Post- 2/23/17

FEB 23 - VOL 19 - ISSUE 15

In this issue...

moonlight, monsters and meaning

upfront

contents

editor's note

upfront features 3 • la la lame

Zach Barnes 4 • stacks shelver

Kathy Luo

lifestyle 5 • taking care Sarah Cooke 5 • expulsion

Ameer Malik 8• perspective Arisha Bandaranaike

arts & culture 6 • the portrait of a monster Ameer Malik 6 • to mock a tyrant Spencer Roth-Rose 7• california dreamin’

James Feinberg

staff

Editor-in-Chief Monica Chin Managing Editor of Arts & Culture Joshua Lu Managing Editor of Features Saanya Jian Managing Editor of Lifestyle Annabelle Woodward Arts & Culture Editors Taylor Michael Joshua Wartel

Features Editors Kathy Luo Claribel Wu Lifestyle Editor Jennifer Osborne Celina Sun Creative Director Grace Yoon Copy Chief Alicia DeVos Head Illustratrix Katie Cafaro

28 is more than 27 and less than 30. It is also, incidentally, less than 31, and less than 32, etc. 28 is, somehow, what the month of February has decided is the ideal number of days to have. Or whatever men decided how long each month of the calendar would be. This isn’t a leap year, right? Probably not. I feel like I would have heard by now if it were. Like, in a commercial or something.

Still, where did the other two days go? Why February? Why couldn’t May have gotten sliced? It has 31. We could have distributed the days more equitably for sure.

The shortness of February is particularly inconvenient because of its place in the semester. Before February, it’s early, we can shop classes, and test the waters of new activities.

After February, we start getting into the real meat of a semester. Midterms happen, and never stop. Theses are due.

Our friends get job offers, and we don’t. Our parents chastise us, and we assure them, once again, that it’s unfortunately too late to become a computer science major.

My proposal to fix this problem is simple: We should switch to the Holocene Calendar. It begins in the year when humans transitioned from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture and fixed settlements. This way, we no longer need to keep track of B.C. and A.D., or accept the problematic implication that Christianity should rule yet another aspect of our lives.

Never mind, I’ve just been informed that the Holocene Calendar also has February in it. Hm. Well, I’ll get back to you when I’ve come up with a better system. In the meantime, best of luck braving the end of this dreary month. It’s getting warmer and brighter every day.

Best,

Monica Please send your photos to alicia_devos@brown. edu!

Serif Sheriffs Livia Mucciolo Yamini Mandava Elizabeth Toledano Staff Writers Sara Al-Salem Daniella Balarezo Anne Cheng Pia Ceres Sarah Cooke James Feinberg Anna Harvey Katherine Luo Jennifer Osborne Lindsey Owen Rica Maestas

Ameer Malik Chantal Marauta Isabella Martinez Randi Richardson Spencer Roth-Rose Ananya Shah Celina Sun Alex Walsh Joshua Wartel Annabelle Woodward Xuran You Staff Illustrators Clarisse Angkasa Alice Cao Tom Coute Socorro FernandezGarcia

Ruth Han Diana Hong Jenice Kim Kay Liang Doris Liou Emma Margulies Michelle Ng Tymani Ratchford Natasha Sharpe Maggie Tseng Claribel Wu Yidi Wu Stephanie Zhou

Cover Michelle Ng

features

3

la la lame the battle for best picture

ZACH BARNES staff writer illustrator MICHELLE NG

The Oscars do not, as a general rule, reward quality in cinema. A cursory glance through the Best Picture competitions of years past illustrates this point: Birdman beat Boyhood, Crash beat Brokeback Mountain, The English Patient beat Fargo, and so on and so forth. The history of the Oscars is one of failures of imagination, astonishingly stupid critical choices, and masturbatory celebrations of the entertainment industry. Why, then, do they still have cultural capital? And why am I writing this piece about them?

Well, they shouldn’t, and I wish I wasn’t.

But they do, and I am. As someone who cares about movies, I can’t help but care about the Oscars every year, even though they so often crush my modest expectations.

To my mind, there is only one rational reason to care about the Oscars: when an artist wins an Oscar, the likelihood increases that that artist will be able to fund and freely create their next project. Oscars landing in the hands of young, brilliant artists brightens the future of cinema; Oscars in the old, scary hands of Mel Gibson do not.

Aside from that stands a more fundamental reason: the desire to see good work rewarded. The Oscars are the most high-profile film awards in the world, and it would be satisfying if they could hand out awards to people and films that deserve them. And when I say “deserve,” I don’t mean to imply that there is one objective “best” film each year that the Oscars fail to recognize. I mean the Oscars often fail to even get close.

This year, the Oscars are veering straight towards such a failure, for at the front of the awards race stands La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s bad-for-so-manyreasons musical starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. It received 14 Oscar nominations, a number matched only by All About Eve (a great film) and Titanic (no comment). Critics and audiences alike adore La La Land for its unabashed love of the MGM musicals of yesteryear and its present-day story of young people navigating ambition, industry, and the workings of the heart.

Also in the Oscar race, with eight nominations, is Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’ film that shows a queer black male at three different stages in his life; first as a young boy, then as a teenager, and finally as an adult man.

The films could hardly be more dif-

ferent. Where La La Land basks in the Los Angeles sun, fills its frame with bright colors, and focuses its camera mostly on white people, Moonlight places many of its most powerful moments in the quiet of night, has a palette of deeper and darker hues, and trains its camera exclusively on people of color.

Unsurprisingly, these films have been positioned as enemies of each other in the Oscar race. La La Land is, at least in part, a celebration of artists pursuing their dreams—standard Oscar fare, essentially. Moonlight, on the other hand, quietly celebrates and explores black lives and queer sexuality. La La Land may be fun, posits the Oscar media, but Moonlight is important. I have an instinctive resistance to Oscar narratives such as this one.

It wrongly frames artists as rivals (Barry Jenkins even tweeted that he loved La La Land). But this year, I think the narrative gets it right, largely because I believe that this country would be a marginally better place if everyone in it saw Moonlight. If everyone saw La La Land, on the other hand, we’d be unchanged, except maybe more likely to wax poetic on the wonders of jazz in the presence of any second-rate Holiday Inn lounge band.

But the relationship between La La Land and Moonlight isn’t just one fraught with questions of social importance. The difference in artistic achievement between the two films is monumental. Moonlight has an ocean’s worth of wisdom and beauty, while La La Land is a colorful splash of disappointing mediocrity.

