately favor the judgment that consumerism around BTS expands, rather than dulls their cultural impact.

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The first argument to support my claim that consumerism leads to greater exposure is Kim’s study, “BTS as Method: A Counter-Hegemonic Culture in the Network Society,” which explores how BTS is creating an “alternative global culture.”4 She does this through three primary pillars: digital networks, fandom, and the K-pop industry. She describes BTS as one of the pioneers in an ever-evolving music sphere, alluding to skepticism about the authenticity of the group’s cultural impact. She also explored instances of exclusion stemming from “cultural ignorance,” the capitalistic culture of the K-pop industry, and BTS’ economic impacts. In terms of consumerism, she writes about how K-pop innately has a consumerist culture through the development of more forms of consumable content (e.g. expansive merch sales, branding, online platforms, albums with extra content). In addition, she found that the success of BTS has also resulted from their ability to acclimate to digital interaction—creating a tighterknit fanbase and more accessible communication internationally.

Despite the group becoming increasingly commercialized, they interact across cultures through these mediums, allowing greater international exposure.

By appealing to a fandom, they gain more dedicated consumers who vote and vouch for them in music awards and charts— hence, how they also gain newer opportunities.

The study underscored how their increased exposure increases cultural impact by narrating BTS as counterhegemonic entities. Hall created the term “counter-hegemony” in his

theories of cultural order.

According to Hall, a dominant cultural order consists of the preferred hierarchical meanings or decodings in culture. Those controlling and institutionalizing these “dominant” views are those in a dominant-hegemonic position—in this case, the U.S. music market.5 I believe BTS are inherently in the oppositional code in the hegemonic order of the U.S. music market, as they are Asian, non-western acts, producing mostly non-English music. Hence, this defies the U.S. music market’s preexisting hegemonic cultural order.

Combining this idea with Kim’s other findings, it becomes clearer that regardless of heightened consumerism, “peripheral entities” (e.g. BTS) have the power to shift established scopes of cultural interaction. Even if they are producing music that listeners can classify as more westernized because of the English in the song, their presence as people with Korean identities counters hegemony and enhances their cultural impact.

However, a converse judgment prevails, which states that the capitalistic culture negates cultural impact. The specific counterargument is a review entitled “BTS churn out a cloying commercial jingle with ‘Permission to Dance,’” which iterated strong distaste toward BTS’s increasing commercialization. This scathing review was written by one of the anonymous music reviewers on the website, Asian Junkie, which writes on Asian pop culture. The writer refers to BTS’ recent single as “utter radio slop,” describing it as “... fake fun,” which reduces BTS to the “lowest common musical denominator.”6 They also describe their other recent singles essay 06

as either “sugary radio pop” or “cloying commercial jingle[s].”

These descriptors combine into the label of “kitsch”—a negative and oppositional perspective on consumerism.

According to Greenberg, kitsch describes popular media fit for urban masses, based on replication and façades, which are culturally insignificant.7 As kitsch products are intended to be highly consumed, they are often heard or seen in essential parts of our society. In this case, the author used radio and jingles as the ultimate symbols of over-commercialization and consumerism, expressing their extreme distaste as they felt the song mimicked a form 5.

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Stuart Hall, “Encoding/ decoding.” In Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Love, and Paul Willis (eds.), Culture, Media, Language, pp. 128–38. London: Hutchinson, 1980.

TheBiasList. “[Review] BTS Churn out a Cloying Commercial Jingle with ‘Permission to Dance.’” Asian Junkie, July 8, 2021. https:// www.asianjunkie. com/2021/07/08/reviewbts-churn-out-a-cloyingcommercial-jingle-withpermission-to-dance/.

Greenberg, Clement.

“Avant-Garde and Kitsch” In A History of the Western Art Market: A Sourcebook of Writings on Artists, Dealers, and Markets, edited by Titia Hulst, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017, pp. 24-27.

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that was the “lowest common musical denominator.”

For those who have transferred into the streaming era, this is not an unpopular opinion either.

Audiences sometimes describe radio music as repetitive and overplayed.8 Hence, the author shows how they felt the song was in poor taste as it could appeal to the “common” masses as the song style emulated those that gained more exposure through the radio/ jingles. Jingles are commonly played in most advertisements or public spaces—they are consumerist parts of society that feel as if they have been made integral to life, like kitsch. More similarities can be drawn by the author’s description of the song feeling like “fake fun”—a kitsch property described by Greenberg as “plastic culture” accessible to all.9 The author highlighted how they felt BTS was no longer producing genuine content, and everything stemming from them were, instead, replications. These kitsch properties imply that the music is unoriginal, and thus, like kitsch, does not have cultural impact.

The depreciation of popular culture also relates to Bordieu’s distinction, in which he describes popularized culture— culture accessible to and for all—as devalued middle-brow culture.10 Bordieu’s distinction encompasses economic and cultural capital, which I consider important in this discussion because it dictated that only the elite could control cultural worthiness.

Cultural and economic capital plays into radio too, as radio is accessible to most people through various platforms, does not require an internet connection, nor does it require deep knowledge of music.

The review thus devalues BTS’

music and consequent cultural impact due to its popularity.

While kitsch and middle-brow culture devalue popularization, the elite (or the dominant hegemonic culture in this case) lauds the “avant-garde” as superior, exclusive, and novel art. Rather than imitating the past, the avant-garde claims to hold a “superior consciousness of history,” with exploratory art for the elite that propels culture. However, exploring the two concepts together, the reviewer’s judgment seems to be limited. First, the review dwelled on the radio focus of the song, whereas the song received only modest radio play.11 Considering that Greenberg regarded kitsch as an integral part of society, the author painted caricatured interpretations of the music’s kitschiness. While placing kitsch labels on BTS’s music, the esoteric Grammy Awards also nominated one of the same songs mentioned in the review. The Grammy’s is arguably this era’s musical epitome of avant-garde, and BTS were the first Korean group to be nominated.12 Their nomination at the Grammy’s was a symbol of elitist approval—the potential converse of commercial radio.

Despite the scathing critique of their future impact, BTS emulate characteristics of the avant-garde, implying they have the capacity to expand culture.

Although their music may have been more commercialized, BTS still became the first Korean group to be nominated in a predominately white institution.

This demonstrated how they are paving paths for future artists and making their culture more well-known.

The notion that something has to even be considered avant-garde to be culturally significant, though,

points to a clear classist binary in both the reviewer’s thoughts and the concept of avant-garde.

Although the reviewer did not believe BTS fit this label, they implied that anything less than avant-garde was less deserving. The reviewer makes another classist insinuation by implying the radio crowds that the songs were catering to were not worthy-enough crowds to gain approval from. Regardless, my argument points to another aspect of cultural hegemony as the Grammy Awards are given the authority and cultural capital to dictate what is considered worthy enough. Even if some groups did not follow their rankings, the elite represent themselves as being the 8.

Reskinoff, Paul. “Why Does Radio Suck? A New Lawsuit Explains Why.” Digital Music News, December 8, 2016. https://www. digitalmusicnews. com/2016/12/07/radiosuck-new-lawsuitexplains/.

9. Clement.

10. Bourdieu, Pierre.

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.

1984. Reprint, London ; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015.

11. Cantor, Brian.

“Billboard Hot 100: BTS’ ‘Permission to Dance’ Replaces ‘Butter’ as #1 Song in America.”

Headline Planet, July 19, 2021. https:// headlineplanet.com/ home/2021/07/19/ billboard-hot-100-btspermission-to-dancereplaces-butter-as-1song-in-america/.

12. “BTS.” Grammy Awards.

Recording Academy, December 15, 2020. https://www.grammy. com/grammys/artists/ bts/287749.

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sole purveyors of culture. These two ideas highlight the classist binary surrounding the idea of cultural worth. This binary explains why commercialization influences others’ perceptions of BTS’s cultural impact.

Both the review and the study highlight that BTS is becoming more commercial. However, their interpretations of this commercialization and its impacts are the opposite. As Kim explored the way their music was disseminated digitally and promoted by fandom behavior, she illustrates BTS as more avant-garde figures who have challenged the hegemonic culture of the western world through their releases. Kim’s study also helps dispute the judgment of middlebrow taste, as BTS’ increasing accessibility illustrated strong cultural impact, despite the fact that according to Bordieu, this would have required cultural capital not awarded to the middle-class. The second review believes that BTS is becoming less culturally impactful due to their kitsch-ness. The review’s author judged BTS and their song negatively, using the judgment of kitsch taste to infer BTS is trying to conform to the western world rather than develop a new culture or spread their own.

Despite the review’s limitations, both this review and Kim’s paper underline that encouragement of greater consumerism, through alternative means or more accessible songs, increases exposure, broadens their opportunities, and thus, is culturally consequential. So, BTS, with their alternative means of creating and dispersing music, are culturally consequential.

With the malleability of the avant-garde and kitsch labels essay 06

regarding interpretations of BTS, my final judgment pulls from both to link how these judgments of tastes affect cultural control. If something has been popularized, it does not inherently mean that the content is meaningless. It brings more eyes to consumers.

Consumers, then, can command the attention on the culture they choose to promote. BTS exemplify, too, that the elite do not solely hold the cultural capital to redevelop cultural norms. I argue that increased transcultural consumerism doesn’t erode the impact of an international act in an international scope. BTS singing in English did not negate their impact as Koreans because they are intrinsically Korean.

As Kim mentioned, despite the increasing commercialization of BTS, their presence as one opposing the dominant has created cultural shifts emulative of the avant-garde without its elite confines. No matter how saturated in lesser-valued forms their music could be, as the reviewer and critics of pop music insinuated, their transcultural impact continues to rise. Pop music—now involving BTS—can still create innovative cultural impact. With consumerism, pop music puts the power into the hands of the majority to help learn about the minority.

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Bushra Mir Blank Spaces

Bushra Mir is a first-year at Pomona College.

She is half Bangladeshi and half Turkish-Cypriot and grew up at international schools in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Reflection For my ID1 “Language, Community, and Power” we had to write a narrative piece on our relationship with language. I found it daunting, as I was uninspired and initially there was no true “happy ending” to me.

My relationship with language was one I associated with loss, as someone who could have been trilingual, was bilingual, but is now mostly monolingual. I was inspired by the idea of “Google translated words,” as I had written a letter in Bangla using Google Translate before leaving for college. I would click “listen” to check if Google Translate was saying what I wanted it to say before copying it down. But with that idea, I grappled with “so what?” What was there beyond the onedimensionality of the sad ending that I can no longer speak Bangla well? I wanted to talk about receptive bilingualism, but not just through a lens tainted in what-ifs and regrets—leading me to what I still have: listening. Through writing this piece, I learned to subvert that journey of loss into a testament of what I do have, and not just what I don’t.

It was easy to confront the idea of language with regret, but as the assignment urged us to look at our relationship with language, I was pushed to expand how I understood my relationship as to how it connects rather than severs. Understanding it through the lens of a relationship allowed me to view my connection with language as dynamic and responsive. As such, persistence, for me, was trudging through the murkiness of loss. For a long time now in Bangla, listening was all I could confidently do. I want to emphasize the value of listening, particularly to Bangladesh’s people—the people who the rest of the world may often relegate into the blank spaces (I would highly recommend learning about Bangladesh’s history as a country!). It was and is very much still a loss for me, so while I now know English and can listen in Bangla, it doesn’t always have to detract from the fact that I can no longer speak well in Bangla. My loss can coexist without needing to be some kind of silver lining in itself.

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And then, there’s me. I grew up playing with my sister and our nanny, Shantona, while my parents were at work. We played hide-and-seek, tripping over the jagged rooftop grounds, our eyes laughing as we counted to 10 in Bangla. Five-year-old me talked to aunts and uncles with the soul and words of an established grown-up (or at least I had assumed so). I had taken a pencil and begun to write my life in Bangla. Despite being halfTurkish-Cypriot, Bangla was my language of choice. English was nothing but scribbles on the margins of my pages. But, the keyword is was.

I joined an international Englishspeaking school. I began listening to Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, Avril Lavigne, and Paramore. I watched old Disney shows and Barbie movies—squealing when The Twelve Dancing Princesses found the secret opening, wondering when I would ever get a vacation as long as Phineas and Ferb, and admiring family in the Full Metal Alchemist with my older brother. I toddled into preschool, English shaky on

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We live in the blank spaces at the edges of print. Bangladesh is often written as overpopulated, over-polluted, and littered with stereotyped notions of being a “pajama republic.” But, in the gaps between the sensationalized stories and stereotypes, are the people—the people who utter the sounds of Bangla, the people who fought for the right to speak it, and the people whose hands moved over pages to create its curves and lines.

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B G my tongue, and came out of it enunciating its syllables with confidence. Despite neither of my parents being native English speakers, they spoke to me in English and, soon enough, those 26 letters began to occupy the spaces that the richness of Bangla once had.

As I acclimated to our little international bubble, school and activities scribbled over time at home. I learned to write Bangla in elementary, engraving the consonants and vowels as an extension of the words I already knew. But I spoke only a couple of words in Bangla when I did get home, instead replacing my

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words with smiles and nods. As one year turned into five and five into ten, I understood the words they all said, but my mind wasn’t able to shape them back out. They told me stories and I gasped and smiled in the right places, but when I had to reply, I could only resort to English. I had lost the ability to produce grammatical utterances beyond simple conversational language in Bangla—the language that had painted so much of my childhood in vibrant cultural hues; the language I had known almost subconsciously as a child.

Now, I look up at the blinking cursor as I copy down the next

Blank Spaces

As long as I can make someone feel like they’re being listened to, maybe my words can wait a moment before I’m ready to spew them out.

Bangla letter on behalf of me and my sister, as we leave for college. I can write it and understand it, but the words don’t seem to come out as they once did. My Bangla words may never be as eloquent as they once were, as English invites my pencil tip and mouth to move when Bangla did before. “প্প্রিয় শান্তোহনা, Dear Shantona, আমরা অত্যন্ত দুঃখিত ও আফসোস করছি যে আমরা আমাদের বেশিরভাগ বাংলা ভাষা হারিয়ে ফেলেছি এবং তাই আমরা একটি অস্থায়ী বিদায় জানাতে একটি চিঠি লিখতে চেয়েছিলাম এবং আপনাকে ধন্যবাদ জানাতে চাই। I’m sorry we lost most of our Bangla speaking skills and so I wanted to write you a letter to say a temporary goodbye and thank you. তাই আমি দুঃখিত, আমরা এগুলি উচ্চস্বরে উচ্চস্বরে বলতে পারি না এবং আমাদের সম্পূর্ণ যোগাযোগ করতে সমস্যা হয়। I’m sorry we can’t say all of this out loud sincerely.”

When I tried to think of the words, all I was met with was empty space. Scientifically, sure, we could call it receptive bilingualism, but as I click the “listen” on Google translate to see if it’s saying what I want it to say, I think back to the time when I didn’t have to rely on computer-generated writing to

express my next thought. What I hear are Google translated words.

I may never be able to fill in those blank spaces in Bangla. But now I can fill in different blank spaces. I’ve been able to talk to more people, whether it be my friends from school, strangers in an airport, or competitors in an international competition.

As much remorse as I feel for losing Bangla, I feel grateful that I can draw paintings with my English words that I was never able to in Bangla. Colloquial Bangla fills in the spaces it didn’t have already with “please” and “sorry”, adding more with “thank you” and “hello.”

English didn’t have to be an “other,” when I could write with both together.

Now, I can only rely on Google translated words.

But, I can listen.

And I can understand.

Bangla had been scrawled and spoken over— so much so they had to create their own book to be able to write their own pages. British colonial rule had left arbitrary divisions that disregarded the ethnic diversity that postcolonial India had. They split Muslims into East and West Pakistan, but the primarily Urdu-speaking government tried to silence the voices of Bengalis. Bengalis had been stripped of their right to write in policy and history, so they fought for their right to speak Bangla—to have control of their

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own pen. After the liberation war, they named their book Bangladesh, the country (desh) of Bangla. I had listened to my dadu [grandmother] talk about losing her husband while she was pregnant with my uncle. I had listened to my aunt describe the bloodshed and hushed whispers she remembered as a child. I didn’t want to be someone that wrote over Bangla with the westernized ideals of phonological perfection. So, I embraced my new role in this language—the role of a listener.

thieves. I can listen to the past, present, and future.

It’s alarmingly simple, yet we often forget to take a moment and just listen. My mind may not sculpt the words and syllables I want, but that doesn’t mean I can’t understand when others show me how they sculpt theirs.

I may not be the person who fought for the right to speak it and the person whose hands move over pages to create its curves and lines, but I can be the person who listens into Bangla’s blank spaces

I listen to my grandma’s quivering breath, as she reads out the epitaph of her younger sister. I feel what she feels, admiring how she uses words to paint a scene above the clouds. With the gentle splatter of raindrops against the windowpane, I listen to my aunt impassionately talk about being a professor in Rajshahi. I acknowledge her shaky sigh and tired smile, as she recounts an interaction with a survivor. I listen to words that remind me that we can do better. I listen to my little cousin playing “shop” with me, sputtering giggles and quick Bangla as he pretends to sell me plushies in a bizarrely overpriced exchange. As his eyes disappear into a smile, I listen to him narrate his make-believe scene where he protects the country from

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As long as I can make someone feel like they’re being listened to, maybe my words can wait a moment before I’m ready to spew them out. I may not be the person who fought for the right to speak it and the person whose hands move over pages to create its curves and lines, but I can be the person who listens into Bangla’s blank spaces.

