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In This Issue Recovery, in Fragments KAHINI MEHTA 6

Post-confidence

ANNELIESE MAIR 5

Patterns of the World

NICOLE FEGAN 4

ERIN LEE WALDEN 7

Is This Too Much?

OLIVIA HOWE 8

Helig Moder

postCover by Joanne Han

MAR 6

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VOL 25 —

ISSUE 16

FEATURE

Patterns of the World math, art, and everyday life

BY NICOLE FEGAN ILLUSTRATED BY NINA YUCHI

“M

y life seemed to be a series of events and accidents. Yet when I look back I see a pattern.” - Benoît B. Mandelbrot, mathematician, namesake of the Mandelbrot set, my favorite fractal. *** Some days, I wish I’d been a math major. I sincerely thought I’d end up as one, too. I was going to be a topologist, or find a way to specialize in fractals, or maybe just become a professor. Waltzing into MATH0350 (Honors Calculus) as a brighteyed, bushy-tailed freshman, I was fairly certain this was merely my first class in a long journey toward a concentration in pure mathematics. What they don’t really tell you about MATH0350—and what, frankly, they should tell you—is that if you don’t have prior experience with proofs or multivariable calculus, you are, for lack of a better word, fucked. And I? I was fucked. Within the first month, I experienced a shattering: Suddenly, everything about my future was called into question. I decided that a girl who cries happy tears about getting a C in an introductory math class—because at least I didn’t fail—couldn’t possibly

be a math major. I couldn’t continue to call myself “a math person.” So, what next?

Before taking that class, I'd thought I had a good grasp on why I loved mathematics. Like most people, throughout elementary and middle school, I simply enjoyed what I was naturally best at. I wasn’t great at learning Spanish, but math classes seemed to take root in my brain. I was a lover of puzzles, I liked knowing there was a correct answer at the end of my hard work, and I found the mathematical process relatively pain-free. Listicles on websites like piday.org and topnotchteaching.com note all of these as “Reasons why math is important in life” or “Tremendous reasons to love math.” According to these sites, math is “helpful,” it’s “satisfying,” it’s “fun,” and, my personal favorite, it “helps out in the kitchen.” To be a lover of math is to be pragmatic about what skills will be useful later in life, or so some people say.

As high school dawned, math began to acquire for me a deeper purpose. Life felt chaotic and I needed something to stabilize the entropy. The solution, I found, was math homework. Sitting down with a trigonometry or calculus worksheet was a completely

self-contained activity; I was (and still am) distractible, but math represented the perfect harmony of engaging and difficult, allowing me to get lost inside of it. English and history were inherently human subjects; in order to do well, you had to understand the complexity of how people and society function. Math, however, enabled me to use my entire brain without ever needing to think outside the scope of the problem at hand. Not only did my personal issues cease to exist, but so did the outside world. For a brief moment, it was just me and a formula, or me and a pattern to dissect, or me and a problem that I just couldn’t seem to solve until, finally, it clicked.

Math became an escape from the real world as opposed to a worthwhile interaction with it. And I’m not talking light escapism—I’m talking a desire for an insulated world so intense that by the time I got to college, the sheer notion of “applied mathematics” seemed borderline gross to me. The only math I considered personally worthwhile was that which existed for its own sake: math for the sake of further math, without any need to apply it in realistic settings.

Why take a perfect thing and make it imperfect by

Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, Women. That’s the editor’s note.

Of course, I’m kidding, but women are so incredible that if there was ever to be a one-word letter from the editor, that would be it. I promise you, no other word could do it justice. Why this sudden deluge of affection for women, you ask? Aside from the fact that many of them are the lights of my life, it’s because this upcoming Sunday is International Women’s Day. I don’t want to speak on behalf of others, so I will use this space to talk about one of my favorite things about the women in my life (and maybe you’ll find that you feel the same way about your friends!). Whenever I find myself demoralized by the senseless misfortunes dealt by our almighty universe, I can always count on my female friends to fill me up with equally preposterous but beautifully positive affirmations. Am I really the baddest bitch to have ever walked this earth or the greatest literary genius to have broken down crying in the halls of the English department? Hell no. But my friends will flood me with all the reassurances they can muster until I come to my senses

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and realize that, in a room full of powerful women, I can count myself among them.