In many ways, I am the ideal La La Land audience member. I love old movies. I love musicals. I love jazz. La La Land belts out its alleged affection for all three. It has a bright and audacious opening number and a dream ballet. It tosses out references to old films and jazz stars. In ways implicit and explicit, it insists on its love of our cultural past. But in the actual execution of the film, Chazelle disregards what makes these traditions great. Instead, he employs shallow, self-satisfied nostalgia that serves only to make the film gratingly anti-contemporary.

The film follows two young, aspiring artists living in Los Angeles. Mia (Stone) hopes to be an actress. Sebastian (Gosling) hopes to find success as a jazz pianist and club owner. Before long, they’re in a relationship, two hopefuls in an unkind world, working at their respective passions.

In a scene near the middle of the film, Mia performs a one-woman show she’s working on for Sebastian. Of course, we don’t see any of the show, as Chazelle (and his gentle misogyny) has little interest in Mia’s art, but in the suffering and anxiety around it. Once Mia finishes her performance for Seb, she tells him that she is worried that the show may be too nostalgic, and that people won’t like it. “Fuck ‘em,” Seb responds.

It’s hard not to read this scene as Chazelle’s conception of his own artistic mission statement. Sure, his work may be nostalgic, it seems to go, but who cares what people think. Sebastian’s trajectory reinforces this idea, and amends it, when his club finds success: if you stick to what you love (in Seb’s case, “pure jazz,” a sterling example of

Chazelle’s dumb phraseology) then eventually you will find an audience.

The first part of this idea rests upon a false premise: that people don’t like nostalgia, and that nostalgic art is thus a brave thing to create. This is demonstrably false.

From The Birth of a Nation to Forrest Gump to The Artist, nostalgia has had a long run of success in film, rewarded both at the box office and, to an even greater degree, at the Oscars. The dishonesty here insults the audience’s intelligence, and becomes even more aggravating when you think about how it positions Chazelle himself as a paragon of artistic integrity, as if we should be inspired by his courage in making an unapologetically nostalgic film—a movie musical, no less. I hate to sound like a typically zealous undergraduate, but Chazelle’s tactics here revolt me.

Something akin to Chazelle’s dishonesty comes through in the film’s sections concerning jazz: his shocking ignorance. Some critics explain this away by positing that the film isn’t really about jazz, and thus can be excused for not being insightful or respectful or even remotely accurate in its portrayal of the music. In some sense, they’re right.

Jazz functions in the film as a proxy for passion of any kind. So, the movie isn’t really about jazz. I just wish someone would tell Damien Chazelle that.

Take, for instance the much-mocked scene wherein Seb takes Mia to a jazz-club to “mansplain” the music to her. The film shows the drummer’s ride cymbal, shimmering and alive, and then cuts to the horn play- ers, enthralled in their craft, as Seb unspools a lesson for the unversed on the wonders of jazz. There’s no ironic distance here; the film clearly shares Seb’s reverence for the music, even if it pokes fun at the little manifestations of it, like Seb’s jealous protection of a stool once used by Hoagy Carmichael.

Unfortunately, the film’s reverence can’t make up for its ignorance. This comes through most clearly in a scene depicting Seb at a cocktail piano gig. His boss tells him he doesn’t want any of that “free jazz,” and to stick to the set list. The set list, it turns out, contains nothing but the squarest imaginable arrangements of Christmas carols. Seb plays them, looking humiliated. Eventually, though, he can no longer take it, and goes into a pianistic flight of fancy that we assume is what the boss meant when he said “free jazz.” It is also, we understand, Seb’s beloved “pure jazz,” the unadulterated artistic expression that Seb lives for, and that exists in a sphere apart from the hopelessly unexciting tastes of the cocktail elite.

The problem, though, is that the “pure jazz” Seb plays is anything but musically profound or artistically adventurous. Essentially, he plays cocktail piano music— pretty and unexceptional, with a grand finish to show us the depths of passion that purportedly live in Seb’s bourgeois ivorytickling. He even jolts up as he plays the final chord, as if zapped in his beautifullysculpted butt by the spirit of “pure jazz.”

As New Yorker critic Richard Brody wrote on Twitter, Seb plays like “Liberace on an off night.”

This may all seem like an inconsequential critique, but in fact it gets to a larger

idea: the audacity of Chazelle’s ignorance, and how it allows him to make points he didn’t earn. In the cocktail lounge scene, Chazelle makes the audience understand that expressing yourself artistically can sometimes be a fight against public tastes.

But to make his point, he plays directly to public tastes, and thus fails to challenge the audience’s own ideas about art. Instead, he positions the audience comfortably on the side of the enlightened, where they can enjoy Seb’s playing and feel like they “get it,” unlike all the other tasteless schmucks sitting in the restaurant. If Chazelle had Seb play genuinely exciting, but less sweet and pleasing jazz piano—if Seb played like Vijay Iyer, or even Fred Hersch—the audience might not be so comfortable. Instead, Chazelle just makes his facile little point.

Chazelle’s ignorance about jazz also stains the film with racism. Jazz is a historically black music, with roots in ragtime and the blues and a period of tremendous vitality during the Harlem Renaissance. Yet in swoops Chazelle, making three consecutive films (including Whiplash and La La Land) that involve jazz, all while having only a shallow understanding of the music.

It’s a classic but still galling example of a white man trampling over a culture he only thinks he understands.

This extensive rant is all to say: La La Land does not deserve the Best Picture Oscar. The film indulges the Academy’s worst instincts, and for it to win this year, of all the motherfucking years, would be unnecessarily cruel.

Fortunately, another option waits in the wings: Moonlight. I will not write much about it here, as I would be far too scared of not doing it justice. For thoughtful and sensitive reviews, I recommend Hilton Als’ in The New Yorker or A.O. Scott’s in the New York Times. I can say, however, that no film has ever moved me so much. The film tells the deeply tragic story of a man oppressed because of his identity, and yet it approaches everything with a vibrant humanity. After seeing it, I wanted both to cry and to sing from the rooftops. I’ll stop gushing, but please, see it. For no film from the past year reaches such cinematic heights. And no film from the past year acts as such a powerful antidote to the toxic bile currently erupting from the White House.

I realize that in Trump’s America, every high-profile contest can feel like a referendum on the president, from Beyonce vs.

Adele, to Falcons vs. Patriots, to Moonlight vs. La La Land. I realize, also, that this is slightly absurd. Every contest can not possibly be so pregnant with sociopolitical meaning. But I also believe that Moonlight’s performance at the Oscars does have some small bearing on the wider world.

Moonlight on its own has accomplished a magnificent feat, and for it to win Best Picture would simply, but powerfully, affirm that. And no, it wouldn’t solve all our problems, and it wouldn’t protect all the people that so dearly need protection right now.