Emrys King Emrys King is a first year at Pomona College pursuing mathematics and Spanish. They have always been interested in storytelling in its many forms, and before coming to Pomona participated in creative writing summer programs, with a focus in creative nonfiction and screenwriting. This is his first published piece, and he is very grateful to be a part of essay.

When I first considered what I wanted to write my final essay on, I understood that the natural progression of the course prompted me to expand one of my earlier essays, either going further in-depth in analyzing a cultural object or bringing that analysis into a larger cultural context. I reviewed the essays that brought me the most joy to write: the reflection on The Odyssey as the earliest piece of fanfiction; the analysis of Picrew, an online avatar creator website popular with LGBTQ+ youth, as a representation of the disparity between our physical forms and our perceived self; and the quasi-memoir on living in the Bible belt, where queerness was treated the same as sickness, a topic avoided in conversation and the absence of which was prayed for. I realized, in reviewing these

essays, that throughout each persisted the same theme: my experience with queerness.

I had unintentionally, subconsciously, been writing the same extended piece for each assignment over the course of my ID1.

Thus, for my final essay, it made the most sense to formally bring these pieces together into one, moving chronologically through my experience with queerness.

Originally titled “Snapshots of a Queer Youth,” it transitioned from my encounters with cisheterosexism while in Alabama, to finding online queer communities and exploring my identity using Picrews, to validating this newfound identity using fanfiction. The original piece kept much of the three separate essays intact, resulting in something

disjointed and disconnected.

After workshopping it in class, I realized that the themes that connected the three essays were much stronger than I had originally thought. I took time outside of class to reflect, asking myself what experiences had brought profound change or validation to my queer identity, and why I thought it important to share these experiences with the world (or at least my ID1 class). I revised the piece to focus on these themes, rewriting large portions of the three initial essays. In the end, I had created a new, meditative piece about my encounters with the queer experience in today’s world, symbolically titled “The House with Infinite Rooms” to represent the way that our community will welcome anyone with open arms.

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ECONOMY

The House with Infinite Rooms

There was a crowd of four – no, five – football coaches in front of what was meant to be our safe space. There wasn’t anything particularly special about this classroom, of course. No rainbow flags, no pamphlets on safe sex practices, no posters of queer icons. The teacher who so graciously let us adopt her room taught American history, so we had to make do with the good old Stars and Stripes and photos of ancient white generals.

This space, made safe only by the fact that we, the queers bold enough to reveal ourselves, decided that it would be, was not enough.

It was the Deep South, so queerness was unsurprisingly frowned upon, though silently: if it was ignored, then it could not exist, meaning we

could not exist. We had to find each other to survive, to prove that we did exist, in plural.

It was a bond born out of necessity, both stronger and weaker than one born out of choice.

Only two weeks into the fall semester, a group of men (whose names I don’t remember) let me know that they were obsessed with the idea of us (not them) dressing in drag and throwing wigs to the crowd during our school’s annual homecoming parade. They first let me know after one of the Gay-Straight Alliance meetings while I was cleaning up. Then they started attending the meetings themselves. Whatever words we wanted to say or topics we wanted to discuss were drowned in the flood of demands.

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[…]

That was where the coaches came in. Luckily, I was buddybuddy with our school’s principal, meaning he had reason to listen to me when I told him that our safe space was no longer safe. He sent in his reinforcements, the head football coach and all of his assistant coaches, to be the muscle in front of our door. I thanked them for being there, they gave me a nod. Our school club had become a gay club, bouncers and all.

Even though they were there to make us safer, they were also a form of accountability. The doors were not thick enough to block our conversations from their prying ears. Nothing we said or wanted to say was secure, as we could not trust them to secrecy. Being honest meant outing ourselves to

these adult men and, by proxy, our entire community.

And that was how I realized no space could be truly safe for us. No matter how hard I tried, we would always be hunted.

Online is a different story.

The Algorithm is often painted as a negative, an artificial intelligence that has boiled our wonderfully individual identities down to statistics in a dataset; however, it is also responsible for the creation of online queer communities.

Queer youth such as myself often live in areas where queerness is a risky identity to flaunt. Thus, we search for refuge in our algorithmic interactions, and find solace in the fact that other humans have felt the same. It was as much a necessity to feed into these relationships as it was to find other closeted kids in my hometown; online, however, friends could come and go naturally, as we were not obligated to stay and ensure each other’s survival.

This freedom, in turn, gave us permission to explore every facet of our queerness without fear.

This past spring, some of my online queer friends and I decided to procrastinate and try our hands at a TikTok trend.

The trend consisted of using Picrew – a site in which artists can upload avatar creators for anyone to access – to recreate how we saw everyone else in the friend group, as well as how we saw ourselves. There is a finite yet large number of combinations for each avatar creator on the site – different skin colors, hair colors, hair styles, outfits, accessories.

The purpose of each creation might differ: while my friends and I used it to recreate real people, many use these tools to recreate fictional characters, both published and of their own creation.

Picrew is a very prevalent tool in online queer communities.

Oftentimes, these images become profile pictures on social media sites, regardless of whether they were meant to recreate one’s own face or that of a character.

Those of us who do use Picrews as profile pictures – our first introduction to the world and everyone in it – believe that our own fabricated version of what we look like is the most accurate, that the elements of ourselves that are not visible to the naked lens, the subtleties of our soul, are the most important parts of ourselves.

That is why we do not default

to the camera, but rather to the avatar creator. We can pick and choose which parts of our face to accentuate, give ourselves a more masculine jawline, make our chests as flat or not-flat as we choose, wear makeup we would be beaten for beyond the screen. We do not trust a traditional camera to capture our essence because our essence is so much more than we are permitted to be in our physical form.

Beyond the tools we have created to alter our physical beings, we’ve also altered the narratives of the world around us through fanfiction. […]

The franchises that are the focus of fanfiction tend to be modern ones, ones that have captured the attention of the general (cishet) public. Nevertheless, this phenomenon can extend to works from any century – on AO3, for example, there are hundreds of stories published under the tags “Shakespeare” and “Bible” with the same focus on the insertion of queer representation into wellknown works. […]

Since before we as a species have had the ability to write, we have been telling stories and –

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more importantly – changing them. The oral tradition of epics like The Odyssey and Beowulf led to stories that were fundamentally fluid; every storyteller would add their own flavor to the original, adapting the tone, characterizations, and even plot to best suit the given situation. From our earliest attempts at storycrafting, we have been creating space for ourselves, reaching out into the tales we know and love for something familiar, grasping onto the twists and turns of fictional life and using them to make sense of reality. The queering of classics is simply an extension of this profoundly human phenomenon: we have written ourselves into worlds where we were told we could not exist.

I am not sure if we will ever be free. I think back to the underclassmen I left in Alabama, the queer and trans folks who made life bearable when every day had a big question mark next to safety, and I shudder. I am not sure if they can or will escape like I was able to. It seems impossible that everyone – all five coaches, and the men who invited themselves to our table, and those kids’ parents,

and the teachers who wrote Bible verses on the board every morning – will be able to change.

What I do know is that we are safe with each other. I know that we have created a home with infinite rooms, and we have hung self-portraits on the walls that look like how we see ourselves. And in this home, we tell each other stories around the hearth, and we can always point to a character in these stories and say, “That one is me.” And the rest of us will nod and take our turn doing the same. Maybe someday, we’ll travel out into the real world and tell our stories for everyone to hear.

But for now, our little house is big enough.

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Self-portrait Picrews

REFLECTION

Gabe Schuhl MATERIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF KITCHENS As soon as I came back home for winter break, I was reminded of why this paper was important to me. My mother put me to work—rolling pasta, washing dishes, boiling water, and the other menial tasks I was deemed knowledgeable enough to perform. As we prepared our usual array of holiday dishes, my mother called upon the recipes of our ancestors. Their work is buried in the margins of others’ recipes, scrawled onto the smallest leaflets, or stuffed between the pages of our cookbooks. I was hyperaware of the kitchen’s influence—how much knowledge, power, and even resistance had been occurring within its walls.

This was my final paper for my ID1 class, and the first true research paper I’ve written. The size of the project was massively overwhelming for me.

My first draft was a scramble of paragraphs, each struggling to speak to the next. My solution was to talk to people about their own kitchens. Though each story was drastically different from another, I found that each of these kitchens maintained traditions, generated legacies, and persisted against repressive backdrops. Needless to say, I fell in love with this project, and was hardly able to put all the things I learned onto the paper. I tried to find a path that channeled my mother’s kitchen, yet was continually aware of the countless struggles that define the broader kitchen imaginary. For however tiring the writing process became, it was the persistence within the stories themselves that pushed my work forward.

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MATERIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF KITCHENS

BIO Hi! I’m Gabe, and I’m from Charlotte, North Carolina. I think writing is pretty neat.

Ever since writing this essay, I’ve been trying to get into cooking more. I discovered that standing around thinking about kitchens too much usually ends up with something burning.

1.

2.

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Roxanne Mountford, “On gender and rhetorical space,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2021): 41.

Mountford, 41.

Barbara Welter, “The cult of true womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 174.

Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (The MIT Press, 1982), 2.

When one enters a kitchen, they set foot into a terrain laden with the residues of history.

Labor, violence, celebration, and resistance have all traversed through this space and contributed to its rhetorical representation.

Kitchens have maintained a vital connection to human affect, and have elicited countless pages, orations, and traditions of human imagination to reckon with their purpose. It is a deeply gendered and racialized location, yet its engagement with systems of power has varied drastically across time. Kitchens are a study in fluidity—a malleable rhetorical space that becomes a site of carceral isolation or intersectional resistance. This paper will explore the physical space of the kitchen as a vital depiction of the duality of marginalized experiences— one that is as immobilizing as it is creative and self-defining.

This paper will present this linkage from kitchen to kitchen, attempting to reveal the intense radical resistance brewing in our beloved cultural hearths.

Space is important to the production of any sort of rhetoric, yet this project views it as more than an influence. I rely on Mountford’s (2001) definition of “rhetorical space” as “the geography of a communicative event.”1 Rhetorical space is the irrevocable linkage between the physicality of a space and an author’s communicative intent. Thus, “space” is used metaphorically to describe the “cultural landscape of laws, customs, and beliefs that form the geographies of our lives.”2 Here enters the kitchen: one of the most unique rhetorical spaces imaginable, with physicality often a constitutive feature of the highly gendered and racialized rhetoric essay 06

they have produced. While a great body of literature attempts to identify a specific social group and then examine the spaces they have inhabited, this project attempts the reverse. Kitchens are the point of origin—we will begin from the physical space and assess how it has developed across identity groups rather than beginning from the groups themselves. Kitchen rhetoric is hardly a monolith, and is necessarily malleable to historical developments and increasingly complex understandings of the value of kitchens.

Kitchens are historically under researched spaces. By nature of their isolation, they are seen as an unnecessary research endeavor— an affirmation of misogynistic society rather than a site of creative energy. Even 19th century reformists found themselves reifying an exclusionary position with calls to “sweep Uncle Sam’s kitchen clean.”3 Spatialized rhetoric featured kitchens in calls for reform so as to encourage women to “tidy up the country house” rather than affect the world beyond domesticity. In a form of radical rebuttal, many feminists have attempted to distort the material space of the kitchen entirely, trying to alter its physicality so as to frustrate the domestic norms it produced.

Between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Great Depression in the United States, feminists designed new forms of neighborhood organization, incorporating apartment hotels without kitchens, cooperative housekeeping, or community dining clubs.4 Feminist resistance to the physical structure of the kitchen was an attempt to socialize domestic work and subvert the isolated nature of the kitchenspace.

However, feminist resistance need not necessitate an attempt to destory the physical kitchenspace. On the contrary, cookbooks are vital depictions of the kitchens and the power of the women who have occupied them. As a medium with a massive audience and literature base, the cookbook is a unique and valuable example of rhetorical space. Within it, the kitchen is increasingly defined as a geographical event—something that records and transmits feminist realities across time like no other rhetoric. Often recalled as vestiges of 18th and 19th century methods of social control, cookbooks have been historically dismissed by feminist discourse.5 They are accused of memorializing domestic life and affirming misogynistic structures. Relatively less literature recognizes cookbooks as a vital source of agency for women, but neglecting their value is to assume that women were largely absent from rhetoric throughout the 18th and 19th century. Cookbooks made women a source of authority on taste and the art of behaving tastefully. Throughout the 19th century, taste became an increasingly important way of publicizing the pleasures of the physical body, and women were the ultimate authority on how it ought to be done.6 Once again, the prefaces of cookbooks provide invaluable insight into the individualized authorship and values of women otherwise limited in their display of rhetoric. Amelia Simmons, author of the first American cookbook, reveals subtle but crucial insight into the lives of women at the turn of the 18th century: As this treatise is calculated for the improvement of the rising generation of Females America, the Lady of fashion and fortune will not be displeased, if many hints are suggested for the more general and universal knowledge of those females in this country, who by the lots of their parents, or other unfortunate circumstances, are reduced to the necessity of going into families in the domestics, or taking refuge with their friends or relations, and doing those things which are really essential to the perfecting them as good wives, and useful members of society. The orphan, tho’ left to the care of virtuous guardians, will find it essentially necessary to have an opinion and determination of her own.7

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Simmons provides a revolutionary framing for a book simply intended to teach culinary skills. The kitchen is not depicted as a natural extension of the female character. Rather, female agency exists prior to the construct of the domestic sphere and enters it out of sheer necessity.

It hardly appears coincidental that the first American cookbook, prepared for an immense audience of women, specifies those in “unfortunate circumstances.”

The implication is that none of these women are far enough from this lack of fortune to be beyond need of a cookbook. To further emphasize her point, Simmons characterizes these women within the lens of an orphan, bereft of familial duties and left only to her own femininity—which includes, for the first time, “an opinion and determination of her own.” Women began to generate a cultural standard for a nation that was just beginning to find its republican ideals, often acting as a point of national identity.

Simmons’ preface works to shape a new republican identity, using the archetype of the orphan woman to “[suggest] that her unknown origins and lineage represent the new republic she seeks to construct, both physically and ideologically, through her recipes.”8 Even when cookbooks showed no signs of a radical challenge to the misogynist order, they were still vital sources of female rhetoric and agency.

The cookbook became a creative energy, a space for women to claim domestic territory and become a 5.

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source of authority.

As feminist theory evolved parallel to cookbooks, cookbooks further allowed for women to assert agency beyond the private sphere and into public society.

Cooking certainly negotiates gendered realities, but it is hardly constrained to them. In fact, feminist literature is increasinly poised to socialize domestic work and bring the creativity of the kitchenspace into the public sphere rather than eliminate it entirely.

La Wisp, the LA chapter of a maternal pacifist social movement known as Women Strike for Peace (WSP) created and sold cookbooks to fund protest efforts in 1969.9 Cooking became a political tool against the war in Vietnam, and encouraged a familiar fluidity within the kitchenspace.

Thus, kitchens became political sanctuaries and sites of an increasingly intersectional struggle. Part of reimagining the kitchenspace, of understanding the vast myriad of rhetoric it produces, involves viewing it as a space for marginalized identities to escape a violent public realm. In the early 1980s, August Wilson wrote a cycle of 10 plays, collectively known as the Pittsburgh Cycle, that document each decade of the Black American experience throughout the 20th century. In the 1930s installment, The Piano Lesson, the kitchen plays a crucial role as a rhetorical space. Boy Willie, from Mississippi, comes to his sister Berniece’s home in Pittsburgh to convince her to sell the family piano so that he

may buy farmland. However, the piano is a “living text of history,” and Berniece and Willie’s great grandfather had carved the family history of enslavement, including births, deaths, and marriages.10 The piano is a physical instrument for the production of music, yet the legacies of enslavement, imprisonment, and violence are carved, literally and figuratively, upon its surface. While the piano is an example of a rhetorical significance meshing into its physicality, it is also situated within a larger rhetorical space.

The play is staged so that the kitchen and the living room are on the same plane, with no separation between the piano’s carceral legacy and the kitchen’s domestic presence. The piano and the blues it produces exist within a domestic political sanctuary, an unyielding fortress to a world steeped in antiBlackness.

The play has a special scene within Berniece’s kitchen, where every male character performs the blues at the kitchen table. All of the men in The Piano Lesson have spent time at Parchman Farm, Mississippi’s convict labor camp established in 1901. Parchman was an operational farm, and a replication of a southern Antebellum plantation.

As the men sit around the kitchen table together, they begin to sing “Alberta” or “Berta Berta,” a song typically sung by men in the convict-lease prison system. The song evokes a grueling labor, and Wilson’s characters “materialize the conditions of their labor” as

Sarah Walden, Tasteful Domesticity: Women’s Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790-1940 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), 3.

Walden, 30.

Amelia Simmons, American Cookery (1798), i.

Walden, 37.