This week, post- offers a selection of essays, all written by said powerful women. In Feature, a writer invites us to explore the evolving connection she has drawn between art and math.

In Narrative, one writer discusses he r shifting definition of confidence, and another writer details her mental health journey facing anxiety. And in Arts & Culture, our writers look up to Carly Rae Jepsen and Silvana Imam, musicians who have taught them how to embrace “excess” in emotion and be more in touch with their sexuality, respectively.

Women, y’all. What more can I say? They truly help make this world go ’round, and as much as I appreciate having a day to celebrate them, we obviously don’t need to wait until this Sunday to tell them how much we love them. Every day is a day to wake up, walk out the door, and be completely and utterly flabbergasted by their greatness. Hyperbolic? Sure. But c’mon, you know we deserve it.

With So Much Love,

Amanda Ngo Editor- in-Chief

Badass Pop Princesses 1. Avril Lavigne (not her doppelganger, Melissa) 2. Britney Spears 3. Taylor Swift 4. Hannah Montana 5. Demi Lovato 6. Selena Gomez 7. Rebecca Black (GOTTA GET DOWN ON FRIIIIDAYYYYYYY) 8. The artist formerly known as Ke$ha 9. Jordin Sparks 10. Hilary Duff

adding, of all things, this vastly imperfect world back into the equation? Math alone was the world I knew, and it was the world I wanted to live in. *** During high school, I found myself creating what can best be described as math art. Restless while sitting in class, I doodled in the margins of my notes, and, time after time, these drawings ended up bearing mathematical significance. A cute little proof of the Pythagorean theorem became my drawing of choice, always occupying space in the corners of a page when my mind got bored. I learned to recreate the curves of a circle using only straight lines. I drew black and white scribbles, filling in negative space to see how the shapes changed. I couldn’t do perfect math with my hand, but the inaccuracy added to the experience. My straight lines were never quite so straight: In a way, I was making new math and new art every time I doodled.

More importantly, I became immersed in writing math poems. For four summers in a row, I made it my mission to inundate my friends at writing camp with my unique adoration of math, its shapes, and the unexpected ways it crops up in our lives. I wrote love poems and elegies alike using math as my anchor, and in doing so realized that mathematics could be just as creative as poetry—interpretive, ubiquitous, and beautiful. After performing these poems onstage, my friends told me they had never loved math as much as they did then, and that they may not really get the theory of the fifth dimension, but they intuitively understood the feeling of it.

Something was going on there, something I knew I needed to crack. And, by the time I had nearly failed multivariable calculus freshman fall and resolved never to take a math class again, all I was left with were the poems, the intricate doodles, and a wide-open schedule. *** As time has passed, I have moved further and further away from math in its traditional sense. In the wake of my unfortunate calculus experience, I dove headfirst into a double concentration in English and philosophy. The time I had previously spent poring over mathematical doodles was occupied by listening to new albums and watching movies that had passed me by for years. My interest in math—its problem sets, its formulas, its rules—was waning, but I continued to consider myself “a math person.” The intangible something beyond the mechanics of actually learning and doing math was what stuck with me. Whatever that something is, it has continued to govern how I view the world.

I wasn’t alone in believing that there is more to math than just its logistics. Outside the realm of vague listicles, people’s reasoning behind their love for math seems significantly more nuanced than “math can save you money!” Applied math concentrator Jordan Hartzell ’21 said, “Sometimes thinking about math feels like thinking about art; you have this set of materials that you can use to build up something that exists in the world or in your head.” In a 2017 Odyssey article, Kiki Shelly Ray discusses her personal reasons for loving math. She writes, “Math is an incredible thing and is both a tool for us to explain the universe and give it a language, as well as a beautiful art form in itself.”

I cracked the code when Gertrude Stein entered my life this semester in a class dedicated to her work.