But it would affirm the value of black lives.

It would affirm the value of fluid sexuality.

It would affirm the value of great art. And, of course, it would deal a blow to Damien Chazelle’s ego. In these dark times, I’ll take what small pleasures I can get.

4 features

stacks shelver finding meaning at the rock

KATHY LUO features section editor illustrator DORIS LIOU

Stacks Shelver When you apply for a job, one of the most important things to do is to sound as excited as possible. Some effective phrases may include: “I’ve always wanted to work in an environment like this!”

“The opportunity would be life-changing!” or “This is a way for me to really challenge myself!”

However, when I thought of applying any of these statements to a book-shelving job, it just seemed condescending and vaguely inappropriate. No one would believe me if I said that handling dusty books for seven hours a day was my childhood dream. Any attempt at passion came off as sarcastic and even offensive. But I really did want that job— it was summer, I was deathly bored at home, and the thought of having some extra money was very appealing. So I had to find some other way to look enticing.

Eventually, under relevant skills, I put that I liked to read. In the additional comments section, I also added: “I do not go to the gym, but I am a capable, able-bodied youth.”

Two weeks later, I arrived at the Rock at 9AM, pushed through its revolving doors, and for the first time, swiped in not as a student, but as an employee.

My one-and-a-half months at the Rock taught me many things. The first was that people really never grow out of drawing on desks, at least not by the time they get to college. It would seem that the allure of a clean, wooden surface reverts even the most diligent of students to their angsty, thirteen-year-old selves. After eating at several different desks during my lunch breaks, I collected a plethora of evidence of this phenomenon. After my library job, I wouldn’t be surprised if office cubicles at

JP Morgan are also graffitied with penises, superman signs, and quotes about how life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, but learning to dance in the rain.

I also learned how to use the Library of Congress system, which organizes books by subject, then author, year, and copy.

The system is much more expansive than anything Dewey could have come up with, making shelving quite slow at times.

Nonetheless, like any language, fluency came with practice. After a few weeks, I was confident that I could be hired by the actual Library of Congress, should all other plans fall through. Furthermore, my newfound fluency made shelving a relaxing activity during which I could think about other more important things, such as the meaning of life and what I was going to eat for lunch.

Of course, that’s not to say that I didn’t still get tired of it. After scanning through hundreds of tiny labels to sort “HJ115 .P781 1999 cop. 2” only to find that there was no more room between “HJ115 .P78 2002” and “HJ115 .P8x” at the very top of a bookshelf for which I had already pulled over a ladder, I often wondered how bad it would be to just shove books wherever they fit and let visitors fend for themselves.

Besides the squeaky wheels of my cart and the occasional book I dropped on the floor by accident, the library was incredibly silent. Sometimes, flanked by row after row of books, I pulled out my earbuds, reminding myself of what the world sounded like when it made no sound. It felt rare. Very seldom do we find ourselves in such places where the quiet is accepted, embraced, and preserved. I was shelving thousands of books and walking through every hall, but by the end of each shift, my presence seemed to be erased by all the history that preceded me. I pulled out books, read them, and returned them as if they

had never disappeared.

Being alone in a normally crowded, public place also made me feel sparingly rebellious. I longed to misplace a book on purpose, write a note on a shelf ’s place card, or leave a love letter in the 1997 Spring Edition of the Yale Law and Policy Review. But in the end, I followed the rules as usual (except for when I extended my break time by an extra fifteen minutes), and wondered what it would be like to resis authority.

Sometimes, as I pushed yet another full cart of books past a student burrowed in a book, I found myself in a complex state of jealousy.

I thought of myself last year, complaining about my reading, sitting mournfully at those same desks, joking about a wasted youth. Now, when a few high schoolers glanced my way, sporting colorful backpacks and temporary Brown IDs, I felt a strange need to vindicate myself.

“What are you looking at?” I wanted to say. “Those lanyards are nice. You know what I have? A real Brown ID.” And soon after, a wave of shame would flow over me. I thought about the people who work jobs like these for their whole lives— not for pocket change during a free summer, and not in their elite school’s airconditioned library, but in far, far worse places, because such a job is their only means of subsistence.

I was usually roused from such thoughts by my phone vibrating. People from the outside were always reminding me that life and time still flowed beyond these shelves and walls. But sometimes, things inside the library seemed to shift my reality. Before, my phone’s notifications were just background noises in the soundtrack of my life. Now, they blared like embarrassing alarms, constantly alerting me of my privilege.

It was a painful new line of vision.

When I looked down at the screen, I inevitably also saw my new, name-brand running shoes, bought not because I was a runner, but because I complained about my feet hurting after my first week on the job. From the top of the phone, my overpriced, tangle-free headphones formed a line back up to my ears. There, music pulsed from a customized playlist on my Spotify Student Premium account. Finally, looking up meant seeing my fifteen-dollar water bottle on top of the cart, it’s sippy straw sticking upright and childish.

When this happened, I felt unable to respond to my messages as quickly as usual, and pushed the cart a little harder.

Besides my temporarily jacked quads and an increased knowledge of which books Brown students check out the most often (surprise: gender studies and econ), I think my month at the Rock really did teach me a lot of things. They’re things that will never look good on a resume, so they probably won’t land me a cool internship this summer (which I’m still hoping to get, instead of shelving books again).

But just for a moment, minimum wage was something more than a concept to me.

For a moment, I imagined working in the library not for one summer, but for life.

I imagined an alternative to education, a shortage of options, the weight of a future that holds no surprises, only repetitions.

As I stepped out of the Rock for the last time as an employee, I reminded myself that the next time I came back in, I would probably carry with me heavy books, a sleepless conscience, and unimaginable amounts of stress.

For the first time, I did not mind.

lifestyle

taking care trying to “right size”

5

SARAH COOKE staff writer illustrator CLARIBEL WU

In her recent talk at Brown, “‘Total Life is What We Need’: Self-determination and Black Arts Collectives, in honor of Dr. King,” poet Elizabeth Alexander spoke of the need to “right-size” or make sure that your energy and efforts go toward things—such as art, care, and communities—that will support you and others. (Alexander, who teaches at Columbia University and read at President Obama’s first inauguration, was invited by the university to give the keynote speech in honor of MLK Day. Since Brown classes are not in session during the holiday, the organizers moved the speech to February so that both students and community members could attend.) In the era of Trump, we need to be careful: We need to remember to say yes when we can, where it matters. Alexander explained that this was not a means of “opting out” of politics or political activism but a careful calibration of where and when you engage.