Isaac West, “Performing resistance in/from the kitchen: The practice of maternal pacifist politics and La WISP’s cookbooks,” Women’s Studies in Communication 30, no. 3 (2007). essay 06

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they sing, stomping feet, clapping, hands, and even using pots and spoons to emulate the sounds of hoes hitting the soil.11 The kitchen acts as a physical distance from the violence of the farm, allowing the men to express themselves and connect with one another in its cultural hearth. They reflect on their experience, and occupying the space of domesticity allows them to “turn their imprisonment into song.”12 The song becomes increasingly visceral as the men slam the table more loudly, each voicing their common pain within the kitchen’s walls and shaping the domestic terrain into a site of resistance.

Despite beginning our inquiry with the kitchen as an extension of carceral space, Wilson’s kitchen generates a fundamentally necessary perspective of the kitchen as the only reprieve from a carceral public sphere.

The kitchen takes on an inversion of affect—it becomes a refuge where it was once a prison.

The kitchen does not only harbor identities from the public sphere, but can also create substantial challenges to systems of power. During the antebellum period in the United States, Black women crafted the cultural space of the kitchen to resist interrelated systems of classism, sexism, and racism. Southern kitchens of American slavery were confining spaces, with plantation mistresses that supervised enslaved women within the kitchen and ensured the continual dehumanization of Black women. However, enslaved women would often respond with “subversive kitchen strategies to circumvent the atrocities of slavery.”13 For example, they would “grind and mix fine pieces of glass into food, or poison the food and set fire to the houses of their masters.”14 The kitchen became a unique point of Black authority, where the violence of the plantation could be resisted within the physical confines of the kitchen. Thus, plantation owners sought ways to restore the former isolationary politics of kitchenspace by moving the kitchen away from the main plantation house, spatially isolating kitchen slaves from the plantation family defining their status as nonhuman compared to whites. Spatial difference, as the Jim Crow South would soon come to relish, was essential to affirming racialized hierarchies.

However, physical isolation also fostered a space of creativity and release for Black women. As Jessica Harris (1995) eloquently explains: “With the improvisational genius that gave the world jazz, we have cooked our way into the hearts, minds, and stomachs of a country.”15 While kitchens were once used as a means of relegating women to the private sphere, the space becomes feminist territory, forcing oppressors to isolate the kitchen itself. Enslaved women were even known to serve traditional African food at their masters’ tables, asserting a creative freedom even under chattel slavery.16 Moreover, the kitchen’s material influence in the antebellum South forwards a contemporary understanding of Black women’s ability to form a “kitchen legacy”—a contingent subversion within a system of domination.

Black women’s production of food, transmission of oral history, and perfection of recipe within the enslaved kitchen was a response—a resistance—to their material condition.17 The kitchen recognizes both their gendered and racialized position, offering them the tools to fuel a Black feminist rhetorical tradition.

Rather than declaring the kitchen a relic of a violent past, new frameworks recognize the historical power in the kitchenspace and use it to advance a radical future. Kitchens open up a new ground of struggle—a place whose historicized identity has consistently reflected the voices of women in rhetoric and continues to threaten patriarchal, white power. Kitchens have been sites of explosive creative energy and powerful female agency . When we view kitchens as merely an extension of domesticity, we miss out on the myriad of valuable rhetoric that has been generated within and about these spaces. Women’s writing provides an interpretive vision of kitchens just as much as kitchens materially influence feminist rhetoric. The kitchen’s presence does not end in its walls, its pots, pans, sinks, and stoves.

The kitchen is alive in its inhabitants, in their constant ability to produce rhetoric that reflects their social positioning as much as it posits alternate, resistant, realities.

10. Anissa Janine Wardi, “The colored man can’t fix nothing with the law: Carceral spaces in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson,” Journal of African American Studies 17, no. 4 (2013): 509.

11. Wardi, 511.

12. Wardi, 512.

13. Olga Idriss Davis, “In the kitchen: Transforming the academy through safe spaces of resistance. Western Journal of Communication 63, no. 3 (1998): 367.

14. Davis, 367.

15. Jessica Harris, The Welcome Table (Simon and Schuster, 1995), 19.

16. Davis, 368.

17. Davis, 369. essay 06

Californian Boarders

Valerie Valerie

Valerie Braylovskiy is from San Francisco, California and loves writing in all forms.

She is a published poet and delves into both fiction and nonfiction.

Outside of school, she is on a mission to find the best coffee shops and beaches.

Braylovskiy

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REFLECTION

I wrote “Californian Borders” for my ID1 class, American Road Trip. I was grateful that we had a lot of freedom in experimenting with form in this class because I’ve always enjoyed creative pieces more than formal essays.

When I read the second prompt for this class to write a fictional road trip story that somehow connects to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, I was excited to incorporate my creative voice into writing.

However, I faced a lot of writer’s block that stemmed from a fear of my work not being good enough and internal pressure to produce something original. After a lot of unsuccessful brainstorming, I decided to try a technique my high school English teacher taught me called “word vomit,” where you continuously write without judging your work. I used this strategy and committed to one idea, not deleting anything until I had a draft. This technique was so valuable because it inspired me to create something I was excited

about, instead of worrying about what others would think. For the next three hours, I wrote without thinking and became immersed in this two-page narrative.

The theme of persistence not only showed up in my writing process, but also in the revision process while I was creating my final portfolio. Although this was my favorite piece from the class, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to improve it, whether that was fixing grammatical errors, changing imagery, or omitting phrases. Initially, I struggled because I tend to get attached to certain sentences or ideas, but I eventually overcame this hurdle by realizing revisions are necessary and inevitable. This piece is special to me not only because it’s a strong example of the intersection between my poetic and prose voice, but because the process was challenging and pushed me to confront my writer’s block.

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Californian Borders We left Arcadia in July, the month of stone fruit and dehydrated heat. We each occupied half of the Toyota’s bony trunk, filling empty space with empty possessions.

Tony insisted he come along when I began designing my “journey of self-discovery and familial reconciliation.”

Two months prior, he’d moved from Missouri to California, a newcomer to a state that masqueraded as a country.

“Maeve, I have to come with you,” he begged when he discovered I was going to San Francisco. We’d been dating for a month.

Arcadia faded into the curves of my map within twenty minutes on the road, its flatness disintegrating into Los Angeles pollution. Tony relished teasing me about my infatuation with physical maps. I loved borders: knowing someone drew intersections with intention, tracing my geographical chronology with one finger. Mom used to sketch them for every road trip we took from the city.

Miniscule dots in the universe became topographical embroideries of Muir Woods, Russian River, Big Sur, Marin, Pinnacles, Yosemite. She stopped mapping when they separated,

consumed by borders herself.

They drew new ones for me, Dad and me in Arcadia, Mom in San Francisco. She abandoned me when I was 12, nothing more than a tangential detail.

It was 6:47, and we’d been driving for two hours. The sun was waking up, pale oranges and reds peeking out from dawn. Tony stopped for gas in Santa Barbara, so I stepped out to look around. Gas stations intrigued me– arbitrary institutions of necessity, housing visitors who were coming and going, departing and arriving.

Mesa Fuel Depot was the one gas station in the world where the ocean was reachable, where I could’ve gone for a swim while our tank was filling up, where people visited for pleasure.

“Ma’am, are you heading North?” a voice asked.

Turning around, I was faced with a girl, maybe in her early teens.

She was dressed in an oversized, ragged Led Zeppelin shirt.

“What’s your name?”

Fear stained her cheeks and I noticed her lack of color, a rarity in Southern California. I gathered she wasn’t from here and she didn’t come to Mesa Fuel seeking

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relaxation. Gas stations were also institutions of hiding and blending and running.

“Dani,” she muttered. “I’m looking to get to Bakersfield. I’m on my own from Tuscon.”

I heard Tony calling my name, but I panged to help her, my maternal instinct sprouting from my maternal loss. Walking to the car, Dani followed me like a shadow of my past self. I knew I couldn’t leave her. I told Tony we had a new passenger and we continued to drive, two lovers who were strangers and a strange girl.

Dani was going to Bakersfield to meet her mom, who managed a vineyard. She’d been on the road for days, sleeping at gas stations and waiting for strangers to come, her signal to go. Dani never spoke, her head buried in a sketchbook that she clutched like a baby sucking on a pacifier. Tony and I filled the car with hollow noise– 21st-century small talk about upcoming concerts, work, new bars, suburban drama. Who was the chatty dog walker on Coyle Avenue? We’d never spent more than a night together and were the epitome of a nauseating millennial cliché: Two Lonely 27-year-olds Pretend to be in Love! My body felt suffocated in the car, and I struggled to maintain physical proximity. (What’s more intimate than inhaling someone’s road trip breath, sponsored by stale mints?)

Three hours later, we arrived in Bakersfield, where I felt further

from Arcadia than I’ve ever been.

The heat felt different, like it was telling me to run, that there was nothing here except rotten oranges and pistachios. We said goodbye to Dani and drove away, watching vineyards shrink into parallel lines of insignificance. I told Tony to drive faster, yearning to get to San Francisco, to feel the fog liberate my lungs, to feel my hair dance on the Golden Gate Bridge.

After minutes of silence, Tony asked me what Mom is like, correcting himself to what she was like after remembering our 15-year separation. “A woman of place,” I said without thinking.

The sun was setting, melting under shades of spilled sangria that stained my first carpet after I moved out of Dad’s place at 22. Highway 5 was giving up on us, its lane lines and inhabitants succumbing to the laws of time.

Tony decided to take the next exit: Los Baños.

Nothing is more deceiving than meeting a place for the first time at nightfall, eyes latching onto curves and edges like a newborn searching for their mother’s nipple. But nothing is more revealing than a city’s stars, how they smile at you and confirm that your existence is a mere speck in a pixelated world.

We stopped to sleep at a crappy Motel 6, and I’d never felt at home more. Me and the stars. And Tony.

When the sun rose, we were on

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our way to San Francisco. I then realized I’d neglected to tell Tony that Mom didn’t know we were coming, but I knew it didn’t matter. Filmore Street was waiting for me, as were my possessions – both used to be mine– they couldn’t forget about me, right?

Two hours shrunk to one, one hour diluted to minutes. I felt a warmth on my shoulder and heard Tony’s raspy voice informing me we arrived. Opening my eyes, my childhood flooded into my adult body, except my body was foreign.

The city was cold, its once dreaminducing fog paralyzed my knee joints. The silhouette of the Santa Cruz mountains was vandalized by anthropogenic fumes and flashy signs, “1-800 For A New Life!”

“It’s beautiful,” Tony gasped. At that moment, I was a stranger to myself and everyone and everything around me.

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REFLECTION

DEVLIN ORLIN Devlin Orlin is a first-year at Pomona College where he studies English, Spanish, and Chicanx/Latine Studies. He also loves serving as the First Year Class President and Sophomore President-elect, as a panelist of the Judicial Council, and has a radio show on KSPC. Reach out with ideas about shared governance, restorative justice, and educational policy :)

The piece I’m submitting is a final reflection for a wonderful class called Latine/x Citizenship; in my essay I describe a quilt square I embroidered for that course and my ID1, Aphrodite and the Power of Love. That ID1 was a community in which my journey of perseverance this semester began as I learned to embroider, and the final product served as a ‘creative final’ for both classes. My ID1 professor, Jody Valentine, also helped me reframe writing as less of a process of explaining to the world what I already know, and more of a coming to understanding through analysis, and such a persistence in analysis is what I’ve found to lead ultimately to the most meaningful engagements with assignments and writing. This informed my first reading of the Latinx Citizenship prompt I answer here, which called for the use of six sources, a project explanation, and self-reflection in 3-4 pages. I realized this required each source to be in greater dialogue, and the connections I draw in my essay to works of radical love like The Body Is Not An Apology were ones I discovered in other courses through writing as a way of thinking, and then applying those frameworks to issues of migration and citizenship. Upon returning this essay, Profe. Barillas-Chón noted the analogy I draw from migrants to apology reminded him of Christian original sin, and the conception of migrants as undergoing penance for not being born in the United States. A continued engagement with interdisciplinary forms of scholarship interests me, and these intersections are ones that greatest bear fruit with analytic persistence.

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Latine/x Citizenship Final Reflection; “The Apology Demanded of Latine Migrants”

My multimodal creative project consists of an embroidery piece depicting Latin American citizenship data superimposed with the word “Apology” quilted in red. I constructed this work in community with my first-year seminar and drew data from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. In my embroidery, the 48 continental states, along with Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, are depicted with yellow thread if more Latin American-born people residing there are non-citizens, and purple thread should there be more citizens. I hope with this art to explore themes of belonging, body politics, and state determinations of social and legal citizenship in a creative and evocative way.

The embroidery of the word “Apology” in red was inspired by Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not An Apology, a book that argues for considering worldwide injustice as body trauma, a framework I apply to migrants with the research of Wendy Brown and Ariana Valle. Taylor writes “when we speak of the ills of the world—violence, poverty, injustice—we are not speaking conceptually; we are talking about things that happen to bodies. … The conservative haircut needed to placate the new supervisor, the tattoo you cover when you step into an office building to increase your chances of being trea-

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ted ‘professionally’ are examples of tiny apologies society will ask you to render for being in your body as you see fit.”1 I found this framing of bodies as sites of pain for migrants to be particularly powerful, beginning in their journey crossing the border. Brown elaborates on the state-sanctioned violence the border enacts on migrants, especially with Border Patrol’s recent changes in the paths migrants take to reach the US, as “by shifting migration to more geographically challenging areas, the barrier has dramatically increased...migrant deaths.”2 The United States chose to funnel migrants through more hot, dangerous areas, and such state trauma performed on the physicality of Latine bodies evoked for me the consideration that to even be alive was an apology for migrants.

These endless barriers for Latine citizens and noncitizens alike continue with the example of Puerto Ricans living on the mainland, who are othered by a ‘perpetual foreignness.’ Valle provides testimony of “thirty-eight teachers [quitting], veteran teachers, [because] they don’t want to deal with the [Puerto Rican student] population.”3 Even young children are asked to apologize for their Latinidad because teachers indoctrinated by and working under the framework of ethnoracial hierarchy invalidate their ability to belong and have a

measure of full social citizenship.

Valle’s first-person research and Brown’s examination of the purposeful danger of the border reveals the state’s interest in categorizing some people as deserving of social and legal protection and others, often Latine migrants, forced to make apology for their existence and lack of US citizenship.

This discussion of body trauma also led me to considerations of the Census and the codification of legal versus social citizenship. When I began this course and project, my view of citizenship was largely legal, and I also believed that with citizenship, one was mostly protected from abuse by the state. I understood the path to citizenship was difficult, but I did not comprehend the unequal or delinquent citizenship Latines faced. This consideration led me to investigate the Census in my multimodal final because I recalled the relevance of the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, especially as such a survey catalogs who the United States considers to be part of their political and social community, and I wanted to learn how it would impact Latines as I consider how the national systems of power which I am a part of and benefit from affect and marginalize Latine communities. Levitt writes that the Census “drove existential questions about represen­ tation

Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology (2018), 4; 13.

Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone Books, 2010), 50.

Ariana Valle, “Race and the Empire-state: Puerto Ricans’ Unequal U.S. Citizenship,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 5, no. 1 (2018): 32.

Justin Levitt, “Citizenship and the Census,” Columbia Law Review 119, no. 5 (2019).

and funding in 1790 and has become no less important in the centuries since. Many observers, including several former directors of the Census Bureau, believed that the 2018 decision to add a question on citizen­ship, in the existing political climate, would put the enumeration itself in jeopardy.”4 While ultimately the citizenship question was not added, the political nature of the categorization and counting of people concerned me as the basis for many legal conceptions of citizenship, and I wanted to explore which geographic areas in the US extended the basic rights of citizenship to the most Latin American migrants.

Data from the 2019 American Community Survey, which I used for my quilt, revealed that of Latin American born people residing in the US, there are only more citizens than non-citizens in Alaska, the District of Columbia, Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York. While some of these greater numbers of citizens may be due to small statistical numbers in localities like New Hampshire, as I explored my creative considerations of the state as determining belonging, I connected this data to citizenship as a political tool for gaining the ‘desired’ populace of the nation. Specifically for Florida, one likely reason for the greater numbers of citizens is “federal programs undoubtedly favored Cubans in important material ways,” and with policies like “wet-foot, dry-foot” granting a clearer path to permanent residence upon arrival to the United States, Cubans had more support to stay in the US for longer and therefore gain citizenship, especially in Florida.5 With this renewed understanding of the differing citizenships the United States as empire-state grants to people based on identity, inflicting trauma in the process, I wanted to provide a visual representation of the difficulty of gaining the protections of the state. I hope my quilt square pushes the viewer to consider why so few states have higher levels of citizens, and the unequal citizenships even within the Latine community with the inclusion of Puerto Rico in my embroidery. The medium of my art also facilitates this reflection as fabric crafts can communicate ideological considerations in a way that academic writing cannot; it is more accessible and uses universal tools such as color, which I employed in embroidering “apology” in red, symbolizing the blood and pain inflicted upon migrant bodies. I hope this work can be placed in the broader context of Chicanx/Latine studies and inspire viewers of the art to consider both the legal consequences of citizenship, and its social implications as migrants are forced to conform, when voting for elected officials who set policies like the Census.

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Lillian Guerra, “Late-Twentieth-Century Immigration and U.S. Foreign Policy,” in The New Latino Studies Reader: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 144.

