Issue 21

S

W A

R T

H

M O R

E

SEPTEMBER 2018

Barispol syncope Photos by Roman Shemakov

AND..

ghs | Reflections on “the Graduate”

Inside the Delco Times | Breasts or thi

CONTRIBUTORS

Kaavya Arakoni is a sophomore who enjoys economics, political science, and telling people she can touch her tongue to her elbow.

Tristan Beiter is a senior from Central Pennsylvania studying English Literature and Gender and Sexuality Studies. He has been thinking recently about hurricane lamps.

Kat Capossela is a sophomore from Boston. She spent her summer reading yoga books and blowing her waitressing tips on concert tickets.

Shelby Dolch is an intended political science/black studies special major and peace and conflict studies minor. She acknowledges that she will probably change her mind by the end of the week.

Leo Elliot is a senior from Brooklyn, NY. He is a classically-trained chamber pianist and a born polyglot.

His left toes are webbed and at any time may share his opinion on Metal (peak: Mittelalter, pit: Hair).

Colette Gerstmann is a somewhat concerned alum.

She’ll see ya never (just kidding, she’ll probably see you sometimes or frequently).

Josh Geselowitz is a sophomore from State College, PA. In his free time he plays board games and graphs things that probably don’t need to be graphed.

Connor Hodge is a senior in Math from Delta, MO. He has a big interest in hogs.

Alliyah Lusuegro is a junior in Environmental Studies from Chicago, IL. You can catch her either in the depths of McCabe or in the warm rays of the sun (there is no in-between).

Letter policy Letters are welcome from all readers. We will not ever publish letters anonymously and we reserve the right to edit all letters for length and clarity without contacting the letter writer. Letters generally should run no longer than 1,000 words. They should be sent to swatreview@ gmail.com

How to contribute Submissions of longform reporting, personal, argumentative and photo essays, book and media reviews, short stories, poems, and anything else that seems suitable can be e-mailed to Leo Elliot, editor-in chief. Submissions will be considered from Swarthmore students, alumni, faculty, and staff, and will be considered anonymously, though will will not, except in rare cases, publish anonymously. Submissions should generally not go longer than 10,000 words.

Contact: lelliot1@swarthmore.edu, jkay2@swarthmore.edu

Joe Mariani is a senior and a heat-seeking truth missile who hates the genre of third-person autobiography.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF LEO ELLIOT

Luke M.A. is a mulatto anarchist who misses the Midwest, loves Clark Park and spends too much time on Facebook

MANAGING JONATHAN KAY FEATURES JONATHAN KAY

Gilbert Orbea is a senior in political science from Fairview, NJ. He is an avid contributor to Small Craft Warnings and the RA on AP 3rd. He has has recently discovered their love of writing out physical to-do lists.

PERSONAL ESSAYS HOPE DARRIS

Shruti Paul is a crazy-average-Asian Economics major.

PHOTO ESSAYS REBECCA CASTILLO

Tiyé Pulley is a senior from North Jersey. He spends most of his free time keeping up with Soundcloud rap beef.

Alexis Riddick is a junior from Philadelphia, PA, with a special major in Educational Studies and English Literature. She is studying to become a teacher and is constantly thinking of books and poems she wants to write.

Abass Sallah is a sophomore Peace and Conflict Studies major who occasionally does plays. It’s good for the soul.

FICTION & POETRY KENNY BRANSDORF BOOKS ANNA WEBER Design © 2017 the Swarthmore Phoenix. All content © 2017 by its listed author unless otherwise noted.

The “R” logo is based on the font Layer Cake by Luzia Prado. The “Review” logo is based on the font Soraya by Pactrice Scott. Printed at Bartash Printing, Philadelphia, PA. Please recycle this magazine.

Roman Shemakov is an immigrant.

Olivia Smith is a sophomore from St. Louis, Missouri majoring in Economics and minoring in Math and French. You will often find her at Hobbs drinking lots of tea.

Zain Talukdar is a senior.

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SEPTEMBER 2018 SWARTHMORE REVIEW

Published by the Swarthmore Phoenix swarthmorephoenix.com

MOVIES & TV KAT CAPOSSELA MUSIC GABRIEL MEYER-LEE SENIOR EDITOR & QUARTERMASTER JOE MARIANI

“August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born.

The odd uneven time.”

Sylvia Plath

ARTS BOOKS “Wade in the Water” 37

September 2018

FEATURE

PHOTO ESSAYS

A sign of the Times Working at a local newspaper in 2018

by Joe Mariani

4

7

by Leo Elliot

by Alliyah Lusuegro

Breasts or thighs?

by Shelby Dolch

“The Graduate” as a graduate

by AV Lee-A-Yong

21

by Roman Shemakov

Obscured India

13

My memory palace

by Connor Hodge

16

Three poems

by Gilbert Orbea

On Roxane Gay’s “Not That Bad”

by Olivia Smith

A mother’s work

40

New children’s book makes strides in representation

by Alexis Riddick

26

MUSIC “Geography”

FICTION & POETRY 33 34

42

Tom Misch distinguishes himself in a sea of young talent with debut album

by Shruti Paul

Black militant gospel

43

“Nostrum Grocers” and black protest anthems for the new millenium

by Luke McGowan-Arnold

Choker, not Ocean 45

17

Two poems

by Zain Talukdar

by Colette Gerstmann

Facing skin disease

Bearing witness 38

by Kaavya Arakoni

PERSONAL ESSAYS My first love, Aking Lupa

Barispol syncope Plus,

SWATDUMPS Inside admin. machinations

Between personal and public in Tracy K. Smith’s new anthology

by Tristan Beiter

20

35

With “Honeybloom,” Michigan’s enigma stakes his claim

by Tiyé Pulley

MOVIES “The Incredibles II”

46

Ms. Incredible smashes the glass ceiling

by Kat Capossela

Wishing for Apocalypse Now 45 Anomie in Sundance fave, “Min Börda”

by Josh Geselowitz SWARTHMORE REVIEW

SEPTEMBER 2018 3

FEATURE

A SIGN OF THE TIMES IN DELAWARE COUNTY

by Joe Mariani

W

hile thousands of pulp copies of the patrician rag “the New York Times,” are distributed every weekday during the semester free of charge, as far as I know only one print copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer and one of the Delaware County Daily Times are distributed to the Swarthmore community: in McCabe library, in the room with board games and the coffee pot in the evenings. The laws of supply and demand clearly have no relevance here, given that while many New York Times papers go undisturbed and unread, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Delco Times are invariably well thumbed through by people working and studying in McCabe, including locals, librarians, and even some students. What’s worse, the Delco Times maintains its offices right next door—less than a mile down Chester road between Swarthmore Pizza and the Homestretch Inn. I am thus writing this article to rectify the inequality of print media exposure and profile the Delaware County Daily Times within a larger transformation of media in the 21st century that will doubtlessly destroy everything except at least that which will remain to affect regeneration.

W

e used to get the newspapers on Saturdays, sheathed in a plastic jacket laying at the end of the driveway; later, we would unfold each one entirely, separating them and scattering them across the kitchen table amidst pancakes and glasses of orange juice. I only used to read the comics—if I thought of newspapers at all, it was only as funny papers, and perhaps that’s what they really are.

The decline of newspapers continues to make headlines. For decades, electronic media has lost readers and revenue to 4

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new media technology, starting with the radio, continuing with television, and accelerating with the advent of the internet, personal computers and smartphones.

No part of the print media has avoided this decline, but the newspapers, with less capital, have encountered the greatest obstacles. Scores of local papers have gone bust in the last twenty years and many more have ceased print operations alto-

When I told him that I wanted to write about what it’s like to work at a local newspaper in 2018, he answered, “try setting your hair on fire.” gether, retaining just a skeleton crew of reporters publishing stories online.

In measurable ways, the decline of local news has already changed the dynamics of local politics and political engagement in this country. Political scientists Jennifer Lawless and Danny Hayes studied the effect of decreasing local news coverage on people living in municipalities across the U.S., focusing on elections for the House of Representatives. They found that in places where local news became anemic or died out altogether, people were less likely to be able to identify the candidates running, their positions on important issues, and (most concerningly) were less likely to vote. Even public coffers take a

hit when local news declines - a study done by the Brookings Institution found that cities’ borrowing costs for appropriations for roads and schools rose after newspapers closed, the authors arguing that the loss of scrutiny on local government resulted in greater mismanagement of public funds.