Tracing the history of Black arts collectives such as the Darkroom and Cave Canem, Alexander described how Black artists came together to form mentorship networks, artistic communities, and a collective sense of empowerment. Resistance, she emphasized, also extends to joy, to the quiet grace of spending time with people you love and who love you. Resistance can be a protest, but it can also be a meal shared, a poem written, a song heard.

Since the inauguration, the concept of “self-care” has become even more urgent. But in light of the

inauguration, I also think there’s a different urgency to how we define self-care. Similar to “right-sizing,” self-care also exists on a continuum and is “scalable,” to quote my brilliant and beautiful friend Anne (I am not contractually obligated to call her this, but since most of this column comes out of conversations we’ve had, I feel like it’s owed). Self-care can mean taking a shower on the days when your body feels like lead (shout-out to all my people with depression who also deal with this) or treating yourself with a marathon of Parks and Recreation episodes because #LilSebastian or taking a social media break because everybody deserves to be away from the noise every once in a while.

But the point of self-care, and part of what Alexander was getting at in her talk, is that self-care, and “right-sizing” more generally, is not about isolation although isolation may be one part of how you get through the day. Self-care, ultimately, is about taking care of yourself so that you can feel more engaged in your life and the lives that are tethered—for better and for worse—to yours. In this respect, self-care extends to your community too, however you define it, if it’s the people you live with or the guy who makes that coffee you love and sometimes have to make yourself on a shitty Monday morning. There “self-care” translates into concrete actions that help people laugh, love themselves more, or get through the day without wanting to egg all the houses within

expulsion

a five mile radius. Politically, this could also mean figuring out what form your activism will take—say making five calls to your reps on 5calls.org or, if you have phone anxiety, asking a friend who’s marching what you could do to support them from your home.

After the lecture, what Alexander said about “right-sizing” churned around in my brain: What is the “right-sized” quantity (or quality) of self-care for college students? This is my last semester as an undergraduate on this campus, and I still do not know how college students take care of themselves. If anything, it seems more and more like there’s an invisible standard against which we measure ourselves: the image of the model college student who can do it all and never slips or falters along the way, who sleeps eight hours a day, works a job, takes four (or maybe five!) classes, makes the grades and also makes it in time for all the parties.

Of course, that’s not possible: College is a series of compromises you make with yourself to get through the day so that you can get a degree—less sleep, more work, less work, more fun. It’s a shifting calculus of time spent and time lost in the spending. And yet here I am, about to graduate and still ashamed that I don’t party, still paranoid that the people who say they care for me only say so because I’m the one who takes care of them. I still feel like I’m not a real college student because I don’t party,

a cautionary tale

because I don’t drink, even though my reasons for not doing so feel, for me anyway, legitimate: I don’t party because small spaces make me claustrophobic and nauseated, and I don’t drink because alcoholism runs deep in my family. I’ve spent almost four years of my life in college, but I don’t feel any closer to figuring out the size I am supposed to be, right or wrong.

On my way back from Alexander’s lecture, I ducked into the shadow of a science building and called my mother. Her voice broke through the cold February air, and I wrapped my hand around the phone and pulled it closer to me. I told her about the talk and she told me about her day, an exchange that we’re slowly getting better at. This is another way to take care of yourself: Hold on and refuse to let go, refuse to give in.

AMEER MALIK staff writer illustrator SOCO FERNANDEZ GARCIA

Do you know that feeling, like a faint buzzing in the air, beneath the silence? A gentle vibration hidden under the surface of everything, below the stillness? It’s the trembling from our frightened souls, in the face of the belief many of us hold, but are not always aware of: Our lives do not belong to us.

Whether or not this belief describes the actual world we live in, I’m not completely sure yet, despite what happened. But what I do know is that this sense of utter powerlessness does become a visceral reality in certain moments. The soul’s trembling erupts and makes the whole body quake.

This is what I felt inside the gray van, as I was being dragged to the hangar. I was shaking as I sat in a middle seat, and I wrapped my arms around myself in order to hold still. A uniformed security official was driving the van, and another official sat in the passenger seat next to the driver.

The man in the passenger seat turned around to face us. Insulting our intelligence, he acted as if this was just another day, nothing out of the ordinary.

“So, where are you all from?” he asked with a wide grin.

I was able to calm my body down long enough to muster a response.

“As if you don’t know already,” I said.

He scoffed and kept his grin intact, as if to tell me that he had seen people like me before, boys trying to look tough. He dropped the act.

“As you all may know, the president, in keeping with precedents set up in recent years, is streamlining the immigration process from certain countries while blocking it entirely for others. Now, the blocks aren’t enough to balance the

number of people coming in. We’re about to have an overpopulation problem on our hands. The best option for us is to have certain people who are already here leave this country.”

He paused. The people trapped in the van were silent. Perhaps from shock. Perhaps from utter hopelessness. Maybe no one wanted to seem scared or sad. I wanted to yell that I was a citizen and that the officials had no right to do this to me, but I stopped myself. I didn’t want to separate myself from the people who were also in my situation. The officials had no right to do this to any of us, regardless of what was scribbled on certain pages filed away somewhere.

I looked around at the stoic faces of my fellows, who had been arrested and thrown into this van, just like I had been. In their eyes, I could see a hint of fear and sorrow.

It was like what I had seen a few weeks before.

At the airport, my father and I had just come back from a domestic flight, back in New York after visiting relatives in Georgia. As we were about to leave the building, we saw people we knew. They seemed disheveled and on edge.

Our friends asked us if we were okay. We said we were, surprised by their questions.

One of them, a woman named Sasha, came closer, her body trembling.

“Did they take you?” she asked.

My father and I shook our heads. We asked her what she was talking about.

The rest of the group stepped forward and stood alongside her. One by one, each of them told us what had happened. Each one had been at an airport after getting off of an an international flight.

At the security gate, each was taken away to an unmarked room in the airport and interrogated relentlessly. They were asked about their religions, their ancestries, their upbringings, the countries where they were born. Some of them resisted. Some of them asked for their lawyers. But for all of them, it ended the same way. They were dragged into vans and told that they had to leave the country. The kidnapped people who refused to be expelled were taken to an isolated area, a building in the middle of nowhere, where security agents tried to coerce them into compliance, through imprisonment and

even torture.

Our friends at the airport said they were let go because the prison was running out of space. They said that they were lucky because many of the people who had been taken didn’t come back. I noticed them trembling, a sign of the bone-deep fear that had replaced their sense of security. They told us to avoid airports. They told us to lie low so we could be safe.

As my father and I were about to leave, Sasha called out my name.