Eliza Powers Redeploying The Male Gaze: A Feminist Mythological Reading of Turgenev’s “First Love”

Eliza Powers is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and hopes to major in English or Religious Studies. Her paper, “Redeploying the Male Gaze: A Feminist Mythological Reading of Turgenev’s “First Love”” will be published in the 2022 edition of The Birch, the Undergraduate Journal of Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies at Columbia University. She loves reality TV, Phoebe Bridgers and searching for the perfect avocado toast recipe.

Reflection Every Sunday School as a young girl, I donned my Mary Janes and tights sticky from Louisiana heat, and learned of all of the ways that women can go wrong. Eve was a cautionary tale: take the apple, and you’ll become a villain too. Only Mary remained pure through the impossible paradox of both a virgin and mother. The rest of us? We’ll become victims or villains. Once the male gaze distinguishes a woman between victim or villain, her sentencing starts. In this paper I submitted for my ID1 class, Russian Books, I investigated how an actualization under the male gaze allows female characters to redeploy male desire for their own selfinterest. This process was a persistent endeavor mostly because I rewrote it four different times with several different women: Pushkin’s Countess in “Queen of Spades”, Russia’s “Decembrist Women”, Karmzin’s “Poor Liza”. I ultimately decided to weaponize

a historically misunderstood mythological woman to challenge the characterization of a historically misunderstood Russian literary heroine. I landed at Medusa late in the writing process. She was perfect: strong, erotic, evil. Both victim and villain, she could stage an intervention on the characterization of Turgenev’s heroine, Zinaida Zasyekina.

This process was also persistent because of the position it put me in as a feminist. I could not rescue Medusa from her construction as a villain nor could I remove the political structures confining Zinaida Zasyekina.

Instead, I had to sit inside their oppressive productions. This persistence challenged so much of my social conditioning: that once a woman is defined as a victim or villain, her agency becomes inaccessible. It turns out women are incredibly resilient in both constructions.

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Redeploying The Male Gaze: A Feminist Mythological Reading of Turgenev’s “First Love” A beautiful woman is raped in a temple and mutilated as punishment; a vivacious woman is slowly degraded by physical and emotional abuse until she becomes hollow. Both Greek mythology’s Medusa and Turgenev’s Zinaida Zasyekina from “First Love” are produced by the male gaze, female characters constructed to serve the paradox of male fear and desire. On the male gaze, John Berger asserts: “Men do not simply look; their gaze carries with it the power of action and of possession.”1 The male gaze both produces a female character and works to subjugate her through that production. While Medusa is constructed by a mythological male gaze, Zinaida is created from a fictional male gaze. Upon first reading, both characters crumble under this actualization: Medusa is doomed to be both monster and temptress, while Zinaida is sentenced to be both virginal bachelorette and faithful maiden. Yet both women defy these impossible expectations by seizing emancipatory opportunities. It is because of their production under the male gaze, and not in spite of it, that enables each character to weaponize male desire for her own power and control. In this essay, I will prove how both Medusa and Zinaida Zasyekina redeploy male desire in the realms of both physical and intellectual. In each realm, I will demonstrate how both characters use their manufacturing under the male gaze to claim agency. By doing so, I will prove how an actualization under the male gaze enables Zinaida to reject victimhood.

Ultimately, Turgenev employs the male gaze to challenge the process of fictionalization: Here he has created a fictionalized character with the ability to reject the grounds of her creation.

Medusa weaponizes her creation under a physical male gaze to physically assert her power. Annis Pratt writes on the process through which the male gaze dehumanizes Medusa: “Myths in which heroes conquer dragons and gorgons and snakes and other monstrous figures are essentially stories of ‘riddance’ in which the beautiful and powerful women of the pre-Hellenic religions essay 06

“Yet, like Medusa, Zinaida maintains a paradox of physical lust and physical threat.”

are made to seem horrific and then raped, decapitated, or destroyed.”2 The need to physically conquer women compels Greek myth to write Medusa as monstrous as means of justifying violence. Yet Medusa uses this urge to create a lustful paradox: maintaining both her beauty and her horror. Medusa is “feminine and fragile”, maintaining a “juxtaposition of her extraordinary beauty and her horror.”3 By infusing beauty into horror, Medusa makes herself irresistible.

She targets both male lust and the male need to conquer to attract her enemies. Then, “the head of this Gorgon whose hair was changed into snakes turned all who looked at it into stone.”4 It is Medusa’s production under the male gaze that enables her to redeploy male desire for her own physical power.

Zinaida Zasyekina from Turgenev’s “First Love” is also able to exert physical control over the men around her because of her production under a physical male gaze.

Zinaida is produced by a lustful male gaze: “so delicate were the features,” describes the narrator, “her sumptuous golden hair, the

pure nape of her neck, her sloping shoulders and her soft, placid bosom.”5 Yet, like Medusa, Zinaida maintains a paradox of physical lust and physical threat. While her charm lures the male suitors to her, it is her redeploying of the male need to conquer that enables her to exert physical power. Zinaida controls her male suitors with just a tap of her fingers.

“The young men offered their foreheads so willingly,” the narrator says, “...that I nearly gave a cry of astonishment and pleasure and would have given anything in the world, I believe, if only those charming fingers had tapped me on the forehead as well.”6 Zinaida’s paradoxical construction of horror and lust is most apparent in her spirit apparition that both haunts and attracts the narrator.

“The image of the young girl still floated in front of me,” he says in one passage, and in another: “The image of Zinaida continued to dwell in triumph in my heart.”7 Through her apparition, Zinaida exerts such a powerful physical control over the narrator that her spirit remains with him even when she is corporeally absent.

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Further, Zinaida claims agency through her understanding of the male desire for physical superiority. Zinaida uses pain to subjugate Lushin.

The narrator recounts that she “occasionally took a particularly malicious pleasure in making him feel that he was in her hands…‘All right, then!

Give me your hand and I’ll stick a needle in it … !’ Lushin went red, turned away, bit his lip, but ended by offering his hand. She stuck in a needle and he did start laughing… and she laughed too, forcing in the needle fairly deeply and looking him in the eyes, which darted about in a helpless way.”8 By using pain as a humiliation tactic, Zinaida exerts physical control. She constantly commands the men: when to meet, what games to play, who should have the upper hand. “‘Write the ticket, I tell you,’ the young princess repeated.

‘Why all this rebelliousness? Monsieur Voldemar is with us for the first time and so the rules don’t apply to him today. No more complaints. I just want you to write it out.’ The Count shrugged his shoulders, but humbly bowed his head, took the pen in his white, be ringed hand, tore off a piece of paper and began to write on it.””9 The men offer little in the way of physical resistance; they are putty in her hands. Zinaida targets the male relationship between physical lust and physical fear of weakness. Ultimately, it is her knowledge and subversion of her production under the male gaze that enables her to exercise corporeal control.

Further, Medusa uses the male desire for intellectual superiority to assert agency. She understands her construction under male morbid curiosity. “The dream interests us not only as a modern variation of the mythological form of the Gorgon’s head, but also as an individual analogy to the myth-producing imagination of ancient people,” writes scholar Theodor Reik. “We conceive of myths as of dreams of the masses, of collective productions of the people in which their unconscious wishes and fears are expressed.”10

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Susan R. Bowers, “Medusa and the Female Gaze.” NWSA Journal (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) 217–35.

Susan R. Bowers, “Medusa and the Female Gaze.” NWSA Journal (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) 217–35.

Susan R. Bowers, “Medusa and the Female Gaze.” NWSA Journal (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) 222- 23.

Theodor Reik, Modern Medusa. American Imago. (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1951) 323–328. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/26301380.

Turgenev, “First Love.” First Love, and Other Stories.

(Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1999), 153.

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Turgenev, “First Love.”

First Love, and Other Stories. (Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1999), 147.

Turgenev, “First Love.”

First Love, and Other Stories. (Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1999), 63.

Turgenev, “First Love.”

First Love, and Other Stories. (Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1999), 166.

Turgenev, “First Love.”

First Love, and Other Stories. (Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1999),159.

Theodor Reik, Modern Medusa.

American Imago. (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1951) 323–328. http://www. jstor.org/stable/26301380.

Susan R. Bowers, “Medusa and the Female Gaze.” NWSA Journal (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 220 Susan R. Bowers, “Medusa and the Female Gaze.” NWSA Journal (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) , 219 Susan R. Bowers, “Medusa and the Female Gaze.” NWSA Journal (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) 219

Medusa, a “widely-recognized symbol of divine, female wisdom” understands that her continued replication as a villainous symbol under the male gaze stems from the male desire for intellectual understanding.11 She uses this intellectual desire to compel her enemies to look. “According to Hazel Barnes, ‘it was not the horror of the object at it which destroyed the victim but the fact that his eyes met those of Medusa looking at him.’”12 This quotation demonstrates Medusa’s intellectual reconstruction of herself; she claims agency by becoming a “Looker” along with her enemies.

“The ‘Look’ is so disturbing because it constitutes judgment of the self outside the self, judgment which can neither be controlled nor even known precisely.”13 Instead of embracing the identity of a submissive animal in a cage at the zoo, Medusa uses the intellectual male gaze to encourage eye contact, thus petrifying her victims. It is again her understanding of the male gaze from which she was constituted that allows her to redeploy male intellectual desire for her own power.

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Zinaida, with the same selfknowledge of her construction, is able to exert intellectual control over the men around her. With her “intelligent half-closed eyes”, she uses her education and sharp wit to control her suitors’ thoughts.14 “Listen,” she tells the narrator, “‘You don’t know me properly yet.

I’m the strangest kind of person: I always want people to tell me the truth… you’ve always got to tell me the truth and do what I say.”15 It is this philosophical assertion that convinces the narrator to do what she says. Her orders are situated on a strong intellectual foundation.

She converses in French with the narrator’s father, reads in the garden, and meticulously plots her game for control and amusement.

She compels each male suitor to assert his intellectual power.

“I wanted to show her that she was not dealing with a boy,” the narrator recounts, which leads him to adopt... as far as possible a worldly-wise and serious look.”16 Zinaida is an intellectual puppeteer: “she understands everything, she sees everything,” 14. Turgenev, “First Love.”

Press, 1999), 147 15. Turgenev, “First Love.”

Press, 1999), 152 16. Turgenev, “First Love.”

Press, 1999), 152 17. Turgenev, “First Love.”

Press, 1999), 153 18. Turgenev, “First Love.”

Press, 1999), 166 19. Turgenev, “First Love.”

Press, 1999), 159

and uses it all to her advantage.17 Her intellectual hold is strongest over the poet Maidanov. “He strove to assure her,” says the narrator, “that he adored her, wrote endless verses in her honor and declaimed them to her with a kind of natural and yet sincere enthusiasm.”18 Maidanov’s desire for Zinaida urges him to produce intellectual property. She not only receives this intellectual labor but uses her own education to quietly subjugate him. The narrator recounts: “She didn’t entirely trust him and, after listening to his outpourings, made him read some Pushkin ‘in order to clear the air.’” Zinaida wields her education as a weapon, using her vocabulary and poetic knowledge to convince Maidanov to play along with her games. “Maidanov,” she commands him, “as a poet you should be magnanimous and surrender your ticket to Monsieur Voldemar, so that he’ll then have two chances rather than one.”19 Zinaida ultimately targets the male desire to be intellectually superior for her own power.

It is in this exertion of intellectual

power that Zinaida ultimately challenges her own fictionalization, and where the schism between narrator and Turgenev becomes apparent. Turgenev, unlike the narrator, is explicitly aware of the role the male gaze has in constructing Zinaida. By confining her to one perspective, Turgenev gives Zinaida the power to reject her own construction, or, at the very least, redeploy it for her own self-interest.

Turgenev does not endorse but instead challenges Zinaida’s actualization by the male characters in “First Love,” presenting emancipatory opportunities for a woman in a story about the loss of freewill. Both Medusa and Zinaida Zasyekina are figments of male desire, male fear, male needs.

Yet both women subtly challenge their own fictionalization and subsequent replication by the reader. By employing the male gaze, Turgenev arms his primary female character with the power to challenge her own construction.

First Love, and Other Stories. (Oxfordshire: Oxford University First Love, and Other Stories. (Oxfordshire: Oxford University First Love, and Other Stories. (Oxfordshire: Oxford University First Love, and Other Stories. (Oxfordshire: Oxford University First Love, and Other Stories. (Oxfordshire: Oxford University First Love, and Other Stories. (Oxfordshire: Oxford University essay 06

Sasha leonard The Art of Collective Identity in Sukina Pilgrim’s Poetry and Music

Sasha’s passion for writing began in elementary school when she first started writing poetry.

Since then, writing has been a therapeutic activity that she enjoys engaging in whenever possible. Her work usually centers around her racial, ethnic, and gender identity, so finding ways to use language as a tool to share alternate ways of storytelling often influences her approach.

Reflection Writing this paper was an overall fun experience for me. This essay was for my ID1 class, “Islam and Media,” and we were tasked with writing about a Muslim creative of our choice. I love poetry and Hip Hop, so choosing to write about Sukina Pilgrim was an easy decision for me. Because this paper was for my ID1, I felt my professor was extremely diligent in guiding my class in terms of the writing process itself. She separated the assignment into three mini assignments which included writing an introduction, creating an annotated bibliography, and then the entire paper itself. Accordingly, I wrote an introduction first and then didn’t actually start writing the paper until about two weeks later. During that time, class was devoted to brainstorming how we would structure our paper and what themes we wanted to focus on, and I think that activity was significantly helpful in avoiding writer’s block. I completed this paper in about two sittings. Although I love writing, I do have a hard time writing a paper from scratch and not losing energy or motivation. I figured this would be the case with this paper. While I did have the control over what I wanted to write about, I feared that writing in depth about Sukina Pilgrim in the context of the prompt would be busy work rather than a piece of writing that I would be genuinely interested in creating.

Consequently, before seriously sitting down to write, during that two week interval, I spent about an

hour or less planning out what I would say and what sources I would use for each paragraph. For instance, for the first paragraph, I came up with about 3-4 questions I wanted to answer in that section, and then put links to 2-3 sources I thought would be helpful or that I would specifically pull quotes from.

I usually do this for all of my writing assignments, and I find this activity to be what I spend most of my energy on. In coming up with questions and linking sources, I’m also thinking about the organization of the paper and its line of reasoning threaded throughout. This made my actual writing process so much easier and less daunting, and I was able to enjoy writing about someone I was really interested in. Much of my experience writing papers in a school setting revolved around this notion that you should be able to crank out good work in one sitting or that taking a “long time” to complete a paper is ultimately unproductive. I think towards the end of high school and this year though, I have become increasingly comfortable with not overexerting myself to come up with and organize ideas that I want to share with others. By stepping away from writing in this paper and taking time, I let myself process exactly what my personal feelings were on the topic that I had chosen.

As a result, in the two sessions that I did write, I was passionate about what I was writing and felt proud of the ideas I put forth.

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The Black Arts Movement (BAM) during the late 1960s and 1970s embodied the cultural production and artistic practices that were born out of the revolutionary politics and social activism of the Black Power Movement. Poets, dramatists, artists, musicians, and writers challenged the canon of American culture and art by redefining the aesthetics of Black expression and helping to institutionalize Black culture.

BAM took inspiration by emulating and critiquing previous Black cultural revolutions. Moreover, much of the critique of previous movements, like the seemingly accommodationist nature of the Harlem Renaissance, followed the assertive and unapologetic expression of values from Malcolm X. In addition, much of BAM and its ambassadors have ties not only to Black culture, values, history, and artistry but also Islam and its philosophies. In contemporary culture, the legacies of BAM have manifested into mediums like Hip-Hop, AAVE, oral media, ethnic studies, and everchanging definitions of ‘Blackness’ in America. Sukina Pilgrim, a contemporary poet, spoken-word artist, playwright, and Hip-Hop musician has created a space for herself and many others within this legacy. A Black and Muslim woman, Pilgrim’s work has influenced the creation of a platform for national and international Muslim artists to pursue careers in their artistic expression. Pilgrim’s use of spoken-word poetry and HipHop to find healing and to offer a means of advancing one’s spiritual journey speaks to the intersections and cultural impact of the blending of Black and Muslim cultural values. Consequently, Pilgrim’s racial and religious identity within her art both serve as an influence for other artists as well as a continued redefining of the

Black and Muslim identity within artistic media.

Sukina Pilgrim was raised in Bristol, England by her mother who was a Jamaican migrant. In a household that incorporated aspects of Rastafarianism and Christianity, Pilgrim felt she had space to find her own spirituality which eventually led to her conversion to Islam. Her exploration of writing was similar in the sense that her beginnings were rooted in finding ways to express overwhelming emotions freely. Initially writing letters to articulate her daily feelings, her journey through discovering creative mediums that resonated with her led to the lyricism and the self-love of India Arie, Erykah Badu, and Lauryn Hill. The nuanced and conscious themes of their songs as well as their unapologetic embodiment of Black womanhood impacted Pilgrim’s understanding of her own identity as well as the power of written and oral art. Earning her B.A. in English Literature and Caribbean Studies and pursuing a M.A. in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes, Pilgrim’s exploration of religion and creative expression has culminated into her career as a playwright, poet, and Hip-Hop artist among other titles.1 Many of the themes explored in Pilgrim’s work revolves around challenging the boundaries enforced on women in some interpretations of Islam, uplifting Black femininity in the Muslim community, healing through spirituality, shifting the narrative of Black history, and recognizing the intersections of Blackness and Islam.