With these startling realities in mind, I called the editor of the Delaware County Daily Times, Phil Heron, to set up a meeting time with him. When I told him over the phone that I wanted to write about what it’s like to work at a local newspaper in 2018, he answered, “try setting your hair on fire,” and then generously set aside time to speak to me.

When we met, he greeted me with enthusiasm and cheer. Stacks of newspapers stood on his desk along with a computer, two cellphones, and a radio that he keeps on the AM station KYW 1060: the local CBS affiliate news station. Mr. Heron explained that KYW was “the soundtrack of my life.”

Phil Heron started in the newspaper business in the late 1970s. At his first job in the industry, an internship at the Denver Post, the clacking of typewriters still filled the newsroom. After working for another local newspaper in Coatesville Pennsylvania, Mr. Heron joined the Delco Times in 1982 and has served as executive editor since 1989.

The Delaware County Daily Times began as the Chester Daily Times in 1876, adopting its current name in 1959 as white flight and industrialization caused a steep decline in the city of Chester’s population. In 2009, it enjoyed the largest circulation of any suburban paper of the Philadelphia region. When Mr. Heron started out at the Delco Times, the paper employed about 35 reporters (not counting the sports section) as well as a

Photos by Jonathan Kay

“small army” of stringers who would write freelance pieces at a fixed rate about local township meetings or other events that staff reporters did not cover.

Without these extra hands, and with the 24-hour news cycle brought on by the rise of cable news and the internet, they are forced to put less work into each individual story and to report on events before all the facts are available.

“Just because of the speed with which we do things now,” he told me, “mistakes are made simply because so many less eyes see a story before it’s published, or because we receive information that just wasn’t available when we first put the story up.”

In addition to the strains that recent trends have put on the newsroom, Heron described how wider changes in the media landscape have changed the place print media has in society and people’s lives.

“We were, and still are—but not in the same way—an overwhelmingly loud voice in the community. But every person with a phone is a publisher now. The walls between journalism and this ocean of information and commentary have broken down.”

Heron was also worried about how the comments section of stories published on news websites, including the Delco Times

website, so often degenerate into arguments amongst the commenter’s themselves instead of furthering discussion of the topic of the article.

“There’s a danger of the cloak of anonymity of comment sections,” he says.

“We used to call it beer muscles when a guy would act really tough even though he was just drunk. Now I think they’re internet muscles.”

Mr Heron did not express any personal bitterness over the decline of the newspaper industry.

“I can’t complain. I’ve had a great career, put two kids through college. But I feel terrible for the young people today entering this business.”

Recent events have not left the Delco Times untouched. They joined with hundreds of newspapers across the country in writing editorials condemning President Trump for characterizing journalists as the enemy of the people.

“Normally, we don’t hear things like that [rhetoric] from the people we cover. We’re hearing it from readers and the public. I get emails constantly that tell me that the paper has a liberal bias, that we’re constantly bashing this person unfairly. I think if people really heard us talking to the people we covered, they would think differently.”

Additionally, the newspaper has cov-

ered opioid epidemic as it’s played out in Delaware County. A priest at the local St. Cornelius parish recently pleaded guilty after the drugs he had delivered to the rectory through the mail were discovered.

“There’s been a rise in car break-ins, just from people looking for anything in someone’s car that they could get money for. Real estate agents tell people having an open house for prospective buyers to lock up all their medications, as sometimes people will go to an open house to try to find medicine they can steal.”

The change was also reflected in the obituary pages of the times, with Heron saying that it contained more and more people in their 20’s and 30s.

“Now people are saying that these young person lost their fight with addiction whereas before if a young person died of addiction it would be hushed up.”

In addition, particular changes to Delaware County have been chronicled by the Times. Heron explained how the Republicans who for one hundred years controlled Delaware County with a vice-like grip have in recent years been overtaken by an increasingly strong local Democratic party.

‘The Democrats have a substantial, about 16,000, voting registration edge while 25 years ago? the Republicans had a 3-1 advantage in number of registered SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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voters. That’s a big change.

At the end of our interview I asked Heron what he thought has to change for local news to survive.

“The first thing is that the industry has needs to learn that credible content is expensive,” he told me. “Everybody wants to write a blog until they start blogging. Sit someone down in front of this computer with a blank screen and tell them to write something—it’s very difficult. The second is that the public has to realize that good news has to be paid for as a public good.”

A

cross from Heron’s desk was a cubicle with a sign outside of it that said “Crime is News.” Intrigued, I contacted the desks owner, reporter Alex Rose, who covers the County Courthouse in Media, and arranged to meet with him.

He greeted me outside the courthouse, finishing a cigarette and wearing a tweed jacket and red Doc Marten boots. He had a shaved head and a long beard. We went to an office he uses in the courthouse.

Rose has been working in the newspaper business from a young age. His family ran a business making a summary of court filings for local law firms, and in the 1980s his father served as editor for the Delco Times. He started out as a freelancer covering local school board meetings. He would submit a story, and if it

got printed he would have to cut it out of the paper and return it to the office to get paid. He started off at $45 an article.

“We used to have 30 correspondents all over the county,” he told me. “Some of them were career freelancers, and most of the ones I knew happened to be women.

We probably had 25 people in the news-

“Delco is such a weird place... it’s a socioeconomic microcosm of the country. Somebody always has a story for you.” room in the ‘90s, plus sports… now it’s down to around five with about four more working on sports.”

This decline in staffing has meant that Rose cannot spend as much time on stories as he might like to. When he wrote an article about the resignation of Dean Braun after the sit-ins last semester, he said it came across his desk late in the

afternoon Friday and he hastily had to make phone calls to get statements from administrators.

“The good thing is I am working constantly. And this beat at the courthouse is the best beat I‘ve ever worked. The bad thing is we just miss so much now.

At first we just started having reporters go to local township meetings every other week—now a lot of the time, nobody goes at all.”

As a Delco Native, Rose appreciates the nature of the community he works in.

“Delco is such a weird place… it’s a socioeconomic microcosm of the country.

There’s extreme wealth and extreme poverty, every type of business, and somebody always has a story for you.”

“Industry left Chester en masse and nothing replaced it. The production base of the local community dried up so the newspapers have struggled. If you gave me a million dollars, I’d blow through it in a year trying to cover all the stuff that goes on, but what you need is a stable basis from which to operate.”

Local news reporting seems indispensable even as its continuing existence is doubtlessly imperiled.

It appears that the fate of local newspapers is connected with the fate of the mass middle class in America, and the democratic institutions which supported it.

Photos by Jonathan Kay 6

SEPTEMBER 2018 SWARTHMORE REVIEW

◆

FEATURE

SWAT DUMPS VOL. I: BACK 2 SCHOOL BDSM

by Leo Elliot with original reproductions by Anna Marfleet

T

he Review’s resident team of secret-spillers, SWATDUMPS, has come into the possession of leaked meeting notes. Discovered in Parrish Hall on a quiet Wednesday before move-in, the papers document the proceedings of the “Back 2 School Forum”—a clandestine meeting held by the administration each August.

For decades, the annual event has allowed administrators to address in private the most sensitive matters facing the college.

Until now, it has always been a secret. The going moniker for the collection of notes is the Back 2 School: Big Dump of Swarthmorean Mendacities, or B2S:BDSM. In the name of the free press and of decentralized open-source blockchain transparency, we offer the following report on their contents.

A reporter from the Review was merrily whistling down a Parrish hallway when all these loose papers covered in odd scrawl started firing out one after the other from under the door of a nearby office. One engineering major friendly to SWATDUMPS

estimated that the amount of force necessary to produce this effect indicates the use of a high-end industrial fan. By their estimate, this kind of machine could threaten to overload Parrish’s energy grid if used for more than a few minutes at a time. Due to the unlikely circumstances and timing, we must recognize that this may be an intentional leak and assume all consequent responsibilities. From here on, the suspected source of the probable leak will be referred to as Deep Float, or D.F. Carried by their considerable backwind, the BDSM papers rapidly scattered across the hallway. Our agent’s efforts to snatch them out of this sudden indoor gale became a humbling and impossible game of fetch. Through trial and then major error,1 the reporter discovered that crucial balancing muscles had atrophied—the papers made loop de loops and barrel rolls, and our agent followed suit. Sympathetic readers can find perforated Get Well Soon! cards in the middle-fold of the magazine.