“I’m so sorry, but may I please borrow your phone? They haven’t returned ours yet. And I haven’t heard from Rahim in so long.”

She looked as if she was about to cry. Rahim was her husband. They had gotten married just over a year ago. It was only then that I realized Rahim was not among the group.

When Rahim answered, Sasha wept and told him she loved him and asked if he was okay. I could hear Rahim on the other end, declaring his love for her, too. After a few moments of crying, Rahim’s voice hardened.

“Sasha, I told you. I told you that this could happen to us.”

“I know, dear. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

I could hear Rahim crying, too. He was angry, but I could sense that his anger came from his love for Sasha, for his having almost lost her.

They did not deserve such anguish. No one did.

A few weeks after that run-in, my father and I were set to fly again. I told him that we shouldn’t go.

But he wouldn’t listen. He said he had been planning to visit more family members for a long time. He said that we were going to be okay, because we were just going to Ohio.

Before we even got on the plane, we were taken.

In the van, the official told us, “You might not believe what I’m about to say. I completely understand if you don’t. But, I truly am sorry that this is happening to you all. I understand that this is going to be difficult, leaving the place you call home. The government is going to make the transition as smooth as possible. All of your finances and possessions will be transferred to and

secured in your new homes.”

I wondered if he actually thought that these details changed anything or if this process was made easier, it was somehow okay.

The van stopped, and as we were pulled outside, I saw a wide, tall building. It seemed as if it had been built to house airplanes, and I wondered if it had been turned into a prison, expecting to find jail cells inside. Instead, I saw lines of people. Lots of people. And guards armed with assault rifles standing in the spaces between the lines.

One guard told us to get in line and wait.

I waited for what felt like hours. I prayed for us to be saved. I noticed a closed door nearby, and I prayed for the door to open, despite knowing that my chances were slim to none.

But soon, a guard entered through the door and accidentally left it slightly open. The automatic lock must’ve malfunctioned.

I wondered if this was a trap. But, afraid I would lose this chance if I waited too long, I got the attention of the people near me and gestured toward the door. Some of them shook their heads. Some of them nodded. I held a palm up and pointed to myself to tell them to wait for my signal.

I took a deep breath. The world seemed to slow down.

I dashed to the door. I heard people running behind me. I heard guards yelling. I heard gunshots.

I found a hiding spot outside where I stayed for hours. Then, when I thought it was safe, I ran to the nearest town and found safety in a hospital.

I don’t know what happened to the people who had escaped with me. We scattered in different directions as soon as we were out of the hangar.

I don’t know what happened to my father, either. He was put into a different van. I grieved, assuming the worst, but I don’t have any more time to mourn my loss. I have to focus on staying safe.

I’m so sorry I can’t tell you where I am right now. I know you’re worried about me, so I wanted to tell you I’m okay. I’ll lay low for a while. Then, I’ll reach out to you again, and I’ll tell you how to find me. We’ll meet again soon.

In the meantime, please stay safe.

I love you so much. I always will.

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arts & culture

the portrait of a monster thoughts on loner by teddy wayne [Trigger Warning: This article discusses sexual violence.]

Teddy Wayne’s Loner is not only one of the most disturbing and distressing novels I’ve ever read, it’s also one of the most important.

Wayne writes the story through the first-person point of view of David Federman, a first-year student at Harvard who is determined to reinvent himself as soon as possible and obtain a higher social status than he had in high school.

During his first dorm meeting, David sees Veronica, another first-year student, and becomes obsessed with her. When he finds out that Veronica is from a prestigious New York prep school and decides that she has a high social standing, David becomes determined to pursue Veronica, to make her his. What follows is a series of heinous events—involving lies, manipulation, transgressions of boundaries—that lead to a horrific ending.

From the very first moment he sees her, David addresses Veronica using the second-person pronoun “you.” Through David’s first-person narration, we see how David ogles Veronica, presumes to know details about her life despite barely talking to her, and expresses his own entitlement by speaking to Veronica as if she owes him something. We also get a sense of how it might feel to be on the receiving end of this vile behavior because when David addresses Veronica as “you,” we as readers can allow ourselves to be included in this direct address and perceive David as speaking to Veronica and to us. The following passage, which takes place during David’s first dorm meeting, illustrates how the structure of the narration immerses us in David’s mind while still allowing us to get a sense of how Veronica might feel: My seat on the couch allowed me to study you with impunity while keeping the dorm proctor, a redheaded grad student in German philosophy, nearly in

my sight line as he introduced himself.

The heel of one of your leather-sandaled feet was planted against the wall. Gazelle legs encased in dark jeans; I estimated your height at a half inch shorter than mine, depending on our footwear.

Thus, Loner works as a powerful critique of patriarchy, male entitlement, objectification of women, and sexual violence toward women by placing readers in the mind of the perpetrator of these wrongs and also, through David’s direct address to Veronica, in the shoes of the victim of these horrors.

In addition to the effective structure of its narration, the book is a vital read because of the ideas it conveys. The novel presents all of David’s actions in his obsessive pursuit of Veronica as belonging to the destructive mindset that women are inferior to men and that men are entitled to women. David’s actions early on—which include snooping around Veronica’s Facebook page and meeting with Veronica under the pretense of helping her on a class assignment—belong to the same series of events that result in a horrible crime. For example, when David finds Veronica’s profile in the first-year student register, he presumes to know much about her from just one photograph and a few listed facts, such as her home address and the name of her high school. As David stares at Veronica’s photo, he narrates: Behind you, an indeterminate bifurcation of sea and sky, your serenely unimpressed smile implying the background was a perennial vacation spot rather than a one-off outing. You had wrapped up a day of lounging in a secluded cove on a private beach, reading a Russian novel from a clothbound volume, wondering how you could feel so lonely in such a beautiful place—you’d always worried there was something defective about you, were scared people wouldn’t like you when they got to know the real you, maybe you’d meet someone

AMEER MALIK staff writer at Harvard who would accept you for who you were, and next summer you could take him back here.

In this moment, David objectifies Veronica by inventing a character who fulfills his romantic fantasies and asserting that this character is the same as the real, flesh-and-blood person who lives in his dorm. David denies Veronica’s true complexity and humanity by claiming to know so much about her when he really knows nothing. In this way, the book shows that creepy and inappropriate behaviors which may not seem to be too destructive are, in fact, destructive because they belong to the same mode of thinking that objectifies women and justifies sexual harassment and sexual violence.

Furthermore, the book puts the blame for David’s terrible actions entirely on him, but, at the same time, reminds us that people like David don’t arise from an abyss. David and individuals like him manifest the misogyny and sexism of the society and culture around them.