Stein’s work suggests she didn’t care too much for math, at least from what I can tell. She cared about the

natural world, people, and the objects we create, but I have yet to find in her work a love for shapes, numbers, or anything of the like. Yet I kept noticing mathematical concepts in her supposedly non-mathematical art. In her essay “Portraits and Repetition,” Stein critiques the concept of resemblance, positing that when we look at things, “any little movement any little expression was a resemblance.” Reading this, I recalled my doodles of tangent lines, creating the illusion of a circle but never a circle itself—merely a resemblance. In the same essay, Stein discusses the portraits she writes of other people, saying, “If they are themselves inside them what are they and what has it to do with what they do.” Stein has a way of making everything sound beautifully convoluted, but to me, her portraiture echoes the pattern-like nature of a fractal. A fractal is a geometric figure of which each individual part has the same characteristic of the whole, forming a pattern that repeats into infinity. I believe Stein’s portraits function similarly: She identifies the essence, the fundamental nature of a person, and replicates this essence in words. Her portraits are essentially composed of their subjects. Stein may not have written explicitly about math, but she was more of a mathematician than she gets credit for.

Stein’s poetry evokes such a strong sense of mathematical understanding because I've realized that, for me, math is at its best when it seeks to explore the world rather than escape from it. Math is, after all, humanity’s attempt to produce a kind of perfection that the universe already creates without us. Italian mathematician Leonardo Bonacci is often credited with the “discovery” of the Fibonacci sequence, but the sequence existed in the petals of a flower and spirals of a pineapple long before Bonacci was even born.

My interest in mathematical concepts like fractals stems from the notion that maybe, just maybe, math can transcend the constraints of our understandable universe. Mandelbrot once said of the fractal named after him, “The most complex object in mathematics, the Mandelbrot set…is so complex as to be uncontrollable by mankind and describable as ‘chaos.’”

Yet, when I look at the Mandelbrot set, I see with my human eye not an infinity but simply a series of circles, bulbs, and coiled lines: It is, in its own right, a work of art. Just as I have found math in art, there is beauty to be found in math. If modern art has taught us anything, it’s that shapes can be considered artful, and if Gertrude Stein has taught me anything, it’s that mathematical concepts are hiding in our everyday lives and the artwork we consume. Through whichever mediums we choose, we’re all trying to make some kind of sense of everything around us—the curves of the sun, the precariousness of love, or the beauty of the particular blue at dusk. *** Perhaps, at this point in my life, it’s unfair to say I’m interested in math for its own sake anymore.

These days, I learn the most about math when I read a book of Maggie Nelson’s poetry or visit the Institute of Contemporary Art. The concept of outliers makes more sense when I can visualize one yellow book in a room of blue, and perpendicular lines come alive when I picture them as two people meeting briefly, never to encounter each other again. Through art, I am discovering the intricate way our lives are made of mathematical patterns, repeating again and again into infinity.

Post-Confidence having faith in yourself

BY ANNELIESE MAIR ILLUSTRATED BY OLIVIA MAYEDA

I've heard confidence described as a strength, a belief in the self that’s unwavering in the face of doubt.

I've seen it as an assurance of future success, I've known it as faith in patterns and solid evidence, and I've seen it advertised as an outcome achieved by using products that sell approximations of “traditional” ideas of beauty. My shifting idea of confidence has been building alongside my academic and personal definitions of coping; it has only taken concrete form during my last semester of college.

The best I have heard confidence put into words was at a confidence workshop led by Professor Barbara Tannenbaum. When my friend Erin let me know Tannenbaum was holding an open session at her home, I tagged along, curious to learn any tips for presenting or even obtaining something I'd long believed I lacked.

To me, Confidence had always been, at least in a visual sense, associated with boldness. Confidence personified was outward-facing with straight posture, a firm handshake, and strong eye contact; she was prepared and unapologetic, clear-headed and driven.

Confidence knew that she was qualified and didn't feel the need to prove this to peers, professors, bosses, or other adults. Confidence didn't grimace at herself in the mirror. Confidence was a badass who did not question her own statements with a hint of upward inflection.

I think one of the reasons I associate confidence with the female pronoun is that I've often heard it encouraged specifically among girls—encouraged because we, as a general and infinitely diverse population, seem to lack it to varying extents. One of the reasons we seem to lack confidence is that we’re told by models, products, and standards that our human forms are not quite enough to be Desirable (to men). And one of the most Desirable qualities in a girl is confidence—but not so much that she impedes the confidence of men.

Confidence is an enigmatic term whose definitions are both complementary and contrasting. This means that, whether used when giving advice or described as an asset, its meanings shift and even conflict between contexts and subjectivities. The Oxford English Dictionary juxtaposes this noun as: 1. The mental attitude of trusting in or relying on a person or thing; firm trust, reliance, faith.