The author of this report would not like to be considered a nag. He just thinks that the agent in question would appreciate the gesture.

As the agent realized the nature of the materials in their hands, the journalist’s instinct for opportunity kicked in. They made their way to the 4th floor, where the administration generously houses independent campus publications mere feet from its caring and paternal eye. There, the investigation began.

The style of the BDSM notes is idiosyncratic. A typical nested bullet-point system coexists with lengthy verbatim quotation and vivid cartoon drawings. Deep Float exhibits an under-exercised artistic talent, as well as a turbulent inner life. Even as they put their workplace resentments on display, D.F. nonetheless manages to preserve the anonymity of (almost) everyone involved.

Taken as a whole, the notes offer insight into the opaque life of the administration: its nature as an octopus creature and its corporate-cum-political management techniques.

The six hour meeting was organized into two halves, divided by a generous break for lunch. Broadly, the first half was dedicated to personnel issues, and the second to capital improvement projects. At the very end of the meeting, discussion touched lightly on academic affairs. This report will discuss highlights from the agenda, and hopes to represent the events in as close as possible to their truth despite the cryptic and obsessive character of the materials in hand. Let us begin at the beginning.

B2S:BDSM, from Section One: “The Grim Setting,” pp. 1-5.

According to hasty blueprints provided in the BDSM Papers, the Back 2 School forum takes place in what appears to be a military-grade bunker lying half a mile beSWARTHMORE REVIEW

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low Parrish Hall. Accessible via high-speed chute, the bunker is cramped and has the general appearance of a high-strategic war room. Neither the meeting nor the bunker that houses it seem to exist in any of the college’s public records.

On the front wall of the dimly lit trapezoidal room hangs a glowing and electronically augmented map of the campus and surrounding area. A variety of Battleship-esque pins mark locations in neon divots in the map. An almost illegible legend provided by D.F. indicates that these different-colored pins mark such points of interest as the dorm-rooms of “notables” among the student body, blind spots in Public Safety’s CCTV network, and favored lunch spots. Attendants sat at a semi-circular table facing the map, and each presenter spoke in turn at the front.

As a preliminary matter, one senior administrator raised a concern regarding the future of the bunker itself. He passed around copies of a report2 that suggests a link between the expansion of hydraulic fracturing practices in Pennsylvania and a nonzero risk of structural damage to the bunker. Discussion was brief: all members agreed that, if the time came, the Board of Managers would consider plunging the bunker another half mile or so towards the earth’s fiery mantle to be a justifiable expense. One lean administrator piped up, “besides, it would pay for itself if we got the jump on any parties interested in our shale deposits. We have to show them, if you follow, who’s gonna suck whose milkshake!,” and pretended to suck noisily from a straw.

“Muted laughter,” D.F. notes, “from those who get the cinematic reference.”

B2S:BDSM, from Section Two: “Personnel Issues,” pp. 6-25.

The same film-snob/administrator started the first half off with a presentation on the college’s long-term hiring strategies.

D.F. titles this subsection: “Trades, Trains, and Transfers,” and documents the man in exacting vernacular: “Ok. So. Hello. So. This weekend I had one of my themed movie marathons. None of you showed up, by the way, and it was a great time. To signal boost all these new concussion studies, I selected films in the theme of ‘Ye Olde Pigskinne.’ [air quotes]. Hahahaha…”

The film buff revealed an XL Kindergarten-style easel pad. Occupying the front page was a rendering of the standard field positions of American football: two embattled lines each equipped with threatening wings and floating specialists. Deep Float describes “a creeping sense of horror” as it 8

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became clear that the presenter had allegorically assigned each administrative post to a position on the defensive line. The diagram was plastered with an excess of x’s, arrows, and o’s—only through invented fictional positions could he make the numbers work.

The film buff replicated the linebackers like shark-teeth: there were “front-linebackers,” followed by “second-linebackers,” and then “last line of defensebackers.”

The analogy was supposed to highlight certain fiscal and counter-insurgent benefits of the college’s hiring practices. The presenter described rapid personnel turnover exclusively in terms of “high-value” and “win-win” trades. He also insisted that constant opaque alterations to job descriptions are, “just a matter of keeping our playbook fresh and our enemies on their toes.” The frequent rotation of employees within college posts was compared to a trick play that he used to run when he himself played way back in high school. Lined up across from Swarthmore’s preternaturally defensive administration, the presenter substituted each offensive position with a single abstract

noun. Where the quarterback should have been, he had up: “Time Itself.”

After copying down the football diagram, Deep Float goes dark in terms of note-taking. A series of monster doodles ensue, all curiously similar in certain respects: shaggy dark hair, professorial thin-framed glasses, and horrible gaping mouths.

Deep Float zoned back in when the film-buff presenter “changed tack but not tactics,” and revealed a back-up metaphor.

“You’re not with me,” the quotation continues, “Let me start over: trains. Everyone knows about trains. Have any of you seen the film, ‘Snowpiercer?’...” Deep Float at this point composed an extemporaneous prose poem that depicts specific brutalities they would like to inflict on the presenter, and speaks to their profound sorrow upon realizing that the total set of these acts would be mortally impossible.

Deep Float receded from their visionary practice, and caught the final words: “The concept is an endless transit system, a continuous loop of positions in constant exchange. We are one ‘station’ in the larg-

er publicly- and privately-funded national ‘rail system.’ As long as we keep sending our ‘train-cars’ along in a timely manner, nobody will bother to ‘check the cargo,’ if you follow my gist…”

Here, Deep Float offers up a full page sketch of the speaker as a maniacal cartoon engine car: smoke coming out of twin chimney ears, reverberation lines representing his endless trumpet moan, a hybrid orifice that is part shouting mouth and part muck-sifting metal pilot, and blood-shot headlights staring in discomfiting fervor at the tracks ahead.

Retiring the matter, the chair wrangled the meeting toward more “tangible issues.3” First up was a strongly-worded letter of grievance from a member of the Philosophy Department critiquing what its author describes as the “naive dualism” of recent administrative reorganizations.4 Starting this year, the Dean of Student Health post will split into two positions: Dean of Physiological Malady and Dean of Lethargy, Despair, and Sorrow. The letter attacks this reshuffling as an “outgrowth of the administration’s narrow and scientistic mentality,” that is “mythological, dangerous, and insufficiently rigorous.” The final sentence reads: “this state of affairs remains an egregious example of the epistemological violence typical of administrative bloat. The signatories to this letter request a public review process.” Several quizzical revisions were accidentally included alongside the letter itself in the form of unresolved Google Doc

comments. Most of them were singular question marks.

The meeting chair thumbed a pager at her seat, calling a member of the college’s counseling services and a troupe of four consultants into the room. Deep Float depicts the consultants as a team of brief-case wielding penguins: conic heads waddling around with their formalwear grafted onto their bodies. The counselor sat down at one side of the semi-circle, and the penguin-consultants took their own places directly opposite. The consultants passed around a factsheet titled: “The Danger of a Nickname: a study of administrative self-branding and cultural subversion among the student body at Swarthmore College.” The counselor reacted with immediate disgust: “I know what this is about and I won’t stand for it.”

As the counselor declared his intent to walk out of the meeting, the consultants became insistent. “We have clear evidence that your nickname magnifies certain risk factors for the college! Please hear us out.”

Their case argued that given a) the similarity between the counselor’s nickname and [redacted brand of quick-and-easy fruit dessert] and b) the frequent use of [same redacted product known for its firm yet pliable delights] in binge drinking behaviors, the college could be accused of sending “mixed messages” to its student body.

Deep Float’s notes at this point transform into a an action comic storyboard. Backset by diagonal red force lines, the counselor on trial bolted upright and let his chair

clatter behind him. With contrasting blue power bars, the meeting chair stood up in defiant response. “I DEMAND TO LEAVE IN PEACE!,” reads the counselor’s speech bubble. The hunchbacked meeting chair wields a menacing extendable pointer enhanced with the heft and the puncturing elements of a medieval flail. With it, she refers to a line graph demonstrating an exponential rise in consumption of “[brand redacted] liquor shots” since the hiring date of the counselor. In the next frame, the meeting chair nimbly evades the correlation/causation issue with supplementary evidence, offering eye-witness reports that students have chanted his nickname in the very act of imbibing. The counselor withdraws in pain, before erupting in the next panel into a triumphant flaming halo, levitating slightly. He begins to speak.