The book condemns this culture through moments such as when one of David’s old friends from high school brags about how many women he has had sexual encounters with during his first semester at college, reducing women’s bodies to trophies meant to be collected. Other scenes that critique society include gross moments in which male Harvard alums, who are visiting campus during a big sports event, try to seduce undergraduate women. We as readers never think David is innocent because we are placed in his point of view and learn all of his vile thoughts and abhorrent justifications. Furthermore, David has numerous chances to avoid or stop doing the immoral and destructive act, but still continues to do the heinous action. At the same time, however, the book allows us readers to see that David’s behavior matches those of the men around him.

One more aspect of the book that I

to mock a tyrant

is political satire worth it anymore?

illustrator MEGAN TRESCA

admire is how Teddy Wayne, while portraying David as a monster, still provides us readers with details that allow us to see David’s humanity. For example, when David relates a horrible incident of bullying from his elementary school years, I felt bad for him. Through moments in which we glimpse David’s humanity, we remember that he is a human being, not a caricature of a monster. It’s important and even morally responsible for writers to present monstrous individuals as still being human. The humanity that we see in terrible people doesn’t excuse their actions, but instead allows us to realize that we, as humans, are also capable of doing terrible things. I am thankful that Loner allowed me to see in David parts of myself (back when I was still on Facebook, I sometimes snooped around on people’s Facebook pages) and aspects of people I’ve known, some of whom I used to consider friends. I think one of the most important truths of Loner for men in particular is that despite thinking we are incapable of doing terrible things, we still are. For everyone, the idea that we’re infallible is dangerous because such a belief undermines the self-reflection and consideration that help us act in morally correct ways.

The fact that Teddy Wayne is able to create a monstrous character both vile and with bits of humanity is a testament to Wayne’s immense skill as a fiction writer. Loner is a difficult book, and it’s

SPENCER ROTH-ROSE staff writer illustrator NATASHA SHARPE

It’s 2017, and we take our timelines like we take our coffee: dark, bitter, and likely to keep us up all night tossing and turning. The front page of every newspaper, every day, reads like a fearmongering Hillary Clinton campaign ad: “Imagine a world in which the least qualified, most morally bankrupt presidential candidate in U.S. history somehow won the election and started systematically destroying the democracy-protecting institutions we thought to be unimpeachable.

So don’t forget to vote on November 8th, or else this future could come true.”

Well, here we are.

One meager respite that we have from this demoralizing, dangerous chaos is Saturday Night Live. The late-night sketch show is currently enjoying its highest ratings in 22 years, according to Variety—no small feat given how most people’s relationship with the show has morphed into more of a Sunday-morning-viral-links-bulletin than a 1990s-gather-around-the-TV-on-a-Saturday-night vibe.

Donald Trump’s obsession with SNL has been

well documented, since he tweets about it nearly every week. Even though, according to him, the show is “really bad television” with a “terrible” cast on a “failing” network, he’s bizarrely glued to his TV every Saturday night, anxiously watching Alec Baldwin’s lip-pouting, hand-splaying impression. In one recent outburst, he became enraged at Melissa McCarthy’s viral popularity on February 4th as White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, not because a popular TV show was portraying a member of his administration as an unhinged madman, but because Spicer was played by a woman.

There’s never been a president more visibly, personally, tantalizingly affected by public mockery. So then why does political satire feel, to me, more pointless than ever?

During the campaign season, it seemed like SNL, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, and, to a lesser extent, Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert, were the voices of sanity, the recipients of the “yes, thank you!” that we all long to bestow on smart, funny people who get pissed at all the same things

we do but are more capable of articulating their thoughts. We hoped that their weekly “epic takedowns” and “eviscerations” would finally end the looming threat of Trump. We figured that the electorate could only be shown how flat-out wrong one side is before switching allegiances to the light. We wanted humor, outrage, and Kate McKinnon to help voters to understand what we knew to be true: that a Trump presidency presented a nearly unprecedented threat to the fabric of our country.

But then the unthinkable happened, and we’re still reeling, and we’re still frightened, and we’re still rethinking the effectiveness of the tactics we thought were going to protect us from this worst-case scenario.

Satire, no matter how biting, did not work.

Facts, no matter how damning, did not work.

Blame James Comey, Vladimir Putin, and the Electoral College all you want (as you well should), but as it stands now, Donald Trump is our president and no amount of celebrity cameos or cries of “Drumpf!” did anything to stop it.

This is due, in part, to the fears on which Trump’s campaign preyed—a campaign built on paranoia and xenophobia, on populism and antielitism. Of course his supporters wouldn’t watch shows filled with Hollywood snobs like SNL or Last Week Tonight; of course they wouldn’t want their views challenged or proven wrong. Not in a world in which facts are malleable if they don’t fit the leader’s narrative, in which the president of the United States claims, as he did on February 6th, that “any negative polls are fake news.” When it comes to reconciling photographs of the meager inauguration crowd with the White House’s claims that it was the best-attended inauguration in history, the question remains: Whose facts are real? Cognitive dissonance of this sort is poison in the age of Trump, and 63 million Americans aren’t about to drink it.

There’s another factor at play here, too. The phrase “truth is stranger than fiction” is cliché at this point, but I can honestly say that if House of Cards just showed footage from this presidency’s infancy, I’d be complaining that it jumped the

arts & culture shark. It’s tough to satirize what’s already a satire.

In fact, Trump’s campaign ran every play in the “fictional demagogue rises to power on a wave of jingoism” book, one that’s been well read by everyone from Aristophanes to Charlie Chaplin.

This assumption of power has been a pastiche in and of itself, and somehow we weren’t able to alert 30 states that we’ve seen this play out before, both in fiction and real life. Making fun of him now strikes me as redundant—he made fun of himself for over a year and won anyway.

Even if you do try, it’s deceptively hard to make fun of him effectively. Political satire in the past month has had to walk an impossibly thin line. Mock Trump’s sillier aspects (his thin skin, his tiny hands, his dumb hair, etc.), and you pluck low-hanging fruit in ways that were done to death by the 1980s. But satirize the more sinister aspects of his regime (his terrifying Cabinet appointments, his willful destruction of the decorum required of the American presidency, literally any of his actual policies) and you risk trivializing the rise of fascism. I’ve been unable to laugh at recent SNL episodes, no matter how funny they are, because of the real world consequences of the actions of the idiots and white supremacists the satires are lampooning.

I don’t mean to diminish the sociopolitical importance of satire. I believe it is vital in the right contexts, and I believe we need people who

7

will fill this role and use humor as their voice of reason. I always have. I’ve worshipped SNL ever since 2008, when I credited much of Obama’s victory to the show’s truth telling. “Look at how silly Tina Fey makes Sarah Palin look!” I thought.