2. The feeling sure or certain of a fact or issue; assurance, certitude; assured expectation.

At first glance, the difference between “trust” and “certitude” seems subtle. But the leap becomes much greater when we consider how these words emphasize different parts of a process.

This distinction became most apparent to me at the confidence workshop. Professor Tannenbaum leaned forward in her bright red chair and said, just slowly enough, “The only way to become confident is to fail.”

My inner monologue split in two and jumped between the thought processes. On the one hand, well, yeah: If the only way to get good at something is to keep trying, and if trying something new often ensures

“Speaking of farting, apparently in morgues…”

“I love that. That smells like my ancestors.”

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NARRATIVE call out occasionally, prompting me to crawl blearyeyed out of my room. It seemed, in those days, the only thing I could muster up energy for was homework.

My grades stayed the same, but everything else dropped off slowly: my social circle, my self-esteem, my happiness…

And the whole time, that hideous neuron looked mockingly at me from my textbook.

No wonder I hated biology.

at least a little failure, then it makes sense that getting good enough at something that you are confident in your skills requires the experience of failure.

On the other hand, what the hell is confidence if it demands failure? How can we feel confident in the face of that, in the face of the pain or shame that experience can bring?

I realized that these questions were contingent on definition number two: confidence as certitude, or “assured expectation,” of some “successful” outcome.

But this definition alone feels at odds with my current understanding of confidence. Recently, I’ve tied the concept to resilience.

This semester, someone asked me to consider the possibility of hurt in the face of trust. As I tried to express my thoughts, all my words fell into the void. It was a situation that my best friend and I describe with the caveat “and, not but.” Yes, hurt is (always) possible. No, I am not certain whether or not it will occur. Yes, it will be very painful if it does.

No, I can’t anticipate the magnitude of that pain.

And (not but) I am certain (by my faith in pattern and evidence) that I will recover—even further, that I will grow. (If nothing else, maybe I'll have more to write about.)

In response, I caught myself on the edge of using the word “confident.” I couldn't feel confident in the situational outcome; I couldn't feel certain of the possibility or magnitude of pain. What I was certain of, though, was a more ambiguous outcome: I have faith in myself, and I will be okay.

This form of confidence blends the two definitions of general assurance and trust in a further part of the process: my ability to cope with any outcome. The only way to become confident is to fail; the best way to trust yourself is to take care in those inevitable moments when things don’t work out, to nourish yourself with hope and love in the face of failure or hardship. The strongest way to build a sense of assurance is to take care, time and again, to prove that your survival is worthy of your own certainty.

This Confidence embraces herself when she feels worn of hope. She abandons the notion of a “productive” day when she realizes she's reached her limit and is in need of rest. She feels the hurt—which is, admittedly, even more than she knew she couldn't expect—and cries in the kitchen while a wonderful friend hands her a top-notch homemade cookie. She is patient for hope to return so she can re-invest it in herself, in her ability to love through people and music and art. She does not feel the need to prove her qualifications because she places her faith in strength and not in an outcome.

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Recovery, In Fragments

winning a war against yourself

BY KAHINI MEHTA ILLUSTRATED BY GABY TREVIÑO

Neuron Versus Neuron I didn’t always want to be a psychology major—I only found out what a neuron was in high school.

In my tenth-grade biology textbook, I found the neuron exceedingly ugly: star-shaped heads colored the pale yellow of bile, with tendrils of hair jutting out from the points and a long body protruding out from its head. This last protrusion was covered in green myelin sheaths, all the way down to branch-like neurites stretching away from the hideousness of its body.

“Neurons are the building blocks of the brain,” my teacher said.

At the time, I wrinkled my nose in disgust.

When I first heard the word serotonin—the neurotransmitter that regulates emotion—I liked how it sounded: It sounded saccharine-sweet, and I had the world’s worst sweet tooth. Something about the syllables was enough to make me crave it.

At first, I thought it was only a linguistic affair.

I didn’t think it had anything to do with the fact that I struggled to get out of bed most mornings, or the fact that I could barely look anyone else in the eyes, let alone myself. I was a neurotic mess of a teenager, alternating between periods of stress and periods of moping.