“This is my name. You are asking me to abandon my name. Do you understand the significance? It is the only way I know myself. In the morning I wash my face in front of my bathroom mirror, and I search for the strength to carry on. I have for a reminder a panel from a single-use cardboard box of [brand redacted: steadfast fruit dessert], stuck in the corner of the mirror-frame.

My name is my tether to the world, and the core of my being. It keeps me ‘cool and refreshing’ in the eyes of the kids. They do not respond to moralizing and judgmental blather. My ethics are those of harm reduction! So listen. I have dedicated my life to this work, and I can promise that I, [brand SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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redacted], know better than anyone else in the room what is needed of me. I will not repeat myself again. Let me go in peace.”

After a tense staring match, the chair admits defeat in the final panel: “Very well.

You may leave.”

Muttering to herself, the meeting chair directed the attention of the room to a proposal from an anonymous member of the administration to throw a “retirement party” in honor of “the former resident of Parrish Office no. 140.” By a show of hands, the party was approved. A ritual burning of incense was the first activity suggested, the aim being to cleanse the office of “any and all wicked spirits of liability and malfeasance.” After racking their summer-fried memories in collective reflection on the last days of the “former resident,” everyone quickly agreed it was better to be safe than sorry.

Further details were raised and approved, and D.F. witnessed their colleagues begin to show their first enthusiasm of the day. “Coll.’s seem oddly cheerful sending her down the river… Personal joy? If so, sadistic or righteous? Relief from bad press?

Guiltless doublethink? My feelings: suspicion, paranoia.” The momentum continued. A small committee was established to see if there were employment termination doulas available in Philadelphia. For the “grand finale,” they decided on a specialty fireworks show over the blaze of a Crum bonfire, with a supply of the former dean’s former possessions at hand for adding color effects to the fire and, of course, a bounty of s’mores.

Planning seemed all wrapped up, then, when an attendee at the dark fringe of the semi-circle raised her hand and began to speak. She had overseen the clean-out operation of Office no. 140, and during the process was approached by an E.V.S. employee carrying two bags that he handed over without comment. The first bag was stuffed full with hundreds of handwritten poems titled “Total Blank I” through “CCVI.” The poems describe the former resident of Parrish Office no. 140’s experience of persecution and public humiliation, beginning the day she dared to share her literary arts with an incoming class of first-years. The other bag held several dozen empty cans of white paint, each pasted with a palette label bearing the same phrase: “Total Blank.” These, the administrator explained, were discovered in a towering stack, precarious and ceiling-scraping, in the former resident’s former closet. The paint appeared to service a nervous habit of some kind, and upon inspection the walls of her office seemed to protrude and sag out as an effect of the as10

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tounding number of layers of paint. Passing over the idea that one poem per can might make for nice party favors, the meeting chair signed off instead on including these items in the after-party bonfire solution.

Always wanting the last word, the movie buff took a crack: “well, whitewashing was in the job description, was it not?”

The meeting chair checked the time and called a break for lunch. The attendants received an ample hour and a half to eat, chat about personal issues, and navigate the troublesome first half of digestion. The servings were typical: a fruit platter, cheese and crackers, a vastness of four-inch sandwiches, and coffee served in individually sealed paper cups (for security purposes.)

“Whitewashing was in the job description, was it not?”

B2S:BDSM, from Section Three: “Capital Investments,” pp. 26-30.

The shorter second half of the meeting began with a presentation by the ITS rep on the internal process that grants administrators access to data from Swarthmore. edu e-mail accounts, and the restrictions on the practice that still remain in place.

Several older attendants, still glib off their free lunch, shared war stories from previous periods of student activism. In particular, the conversation revolved around the “sticky situations” administrators were always getting into during the era of analog and in-person surveillance methods: false walls, cat burglar trapeze suspension rigs, old-school entrapment, etcetera.

Deep Float sketches a yawn as it makes its way among their colleagues.

“I can see that our energy reserves are strained…” noted the meeting chair in segue, “so I will try to keep the rest brief. There are a few construction updates that, with your cooperation, we can address quickly.”

First, the chair announced that the college has accepted an invitation to participate in a secret space-flight program spearheaded by Elon Musk. Cutting past a round of grumbles about PayPal customer service, the meeting chair explained that, disguised as a run-of-the-mill construction company, Musk’s program will install secret subterranean launch pads at over 50 elite American colleges and universities over the next ten

to fifteen years. The aim is to provide an escape route for the “our nation’s most valuable intellectual capital” in the case of largescale environmental collapse. “Over the next ten years,” the meeting chair explained, “we will move an improbable number of student services into the one dining hall, as we have done with Crumb Cafe and Essie Mae’s this academic year. The objective is to cram into Sharples all the functions necessary to sustain human life.”

Blueprints provided at the meeting indicate that Sharples will undergo a two-fold expansion. Laterally, Sharples will grow into the surrounding fields to increase daily capacity. At the same time, a vertical expansion under the aegis of the U.S. Department of State will transform Sharples into the life-sustaining biome-pod at the nose of a massive space rocket, pre-targeted to land on a topologically appropriate region of Mars when the time comes.

Deep Float at this point drew up a three column tally of their peers: “Asleep / Amazon Shopping / Picking at a Body Part.” The meeting chair also took the hint.

“I can summarize the rest: the project will remain secret until its completion, it will be managed in perfect separation from all above-ground operations at the college, and any and all public projects funded under the Musk umbrella will take the name ‘SharplesX.’ For all intents and purposes, the project will unfold without any involvement from college staff, and you all have my permission to forget this conversation in its entirety. Any questions?”

There were none. Deep Float: “benefit of the doubt: mute in disbelief.”

On cue, an aging man in a double-breasted suit stepped out of the shadows and made his way to the front of the semicircle.

He introduced himself, and told the arcing row of half-asleep5 administrators that he represented a cutting-edge law firm named Backwards Solutions. Under the guidance of his firm, the college will be adding a small construction project to the current slate. “The Security Pasture of Slow Golden Descent and Contended Rumination” will be an open-air space located in the grassy knoll directly behind the new Temporary Building.

“Due to recent problematic public relations experiences,” the lawyer began, “your college—like many others—has recognized that any given administrator can face … difficult tensions … between their publicly-stated and/or legally mandated responsibilities and their invaluable loyalty to the college. In the recent past, these difficult situations have become… problematic, for both the individuals involved and the col-

lege at large.”

Deep Float has it that at this point the ears of their colleagues visibly perked.

“Moreover, there have been some close calls, legally speaking. Over the summer, we put our best minds together with yours and came up with an easy solution. By 2020, Swarthmore College will be the country’s first undergraduate institution to have a dedicated legal pasture. Any long-term college staff facing pressure in their current positions will be relegated, or relitigated— my favorite intern gave me that one, to the Security Pasture. There, the staff member will be further out of view and will receive a diminished workload involving research reports on various angles of liability that may affect the college in the future. Any questions?”

Deep Float records six immediate hands raised for inquiry. “I am not entirely clear on this,” stated the first hand. “In the scenario you describe would an employee of

“By 2020, Swarthmore College will be country’s first undergraduate institution to have a dedicated legal pasture.” the college be sent to the Pasture for legal reasons, or for legal reassignment?” The looming man’s response was alacritous.

“Precisely!” After a pause, a second voice rose. “Sorry. I think my colleague meant to ask, and please excuse my being blunt, if the aim of the Pasture is to have us WORK ON legal issues, or, well, EVADE them?”

The lawyer shot an emphatic index finger at the speaker. “Yes! Yes. Both and. The one and the other. Total security in the present and the future. This is the lynchpin of the innovative approach we have cautiously advised. Who better? You know?”