“People must get that!” Besides, making Trump feel bad is a net positive in the world of 2017. Every time he gets upset, an angel donates to Planned Parenthood.

But right now? I’m disillusioned with political satire. I’m sick of takedowns. I’m sick of eviscerations. A few minutes ago, my roommate turned to me and told me that people on Twitter have spent the evening calling out all the comma splices in Trump’s horrifying tweets. I’m sick of that, too. It might feel good, and sure, you should get your kicks where you can, but it’s not doing jack. When the content of those tweets is putting people at risk, poking holes in grammar is embarrassingly petty.

Fascism is unaffected by being proven wrong.

This much we know. Maybe I’m becoming radicalized over here, growing militant in the face of dark times ahead. But I’m realizing that we have to do more than spit, snark, and giggle at the stupidity of those with whom we disagree. We have to do more to fight this, with our time and our money and our work. Someone lace up my gloves; I’m ready to punch a Nazi.

california dreamin’ picking the oscars

JAMES FEINBERG staff writer illustrator CLARISSE ANGKASA

This is the time of year when art becomes competitive, when the stakes are high and the impact is real, and little gold statues handed out Sunday night aren’t snobbery to be scoffed at but magic amulets that can change the course of careers or, for some films, be all the difference at the box office. The 89th Academy Awards are on Sunday, and like many octogenarians, they’re often dismissed as irrelevant but are certainly worth talking about if only for old times’ sake. So, ignoring conventional wisdom and retaining not a shred of concern for anyone else’s opinion, let’s break this thing down.

Best Picture: La La Land La La Land was the best movie of the year.

La La Land was one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. I don’t expect everyone to agree with this, and I’d wager the film’s creators don’t expect that either; the film openly celebrates pursuing personal passion personally, without cynicism or conditionality, and overt (if slightly tempered) optimism doesn’t tend to go over well with everyone. But it’s a magnificent musical—the score is gorgeous, Linus Sandgren’s cinematography drapes light over an average-looking city until it drips with glamour, and the chemistry between the leads, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, is tangible. Chalk its wins up as Hollywood celebrating itself if you like (that’s the problem many had with The Artist, a film I also loved, if not as much); in my book it’s a miracle this film exists at all, and don’t let anyone tell you there’s anything wrong with savoring it.

Best Director: Damien Chazelle, La La Land Damien Chazelle, at 32, stands ready to take the helm of auteurist filmmaking with relish and style and a profound respect for the traditions of the medium. He achieves things with the camera in La La Land, his third feature (and follow-up to 2014’s Whiplash, another Best Picture nominee), that seem conceptually impossible—that opening number, destined for immortality, is a miracle of bravura filmmaking. The vision of La La Land is total and infuses the movie with effortlessness beyond anything we saw last year. Should he take this award (which I’m certain he will), he would become the youngest person ever to win it.

Best Actor in a Leading Role: Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea Easily supplanting his overreaching brother as The Better Affleck in one fell swoop, Casey Af-

fleck etched his name on the Oscar the minute he wrapped Manchester by the Sea. It’s a transcendently sad film perfected by his presence in it, as a bereaved janitor, in the way the classic dramas made no sense without their stars. Think of On the Waterfront without Brando, Dog Day Afternoon without Pacino—Affleck here lays claim to that history definitively and powerfully.

Best Actress in a Leading Role: Emma Stone, La La Land Emma Stone is a classic Hollywood leading lady in La La Land, as instantly iconic as Lucille Ball, but she brings a realness and a quiet desperation to her character, a struggling actress, that legitimizes and grounds her. As a woman for whom everything is an obstacle to overcome, Stone brings the focus and determination that make the movie work.

Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Mahershala Ali, Moonlight While I understand why others were thrilled

by Moonlight, I wasn’t, personally—to me it was unremarkable, and too confident in its importance to bother with dynamism. Mahershala Ali, though, as a benevolent drug kingpin who takes the lead character under his wing as a child, is a breath of fresh air—and not just because of his towering screen presence. He’s a real person in the movie, not struggling under the weight of his own significance, and he brings a loving care to his role that should eke out the award over the equally talented but much younger Lucas Hedges, who will certainly be back at the ceremony in the future.

Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Viola Davis, Fences Fences, as many have correctly pointed out, is not a movie so much as a filmed play, and something of a vanity project for director Denzel Washington, who also stars. His inherent dominance as an actor is what makes it so remarkable that Viola Davis, as the wife of his Pittsburgh garbage man, can steal the show so easily. She makes the most of her dearth of lines and inherent quietude as a character actress to deliver a captivating performance. The category belongs to Davis, who’ll steamroll over her former The Help co-star Octavia Spencer (nominated for Hidden Figures) easily. My only complaint about her masterful performance?

Despite her comparative silence, she’s central to the story—it’s clearly a leading role.

Best Original Screenplay: Manchester by the Sea Kenneth Lonergan, the screenwriter and director of Manchester by the Sea, is one of the two best playwrights of the past quarter-century (with Tracy Letts), and this, his third screenplay, reflects his talent. A portrait of middle-class America painted sans irony or condescension, it’s a story constructed without artifice or easy answers, dashing hopes one minute and daubing them with laughter the next. It’s a great American work of screenwriting that will likely stand the test of time, and perhaps give Lonergan the respect in Hollywood he has so long deserved.

it’s won leading up to now, it losing this category would be an event statistically on par with a meteor strike, but I’ll still take credit if Disney goes home happy on Sunday.

Best Sound Editing: La La Land Best Visual Effects: Doctor Strange Best Film Editing: La La Land Best Short Film, Animated: Piper Best Short Film, Live-Action: Silent Nights Best Documentary Short Subject: Joe’s Violin

Best Adapted Screenplay: Arrival The twist in Arrival is really good. It’s one of those—those Usual Suspects, hair-on-your-armsstanding-up moments that stick with you and won’t leave you alone. And while much of that is due to Ted Chiang ‘89, who wrote the short story on which the film’s based, the tautly constructed movie itself is an achievement, if not a major one, in science fiction. Eric Heisserer’s screenplay, the film’s strongest aspect but for the egregiously snubbed Amy Adams in the lead role, deserves recognition.

Best Foreign Language Film: Toni Erdmann In the interest of promoting foreign film attendance, I want to tell you that Toni Erdmann is a fun, provocative father-daughter comedy, a genre rarely nominated in this category but heavily favored to win it. In the interest of honesty, I haven’t seen it. But I stand by my pick—it’s cleaned up at Critics’ Circle awards all over the world, and it’s already been optioned as an English-language Jack Nicholson vehicle. Good enough for Jack, good enough for me.