“Are you done hibernating?” my mother would

Learning in Traces I was in eleventh grade when I learned just how pliable my brain was—that neuroplasticity was a highly possible thing.

“Think of neural pathways like a dirt trail, and neurotransmitters like cattle,” my teacher said. "The more cattle travel a path, the more they wear it out.

That’s how dirt trails become dirt roads that become paved streets.”

If this is true, I thought, there must be a highway somewhere in my brain linking every single thought to some sort of abyss.

My psychology teacher called this abyss “learned helplessness.”

“If you administer shocks to a dog in an inescapable cage, it will learn not to try escaping— even in an open cage,” she explained.

This felt somewhat understandable to me.

There were so many things it was just easier to give up on.

Through Tinted Glass Cognitive Behavioral Therapy sounded abstract until I went through it.

I was in twelfth grade when they finally diagnosed me with anxiety.

They told me that the CBT would help me “think more positively.” I didn’t know about any of that, but I did know enough to understand that my friends did not see things the way I did.

During our first session, the school therapist gave me a little booklet: “10 Cognitive Distortions.” I thought it was complete gibberish.

All-or-nothing thinking? Black-and-white thinking? I wasn’t a computer; I didn’t think in binaries.

Mental filters? How could I possibly filter out the good, if there was nothing good to filter out?

Psychological magnification, though, I couldn’t deny. It was too evident, too much a part of me. I’d just spent the whole session secretly worrying about an AI’d gotten on a paper two years ago.

Conditional My fifth therapist (I really went through 'em) made me draw my anxiety.

ARTS & CULTURE I drew a tornado and named him Shylock because he wanted a pound of my flesh. This made my therapist laugh, so I smiled.

I was in college by then, and I’d do almost anything to make people laugh. My therapist thought I was funny, and that validated me in ways I didn’t think were possible. I had spent so much of my life trying to seek validation from people who could never quite reciprocate.

My teachers didn’t care how many A's I got if I couldn’t speak up in class, I felt like I could never do anything right in my friends’ eyes, and my family… well, I’d closed myself off from them so long ago, I was sometimes surprised they even remembered what I looked like.

I didn’t grow up with many friends, which I always believed was because of how much I resembled a walrus from second to eighth grade.

College, I’d told myself, will be different.

It wasn’t, not completely.

More Than Recovery is never going to be linear, and I understand that now.

When I was too little to know what it meant, someone told me, “Home has a heartbeat,” and I laughed, because I could never imagine synchronizing my heartbeats to someone else’s or draping the windows of someone else’s soul with the living, pulsing walls of my heart.

But I realized—maybe I was wrong.

Over the past year, I have found home in the annoyed shake of my roommate’s head as she tries (unsuccessfully) to wake me at an ungodly hour, in the smile of a friend who didn’t get home till midnight because she wanted to buy me tea when I was sick.

I have found home in the smiles of the girls who live next door to me, who have taught me to believe in myself just like they did.

I have called one best friend home long before he literally risked his life to carry me out of a burning building, and another before she stayed awake all night to wipe tears from my eyes.

So maybe, in the end, it hasn't been about the bad days, or the bad weeks. It hasn't even been about weathering them to get to the good parts. It has been about finding home in myself upon learning that home doesn’t have to mean anything other than the knowledge that I’m going to be okay.

Is This Too Much? embracing excess with carly rae jepsen

BY ERIN LEE WALDEN ILLUSTRATED BY CAROLINE DAI

It’s hot. The kind of hot that plasters clothes to your body and makes it uncomfortable just to be awake.

If today were a normal day, I would nap until night brought cooler temperatures, but I have somewhere to be in a few hours, so I pass the time swiping ice cubes across my forehead and fanning myself with a small stack of scrap paper. I’ve traveled to Philadelphia in the middle of July to see a Carly Rae Jepsen concert.

Though the humidity is intolerable and the portable AC unit in my partner’s bedroom doesn’t work too well, I know it will be worth it. We’re listening to Jepsen’s most recent album, Dedicated, and waiting for dusk to fall. As we pick out what we’re going to wear, my partner questions whether the pink mesh top from Ariana Grande’s collection at H&M is too much, but

we ultimately decide that it isn’t. We head to the venue early, hoping to get spots close to the stage. When we get there, I notice that I’m wearing the same t-shirt as the girl in front of me. I want to say something but realize I don’t need to. We’ve already made eye contact, which is enough for us to communicate a mutual hello, we have something in common.