Deep Float sums up the reception visible on the faces of their peers—“cautiously: ‘Eh, I could dig it.’ ” A third member then asked, in code, whether the project was in fact going to serve as an alternative to termination. The lawyer “swelled” with pleasure at the question, “like an adolescent boy who has just converted his parents’s garage into a training bachelor pad and is moments away from revealing the flat-screen pièce de résistance to his friends.” The lawyer answered, “Yes. As is proper, your job security will be tied to the security of the college. Since the college has no shortage of concern for legal potentialities, there is no limit to work in what will be, if I may be frank, a cushy re12

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search gig. The employee reassigned to our Pasture would work there until the original issue blows over or they reach a reasonable retirement age, whichever comes first.”

Beaming, the lawyer looked out on the crowd, this time “like a father at his eldest’s confirmation.” The entire audience broke into applause, and several went up to shake the man’s hand. Quelling the excitement with a wave and an uncharacteristic minor smile, the meeting chair thanked the man for his time and sent him out.

Before moving on to other topics, the meeting chair took advantage of the lawyer’s presentation to address upcoming reports by the Ad Hoc Committee on Wellbeing, Belonging, and Social Life, and the External Review of the Dean of Students Division, which have since been released by the President. The chair took a moment to emphasize that for the college “Communication”—the third commitment in the External Review’s “Executive Summary”— means a specific ethic of non-attachment to specifics. “Our values, mission, intentions, and self-image,” the chair expressed, “are always to be expressed in the most abstract terms. Avoid the following species of detail: transparent plans, assurances, goals, benchmarks, any discussion of outcomes.

Details come with specific commitments… and commitments are irretractable.” The External Review letter, she assured the crowd, offers a wonderful example of the principle. “For instance take the recommendation that we begin a ‘structural reorganization’ of the Dean of Students division. That could mean anything! We remain free as birds. It’s just beautiful work.

The authors sustain ambiguity like cutting edge meta-fictionists.” The behavior of the Ad Hoc Committee, she concluded in a sinister tone, “has not been as satisfactory. We still need to … resolve … certain problems with their report…”

“Now, we have kept you today about an hour after your normal ending time,” chirped the chair. “For that I sincerely apologize, and you will all receive overtime pay as promised. But as you are all aware, these meetings are crucial. This is the sanctum where all the contradictory forces of our line of work come to find their central alignment. Thank you for your patience. In the short time before we call it for the day, let us address academic affairs.” The meeting chair tugged gently on a cord by the front wall, and a projector screen dropped down from the ceiling. The words “Five Year Plan” flashed into place.

“For the most part, we will continue as previously planned. We will respond to shifting trends by prioritizing tenure lines

in the Computer Science, Biology, and Economics departments. Other STEM departments are next in line, and then Political Science, our dark horse in the Social Sciences. I’m also pleased to announce a grant for a new faculty position. The Scrapps-Andaimya Scholar, provided for by notable alumni Fordem Scrapps and Nick L. An-

“The behavior of the Ad Hoc Committee,” she concluded in a sinister tone, “has not been as satisfactory.” daimya, will be a rotating humanities position. The grant describes a flexible one- to two-year position that will help plug gaps that have opened up in our lesser-enrolled departments. Over the next few decades, the ambitious grant may benefit as many as twenty departments, making it the most widely spread faculty grant in our history. Potential beneficiaries include: Islamic Studies, Interpretation Theory, Classics, Theater, Dance, Ancient History, Art, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Music, Medieval Studies, Black Studies, Asian Studies, broadly speaking: any of the language departments, and others. It will exclude Peace & Conflict studies, since we already threw them a shapely bone last year. Beyond this small update, there’s not much to add on the topic of academics at this juncture.

Thank you for your time. Good afternoon.”

Deep Float’s final note, scratched out as their colleagues made small talk and packed their things, was an anxious prosand-cons list: “Accept inevitable invite to the Stretch? / Straight home for long shower?”

◆

Notes: 1. The Review’s own pre-legal team recommends no further disclosure of details of this event, citing HIPAA. 2. Produced at considerable cost by a D.C.-area consulting firm specializing in the intersection of interior design and energy grids. D.F. marks the topic in their notes, “$$$,” like a prix fixe joint on Yelp.

3. Appears from the notes to be someone without a public position at the college. The figure is described only as “ancient” and with a “smoker’s rasp that has become even more gnarled and fibrous since last year…”

Is the Board of Managers operating a Manchurian Candidate? Swarthmore’s Deep State? FBI involvement?

4. D.F. writes: “which, to be fair to the honorable chair, bears closely on the tangibility problem.”

5. Statistically speaking, per Deep Float’s tally chart.

PERSONAL ESSAYS My first love, Aking Lupa

by Alliyah Lusuegro

I

t was probably in late elementary school when you learned about Harriet Tubman. You were taught that she was a former slave, an abolitionist, and a hero in the Civil War, helping in the escape of almost a hundred slaves through the Underground Railroad. Yet did you know she was an environmentalist? Did you know she was a feminist?

I surely didn’t, at least not before the past summer I spent in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

This surge of knowledge came during only Day 2 of my two-month long stay as part of the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at the University of Michigan.

Something about being in that classroom of the School of Environment and Sustainability felt different. Maybe it was the big university vibe, or being forced to stay inside during a summer day but, whatever it was, it was refreshing. I looked around and saw faces and faces of people of color that I would get to call my cohort. We all looked anxious, but with that came eagerness. Maybe it was them.

Dr. Dorceta E. Taylor, our program director, imparted her endless knowledge of Harriet Tubman to the seventeen of us during her orientation presentation. Three examples: 1) Harriet Tubman’s husband and brothers refused to join her initial efforts to escape slavery, and so she embarked North without them; 2) Because she knew the waters so well, the Union requested her presence on naval ships to navigate them through Chesapeake Bay during the war; 3) Not only did she follow the stars to guide her way up North, but she also searched for increasing moisture from the trees around her, a natural indicator that she was leading others northward toward freedom.

Dr. Taylor provided us an excerpt from her book, “The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection.” In a Powerpoint-packed sixty minutes, I learned about

the history of the conservation movement in America through an entirely new lens.

Dr. Taylor began the hour declaring the different parts of her identity: Black, woman, professor, sociologist, author, mother, and environmentalist. She then spent the remainder of her time weaving the layers of herself into the narratives of early environmentalists, all people of color. Her pedagogy was candid and creative. Above all, it was relatable. Her words resonated with my own multifaceted identity, a rare experience in my everyday education.

To hear it actively told in an academic space, this academic space, somehow made it feel more grand.

While I was pleased to soak it in, I couldn’t help but feel cynical. Thinking about these missing narratives, especially in the context of American education’s Eurocentric perspective, my heart sunk to the ground. Was my entire history education a lie? I immediately decided that it wasn’t. I just needed to find what had been hidden from me.

Once they escaped Dr. Taylor’s lips, these untold histories absorbed into my skin. Their heavy reality sprinted through my blood and burrowed deep inside my bones. And the aftermath: gratitude and resentment. The former for Dr. Taylor, and the latter towards the burdens of our colonized histories. What followed was a sudden rush of zealous inspiration, and then a revelation. I needed to engage these absences in my knowledge.

That day, Dr. Taylor taught us about all the ways that colonialism manifests in contemporary America, from the privatization of water to gentrification. I already knew these things, of course, but they lay tucked

away in my subconsciousness, sheltered from everyday life. To hear it actively told in an academic space, this academic space, somehow made it feel more grand. My eyes scanned the room and I could sense by the affirming nods and interlocking gazes that there was a fervor of understanding in the air. All seventeen of us knew what she was talking about. Despite the absence of these untold histories in our formal education, we knew them and held on to them tightly.

We knew them because we had lived them.

I needed this moment, most of all, because it made me think about the modern environmental movement, and everything it’s missing. Including me.

I

met my first love at an early age. I call her aking lupa, or “my land” in Tagalog.

I was born in the islands—the Philippines—and I grew up walking the streets of my childhood neighborhood barefoot. Bacoor is an urban city right outside of metro Manila (the capital of the Philippines), and city life to us meant breathing. We took our time with everything. We took our time in waking up, in eating, and in working. We took our time in speaking, in moving, and in sleeping. My people believed the slowness of time to equate to the indulgence of time. We extended each second into just two more seconds, and so I savored every triple-second of my first love.

During monsoon season, we didn’t just look at storms as passing episodes—we participated in them. With my oversized white tee and my tiny bare feet, the two things I only ever needed to join aking lupa in the storm, I raced down the front steps and jumped into the flooded streets.