Best Animated Feature: Zootopia It’s not easy to make an animated children’s movie about a major metropolis populated by animals that also serves as intelligent, probing commentary on police bias, but with Zootopia, Disney’s latest Oscar juggernaut, writers Jared Bush and Phil Johnston and directors Byron Howard and Rich Moore have done it. Given the string of awards

Best Original Score: La La Land Best Original Song: “City of Stars”, La La Land Best Production Design: La La Land Best Cinematography: La La Land Best Costume Design: La La Land Best Makeup: A Man Called Ove gro

Best Documentary Feature: I Am Not Your NeBest Sound Mixing: La La Land I liked La La Land.

8

lifestyle

topten people who should host the oscars

the only reason i got out of bed today is because i was hungry. when i have to pee i hold it in because i don’t want to have to walk to the bathroom.

1. harambe 2. j.k. rowling (what else does she have to do these days?)

3. left shark 4. the priest from the princess bride 5. barack obama 6. stephen hawking 7. gail 8. michael cera 9. mclovin 10. all of taylor swift’s ex-boyfriends

i think whoever invented pants must have been anti-human.

perspective ANISHA BANDARANAIKE staff writer illustrator JANICE KIM This past summer, I got LASIK surgery.

The procedure took about twenty minutes the laser part taking fifteen seconds per eye. The doctors clamp open your eye, numb it, clean it, use an expensive machine to very precisely cut into your cornea with heat, spread some medicine on, and then move on to the next eye.

I started wearing glasses when I was seven, and now I have to undo fourteen years of muscle memory. I still reach to push my glasses up my nose when my vision goes blurry (part of the healing process). I still try to take them off my face before I go to sleep. I’ve poked myself in the now-unprotected eye more times than I care to admit.

I remember learning about the parts of an eye in middle school. There’s the cornea, the aqueous humour, the lens, the iris, the pupil, the sclera; there’s the ciliary body, the vitreous humour, the retina, and the optic nerve.

I remember being fascinated by the parts and by all the things that could go wrong. When I focused on the green dot between the lasers, that’s what I thought about.

Why did I get LASIK? Vanity, mostly. But there are other reasons too. There’s a sense of joy, of satisfaction in being granted something that you could never have before. Now I can see every detail: the individual leaves on trees, the bricks on the building across the street, the blemishes on my face—even in my periphery.

I’d worn contacts before, but those were never perfect. Even now, it’s not perfect, but it’s the best it’s ever been, and I could never imagine anything better.

And that’s the thing, right? I will never know what it’s like to have truly perfect vision; I’ll never know what other people see when they open their eyes. All we can do is try to communicate, argue when we can’t decide on the difference between yellow and green, or

pink and red.

And it’s not just colours. When I see two people talk to each other, I notice things. The faint smile behind their eyes or the nervousness in their eyebrows—the details that tell me something about their relationship. I don’t know if anyone else can see it. I’ve always been the kind of person to see misunderstandings. I witness a conversation where he’s saying something, but she misses the point, and he doesn’t see that she’s missed the point, and they’re trying to have two separate conversations. I see it.

I don’t always interject, don’t say “I think he’s talking about… but she’s talking about…” because I don’t want to speak for anyone, and I’ve never wanted to call attention to how blind they are, not when my own eyes are imperfect. But that’s perception, not eyesight— equally important, but not the same.

They say eyes are the windows to the soul, but I’ve never really understood that. Because 1) if the soul does, in fact, exist, it would not have a physical manifestation, and would, therefore, have no windows; it would not be represented by any one thing, its reach would be all encompassing, the eyes, mouth, the hands, the feet. 2) What does it even mean to serve as a window to the soul? Look through them and you see someone’s soul? Are eyes metaphors for the soul, so when someone’s eyes are bright, their soul is bright? Through your own eyes, are you able to bear witness to your own soul? The phrase is ambiguous.

There’s always a better alternative. Precision is key.

When using a laser, there’s no room for mistakes. If you burn into something, you’re making it disappear. Changes are permanent; scars and blindness are avoidable. Eyes fixed on that green dot, deliberately still.

Eyes are the focus of hundreds of quotes.

Quotes about love and beauty and smiles and

morality. Why do we talk about eyes as metaphor when none of us know what anyone else is seeing? How can we make any kind of generalization when we have no frame of reference?

I’ve always wanted to know how other people see, how they think. When people see someone talk about something they care about, do they see what I do? The tension of excitement in their muscles? The way their faces animate?

Or do they just see someone talking?

After my surgery, as short and easy as it was, my eyes reacted to the trauma. For the first three days, I struggled to keep them open.

At first I thought it was because they were healing, but I very quickly realized it was because I had developed some sort of block. I could open my eyes briefly, but if I thought about them, they would close, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I spent the fourth day holding my lids open with my hands, forcing my eyes to take in the world.

I have my grandmother’s eyes, or that’s what my mother tells me. She died when I was young, so I don’t remember, and the photographs don’t do her justice. With a photograph, you never see the whole picture. In motion, you can see a person’s character, their heart, and my grandmother had a lot of heart.

My mother talks about her like she was a saint.

Children see their parents as perfect until they don’t, but I don’t think my mother’s vision changed. When my grandmother died, hundreds of people wrote articles in memoriam, expounding on her saintly character. Maybe she was a saint. What is the truth but a widely held perspective?

The doctor told me he could fix my vision, but the astigmatism couldn’t be corrected entirely. Astigmatism is when your lens is turned just a little on its axis; nothing focuses quite like it’s supposed to. It’s the hardest problem to correct, with glasses, contacts, and

lasers. “You have her eyes… You’re so much like her,” my mother says. She sees my grandmother in me; she sees the best, but the axis shifts. It’s a weighty mantle to bear. I try to be who she sees, but nothing can be perfect.

People say that a genuine smile reaches the eyes. It’s an if and only if sort of statement—a biconditional connective. Proof by contrast, the statement is false. When I smile, it’s not always genuine. When I smile, it always reaches my eyes.

For months after the surgery, up to six, I had to wear sunglasses whenever I was in sunlight. Long term corneal scarring was the warning, caused by UV rays. So I wore them; everywhere I went, and they shielded me. I saw the people walk past, I could stare; no one noticed. I sometimes think about the fact that a person can never see themselves. Even in a mirror, it’s always a flipped perspective. With those sunglasses on, I could stare, I could form opinions, but I will never see what they saw when they looked at me.

Then again, did I ever?