It is packed—standing room only in a balcony section. Everyone in the audience is smiling and dancing to the music pouring from the speakers as we wait. It’s definitely not going to be one of those concerts where people stand around and act like they’re at an art gallery.

We’re all pushed up against each other, and, though the AC is blasting, I’m sweating and feeling uneasy. I pull at my shirt, trying to keep it from sticking so tightly to my skin. Soon, the lights dim and Carly emerges wearing a purple vinyl dress. Everyone screams.

I was first introduced to Jepsen the way most people were: through hearing "Call Me Maybe" on a loop for most of 2012. I wasn’t reintroduced to her until last year, a few months before Dedicated came out. I was excited to find three albums and an EP waiting for me, and even more excited to find that I loved all of it.

Her music is catchy and enveloping. The more I listen, the more I appreciate its power to carry me through all of the highs and lows of crushing on someone in the course of just a single song. It is music that embraces emotion, giving you permission to feel things the way Jepsen does. For me, and probably for many others in her fanbase, this permission is a welcome break from a society that is often quick to condemn genuine emotion. Sometimes it’s hard to give in to and accept what you’re feeling, especially if you’re feeling something that you’ve been told is wrong and meant to be pushed aside. But Jepsen doesn’t care about these expectations; she lives a life abundant with feeling and desire. Her songs, with lyrics like “...dream about me/ And all that we could do with this emotion,” “I want to cut to the feeling,” and “When I feel it, then I feel it too much,” are invitations to relish in emotion, regardless of whether it’s good, bad, or “too much.”

There is a long history of labeling people who embrace emotion as “too much.” This critique of emotion acts as though it were possible—and bad—for one to be too open, too gullible, too sad, too happy, too naive, too quick to express emotion, or too slow to get over them. These insults paint emotional excess as unnecessary and childish, condemning how one copes with and enjoys feeling. The pejorative “too much” targets more than excess emotion, it is also levied at those whom society deems too ugly, fat, mouthy, old, sexual, or prudish, among other things. In these cases, the slight “you’re too much” targets physical appearance to equate excess with the grotesque. In the past, Freud pathologized feminine excess as hysteria (something he called “characteristically feminine”) and this stigma continues today. There is, however, a

move toward reclaiming excess—psychoanalysts like Juliet Mitchell have written about the “demand for the right to be hysterical.” Jepsen’s willing embrace of emotion, particularly of “too much” emotion, is another way to reclaim and rethink the excessive.

Being “too much” is a common motif in pop music, one that is especially prominent in lyrics written by women. Jepsen embraces this excess in both the quantity and content of her lyrics. Almost all of her songs focus on some kind of romantic endeavor and every single song on Dedicated is directed at a “you.” Yet all of this desire often culminates in feeling like nothing has happened. Instrumentally, her songs build up to a breaking point, into something that sounds revelatory, while the lyrics remain fixated on craving and trying to reach a subject. As a listener, I find myself asking, So now what, did something happen next? And before I can even begin to process what I’ve just heard, the next song begins and she is again singing about wanting. Her existence in what the poet Hanif Abdurraqib calls “the Kingdom of Desire” demonstrates an abundant and lasting hunger that spans multiple albums. Her lyrics are excessive in a way that historically (and currently) might be described as “characteristically feminine” and “obsessive” because she focuses so strongly on emotion.

One of my favorite songs from Dedicated is “Too Much” (no surprise here). From the instrumentals that build up just to drop out, to its repetition of the phrase “too much” 24 times in just over three minutes, this song can certainly be viewed as excessive. Toward the end of the song, Jepsen asks, “Is this too much?” But this is a rhetorical question. She doesn’t care about the answer because she has already embraced being too much— the question is whether or not you are ready to join her.

“Be careful,” she warns—if you’re not prepared to “do anything to get to the rush,” you’re not ready for me. It is almost a taunt, as if she is asking us to come closer, daring us to feel with her. And with all the joy and beauty in her music, why would we decline this invitation?