Rain in the tropics ferociously poured down on me, like receiving the sacrament of baptism, over and over and over again.

In between vast puddles, I raised my head to the beige skies and exhaled in pure bliss and I stayed. It was during these storms that I first became conscious of my presence in the Earth. I was a small and separate material entity but, in essence, one with my first love.

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Bacoor sits next to the Pacific waters, but it was in Tagaytay, twenty-four miles south of my neighborhood, that I heard the initial heartbeats of aking lupa. My first few dates were with the Pacific Ocean. Each time my family brought me to Tagaytay, my first move was to dart to the waters and hug her vehemently, my teeny infant body kissing the majestic cerulean waves and tasting her saltwater through my pores.

Again I stayed. I floated with my love for hours, grateful in her grandiosity, and she shamelessly took me in. When I had to dry off, I stayed as close to the shore as possible, embracing the place where the liquid white foam touched the silky alabaster sand.

Rain showers and ocean visits were the reason I found peace and love as a child in the Philippines. I found peace in the waters, as high as the skies and as deep as the ocean, and I found love for my home that gave me the most vivid memories of my childhood.

Aking lupa was right there for me when I arrived into this world and she is here for me now, her love intrinsic, ever-present, and endless. My love for her accompanied me when I moved all over: to the US, in between states, and up to my current study abroad in Hawaii. With constant movement came an inclination to run towards her and observe. I observed aking lupa in a soft-spoken manner, keeping curious and stimulating and wondrous thoughts to myself: “She is beautiful, or I wonder how big the waves are in Tagaytay right now, or I

photo by Alliyah Lusuegro 14

SEPTEMBER 2018 SWARTHMORE REVIEW

can’t believe I’m here.”

It took some time for me, however, to realize that the world we have constructed— the human world—didn’t love me back in the same way. A propensity for knowledge bred the reality of cold truths. I showed the world my identity: Filipina, woman, DREAMer, feminist, first-generation, low-income student, and environmentalist. And it turned me away. I have always imagined my silence innate. I didn’t know until college that it was also perpetuated by a system that viewed all these markers of my identity as disposable. Or at least, semi-disposable.

I say semi-disposable because, while I am marginalized for my identity, I am still privileged in other aspects of my life. I am privileged for this education at Swarthmore as well as the education I didn’t know I longed for during my summer in Michigan. I received many gifts from this summer, some external, others internal: friendships, new memories, and answers, along with healing, hope, and assurance.

On top of falling in love all over again with aking lupa, it was this particular moment in my life where I learned exactly what I love about her, and grounded myself in my values. I reconciled the love I felt for aking lupa with the love I was missing from the rest of the world. I don’t hesitate or exaggerate when I say that it was the greatest summer I’ve ever had.

I

arrived in Michigan feeling lost. I had just finished my sophomore year at Swarthmore and felt irrevocably burned out, much of which came from taking classes for my pre-med requirements and itching for something more than STEM. And so, when I got to the program and participated in an academic space that highlighted the elements of knowledge-seeking that I craved—the social justice elements—I couldn’t stop learning. I couldn’t stop wanting to learn.

I reconciled the love I felt for aking lupa with the love I was missing from the rest of the world.

Every Friday, an academic seminar took place. As we read texts that examined and challenged environmental discourse—papers on the origins of U.S. National Parks, state-sanctioned violence in the Flint Water Crisis, the segregation of pollution, and theories of Critical Environmental Justice (CEJ) Studies—we prioritized the social identity of the authors, emphasizing the importance of their perspectives in the context of a movement that demands justice for all people. We looked at these texts, exchanged ideas, and contemplated the blank spaces, the absences in their knowledge. Often, they missed discussions regarding people of color. They missed the normalization of systemic racism that is the foundation of all injustices—what we so intensely need to be conscious of.

Otherwise, we become passive in the process. Through these seminar discussions, I gained my first value of the summer: “Know your history.” Like, really know it.

Do research and learn about the history of aking lupa and critique it. Then, when you’re done, leave the boundaries of these theories and go out and engage. That’s how you step out of the silence and approach the world thoroughly, critically, and fearlessly.

Because the program focused on the environment, my cohort and I naturally spent a lot of time outside in the verdure of Michigan. It was different from the Philippines. My early life was surrounded by blue waters, but here I learned to cherish green terrains. In Ann Arbor, I spent my days admiring the grass in all its variety.

Jogging down the soil paths of Nichols

Arboretum, the sweet fresh scents of the peonies would lead me to a lush open field, where the winds of aking lupa gently swayed the grass, creating an opus of soft chimes. During late afternoons, I lingered in the quad of the law school library, reading Roxane Gay and bell hooks and laying amongst dewy blankets of grass. Ann Arbor was cute and unlike the big cities that I’m used to, but it provided me peace in accordance to the pleasant slow pace of summer.

We also stretched to the outskirts of this college town and explored forests, farmlands, lakes, rivers, and other landscapes of Michigan. I ventured into the Great Lakes, floating in the calmness of the indigo waters. My unchanged, yet fuller, teeny body became familiar with these freshwater bodies, trading salt and white sand for docks and stone-filled bays. I also witnessed lavender sunsets as late as 10 PM for the first time, and danced between masses of wood: from Northern White Pines and Eastern Hemlocks to frail sticks and wooden logs.

At the end of the night, I raised my head to the midnight skies, to the stars that belong to the histories of many peoples. As they twinkled, so did my eyes. For the first time since I basked in the monsoon showers and the Pacific waters of the Philippines, I felt whole again. I felt one with aking lupa.

I stayed. It was those moments, when I felt materially intimate with my first love, that I gained another value: “Remain a humble learner of the world.” In a world where the human entity can feel so big, we also need to be reminded that we are small. No matter how self-righteous you may feel, think of this world as allowing you to be a part of it. That is another way that you are privileged: this world makes space for you.

At the end of the night, I raised my head to the midnight skies, to the stars that belong to the histories of many peoples. As they twinkled, so did my eyes.

As much as I learned from the seminars, I gained even more from my cohort. They were the reason I had that refreshing feeling on Day 2 of the program. They taught me not to separate the natural world from

photo by Alliyah Lusuegro

the human world, as I have a rightful space in aking lupa just like anyone else. And when I talk about this space, I mean it beyond the physical sense. I’m talking about the validity of my voice and my story. I’m talking about the validity of my identity. It is exactly the union of these two worlds, including giving people their rightful spaces, that is the core of the modern environmental movement. It calls for justice.

It calls for me.

With my cohort, I felt like I belonged. In those two months, we grew into a family.

Like aking lupa, these sixteen individuals made space for me. They made space for my voice, because like similar to my experience of that fateful second day, they knew the depth that it had contained. Diversity of our identities, our experiences, and our lives ruled that summer, one of the rare periods of my life where everything was PoC-centered. We listened to each other’s stories from our pasts: our childhood traumas and favorite home-cooked meals, and our nows: our academic successes and environmental justice dreams. We listened to each story knowing and understanding, and like aking lupa, offered each other endless, intrinsic love.

These individuals reminded me that I am not alone and that it is possible for me to feel things and connect to others deeply, on a soul-to-soul level. They gifted me with a sense of home, paralleling nostalgic feelings of the Philippines. With them, I gained my most closely held value: “Healing.” Healing from aking lupa and healing from others, a process only enabled by the joining of the two together. We all have

pains and rock bottoms and darknesses, but we all go through healing to know what is worth loving and worth living for.

I have lived most of my life keeping to myself because my silence is my comfort (though my thoughts are innumerable).

My non-silence, on the other hand, is the means in which I heal and grow, always in tandem with particularly special people in my life.

With my cohort, I felt like I belonged. In those two months, we grew into a family.