In particular, her use of Sufi poetry as a framework invites this interweaving of Pilgrim’s multiple identities and concerns.

Sufi poetry is a form of poetry that has been mainly written in Persian and is used for private devotional

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reading and as musical lyrics played during worship (dhikr).

Throughout the Islamic world, Sufi poetry has helped to maintain communal harmony. Because of its accessible and sympathetic quality, the medium shapes perceptions of peace, love, and camaraderie.

The legacy of Sufi poetry is rooted in the harmony of a community, and central themes include the concept of love as “all-consuming” and a direct manifestation of the will of God. The medium perpetuates the unity of mankind and suggests that since human beings are all creatures of God, God has given humans the ability to understand love, affection, and sacrifice.2 Though she does not write in Persian, Pilgrim employs this poetic structure and its associated themes in her own context which offers space for her to blend both Black and Islamic artistic expressions in a way that highlights the overlap that occurs.

In her song “Land Far Away”, she seamlessly blends the two by reciting lyrics about her piety: “we’re all seeking this essence / to reunite to the one who gave us life” to traditional Jamaican beats and drums in the background. The inherent loving and communal nature of Sufi poetry speaks to Pilgrim’s ultimate intention of providing community healing and uncovering the relationship between female liberation, Blackness and the Caribbean diaspora, Islam, and creative expression.

In using multiple art forms like written poetry, spoken word, rap, and theatre productions, Pilgrim’s artistic expression embodies the legacy of BAM which demonstrates her redefining of the Black and Muslim identity.

The structure of BAM was rooted in four main art mediums: Hip Hop/Rap, Poetry/Fiction, Dance/ Theatre, and Visual Art. According

to Ron Karenga, an AfricanAmerican author and activist, the Black Aesthetic and subsequently, Black art can be characterized as interactive, vibrant, and collective.

Similarly, BAM and contemporary scholarship on it has centered around how the movement emphasizes a group identity that is vast and multifaceted. The collective inherently relies on the overlapping and combination of multiple artistic forms. As the portrayal of Black identity is unlimited, so is the art that is borne out of cultural and social experiences of the Black collective.3 Pilgrim’s weaving of music, written poetry, and oral performance aptly demonstrates the aesthetics and philosophy of BAM which ultimately intended to reshape Black expression independently from the dominant white culture.

Moreover, Pilgrim engaging with Sufi poetry in this BAM framework shows the similarity between common themes and goals. Both Sufi poetry and BAM establish a sense of collective expression and communal affection for a shared identity. Furthermore, the fact that she grew up in an environment that was diverse both religiously and culturally contributes to the way she has participated in artistic expression.

The themes she explores and her understanding of a necessarily collective expression as a form of reconciliation continues the legacy of BAM and simultaneously employs her interpretations of Islam and her religious purpose. Pilgrim’s contemporary execution of BAM, whether

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intentional or inadvertent, further strengthens and diversifies Muslim representation because of her attention to the intersections present in those communities. Though the simple act of her rapping already provides inspiration to other Muslim girls and women, her being a Black Muslim woman who discusses themes and experiences unique to her identity invites others who share any and all of those identities to feel represented. Essentially, through the collaborative nature of BAM and Sufi poetry, the consumer is able to find community and validation in Pilgrim’s art.

Cofounding Poetic Pilgrimage in 2002 with her childhood friend Muneera Rashida, Pilgrim has impacted the way women in music are perceived and the purpose of poetry within the Muslim community. Rashida and Pilgrim met in secondary school and began rapping together during a talent show. They performed together for 4 years before they converted to Islam. Rashida, like Pilgrim, had been raised in a religious and musical household; much of the music she grew up with had religious undertones which led her to understand the art form as a medium for spiritual exploration. Rashida and Pilgrim both embraced their religious journeys, so Poetic Pilgrimage offered them a continuation of this quest for their purpose. Despite Rashida and Pilgrim’s artistic contributions, some individuals in the Muslim community have asserted that music is prohibited

by Islamic law and describe the

work of Poetic Pilgrimage as impermissible. However, Pilgrim and Rashida have pushed back on this narrative. The art form of Hip Hop is not inherently sexual or derogatory though there are performers who engage in that type of expression. Hip Hop is an art style that melds together oral performance, dance, art, fashion, political principles, and the like.

The art form is a cultural movement built upon musical forms from the Caribbean and South America, and this artistic vibrancy and range is why Pilgrim has continued to participate. In fact, according to Pilgrim, she believes that an overlap exists between Hip Hop and Islamic culture and deems them as complementary. During one of Poetic Pilgrimage’s travels, they encountered a group of women, who met weekly, using music and dance as forms of religious worship and outpouring.4 This experience merely served to validate Pilgrim’s affinity with Hip Hop and decisions to use it to further share and interpret a Muslim identity. Music and poetry are complementary and intertwined and also distinct.

Both art forms can garner such different reactions, and Pilgrim uses that fact to her advantage which has served to broaden Muslim representation. Through using a medium that is often male-dominated and opposed by some interpretations of Islam, Pilgrim simultaneously challenges stereotypes and communicates an experience unique to Black, Muslim women in a way that can resonate with a diverse audience.

Touré, Tariq. “Sounds of Sukina: The Journey of Poet and Playwright Sukina Pilgrim .”

Anchor: Above and Beyond, 22 Mar. 2020, anchor.fm/tariq-tour351/episodes/Sounds-of-Sukina The-Journey-of-Poet-and-Playwright-Sukina-Pilgrim-ebpgjp.

“Sufi Poetry.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 13 Jan. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufi_ poetry

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Hip Hop offers her another way to heal and discuss trauma in a way that is digestible to herself and her audience.

Similarly, this idea of healing is present within her spokenword performances. Pilgrim has facilitated many creative writing workshops internationally, and through these gatherings, she has investigated the repairing power of words. In a space where collective expression is fundamental, Pilgrim has explored the extent to which the articulation of shared trauma can be a means of healing.

Poetry as a medium intrinsically necessitates the creation of a relationship between the reader, the writer, and the speaker whether intentional or not. Consequently, within these workshops where Pilgrim focuses on topics that can be traumatic and emotional, and even in her own work which discusses subject matter that is upsetting, she affirms the humanity of the marginalized and presents a platform for oppressed individuals to speak their truths.

Her work empowers other Muslim creatives to unapologetically express themselves and interpret Islam through different artistic mediums.

Under the broader framework of the partnership between BAM and Islam, Pilgrim casts light on an experience and identity that is often left to exist in the shadows.

Pilgrim’s lack of hesitance to celebrate the intersections of Islam and BAM and their respective philosophies embodies the diversity of the Muslim and Black diasporas and legitimizes a

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Black Muslim identity. Analyzing her work through this lens is significant in the sense that it demonstrates the vastness of what can be defined as Muslim, or Black, and the cultural vibrancy that exists in the overlaps of these two identifiers. To read and understand her poetry, music, and intentions, one must acknowledge that Pilgrim’s Muslimness, Blackness, and woman-ness all exist simultaneously. Recognizing the shared philosophies, art forms, and trauma embedded in BAM and the Muslim identity is essential to honoring Pilgrim’s vulnerability in her work and grasping the intersectionality of her own being.

More broadly, the BAM-Islam framework contributes to Muslim representation by appreciating how ethnicity and gender shape interpretations of religion and expressions of identity.

Ultimately, Pilgrim as a person and through her work serves as such an important figure in terms of Muslim representation and demonstrates the fruitfulness of intersectionality.

“Black Arts Movement.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 17 Oct. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Arts_Movement.

English, Al Jazeera. “🇬🇧 UK: Hip Hop Hijabis.” Youtube, 8 Mar. 2015, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1kSh6bobLTU.

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Outlook

LIBBY LIB BY LIBBY HARRIS HAR RIS HARRIS

Libby Harris is an exchange student from the UK who is learning to love the California sunshine.

REFLECTION I sent this email to Jordan Kirk after our final class before Thanksgiving break. It is a response to a composition called The Resonant Isle by Éliane Radigue, during which my ENGL 153 class lay on the floor in as absolute a silence as we could maintain.

The soundscape was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. Radigue’s piece is somehow both a void and a cornucopia, the sounds indiscernibly sidling into earshot, having their moment of opacity, and slinking away. Description cannot do it justice – I urge you to lie on the floor and listen to it for yourself.

The openness of mind I experienced during the composition, the ease with which my thoughts came and went, was a wonderful relief. When I moved to Claremont from the UK, my mind was the only remnant of my past; I chose to spend a lot of time there in the first half of the Fall semester. Constantly puzzling over your own thoughts is fatiguing, yet by the time I was lying on the carpet in the Crookshank basement my headspace had begun to feel my own again. After weeks of pushing and forcing, holding firm against my instincts to run or disappear, I found myself effortlessly present in the moment, sure of where I was going.

I make a few references in this email to texts I knew Jordan to be familiar with. Stalker (1979) is a Russian film which Jordan screened “just for fun” for a rabble of his acquaintances. The tiny theatre in the Studio Arts Building did not allow for a chink of light to interrupt the showing, and the space combined with my (everyone’s) sleep deprivation to lend an overly real quality to the film. Stalker is largely silent, and most all the elements seem to quiver against each other, notably a water glass on the table of the lead character’s living space. The ‘Pauline paradox’, based on my understanding of St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, describes a situation of interchangeable absence and presence – weeping as not weeping, power as contingent on weakness, and a wasteland of sound as demanding attention.

LH

Search Send

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Jordan Kirk (Jordankirk@pomona.edu)

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Cc

Re: The Resonant Isle

Text here

Here are some reflections -

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Text here

I felt I was listening to anything but Radigue’s piece. The underlying, overlying, sound of the Crookshank building, emanating from the walls/ceiling, asserted itself with forceful rhythm. I have no idea what Text here might have been causing it; still, I am unsure where the piece began and ended. I assume this is precisely Radigue’s point. I wonder how much of our mood is influenced by the ambient sounds of our electrified existence. It felt aText lot here like we were within Stalker (1979); towards the end, some pieces of the blackboard began to vibrate against themselves in a way which reminded me of the glass on the table.

Text here The guy who sits behind me in our unwritten seating plan fell asleep early in the experience; I could tell because he snored. I foundText myhere subconscious attuning itself to his snoring/breathing far more keenly than to Radigue’s music, and I’ve been wondering if that is an atvavistic trait. He seemed to come closer to consciousness during sections which sounded more like human voices, which may Text here be related evidence. Also of interest is whether he was aware he was sleeping, and to what extent the piece influenced his dream-state/unconscious experience. Several other class members’ snores joined the fray as the piece went on; I found this curious as the piece left me more alert than before Today class.

At one point, Alan filmed a quick video of the class. I wonder how someone might perceive the video Text here without context. I wonder why lying on the ground to listen to a soundscape is so amusing (though I don’t deny that it is) and whether this sort of entertainment might take on greater popular appeal.

I feel society is leaning, somewhat, towards all-consuming experience, towards media forms which do away with the boundary between art and self, but perhaps more so in the way of VR. I wonder if entering VR is less effortful than listening and hallucinating; I am not convinced it is. I found this Textengaging, here piece less effortful, and more to experience than a film - a Pauline paradox?

There was an instrument (perhaps a water sprinkler) in the ceiling above my head, the shape of which resembled a man with a trumpet-like, extolling mouth. It made a lot of sense to consider the sounds as pouring from him. here my pulse seemed to be dragged through my blood vessels by During the deeper section Text of drone, the sound. This may be an abject case of confirmation bias, or an over-interpreted coincidence, but I’m not convinced. I felt a loss of control in that moment. Maybe they’ve done studies about whether sounds can influence cardiac rhythm.

Thank you for sharing this with us - I doubt I’d have ever come across it otherwise, and it is already here changing how I exist in the Text world (I am writing to you from a train, whose electrical frequencies and intercom feedback feel like an extension of The Resonant Isle).

-Libby Harris Text here

From: Libby Harris Send

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REFLECTION

Giacomo Marazza

SOGNI D’ORO

I was born in Rome December 20th, 2002 and lived there until 2016. My mom, my brother, and I moved to Miami when I was 13. I got into Pomona fall 2021 and I am a proud Posse Foundation scholar. My interests include history, linguistics, and learning foreign languages; furthermore, I love to learn about different cultures and traditions. I never wrote a piece like this one and I am looking forward to writing more pieces in a similar format.

I wrote this piece on September 26th, 2021, for my “Language, Community, and Power” course. I started writing with a great deal of fear since I never wrote such an extensive narrative piece and since I struggle with recounting stories in general.

In the process of coming up with scenarios from my childhood, I contacted several family relatives to confirm or deny certain memories I had. Throughout the day, I would jot down on my phone any idea for the piece and later incorporate it having returned to my room.

I started the writing process by writing down the questions I asked myself as an elementary school child to introduce my feeling of not fitting in and not feeling normal. I then came up with scenarios to set up the story, such as the hospital visit and Valentina’s office. Then, I moved on to the conclusion to give myself a broad direction to aim the story towards. I met with a writing partner having done three pages. The writing partner gave me the advice to focus on the theme of finding a new normal, on incorporating more “show

don’t tell.” Consequently, two classmates of mine helped me decide what to incorporate in the text and how to incorporate it.

Furthermore, I got assistance from another close friend of mine who pushed me to focus on the five senses and suggested removing certain repetitive sentences. My roommate also assisted me in deciding what to keep and how to express certain events, such as the “hieroglyphs” part.

I feel like the theme of the story is the evolution of my definition of being normal, alongside the idea that any goal is attainable through hard work. I loved the process of writing this piece, more specifically I loved pondering about and trying to remember miscellaneous memories about my childhood and asking friends and family opinions on the draft. During the process, I learned a lot about my past and present self, and how my past events shaped the person I am. Furthermore, I discovered that I should not be ashamed of collaborative writing and that having peers assist me does not imply that the piece is no longer my own.

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Sogni d’oro GIACOMO MARAZZA

“Finisci il compito adesso, così non ci devi pensare dopo,”1 was mom’s answer to whether I could take a break from working. Why did I have more homework than my classmates? Why did I need to visit a speech therapist on a daily basis? Why was it so hard for me to do simple things?

Mom and dad noticed that I wasn’t quite like the average two-year-old child. I slept often, and I was not even able to utter “mamma” or “papá.” I appreciated all the melodic Italian words around me, yet I was no singer. Like a conductor, I only had the Italian hand gestures at my disposal. Mom and dad sent me to the notorious Roman Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù on the banks of the Tiber. There, the doctors diagnosed me with autism, but my parents knew something different was going on. Dad was enraged: he argued that my brother would sleep more than me, yet he was not impaired in any shape or form. We later visited a different facility; I was intrigued by its green courtyard full of flowers and its pungent smells of mimosa. Valentina, the speech therapist at the facility, confirmed their doubts; I was not autistic; however, I had a severe speech impediment. She later explained that I would be able to speak only through extensive speech therapy; she did not know

how much time it would take, but it was possible. Valentina also remarked that I would sadly never be able to speak foreign languages and that I would be overall slower than my peers; my brain was just not wired to accomplish such feats.

And so, my crazy journey towards becoming a normal kid started. I started going to “Valentina’s office,” a facility for mentally impaired kids, around five times a week to practice reading computer exercises, and later verbal exercises with Valentina, such as saying the alphabet out loud. Valentina let me relax only whenever I finished the exercise in its entirety. I began to dislike Valentina; I could not understand the harm of taking a small break. I was so irritated by Valentina that I cried in the car on my way to her office. When mom asked why I didn’t want to see Valentina, I told her “Non mi piacciono i suoi capelli!”2 Her medusa-like hair seemed to stare back at me.

Valentina was well aware of my fear of her, so she emboldened me to work harder to not have to work with her. And so, I sat on the small plastic chair and worked on the computer for at least an hour. The reward for the hard work and the attention given to Valentina was playing in the courtyard with other kids at the facility or setting up playground games for them. Both

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activities were delightful, I bonded with these children so much that I often forgot about their impairments. One of the children I played “Nascondino” and “Un, Due, Tre Stella”3 with was Amadin. She was an Indian autistic girl and one of my closest friends at the facility. Our friendship started around the time when we both could not speak. As I learned how to speak, she didn’t make much progress; however, our friendship never waned. I spoke to her slowly and pointed out the playground game or part of the courtyard to explore -- that’s all the communication we needed to get along.

At around age four, I finally managed to connect syllables to make words. The shift from mute to speaking was surprisingly fast, by the age of five I did not stutter nor hesitate to speak. I could finally call out to Papá, mamma, Leo, nonna Ornella, nonna Anna, nonno Lamberto, and nonno Chicco - the nickname that Leo gave to nonno Francesco. Leo, my brother, came up with the nickname because the “ch” sound in Francesco was too hard for him to pronounce when he started speaking. Evidently even normal people struggled to speak. Even with all the progress, I still had to visit Valentina at least five times a week earlier than the sound of the bell. For instance,

“I could do anything only if I truly believed that I was capable of such feats.”

during recess I set up a “Nascondino” game, looked for the best hiding spot, hid there, and then had to leave mid game to get in the car to visit Valentina’s office. I could not even say goodbye to my friends. Having now repeated one year of kindergarten, my new classmates and I were sharing the stage being celebrated at the kindergarten graduation. We also got to know Roberta, our elementary school teacher. Her assertive yet comforting conduct reassured me. Roberta’s lectures were very entertaining, especially the history lectures.