As someone who has been called “too much” as an insult, who has felt like a burden for any number of reasons, I have found a space in Jepsen’s music where I am allowed to be more than. Leaving that concert in July and entering the cooled air of a summer night, I saw people headed in all directions. Some were heading home, some to parties, some to eat, and some just to sit outside the venue, as if to catch their breath and hold on to that moment for as long as they could. Some screamed to their friends, ears still clouded from the noise inside, and others just rested their heads silently on another’s shoulder or their own palm. We had all just exited a place where we were free to be ourselves, and were even celebrated for it. We watched and danced and sang and cried as loudly and as extravagantly as we could while Jepsen reminded us all that yes, we are too much—and isn’t it wonderful?

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ARTS&CULTURE

Helig Moder

on silvana imam, sweden's holy mother of rap

BY OLIVIA HOWE ILLUSTRATED BY IRIS XIE

I probably would have stopped studying Swedish if it wasn't for Silvana Imam. The only reasons I began taking Swedish in the first place were that the guy I dated during my senior year spoke it, and that I wanted to teach myself a language that wasn’t offered at school. My efforts to have secret conversations with my boyfriend in the hallway improved, but our relationship did not. When it ended in the middle of college rejection season, I was derailed. But I seized my crumpled ego and dragged it after me on my pursuit of Swedish fluency. He had left; Swedish remained.

As a lifelong language learner, I knew that music was supposed to be the key to fluency. Because singers use language at a rate comparable to regular speech, the listener becomes accustomed to speech patterns that improve their own pronunciation and comprehension. Blindly, I searched “Swedish music,” but a few seconds into the suggested folk songs, boredom was causing my brain to ooze out of my ears.

I needed something powerful to stabilize my wavering innards, and I decided there must be one cure: rap.

If the Scandinavians were as gory as popular culture made them out to be, they must have music aggressive enough to launch me back into reality.

And then I found her. Under the Wikipedia list of Swedish rappers (the only way I found music preSpotify), there was a tiny subcategory of women. The moment I saw her name, something unlocked inside me. Silvana Imam. The video for her hit “Zon” showed Silvana dressed as a devil, hovering behind a woman and sneering with seduction and malice. I clicked and was immediately greeted by thundering electronic dissonance. All of my twisted fears and pains rattled out of my chest and fell to the floor.

For the remaining months of senior year, Silvana drove with me to school, finally allowing me to experience the rush of the bass at maximum. She spat at me while I did my homework, got changed for dance class, and cooked dinner. And when I finally got tired of the anger—and was accepted into Brown after I had braced myself, with no small help from her, for cold rejection—I was ready to explore Silvana’s other sides.

What I love most about Silvana is not that she is angry—Swedish rappers aren't the only ones who offer that. It’s what she is angry about: racism, xenophobia, patriarchy, capitalism, homophobia. From her earliest songs, she scathingly calls out Swedish neo-Nazis, praises and laments her father’s home country of

Syria, and proclaims her love for women as loudly as she can. Silvana hits, hits again, and doesn’t apologize.

When I found her, Silvana was offering me emotional armor as I screeched toward the end of high school, terrified and confused, through humiliating moments like my first attempt to sing solo in front of my peers or my scramble to make last-minute friends to patch my loneliness. When I walked through the hallways or down dark streets, I muttered the lyrics to “Sett Henne” (“Seen Her”), in which Silvana raps to an anonymous woman about how she supports her whether she’s seen her angry, ballin’, crying, naive, or clubbing. The words pushed me forward, encouraging me to be as unflinching as I knew Silvana would be.

And when I arrived in Providence and first explored downtown at night, shrinking away from any person— especially any man—who glanced my way, I continued this practice. The adrenaline that surged from Silvana’s lyrics into my stride came from more than just the message: It came from the language itself. No one could understand the furious foreign words even when I stumbled over them, and this realization made me cackle in the streets—which only helped to repel strangers.

But, beyond these moments, the Swedish I was learning from Silvana was offering me more than superficial self-confidence. After obsessively reading and singing along with her lyrics, I discovered that I could understand Swedish news articles and poems. I tried talking to myself in Swedish and realized that I could express much more sophisticated phrases than I had ever learned from my high school boyfriend (with whom my vocabulary was mostly limited to “sweetheart” and “want to go to the museum this weekend?”). This realization motivated me to drop into Ann Weinstein’s Swedish class one damp afternoon during my second week at Brown. I plunged blindly into a room with eight other people—each of whom had their reasons for caring about Swedish—and though I couldn’t articulate why, it was essential for me to stay in that bright living room where Ann held class and connect to the language that had made me a woman.