When I left, I kept describing my time in Michigan as an attractive temporary escape. I said this because of the short duration of the season, the persistent newness of Ann Arbor, and the fact that experiences stay within a place. But just because this was a moment of my past doesn’t mean that it trails away into time. I found permanence by raising my voice, marrying two worlds, and claiming my rightful space. I found permanence in my values of knowing, learning, and healing. I found permanence through untold histories, rediscoveries of aking lupa, and new enduring friendships. It is in these words, in this love, and in this family that I float seamlessly through time. It is in these words, in this love, and in this family that I stay, I stay, and I stay. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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PERSONAL ESSAY

Breasts or thighs?

by Shelby Dolch

W

Content warning: discussion of sexual harassment, assault, and trauma.

hen I left college for the summer, I thought it might be a time of healing for me after the pains I underwent at Swarthmore. When I got on the plane to Montana, I was still broken from the sit-in held in former Dean Liz Braun’s office, led by a group of students during the spring semester. I had joined that sit in to give a voice to both myself and all of the other survivors on this campus.

We had been failed by the administration and all of those in power who were meant to support us throughout these traumas. We were treated as if we were less than human.

Men would order pieces of chicken, staring at me and my body parts, overenunciating the words ‘breasts’ and ‘thighs’.

During that sit-in I became a survivor.

I didn’t feel like a victim of sexual assault, but that was mainly thanks to my peers.

There was no longer that support once I got on that plane, and as I spent more time in Montana, I found that there was actually the opposite of support. I lost my voice and ability to advocate for myself.

In order to bring myself back to Swarthmore, the place that had simultaneously harmed me and empowered me, I had to take a full-time job in a deli. I couldn’t afford to pay for tuition without the money I earned cooking chicken and slicing meats.

My parents told me to be grateful for the job—most companies wouldn’t want to hire someone for just three months. Despite the required gratitude, I couldn’t help but notice that the longer I spent in that little grocery store deli, the more I regressed in my progress. I wasn’t empowered to speak for myself. Instead, I was suffocated by my obligation to the customer. No matter their actions I had to thank them and help them. No matter how they demeaned and attacked me, I had to smile and serve them.

Men would order pieces of chicken, star16

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ing at me and my body parts, over-enunciating the words ‘breasts’ and ‘thighs.’ Sometimes they would ask me which I preferred, knowing very well the implications of their words. All I could respond with was silence.

My fear of their retribution forced me to forget that I did have a voice. That’s all that I was this summer: a piece of meat to be looked up and down.

When I would reach out to my boss and coworkers, they all told me the same thing:

“Just ignore them.”

“What can you do?”

“Oh, he’s harmless.”

It didn’t feel so harmless to me. Instead, I relived my assault in broken pieces. I pictured my perpetrator’s face in corners of the store. When men walked behind me, I all but climbed into fridges and hid in corners.

Even then they still would touch me, sometimes even grabbing my arm. Men would take me away from my job, flirting as they sampled every single item on the menu. According to those in charge, however, I wasn’t allowed to be uncomfortable.

The other women I worked with experienced the same things I did. We all quietly navigated the store, never really acknowledging that none of us could feel safe. I thought often about how maybe it was just me who was struggling. Maybe I had become hyper-aware of potential violence

photo by Shelby Dolch

because of my trauma. When I would mention it to my coworkers, they often ignored me and acted as if I should ignore it, too.

So I was then left with important questions: how do I heal in a place so harmful?

How do I cope with trauma in a place where I have always had to hide my identities?

We all quietly navigated the store, never really acknowledging that none of us could feel safe.

And that was when I came to the realization: healing doesn’t have to happen when it’s convenient for other people. It doesn’t have a rulebook. Every time you break down, you aren’t stepping back or losing progress, you are just taking the steps you have to take to heal. I had to learn how to not be a victim in my own way. I had to learn how to not blame myself for what happened to me.

People say there are two responses to fear: fight or flight. According to my therapist,

there is one more: paralysis. Sometimes the human body chooses to ignore your preferences when it comes to this response. At least that was my experience.

I was never raised to be weak. I was a gymnast, a runner, a basketball player, and a black belt—none of which I claim to excel at—but all of them are part of me. I knew that no matter what I was strong. I have found, however, that our dispositions and histories lose their say when it comes to fear.

In the face of a six-foot-one quarterback, I lost all that I was. Everything I knew about my own strength and courage was gone.

The pepper spray my father gave me that

...how do I heal in a place so harmful? How do I cope with trauma in a place where I have always had to hide my identities? sits in my right coat pocket.

The number 911.

All of those things left my mind when I looked into his eyes.

Now his eyes are always going to be in my mind.

And I will always be healing. I will have to deal with my fears and the hauntings of my trauma no matter where I go. My progress will rise and fall, and that is okay. When I responded to my assault it was with paralysis and I learned this summer that I no longer have to feel guilty about that.

All I know in regards to my healing is that I’m not just breasts and thighs. u

PERSONAL ESSAY

“The Graduate” as a graduate

Reconsidering the ethics of Swarthmore’s favorite cinematic tradition

by Colette Gerstmann

M

y first week of my first year at Swarthmore I had a tight throat and trouble swallowing. It’s something that happens to me during times of transition, and during orientation, I was processing too much change to have much room in my stomach for food. My blood sugar got low, I had trouble focusing on the French placement test, and when people asked in Sharples why I wasn’t able to eat soup out of a bread bowl, I responded that I just wasn’t “feeling well.” Which wasn’t a lie. I was having trouble sleeping, I was crying on the phone to people from high school who I no longer speak to, and I was staring into the dusty ceiling of my room in Mary Lyons and wondering how I would become the kind of loose-jawed college girl who could eat mozzarella sticks in class and knock back tequila in someone’s Willets bedroom.

By the end of the week, when it was time to sit in the damp grass and watch “The Graduate” with everybody I had just met, I was feeling better. I was able to eat hot popcorn out of a cup and sip red wine from the water bottle of a new friend who had a cold. I put on a tight-fitting dress with a big striped sweater on top and walked through a light wind to Parrish Beach. I thought of myself, for at least a few hours, as “beautiful,” a sensation that is my occasional (and occasionally troubling) antidote to fear. I must have eaten dinner, because I felt full, in a good way.

There was decoding to do. I wasn’t sure why people were yelling “Fifteen!” Fifteen what? Fifteen times that Ben gets asked “Are you going to graduate school?” It took

Content warning: Discussion of emotional abuse and sexual coercion. me a while to figure out that it was seniors ing notes of “Scarborough Fair,” which my shouting their class year, and when I did, I mother used to sing to me as a lullaby, bewas excited about learning An Idiom Peo- cause I was thinking, “Hey, are you really ple Yell. I had never seen the movie before. I yelling ‘Seventeen!’ while Ben stalks Elaine watched it, and liked it, because it was com- around her college and tracks her down on plicated, and I didn’t know which characters her date at the zoo? But I thought it over, and to like and which to judge. The fizzy outline I started to feel okay about the movie again.

Our ritual of watching “The Graduate” was weird, but it was, at its heart, supposed to be a joke about how Swat students don’t know what to do when they graduate. My thinking went, it isn’t the ritual that was wrong, it’s how we’re doing it: people are just shouting during the wrong scenes. It was a temporary conclusion that helped me wash the tradition down. I justified to myself how much I

What did it mean to yell ‘Seventeen!’ during the scene where Mrs. Robinson humiliates Ben into agreeing to ... That abusive sleep with her? ... behavior and coercion of Katharine Ross’s wedding veil stayed surprisingly still as the bus bounced around at are somehow the end of the movie. Nobody could smile or really even move. Nobody could grow. emblematic of “The Sound of Silence”, the track that had ushered in the movie only to carry it back Swarthmore’s culture?” out, gave you just an eerie repeat of what had happened already, which was alright because the harmony of the song was so quietly congruous, like two people falling into step.

I saw that movie so many times in my four years at Swarthmore. The beginning of my junior year was the first time I got the feeling that I never wanted to see it again.

This was barely a few months after I had gotten out of an emotionally abusive relationship, and I was still pretty mired in its aftermath. I could barely focus on the glid-

looked forward to finding a corner of linen to sit on among friends and semi-strangers, whispering about the summer, easing into the coming fall that was all around us in the fleeting pinpoints of real, live fireflies. We opened up a new September with our laughter when Ben said into the phone, “I want you to know how much I appreciate this.”

It was once I actually left Swarthmore— thank God, by the way! But how weird— that the oddly-timed shouts at the screening of “The Graduate” began to feel grossly logical to me. It made so much sense that Swat

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students shouted their class year during the most emotionally violent scenes in a movie about people unable to deal with their trauma without inflicting it upon one another.