While she taught history, I got lost picturing myself being next to Hammurabi, Alexander, and Caesar. While daydreaming, I pictured myself as a polyglot man living the life of kings and emperors. Back in the real world, Roberta got around to teaching addition; I staunchly refused the notion that the “greater than” and “less than” signs were supposed to be reversed. How could the “greater than” sign point towards the smaller number?

Roberta explained that the symbol points towards the smaller number because its ends originate from the biggest number, but I did not try to understand. I concluded by stating that I was just not capable of grasping the concept. The easiest way out of forcing myself to study and pay attention in class was to convince myself that I just could not learn the concept at hand. Roberta did not allow such statements and forced me to accept that I could do anything only if I truly believed that I was capable of such feats. So, after a week of persistent explanations and practice exerci-

ses, I gave in to the fact that probably Roberta was right and realized that the most logical way to put the “greater than” sign is pointing towards the smallest number.

Alongside a basic knowledge of English and mastery in reading acquired in elementary school, Valentina was carrying out psychological evaluations of me, and teaching me new skills such as writing in print and memorizing sentences. I smoothly transitioned from the immaculate and practical cursive that I just learned, to the useless and rudimentary print. On the other hand, my brain was not ready yet for memorizing whole sentences word by word. The Italian school system emphasizes memorizing poems as well as definitions of algebraic and geometric formulas.

Valentina made me draw the definitions and the poems out so that I could interpret the drawings and recite them out loud. I called my drawings hieroglyphics since they literally depicted forms of speech. This opened my eyes to the beauty and complexity of languages: how does one draw a verb, or a pronoun?

I was fascinated; however, my classmates weren’t as fascinated. As soon as I stood up to go to Roberta’s desk, at least two classmates said “Giacomo sta barando!”4 I knew that I was not cheating, I felt like they were cheating. Afterall, they didn’t study three additional hours a day on software focused on speech, reading, and writing. Putting the anger aside, I stood in front of the deadly silent class, wrinkling my hieroglyphs, and feeling the smooth texture of the paper. As I slowly recited one word

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at a time, both my voice and hands were trembling. As I enunciated my last word, I scanned the room for any sign of tension, hopefully nobody noticed any mistakes during my performance.

The room was still deadly silent. Roberta said “Bravo, nove.”5 As I folded my hieroglyphs, I sat down among the grumbling of a few classmates. I knew that one day I would be able to recite poems just like the other students and that then I would really have a fair fight.

As elementary school progressed, the times that I visited Valentina decreased, conversely my eagerness to become independent increased. I now understood the value of holding the psychological examinations with Valentina and felt safe to express my issues to her. Valentina always started with the question “Allora Giacomo, come è andata la tua giornata?”6 Whenever I answered she meticulously jotted down notes about my answer, this made me feel appreciated and not alone. I now answered the questions from my own big rotating chair. I also spent most of my work time inside Valentina’s personal office and became her de facto assistant. Furthermore, I came to appreciate Valentina’s authoritative behavior which motivated several other children to work harder.

I was ten years old when I visited Valentina for the last time, the assignment consisted of one last psychological evaluation. As I got to the final questions, I was eager for our session to run out and officially become independent. When I was dismissed, Valentina suggested to mom to enroll me to drama club. As I stepped foot off of the room, I realized that I was on my own, but more importantly, I realized that I was just as or more intellectually efficient as anybody else.

I was fourteen when I moved to Miami, and it had been four years since I participated in drama club: the institution which removed my shyness.

The first day of school virtually nobody understood me, and I understood half of what they said.

I was so lost that I got to my first period thirty minutes late and got yelled at. I was clueless as to what was going on. Six months into middle school I learned English.

It has been a long time; I can vaguely remember the smell of the plastic chairs at Valentina’s office, the chirping of the birds in the atrium outside Valentina’s office. I remember the eagerness to get the assignment over with and the eagerness to go play in the courtyard with the other kids. I remember tucking myself under the warm bed sheets after a hard day of work waiting for nonna Ornella’s lullaby. As nonna ended her lullaby saying “sogni d’oro,”7 I dreamt of an older, more confident, more independent, and more normal Giacomo.

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“Finish up the assignment now so that you don’t have to worry about it later” “I do not like her hair!”

“Hide and seek” and “red light, green light” “Giacomo is cheating!”

“Good job, nine out of ten.”

“So Giacomo, how has your day been?”

“Sweet dreams”

Zoe Piccirillo Reflection This essay was my final assignment for my ID1, Geomythology. I had spent the semester reading Indigenous geomyths, and it was time to write one of my own. I hadn’t been given a creative writing assignment since my freshman year of high school. Four years later, upon receiving this final assignment, I was excited but fearful. What if I had lost my creative juices? Was I really capable of turning a geologic event into a story? I wasn’t used to having so much freedom with my writing, which overwhelmed me.

For a few days, I gradually made a list of random ideas for my geomyth, but I struggled with stringing them together into a cohesive narrative. Over and over again I ran through potential plots in my mind, but nothing felt right. I thought I had to have a perfect outline before writing the story, but I was wrong. After running through my ideas at a Writing Center appointment, I realized I could take baby steps. Write one sentence down, then another. If it doesn’t flow, try again. I chose to move forward without perfecting my outline in part because I didn’t have time to keep dwelling on having a thorough plan, but I also felt I had the space to improvise—I was a creative piece, after all, and I thought my writing might benefit from some spontaneous experimentation.

Even though I came to this realization, the process was daunting. As someone who likes structure and fears uncertainty, I had to step out of my comfort zone. In the end, however, each baby step became a bit easier, and my disjointed bullet points eventually morphed into a geomyth.

I’m proud of this essay not only because of the fact that it was my first creative piece in years, but also because it taught me the importance of patience when writing. I didn’t build my geomyth’s personality before bringing it to life. Instead, I let it unfold at its own pace, patiently yet persistently guiding it along its journey.

Zoe Piccirillo is a prospective mathematics major who is also interested in environmental analysis, economics and cognitive science. You’ll probably find her studying at the Skyspace or Lebus Court, but if not, she’s likely at Trader Joe’s buying their new products.

In her free time, she loves to travel, write restaurant reviews and watch game shows (especially Jeopardy!).

The Kīlauea and Kapoho Bay Myth

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In a very long volcano that stretches across many towns, there lives the Great Fire Spirit.

Long ago, the Great Fire Spirit fell in love with a young woman from one of the villages he guards.

He found her so beautiful that he had to have her for himself. Thus, he kidnapped her. For several weeks, villagers visited the volcano and pleaded for the Spirit to give back the young woman.

Each time they begged, the Great Fire Spirit refused and caused the ground to rumble. He loudly roared, “No one is to come near my sacred home. If you do, you will be cursed,” but the young woman’s family and her fellow villagers couldn’t resist trying to take her back. One night, they all decided to quietly climb up the sides of the volcano and save her. Using axes and shovels, they split open parts of the volcano’s surface, hoping the young woman could climb out to safety.

However, underneath each crack they made lay an angry son of the Great Fire Spirit. The sons threw balls of fire through the cracks, attempting to scare away the villagers. Still, the villagers persisted, and at the 24th crack, the beautiful young woman leaped out. The villagers cheered for their victory, but their celebration came too soon. When the sons realized the woman had escaped, they joined together and spewed out the largest amount of fire the villagers had ever seen. The fire was never-ending. It rolled down and down the volcano, chasing the young woman and the villagers through their land. The only place they could turn to was the sea.

When they reached the ocean, the villagers looked back only to see that the angry sons’ fire was still following them. They had no choice but to swim away, leaving their destroyed land behind. They prayed to the Great Water Spirit for safety as they swam away, for the fire still chased after them. Finally, the Great Water Spirit answered their prayers. Enraged about the invasion of his territory and how the fire destroyed the village, he waged a battle against the Great Fire Spirit and his sons. With all his might, he pushed against the path of fire so it would no longer spread into the sea. The Great Fire Spirit’s sons turned the path of fire into heavy rock to make it harder for the Great Water Spirit to resist their force. Villagers from the town next door could see the Great Water Spirit fuming and hear him grunting as he pushed against the moving rocks. The Great Water Spirit held his ground for seven days and seven nights—long enough for the villagers to out-swim the Great Fire Spirit’s frenzy. After the seventh night, the Great Fire Spirit and his sons surrendered in defeat. Even though they lost the beautiful woman and the villagers, they have kept the rocky path scorching hot ever since the chase, cursing the village for prosperity.

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The Kīlauea and Kapoho Bay Myth ZOE PICCIRILLO

In 2018, the island of Hawai’i’s Kīlauea volcano experienced eruptions for 107 days, from May to September. The eruptions at the shield volcano took place at Kīlauea’s Lower East Rift Zone on the southeastern edge of Hawai’i. They began when Pu’u Ō’ō, a cinder cone on Kīlauea, collapsed at the end of April. The collapse triggered a series of 24 fissure eruptions, which occur when lava erupts through cracks (fissures) along a volcano’s surface.1 The incessant fissure eruptions drained the lava lake at

Halema’uma’u, a crater inside Kīlauea’s summit caldera. The lack of volume from magma underneath Halema’uma’u caused the crater to collapse at the end of May. These events occurred in conjunction with dozens of earthquakes daily, typically having magnitudes of around 3.0. The largest earthquake, however, was a magnitude 6.9 on May 4, 2018, shortly after the fissure eruptions began. This earthquake was one of the strongest to hit Hawai’i in the last half-century.2

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While the 2018 Kīlauea eruptions had a vast number of impacts, the Kīlauea and Kapoho Bay myth focuses on the eruption at fissure 8, the eighth fissure to form out of the 24. This eruption led to the filling of Kapoho Bay. Before the fissure 8 eruption, Kapoho Bay was a popular coastal area for tourists visiting Hawai’i.

Kapoho means “depression” in Hawaiian, which refers to the former abundance of tide pools in the area. The bay was also a popular area for snorkeling, as it contained a great amount of marine biodiversity.3 Fissure 8 changed Kapoho Bay’s landscape completely, however. Eruptions at fissure 8 began primarily at the end of May, coinciding with Halema’uma’u’s collapse. Lava fountained to heights of more than 200 feet, which accumulated and formed an immense lava channel. The channel traveled 12 miles through Hawai’i’s Puna district, destroying the housing and infrastructure along its path. On June 3 and June 4, the lava flow entered the Pacific Ocean at Kapoho Bay. Ocean entry continued until the end of August, forcing about 2,500 people to evacuate the area. Lava

completely filled Kapoho Bay, creating nearly 1.5 square miles of new coastline. Damage to the surrounding community at Kapoho Bay was not only caused by the lava flow channeling through the area, but also by the hazards formed once lava came in contact with the ocean.

Ocean entry created laze, which is a toxic, acidic steam composed primarily of ocean water, hydrochloric acid and volcanic glass. Enormous laze clouds covered the bay as lava flowed into it. Laze can also be explosive, and one such explosion on July 16, 2018 injured 23 tourists on a boat tour.4 Kapoho Bay is now uninhabited due to the fissure 8 eruption.

Overall, the Kīlauea and Kapoho Bay myth aligns with the progression of the Kīlauea eruptions in 2018. When the Great Fire Spirit roars and rumbles the ground, he represents the earthquakes that accompanied the eruptions. The villagers creating cracks along the volcano represent the creation of fissures.

The 24 cracks are the 24 fissures from the 2018 eruptions, and the “balls of fire” represent lava fountaining through the fissures. essay 06

The fire that chases the young woman and the villagers to the ocean is the lava channel from fissure 8, and the Great Fire Spirit turns it to rock to symbolize the hardened lava that filled Kapoho Bay. Additionally, laze from the lava’s ocean entry is supposed to be the physical representation of the Great Water Spirit fuming as he holds back the flow. The myth also personifies explosive sounds from laze by mentioning the Great Water Spirit’s grunting.

1. “Steepest descent paths and eruptive fissures, Kīlauea ERZ, May 6,” U.S. Geological Survey, last modified May 6, 2018.

2. Dee Williams, Vic Avery, Michelle Coombs, Dale Cox, Lief Horwitz, Sara McBride, Ryan McClymont, and Seth Moran, “U.S. Geological Survey 2018 Kīlauea Volcano Eruption Response in Hawai’i—AfterAction Review,” U.S. Geological Survey (2020).

3. Karen Rose, “Spending Time at the Kapoho Tide Pools,” accessed November 2021, https://www.hawaii.com/ big-island/attractions/ kapoho-tide-pools.

4. Williams et al.

5. James Dow, Susan Dow, and Roger Welsch, Wyoming Folklore: Reminisces, Folktales, Beliefs, Customs and Folk Speech (University of Nebraska Press, 2010).

The Kīlauea and Kapoho Bay myth is primarily inspired by myths where geologic events occur due to the kidnapping or chasing of women, as well as spiritual beings battling each other. For example, in one version of the Devil’s Tower myth (from an unspecified Indigenous group), a man’s wife gets kidnapped by a bear living at Bear Lodge.5 In a Cheyenne version of the myth, a bear falls in love with a woman.6 Likewise, Mount Mazama erupts in a Crater Lake myth because the chief living inside the volcano is angered when a young woman refuses to marry him. Battling is also part of the same Crater Lake myth when the Chief of the Above World and Chief of the Below World fight, which causes Mount Mazama to collapse.7 Another example of a spiritual conflict is when the Hawaiian volcano goddess Pele sets the forest around Kīlauea on fire because she believes her sister Hi’iaka is romantically involved with a man she loves.8 The themes from this myth are incorporated into the Kīlauea and Kapoho Bay myth when the Great Fire Spirit kidnaps the young woman, as well as when the Great Water Spirit battles the Great Fire Spirit in order to defend her and the villagers.

In addition to being adapted from common themes in geomyths, the Kīlauea and Kapoho Bay myth expresses several of Masse and others’ cognitive principles.9m For example, the angry spirits

at each fissure being brothers represents the Kinship Principle.

The Willfulness Principle is reflected in several instances, including when the Great Fire Spirit causes earthquakes to threaten the villagers, and when the angry spirits incite the fissure eruptions to chase away the villagers. The Great Water Spirit also intentionally stops the entry of lava into Kapoho Bay. Similarly, the Analogy Principle is included because the actions that represent the Willfulness Principle are all ways in which anger is represented geologically.

Lastly, the timeline of the fissure eruptions is compressed. All of the fissure eruptions occur in one night instead of occurring over several months, which is an example of the Perspective Principle.

Overall, the Kīlauea and Kapoho Bay myth attempts to describe the very recent Kīlauea eruptions

using Indigenous methods of telling geomyths. By writing about these events figuratively, I was able to better connect with them. Perhaps if we continue to express scientific concepts in this manner, we can reach a wider audience and foster a greater appreciation for the natural environment.

6. “First Stories,” National Park Service, last modified March 17, 2019, https://www.nps.gov/deto/ learn/historyculture/ first-stories.htm.

7. Ella Clark, Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953).

8. Donald Swanson, “Hawaiian oral tradition describes 400 years of volcanic activity at Kīlauea,” Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 176 (2008).

9. W. Bruce Masse, Elizabeth Barber, Luigi Piccardi, and Paul Barber, “Exploring the nature of myth and its role in science,” Geological Society 273 (2007).

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Isabela Pardo is a first year student from Oklahoma City, OK. Largely undecided about her major, she finds linguistics, anthropology, and sociology quite fascinating.

In Isabela’s spare time, she loves to apply her skills to the acts of painting, collage-making, makeup artistry, acting, and more recently crochet! Through linking her artistic endeavors and academic pursuits together, Isabela hopes to become a writer of some kind, whether it be research papers, cheesy novels, or possibly even a movie script…

REFLECTION

Isabela Pardo

THE AUDISTIC AGENDA: HOW HEARING PEOPLE STIFLE THE ABILITIES AND ADVANTAGES OF SIGN LANGUAGE Finals week: the most soul-crushing, mind-melting, panic-inducing event an unsuspecting college student can experience. Although the exam dates and deadlines are always well marked in their calendars, and the dreaded week comes around the same time every year, students always find a way to be both surprised and horrified by final exams at the end of the semester. Unsurprisingly, my first finals week at college affected me the same way. While I hoped to do well on all of my exams and final papers, it felt impossible to do so with the constant weight of stress and selfimposed expectations on my shoulders. I especially felt this added weight while I wrote my final paper for my ID1 class, “Language, Community, and Power.” I was very invested in my chosen topic, examining the nuances of sign languages that are often overlooked in our hearing society, and I wanted to make sure I did it right. I felt so excited to share with others the concepts and culture that amazed me when I first discovered them during my research. However, I felt so daunted by the idea of writing this paper that I lost all motivation to start writing at all. Eventually, after many tears and pep talks, I began crafting a paper which I could feel proud of.

Although it took many stops and starts, many drafts, and many editors, I have now created a piece I would love to share as proof of my hard work, determination, and perseverance as a writer.