In the midst of “adjusting” to my first year at Brown, I spent many hours studying, musicless and untethered, surrounded by blank faces. At first, I asked people if they had heard of Silvana, but I quickly gave up. None of my passionate speeches about how she had changed my life compelled any of my new friends to listen to her music. Eventually, I searched for new music and let my dedication to Silvana trail off to sporadic minutes when I needed a boost. That was until sophomore year, when Silvana returned to remind me once again of who I am.

It began when she dropped “4h” (“Four Hours”).

The title refers to the amount of time Silvana and her girlfriend have together, and Silvana is quite clear that EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Amanda Ngo FEATURE Managing Editor Liza Edwards-Levin

“FaceTiming every night helps to bridge this gap, but until Elon Musk invents phones that can replicate hugs (which, if you ask me, should be of higher priority than getting to Mars), it’s just not the same.”

-Cathy Campo, “campo girls vs. gilmore girls” 3.8.19

“The urge to read your life like a novel is no novel impulse—in fact, we’ve been writing our lives into books for millennia.”

-Emily Yang, “narrativizing the self” 3.9.18

Section Editors Alice Bai Erin Walden Staff Writers Gaya Gupta Anna Harvey NARRATIVE Managing Editor Nicole Fegan Section Editors Michelle Liu Minako Ogita

they will be taking advantage of this time to have sex… because her girlfriend is hot. Simple enough premise when a man tells the story, but layered when the rapper is a woman. I smirked to myself as I sang to it in my parents’ kitchen, where I could tell them as much as I wanted about my love for Silvana without worrying that they would disapprove of my music taste—or my sexuality. The more I listened with delight, the more I wondered whether I had missed something in my life.

I’d known since kindergarten that I liked girls, but I let myself assume that I also liked guys because it was expected of me as a female. It hadn’t occurred to me until college—and Silvana—that I could let go of those expectations and figure out what my head was actually telling me. When I listened to Silvana’s autobiographical song “Hon Va” (“She Was”), I felt the wrenching pain of her father’s rejection of her sexuality. When Silvana rhapsodized about staring at her girlfriend in her dress on “Jag dör för dig” (“I’ll die for you”) and screamed “Tack gud jag är homo!” (“Thank god I’m a homo”) on “För Evigt” (“For Eternity”), she was really saying that she saw me. Not just as a woman, but as a gay woman.

And it wasn’t just that Silvana was yelling at me to love my angry, scared, gay self. She was also teaching me to take pride in my politics and my womanhood.

With “Fri” (“Free”), she lets loose her gratitude for being an immigrant to parents from Syria and Lithuania, an identity from which she derives her strength and inspiration. This theme carries into “Simone” (the name of her baby niece, whose Swedish babbling features in the song—one of her softest), which celebrates Simone’s nationalities and Silvana’s love for Simone’s mother. But the pearl of Silvana’s work so far is “Vikken Då” (“Which One”), in which she tears apart patriarchy for suppressing female art and agency. In each of these songs, she reminds those listening to her, especially other women, that they have a place at the table and they need to take up the whole chair. Silvana designed “Vikken Då” to be shouted in dark streets, muttered under one’s breath, slammed seismically through car speakers. So I do. Loudly, och med kärlek.

Staff Writers Kaitlan Bui Siena Capone Danielle Emerson Jordan Hartzell Naomi Kim Anneliese Mair Kahini Mehta ARTS & CULTURE Managing Editor Griffin Plaag Section Editors Olivia Howe Maddy McGrath Staff Writers Rob Capron David Kleinman Julian Towers

LIFESTYLE Managing Editor Caitlin McCartney

SOCIAL MEDIA Head Editor Paola Solano

Section Editor Christina Vasquez

Editors Cecilia Barron Tessa Devoe

Staff Writers Eashan Das Lauren Toneatto COPY Copy Chief Moe Sattar Copy Editors Kyoko Leaman Aditi Marshan Emma Schneider

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HEAD ILLUSTRATOR Gaby Treviño LAYOUT Co-Chiefs Amy Choi Nina Yuchi Designers Joanne Han Steve Ju Iris Xie WEB MASTER Jeff Demanche