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1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Nonverbal communication: a form of bodily communication without the use of language Peter Hauser, Amanda O’Hearn, Michael McKee, Anne Steider, and Denise Thew, “Deaf epistemology: deafhood and deafness,” American Annals of the Deaf 154, no. 5 (2010): 487.

Audism: Discrimination or prejudice against individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing Dana Dunn, “Outsider privileges can lead to insider disadvantages: Some psychosocial aspects of ableism,” Journal of Social Issues 75, no. 3 (2019): 667.

Timothy Reagan, “Ideological barriers to american sign language: Unpacking linguistic resistance,” Sign Language Studies 11, no. 4 (2011): 611.

The Audistic Agenda: How Hearing People Stifle The Abilities and Advantages of Sign Language Hearing people often consider deaf individuals to be at a disadvantage in a predominantly hearing society because of their inability to interpret and understand verbal communication. While deaf people may be disadvantaged in communicating or receiving information verbally, the majority choose to communicate advantageously through sign languages. Sign languages, such as ASL (American Sign Language) in the United States, allow deaf individuals to communicate visually rather than verbally through a complex system of hand signs and facial/body expressions.

By communicating through a visual language that relies on interpreting incredibly minute changes in nonverbal cues1 such as facial expression or body language, deaf individuals gain the ability to understand the nonverbal cues of both deaf and hearing individuals. From a young age deaf children must learn to pick up on these nonverbal cues in order to understand

the world around them, whether they are born into a deaf family or not. Although it is commonly assumed that deaf children are more likely to be born into deaf families, “over 95% of all deaf individuals are born into a family and a community that have no experience with how deaf people learn and live.”2 This can result in parents of deaf children being opposed to learning and teaching sign languages to their children simply because they themselves know little about sign languages and Deaf culture.

If hearing people learned even a minimal amount about the complexities of ASL and Deaf culture, they would be able to connect in some way to deaf people. Instead, hearing people usually resort to communicating to a deaf person by speaking incredibly loud, enunciating their words to the point of absurdity, or choosing to not interact with a deaf individual altogether. Deaf people have learned to understand the smallest

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nonverbal cues in hearing people in order to track information. The extreme forms of expression that hearing people use to interact with deaf people completely counteracts the efforts deaf people use to comprehend speech, and makes it much more difficult to understand the information being conveyed.

By attempting to be “heard” by deaf people, who have no ability to do so, hearing people make interactions more challenging, confusing, and uncomfortable than they ever had to be. Deaf people want to communicate and be involved in experiences and discussions, but the current mindset of hearing people when interacting with deaf people leads to audistic3 ideologies that further isolate deaf people. Even if the intentions of the hearing individual were good when they tried to interact with a deaf person in an ineffective way, the interaction could lead to the deaf person feeling infantilized and more isolated than before. Abled people generally hold ableistic worldviews when interacting with disabled people, whether they know it or not. Due to the fact that abled individuals have no reference point as to what having a disability would be like, they resort to “imagin[ing] what disability must be like for [disabled people], routinely presuming it must be a negative, ongoing preoccupation that poses myriad problems for daily living.”4 Disabled people adapt to their body and experiences and see themselves as normal human beings, but the tendencies of abled individuals to infantilize and look down upon disabled people’s experiences leads them to feel like outcasts and broken members of society. Hearing and abled people must learn how to

interact with deaf/disabled people in a humanizing and respectful manner, and understand the similarities between them rather than the differences.

Whether they learned sign language at a young age or did not have the resources/ community support to learn sign language, deaf people learned to expertly notice and interpret nonverbal cues daily. Nonverbal cues exist in a wide range of communication, from subtle facial expressions to hand gestures or body language.

Hearing individuals rarely consider how they receive or convey nonverbal cues because they have not learned to interpret them as deaf people have. This reciprocation of nonverbal cues occurs just as often among hearing individuals as deaf individuals, although hearing individuals are often oblivious to their participation in this exchange.

Those who communicate verbally often rely solely on subtleties and changes in verbal tones, such as sarcasm, to understand the deeper meaning of a statement.

By neglecting the immense range of expression and nuance available through nonverbal cues, hearing individuals often ignore obvious indicators of the inner thoughts and emotions found in those they interact with.

These miscommunications in interactions can lead to a conflict between what a person says verbally and what their nonverbal cues indicate. If hearing individuals were to consider the greater advantages of communicating and interpreting nonverbal cues in a similar fashion to deaf individuals using sign language, it could benefit not just their ability to communicate effectively but also improve their relationships with deaf individuals who they may avoid essay 06

in other circumstances. […]

A lack of proper information and education of deafness persists not only in a healthcare environment but also in education and legislation. In more recent decades U.S. high schools and universities have allowed ASL to be taught as a language to students, creating bridges between deaf and hearing people through language and culture. However, the status of ASL as a viable language to be taught in schools varies from state to state. Certain states choose to restrict the teaching of ASL through subtle wording in legislation, stating “that schools and universities ‘may’

6.

ASL actually originated from the mixing of FSL (French Sign Language) and various indigenous signed languages in the United States during the early 1800’s. As a result, ASL and FSL share many cognates, meaning an ASL signer and FSL signer could carry on a rudimentary conversation.

Contrastingly, BSL (British Sign Language) and ASL share almost no similarities despite them originating from countries with the same major language, English (Rutherford, 1988, p.

133).

7. Reagan, 623-624.

8. Hauser et al., 487.

9. Belinda Hardin, Sheresa Blanchard, Megan Kemmery, Margo Appenzeller, and Samuel Parker, “Family-centered practices and american sign language.110.

10. Josh Aronson and Roger Weisberg, Sound and fury, (2011).

accept ASL for foreign language credit rather than that they ‘shall’ accept ASL” on the basis that it cannot be considered a foreign language because of its origins in the United States5 This distinction in wording allows schools to not give credit to ASL classes, thus discouraging students from learning ASL in the first place. Resistance against the teaching of ASL comes from educators as well as legislation.

As ASL became more commonly taught in U.S. classrooms during the 1990’s, ignorant and audistic arguments from educators arose.

These educators believed that ASL should not be considered a real language for the following reasons: ASL exists only as a visual version of English6; ASL lacks both literature and culture (which is necessary when teaching a language for high school or college students); and students would find ASL too easy to learn and should instead study a more difficult language.7 It remains baffling as to why these educators would choose to make such unfounded claims about ASL as a language and as a medium for Deaf culture. The lack of common knowledge and respect towards ASL and deaf individuals led to these outrageous claims, when simple research would have proven every claim completely false. Audism begins with these false claims and misconceptions about deafness that healthcare workers, educators, and students learn and apply to their interactions with deaf people. […]

Deaf people must navigate the hearing and deaf worlds simultaneously in order to survive in a hearing society.

Whether a deaf person uses a cochlear implant, has the ability to read lips, or only communicates

through sign language, they must learn to read nonverbal cues from hearing individuals who rarely give the same effort in attempting to communicate.

Deaf children often lag behind in communicational development and education because of the high likelihood of them being born to hearing parents who are ill equipped to communicate with them effectively.8 The common belief that deaf children are less intelligent than hearing children comes from this communicational delay and lack of resources for deaf children rather than anything inherently wrong with their ability to learn and retain information. To follow the flow of a conversation, understand directions, or actively engage in a discussion, deaf people must devote all of their attention to studying the person speaking in order to understand their meaning. This necessary codeswitching for deaf individuals between communicating through ASL and focusing on understanding a hearing person is exhausting both physically and mentally. For a deaf individual, every interaction they have in the hearing world revolves around their ability to accurately read nonverbal cues. […]

The need for deaf individuals to exist in both the hearing and deaf world can lead to conflicts in identity, despite the fact that Deaf culture represents a loving and supportive community for many deaf people. A deaf person who lacks the proper support and resources may have a marginal identity, meaning they struggle with connecting with both the hearing and deaf world.9 The sense of isolation a deaf person with a marginal identity feels may result in depression and a

lack of self identity. However, this fragmented identity that so many deaf people connect with does not need to exist in our modern society. In the documentary “Sound and Fury”, six year old Heather Artinian must make the decision between joining the hearing world through the use of a cochlear implant or remaining deaf like her parents and siblings. Heather’s father, Peter Artinian, repeatedly gets told by his own parents that Heather can only succeed if she joins the hearing world through the use of a cochlear implant.

Peter knows that “hearing people think that deafness is limiting, that we can’t succeed”, but he chooses to respond by “say[ing]

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no way!”10 Deaf people, Deaf culture, and sign languages represent a rich and beautiful variety of experiences, identities, and ways of life. The nuances and complexities inherent in sign languages must be better understood by hearing people/verbal communicators in healthcare, government positions, and society as a whole so that deaf individuals can receive the accommodations and fair treatment that they deserve. Once these accommodations are met, and hearing people can have a better understanding not just of how to better communicate with a deaf person but also their similarities in experiences rather than their differences, deaf people will no longer feel the isolation from the hearing world that so often plagues their lives. The study of ASL and Deaf culture could aid greatly in our further understanding of nonverbal communication in hearing and deaf people alike, and help us to better understand the magnificent ways human beings can communicate with each other without using “words’’ as we know them. Despite the efforts of those with audistic ideologies to refute it, ASL and other sign languages are valid languages and forms of communication that deserve to exist and be taught to others.

Understanding these languages can help us understand the incredible complexities of the human experience, and how each of us has the need to communicate and be understood on a deeper level with those around us.

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Sunny Jeong-Eimer “Rolling Stone: Ono and John” Sunny Jeong-Eimer grew up in Chicago and is now growing up some more in Claremont as a philosophy student at Pomona. They write and edit for Agave Review and have a forthcoming piece on anti-capitalist mass media in Tabula Rasa. A few things they find easy to love: lime popsicles, rainy days, soft pastel crayons, roaming neighborhood cats, wordplay.

Reflection When I first came across this photo, I had very little context as to the events surrounding the photo and wasn’t particularly in tune with the nature of Ono and Lennon’s relationship.

In a way, I find that not having extensive context helped me develop an independent interpretation of the photo from a purely aesthetic standpoint. All I knew was that Lennon was a Beatles member and that Ono was commonly known as Lennon’s wife. It was this last part that sparked the direction of my thinking: what it is to be “Lennon’s wife,” and how racialized/gendered dynamics of possession, vulnerability, discomfort and labor seemed to be written in the subtext and hidden, perhaps, under the more immediate pretense of their love affair. My interpretation was rooted in my lived knowledge of being someone associated with Asian femininity who’s related to white masculinity my entire life as well as seen how power has operated between my Asian mother and white father.

There are subtleties in Ono’s expression and the scene as a whole that I am not sure I would have caught or interpreted had I not come from the background I do. I aimed to subvert conventional representations of Ono and Lennon’s relationship by opting to use Yoko Ono’s last name and John Lennon’s first name (John could be anyone without the specificity of Lennon, Ono affords respect) and referring to John as Yoko Ono’s, rather than Yoko Ono as John’s, to reverse the typical patriarchal narrative of possession and domination that always frames the woman as the possession

and centers the desires of the man.

More generally, I am interested in how white manhood often hinges on the appearance of possession and domination, whether of land, finances or people. There is the idea of the ‘trophy wife’ and though I consider Ono far from that given that she has a prolific career as an artist herself independent of Lennon, I do find that there is a grain of truth in how popular media has cast her as a trophy of sorts anyway. So, this was an idea I was able to elaborate upon finding Cheng’s Ornamentalism which discusses how Asian women are ‘thingified’ and represented as lifeless for the sake of aestheticizing fantasies of yellow peril, hypersexuality and submission. These themes of beauty/violence and life/lifelessness that go into the process of generating images I found Barthes helpful in considering more. Eventually learning the context of the photograph, particularly that Lennon was killed by gunfire the same day as the photoshoot, opened the opportunity to experiment creatively when elaborating on the connections between Barthes’ conversation on aesthetic capture and death by playing with the camera/gun shot/ shooting and going for a tone reminiscent of a murder mystery/autopsy as a hook.

I really loved writing this piece and am grateful for the level of freedom I had to experiment with it, especially since up until this class I had only written formal academic essays for school.

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“Rolling Stone: Ono and John” December 8, 1980. The Dakota, New York City. Five shots: four hit, one misses –– nonetheless, the four suffice to leave fatal wounds in the back of Yoko Ono’s then-husband John Lennon.

Rewind twelve hours and you would find John’s back shot again, only this time instead of bullets, every shot is fired in the form of a camera shutter. The target is shrunken and deprived of eyesight, so helplessly naked in his surrender to the deceptive safety of this premortem photo shoot(ing) that his body regresses into a fetal curl.

Just as the fetus curls inside the womb of its mother, John curls round the frame of his wife, Ono. Her expression betrays the suffocation and boredom of a woman held captive by a society of disciplined social performance; there is apathy held in her gaze which, rather than resting on John, vaguely directs itself beyond him, perhaps toward some distant object of desire unknowable to us, her faceless mass audience. In disinterest, a fully-clothed Ono assumes assertive composure.

Her arms loosely cross above her head as her hair plumes skyward, simultaneously defying gravity and lengthening her body into something larger than life itself (and its representation).

Notably, then, as John shrinks to fit his entire body into the camera’s frame, Ono, in effort to evade photographic capture, is butchered from the waist down. In effect, her legs – a basic anatomical symbol of mobility and dynamism – are eliminated from the representation. John’s

bare skin confirms his natural corporeality as undeniable.

Conversely, Ono is covered head-to-toe in fabric, her flesh mediated and left invisible by cloth surfaces.

Look closer and the initial mirage of a blissfully in-love celebrity couple gives way to clues of contested relational power.

Rather than reciprocate John’s kiss (her face is immobile, trapped by his arms into a one-sided liplock) Ono’s lips draw downward as if in quiet protest against this engineered scene of intimacy wherein she plays the exoticized feminine counterpart to John’s effortlessly authoritative

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white masculinity. After all, it is never John who is Ono’s but always Ono who is John’s.

Here, we see a less conventional representation of possession and power. John clings to Ono the way a child stubbornly clings to a stuffed bear, suggesting his disproportionate dependence on her labor: the wively prop on call to accompany his eternal media carousel, the human-turned-site of extraction for anything from sexual/emotional gratification to maternal domestic servitude. . .

Roland Barthes writes that in every photograph there is “that terrible thing [...] the return of the dead.” Intended by the

I imagine Ono’s isolation during this shoot(ing)... a spectacular object to the white photographer and the eventual predominantly white Western audience. photographer to be a front-cover-friendly testament to Yoko and Lennon’s highly public love life, the image now appears haunted. By the time its publication rolls around, just over a month after Lennon’s assassination, the image ceases to depict the living in more ways than one: As Ono and Lennon are shot and printed into the hands and gazes of the Other(s), their subjectivities die and reconstitute into pure cultural objects. Of course, this is redundant for the two of them; given their status as a feverishly spectated celebrity couple, they have already undergone this process of death by ferocious photographic operation many times before. Nonetheless, here we see their postured intimacy again crushed into a mass media fantasy that exists outside themselves, one that dually transcends and immortalizes their bodies into corpses suspended in space and time, forever condemned to act out that familiar “funereal immobility” of the photographic charade. Ono in print after the fact of John’s death presents us with a more sinister image.

Death done them part, Ono is now a widow posing next to the ghost of her husband for the world to see. We witness Barthes’ “glum desert” of mass image culture collide with the facts of mortality and violence, turning the photo past expiration date1. . .

I imagine Ono’s isolation during this shoot(ing). Likely the only Asian woman in the room, she must have felt painfully aware

that she was posing only as a complementary side-piece to John, a spectacular object to the white photographer and the eventual predominantly white Western audience.

I wonder, relative to Ono’s individual expression, where did the photographer’s directed manufacture of spectacle start and end? To what extent is the Ono we see manipulated by the shadows looming behind the camera versus the Ono living before the lens? And what about the subject, John? John the man who publicly admitted to physically abusing women, including his first wife but suffered little consequence thanks to the moral immunity of celebrity status.

Apparently this is the same John as the man in this shot, depicted helplessly lovesick and in the nude. Initially the photographer, Annie Leibovitz, had intended to shoot John without Ono. John pushed back on Leibovitz, insisting that Ono appear alongside him.

When Leibovitz asked both of them to strip for the camera, only John complied. After the photo was taken, Lennon was quoted as telling Leibovitz, “This is it. This is our relationship.” Whether Ono insisted on being in the photo as well, how she felt about the photo once it was taken—none of this is quoted in the articles written about that day.

Why not?

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In her work, “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman,” Professor Anne Anlin Cheng writes that in most aesthetic representations of the yellow woman, there is an “intractable intimacy between being a person and being a thing.” Cheng discusses the yellow woman represented in inorganic objects such as ceramic china, noting how this process of remaking Asian femininity into lifeless commodity forms defiles representations of Asian feminine corporeality. In the same way that a person would possess fine china to symbolize high class personhood, Asian womanhood is fetishized and manufactured into ornamental supplement for the phantasmic story of Euro-American modern manhood.

Through Ono, I glimpse into that familiar ancestral rage which simmers in the collective consciousness we share as feminized Asian people perpetually wrestling with our given roles as exotic sexual commodities: imported “Oriental” props publicly visible only when we are used to entertain the white colonial cultural imaginary which, in this example, John commands so effortlessly. Depicted infantilized and pathetic, he still manages to command the spotlight of the image.

Though her rage is muted, it comes through to those who are able to listen and resonate.

I manage to meet her in the margins and crevices of personhood. But perhaps, I am merely projecting a desperate hope for

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connection and authenticity onto this image.

Still, my eyes draw to the smaller intricacies of her expression—the assertive posture, apathetic, cold gaze, clothed thus guarded by comparison—and I sense a familiar feeling of arrested power. Power to transcend past the visual alone and light fire in the One who sits on the other end of the photograph.

The One can be you, me, us. One receives the photograph with their arms open with wild abandon, prepared to resurrect from the shot/represented/killed subject a terrible, novel confrontation with what parts of oneself can be found in the Other’s image.

Power to transcend past the visual alone and light fire in the One who sits on the other end of the photograph. The One can be you, me, us.

1.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Vintage, 1993), 20.

Seohyeon Lee A Conversation With You

I’m an undecided first-year planning to double-major on STEM and Art (in a broad sense). I absorb bits of stories to find form for my voice; words, drawings, possibly more. I want to explore different forms of stories I’ve never known before. I’m learning to articulate my voice while remaining empathetic.

Stories and art show me the way, while STEM empowers me to make them come true.

Reflection

This essay started as a close reading assignment for ID1. I chose A Room of One’s Own as my subject because Woolf articulated haunting thoughts I couldn’t put into words. Her ability to write in her voice sparked my desire to find mine. This essay was an opportunity to explore how.

I had so much to say, but I couldn’t stitch my ideas into a coherent narrative. My ideas had large gaps between them, which I didn’t notice when I was brainstorming. Nothing came out for a while. When I did manage to squeeze something out, the words weren’t mine. I started over until the result had my actual voice in it. The process taught me to be

authentic to myself. For instance, I used to hold important points back because I thought they were too aggressive, but my ID1 writing partner encouraged me to write them out. I learned I didn’t have to censor my thoughts to fulfill an invisible standard. By doing so, I was blocking out my voice. I put conscious effort to embrace my thoughts as they are. Eventually, my thoughts spoke in a voice they never had before, which filled me with energy. Persistence was an enchanted pot that turned scattered ideas into my voice.

When I feel stuck in my writing, I recall this moment. The memory keeps me going.

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“I need to let them out in my voice, but voice is a foreign language to me.”

A conversation with you You made me swallow my words.

You made me feel ashamed of what I wanted to say. I don’t know how to retrieve the words you made me swallow. My words turned into ghosts. They come back again and again to haunt me because they can’t find a way out.

They keep going until I promise I will do something for them.

I made the same promise over and over, and I was serious every time I did. But I’m failing them because I don’t know what to do.

I need to find them a way out so they can speak for themselves.

I need to let them out in my voice, but voice is a foreign language to me. I never learned how to put my thoughts into a coherent story. I can speak and write, but the words don’t feel like me. I have to fold and squeeze my mind to put my thoughts into words. I want my words to be mine, not something I heard before. My voice is dim, flickering. Sometimes it’s there, but most times it isn’t. I envy Virginia Woolf because she has a voice. She put her story into A Room of One’s Own. Woolf says a woman needs a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Woolf’s room means much more than a essay 06

physical space. A woman needs a headspace of her own to write her story, free from discouragement and ridicule. I get that. My headspace has never been my own, so I never had a chance to develop my voice.

“You can’t say no, you’re asking for too much.”

You take over when I try to stand up for myself. You make me freeze. You blur my memory.

You automatically agree with whatever the other person says, even when I tell you something feels off. You make me say I was wrong when I shouldn’t. You push me to say “thank you” or “I understand” when I shouldn’t. I don’t realize I should have stood up for myself until it’s already too late. My words come to haunt me because I couldn’t let them out when I should have. I don’t want this to repeat, but it keeps happening. I can’t tell if I’m getting any better.

AA CC oo nn vv ee rr ss aa tt ii oo nn

“Say that and you’ll be crushed.”

W W ii tt hh YY oo uu

I have something to say, but you snatch them one by one until I have nothing left to say. I don’t even realize you’re stealing my words because I’m so used to you. I can’t stand up for myself because I can’t speak for myself. I can’t stand up for myself because you sit in my mind, undermining my voice. I can’t articulate my viewpoints. I don’t know what I’m thinking about because you say things that contradict each other. I feel utterly lost in your pool of twisted logic. You come in someone else’s face and tell me I’m childlike and stupid and delusional. You punch a hole in my mind and drain my thoughts away. Most things you imagine don’t even come true. But you stay in my mind because some of them do, and just one blow is enough to drain me.

“Just say no, why can’t you?”

You’re the one who scraped the word “no” from my mind. You made me twist my thoughts to agree with nonsense, even when it harmed me. You made me terrified of disagreement. You made me trash myself to avoid conflict. You blame me because you can’t make sense of the nonsense that happened to us.

You speak like people who blame me to hide their problems, people who think willpower is the golden key to make everything work.

I can’t say “no” because I think I should, just like I can’t learn

Chinese and Spanish and French in a single day because I want to.

You tell me I could have left if I wanted. You tell me I blame other people because I’m immature.

You make me think I shouldn’t trust myself. You echo people who wanted to erase me.

“I can’t wait any longer. Let me out.”

You are my pain. You are relentless. No matter how desperate I am, you never let me go. I pretended you didn’t exist and tried to float above you. It didn’t work. You piled up and changed shape because you couldn’t find a way out. You absorbed people who hurt me.

You started to wear their faces and speak in their voices, so I won’t recognize you and push you away. You wiped out my thoughts until I had nothing but you in mind. I had other things I wanted to talk about, but you erased them. I thought you were off topic, but I decided to write about you because I need to let you out. Only then will you give way to the next step.

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“When you come back, I will answer you in my voice.”

I was horrified you’d tear me down before I found my way out.

When you overwhelm me, I feel I’m back to Square One. I try to remind myself I made progress, but it’s hard to believe, even with solid proof. You tell me I’m stuck, and it sounds more real than anything. You cloud my thoughts.

Everything turns into a garbled heap of nonsense circling around the same thoughts. I thought you’d leave me trapped forever.

But that didn’t happen. You stay inside me, but my efforts took me to a place where you can’t wipe me out.

I recognize you are not me. I find a headspace of my own. I find room for my voice. I’m not comfortable sitting there because you still take up a lot of space.

Where I find distance from you, I find perspective. You tell me I ask for too much, but I remind myself I deserve better. You threaten me when I want to say “no”, but I stand with myself. I don’t mean

I can always say “no.” Sometimes you take over. Sometimes I voice out, but it doesn’t take away the pain, and my voice shrinks. I remind myself I have come a long way, and there will be an exit.

You tell me it’s my fault I don’t have a voice, but I use my voice to overwrite you.

One day we will let go of each other. You will find sleep, and I will look at your face. When you come back, I will answer you in my voice.

essay 06

N

REFLEC

Leeandr Ndeisanz Leandre Ndisanze is a Pomona College sagehen from Rwanda, East Africa, with plans to pursue a major in Chemistry and a minor in Sociology. He is passionate about racial and gender equality, free sexual expression, the power of storytelling, education, and easing cumbersome conversations. Leandre enjoys reading books, watching various shows, and making new friends. He loves taking photographs and writing poems inspired by the beauty of his country and its people.

T IO

LE EF

N

CTIO

L o s i H n o g p e

Death has always fascinated me, but more importantly why people kill has struck me as deeply puzzling from an early age. Growing up, I could never understand why and how people, my people, the people I call family and friends, woke up and started killing each other. It never made sense to me.

I understand that there are decades of ideology and hate, but who wakes up and kills their wives and children? This is some of the thinking behind losing hope. Throughout the semester I was trying to find resources and doing research, but I never found the reason. This left me shattered, until now. Authoring this essay and talking about Ted Bundy made me realize that a person is so much more than what they can do, and that behind every single mask there is a person with their own feelings and life like the rest of us. Now I can forgive the people in my life that I never used to understand, and I can see why most people choose not to see what is happening beside them. My people have been through a lot, they now need time to recuperate.

R

HAROLD KEMPER EDMUND BERKOWITZ DAVID BUNDY TED LEWTHWAITE SAMANTHA SHIPMAN HAROLD KEMPER EDMUND BERKOWITZ

Losing Hope It is Saturday night; you are alone and tired, and it’s unbearably boring: Gosh, another gala? Can these people be even a little bit fun? Normally, you would be in your best outfit ready to smash the college parties, but today you need a conventional “me time”.

You take a hot shower, apply face lotion, and put on clean pajamas; but you can feel that something is still missing. So, you open your laptop, start scrolling down Netflix, and it feels as if you have watched all the shows there are.

You stopped watching True Crime series because you get addicted so easily, but tonight is all about having fun; and as you scroll down past iCarly, you see Ted Bundy: The Handsome Devil. Growing up, you read and watched everything about the Menendez Brothers: the rich Hollywood siblings who killed their parents in 1989, also about the Co-Ed Killer, Edmund Emil Kemper III: a humble, gentle, 6.9 feet tall, and highly intelligent but brutal murderer who killed ten people including his grandparents and mother. In 2018, you read everything there was about the Burari deaths: an Indian family mass suicide that took the lives of 11 members of three generations.

Like most people in East Africa, you believe that Samantha Lewthwaite is living in Kenya after allegedly being linked to the 7/7 London

bombings and Al-Shabaab attacks in East Africa. Despite MI6 and CIA getting involved and billions of dollars having been spent over her whereabouts, Samantha might never get caught. However, it doesn’t bother you because you know succinctly that Africans are used to legal injustice: King Leopold III of Belgium is accused of killing over ten million Congolese.

The photographs of the infamous ritual of amputating children in front of their parents who could not bring enough diamonds and gold are in hundreds of museums but we don’t notice them. Perhaps, it is because King Leopold was a titled, noble, wealthy man; and that is why he might never be convicted. Either way, you know that no one is going to the Sahara desert to find Samantha despite being accused of the death of over four hundred people. They say that it is because she was born in Northern Ireland during the ethnic-nationalist conflict in the ‘70s, and had to endure a painful parental divorce. This is why she got married to Germaine Maurice Lindsay: A 7/7 Al-Qaeda suicide bomber. However, with her sky blue eyes, blond hair, and black hijabs, you hardly think she can even kill a bird. Nevertheless, all the evidence points to only one woman: Samantha Lewthwaite.

Hope

DAVID

Lognis

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essay 06

“you couldn’t help but see how much they longed to be seen, understood”

You more than anyone else understand the correlation between psychological trauma and the crimes those folks committed because it was your high school research paper. You watched hundreds of documentaries with serial killers, bombers, genocidaires, and mass shooters; and they all seemed human to you. You read books and essays most of them wrote on their death row, and you couldn’t help but see how much they longed to be seen, understood, and clearly needed help. David Berkowitz, the son of Sam, in particular, who killed six people and wounded nine in New York City only attacked women who looked like his Italian mother who left him as a baby.

As you research, it almost makes sense why these otherwise wellrepresented people in the society kill, until you read about Harold Shipman, a.k.a. Dr. Death, a doctor who killed over 240 people.

The psychological evidence was

there in front of you but it was not enough, and the fact that they were all found sane during their acts boosted your doubts. Perhaps, there were other motives, but they couldn’t be justified; so you instead changed your research paper to Schizophrenia, and went as far as possible from serial killers and real crimes. But today, the trailer of the Ted Bunty documentary is graphically done so that you have to hit play. So, you lean back on your pillow, align your bed cover, and start watching the documentary: Conversations With a Killer, the Ted Bundy Tapes.

They all start the same: usually in jail with the girlfriend visiting or with a terrifying monologue. The killers normally had a troubled childhood; abused by their parents or a significant person in their life. They are usually outgoing but introverted, never giving away a secret to anyone, and they are physically weak. But Ted, Ted is special. Sure, it does start with the

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Why they Kill

TED BUNDY

gruesome stories about women missing in Washington and vintage pictures of Ted growing up in Vermont. They say that his stepfather abused him and that when he was a teenager he used to create traps in the forest that led to one twelve-year-old girl losing her leg. But something in you says it was just an accident, he wasn’t trying to hurt anybody; it was for fun with his friends. Maybe it is because you used to create traps in swamps too even though they were animal hunting. You don’t know why but it feels like you have met Ted before; he is thirty years older than your mother but you are sure you know him. He sure does look like that actor in

essay 06

Blank Spaces

Baywatch, doesn’t he? His piercing brown eyes and perfect model jawlines make it harder to believe that Ted can strangle anyone let alone decapitate a person. You want to say he is innocent but he clearly is not; in fact, he did admit to thirty murders a while before his electric chair death.

Nonetheless, you still want to believe that Ted is handsome and intelligent, and he could not kill anyone; after all, he was going to law school so he vividly knew that murder is wrong. No...Wait...Are you crushing on Ted? Soon enough you realize you are not alone; his conviction was the first national televised court hearing in the U.S., and you can see other people who are just like you. Dozens of teenagers and college students on camera saying how they would never believe Ted killed anyone; they are still terrified at night of Ted, but he is too handsome; Hence, innocent.

You don’t want to believe that this is happening to you, yet it is, and you can’t do anything about it. Ted is now all over your head; it is confusing and you don’t like it, and you are better than this.

You can see that he is obviously a disturbed individual and very good

at manipulating. He convinced the judge to let him be the lead counsel on his legal team; yes he was going to law school but he was no attorney. Ted somehow managed to escape from a courtroom with police and detectives all around; he was chased around for a week with no success until he decided to turn himself in. He was amazing at convincing people and now he is doing it to you despite being dead for almost forty years. You want to assume that you would have known better if you were there in the seventies, but you are not sure if you would have survived his deceptive smile. Ted brings you back to believing in the significance of mental trauma and disorders to crimes again, so you start doing research again. This time in an African nation.

You start with the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994 perpetrators in Rwanda to understand what made millions of people wake up one spring Thursday and kill their fellow citizens. It is not easy because the only childhood stories of those people are of them going to a missionary school, then college, and Ph.D. in France and Belgium. Also, you soon realize that over eighty percent of the

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killers were farmers meaning they have never been to a school nor paid their health insurance.

These are generally the people who grew up with alcoholic fathers who regularly beat their mothers, and you start feeling sorry for how they never had the privilege of comforting their trauma up until now. You read various books about specific murders during the genocide, do extensive family research, and visit some perpetrators; and the results are troubling.

Chronic psychological episodes, alcoholism, family abuse, inferiority complex, and serious mental disorders are very common in most Rwandan families; and it finally all makes sense. So, you start writing letters to ministries and health institutions with the hope that these people will finally get the mental health services they truly need, but no one replies to your email or gets back to you.

It is all as if suddenly it doesn’t matter and no one cares; so what

did you do? You quit.

A year later, you get a call from your mother, and she tells you that Sekuru is dead, and someone killed him. You remember quite well that as a seven-year-old, Sekuru bullied you, but you later became friends even though you never cared about his story.

It is not only that someone knocked on his door at night and stabbed him multiple times that disturbed him, it is also because he was becoming a man. You now know that Sekuru never knew his parents, never had hard money to attend high school and never was he taken seriously. He turned to robbery and drugs after dropping out, but he recently was sober and working. Sekuru had a girlfriend, a dog with beautiful puppies, and he now had a house from his own money, but someone took it away from him. They took away his life, and no one shed a tear because he was a nobody, poor, and not noteworthy; we felt sorry, but nothing more. Three

essay 06

weeks later, another elementary school classmate of yours also got murdered, the same story: A new girlfriend, a new house, and a rising, stable shop. No one cried.

The next week, they find a body in a nearby river, but no one knows who that person is because they can’t afford DNA profiling. Three months later, a policeman is found

dead and they know who did it; they are convicted, sentenced to life imprisonment, and no special treatment to the victim. No tears, no vigil, just forgotten weeks like that. You know this doesn’t happen in your hometown only, but that doesn’t bother you much.

What is more serious is there is a serial killer in your hometown,

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and no one cares. But you, you care.

You know there is a serial killer because young men have always been missing or found dead for as long as you can remember. It is never someone born with money, it is always the one who made a life from nothing. None of the boys you know who died finished high school because that is the norm for numerous kids in your hometown. But they all turned their life into something of value, a life that they have been deprived of growing up. The first one you remember was a football player and a coach; everybody knew him because it is a small town, but now no one remembers.

The next was an older kid at your elementary school who had dropped out to start selling clothes in the market. They all were on the course of making their lives better, and that of the families they were starting soon enough.

You know the killer always uses a knife, and he has to be a man because his victims were all strong tall young men. It is evident too

on the crime scenes, that never get investigated, that the victims always fight back, but the killer always succeeds, so he must be a very strongman. You put together a profile for the killer, but no one is interested, yet anyone can be the next, and it is going to keep happening. No one cares because Rwandans have endured so much death that the illusion of everything being normal makes them live through the next day.

You don’t want to admit it, but you more than anyone else knows that crimes and mental health struggles Rwandans deem to be for the “crazy” are not what they want right now. ...so what do they desperately need?

essay 06

“....so what do they desperately need?”

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