Only after I became, if you will, “The Graduate,” did I realize that abuse, the cycles that lead to it, and the excuses made for it were something that marked my undergraduate life, and they were emblematic in many ways of the culture there. I needed to leave, to break out of that cycle in order to actually see the loop of trauma and how it refuses to detach itself from skin and fabric unless cut with a steady and intentional scissor. Now that I have left, I can visualize, accept, and begin to move beyond the ways in which I relived the same dysfunctional dynamics over again for four years, because I had memorized the lyrics and the melody would just roll off my tongue.

The people who I had relationships with (or whatever you want to call them) at Swarthmore were men with trauma, who didn’t like using the word “relationship” because they did not want to relate emotionally with someone else (I can’t relate!).

These men reacted to the stress cult(ure) of Swarthmore like night lilies: opening up after midnight, and in the morning folding themselves back, revoking their love, sitting

on the corner of my bed and slowly tying their shoes. When they left my room, it meant leaving my life for weeks and returning only when they needed something from me (sex or a WA). They would tell me about their experiences of unlove; someone did not treat them well. And then they would cloud the room with so much unlove that I could not see what was going on until the air cleared and I could see its powder had settled onto my furniture and into my hair and make a move to start brushing it off.

There is no clear cutoff point on the spectrum between toxic habits and flat-out abusive behavior. While it’s crucial to understand the ways they’re linked, I want to make clear that I did also experience the latter. Yes, the people I dated subtly eroded my sense of worth by acting as if my interest in real emotional intimacy was “unrealistic” for such a stressful setting--as if I, unlike them, did not have my own homework, my own mental illness, my own impostor syndrome!

That, in its own regard, was damaging. But some of the people I dated also spun into drug-fueled rages that kept me up all night, broke objects, unpredictably switched between terrifying anger and paternalistic calm, and then scolded me for being insensitive or unreasonable when I was trying to

voice fear or sadness about these behaviors.

And then there was the surface-level funny, but actually unacceptable, behavior of men I slept with and didn’t know very well. Like that one time someone brought his friend into his room where I was asleep and naked so that they could smoke and watch TV together. “Can you believe that he did that?” I laughed the next day while reporting the incident to friends in the comfort and safety of my own bedroom. I used laughter to fill up a violation with life and lightness, to make myself feel dignified, to ignore the tightness in my chest.

It became a game or a joke for me to tell stories about the traumatizing ways that men treated me at Swarthmore. It became an excuse for me to remain in the cycle and tell men that, while I wanted to hear them and empathize with them, I could not and would not take their trauma and lug it around with my textbooks and my medication. It also became an opening line for people I was just starting to see: see how this person treated me? Don’t do that. I would put it on the other person to make sure not to recreate the same exchanges that had always hurt me, even when I could already see warning signs beginning to set like angry jewels into our own dynamic. I felt af-

Photo from Google images 18

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Photo from Google images

firmed—beautiful, and not afraid—when the people I dated expressed sorrow about the violent experiences I’d voiced, and then when they told me about their own trauma.

But then what was I supposed to do when they did exactly the thing they’d scorned?

Or when I myself learned and exhibited some of the toxic habits that had been directed toward me?

It became a game or a joke for me to tell stories about the traumatizing ways that men treated me at Swarthmore.

No matter the number of times you go through the experience of getting the text message “Lol ok” in response to a vulnerable and difficult attempt at communication, you do not have to do the same to others.

But I think that, in certain instances, I did start. I would perform casual disinterest as a defense mechanism, a way to engage—to not break the cycle—but attempt to not get my heart broken. Okay, a defense mechanism, fine; I’m not an attacker. But is that really enough of an excuse? Mimicry of bad behavior is not a healthy way to grow in any kind of garden. Which reminds me of that scene in “The Graduate” that is the most important to me: the one about “Art.” Maybe halfway through the movie, Ben insists that he and Mrs. Robinson “talk” for a little instead of “just jumping into bed together.” What should they talk about? Art, a topic Mrs. Robinson apparently knows nothing about. But then they begin to talk

about Mrs. Robinson’s life, and why she married Mr. Robinson. Ben and the viewers learn that Mrs. Robinson used to have a lot of goals, interests, and joys that she lost when she got married to Mr. Robinson, a process that it seems like she wouldn’t have entered if she had not gotten pregnant with her daughter, Elaine. Resentment for her husband and Elaine and dissatisfaction with many parts of her life are what drive her to seduce/coerce Ben. Can we understand?

Yes, we know that trauma cycles like this.

But do we excuse? No; people have agency.

Of course, the scene ends with Ben demanding to know what Mrs. Robinson studied in college, before she became entrapped in an unwanted family life. “Art,” she says, supplying the punchline of the whole scene. “Art” cycles back around the way trauma does, rising out of the bones of the person who experienced it and sitting— comfortably!—in the room with that person and the person they are, supposedly, trying to care for.

During my last weeks at Swarthmore, I spent most of my time sitting in Liz Braun’s office in solidarity with Organizing for Survivors and their efforts to address the administration’s gross failures to support survivors and the way that Swarthmore’s culture facilitates, excuses, and permits sexual assault and abuse. Witnessing O4S’s work pushed me to conclude that I will not take bullshit from people or institutions. I started speaking honestly and openly in ways I never would have with those who have hurt me: “I feel really injured by the way you treated me. Can we talk?” Of course the answer isn’t always talking. Many kinds of healing need silence. But listening to conversations around me about restorative and transformative justice made me want to dedicate a lot of myself to understanding how people

house and then eject their trauma. I do not want to speak with my abusers, but looking back and looking forward, I do hear them.

I do empathize with them. I want to work for a world where they can live among other people and find a way to deal with their own trauma without setting it onto the bodies of others. That kind of work is hard. I want to be a part of it, in some way. And I want to make sure I do not take the bad things that have happened to me and heap them onto someone else, even in the name of self-defense.

This is not an argument that we should stop watching “The Graduate” at orientation. This essay has another purpose: to say that we should think about what we are doing when we watch the film. What kind of reactions to coercion, to violation, are we institutionalizing? What premises are we asking ourselves, and others, to absorb into our relationships when we enter this place (that place, where I no longer am, but which held me for four years and then ghosted me. My longest relationship?) And what are we asking ourselves and others to keep in mind as we navigate and exit this place (that place)? For me, it was a difficult and beautiful place filled with violets and popcorn and gum: objects that are safe but thick, tough to move through, to chew, to hold inside your mouth at all. I do not like to still be talking about this when I have a whole pliable life in front of me, clay that I cannot control but that can impact. But I need to talk about these things that happened to me at Swarthmore, because they taught me so much about impact, about how my hands can leave things in other people’s stomachs, things that might be nourishing or poisonous. I want to talk about it forever, and I want to press lightly, love wholly, and shape things well. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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Facing Skin Disease

PERSONAL ESSAY

Memories of skin and judgment

by AV Lee-A-Yong

T

he face is arguably one of the most important parts of the body. It’s the primary way in which we communicate our thoughts and feelings to others. In most cases, when meeting people for the first time, the face is the initial thing people see—the thing that people who truly care about us love the most.

There are countless methods of caring for and decorating the face: scrubs and masks and various kinds of makeup only being two simple but ubiquitous examples. Whole industries have been dedicated to the beautification of the part of us most exposed to the world.

The face is the initial thing people see— the thing that people who truly care about us love the most.

Mostly, the influence of beauty goes unnoticed. Not many people need to worry about the quality of their skin (save for the occasional pimple or blackhead), nor do they ponder the ubiquity of the concept of facial beauty until something goes wrong. Acne spurts during adolescence jostle most for a time. The lessons learned about the importance of inner beauty and judging people not by their appearance, however, go out the window by adulthood.

You become exceptionally aware of this when you have a skin disease. You’re ugly.

A person without my disease could compare the state of my face to a permanent sunburn: red inflammation, peeling and flaking, itchiness, and general soreness. In this way, it was easy to blow off getting diagnosed. I often just threw some lotion on it and moved on, doing my best not to scratch or pick at the searing pain on my face.

Of course, people noticed - my face was turning bright red and flaking off - and they commented. Some of the most common phrases I’ve heard are the sunburn 20

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comparisons; my friends would sometimes excitedly, and well-meaningly, ask if I’d gone to the beach recently. Others would try consolation: it really wasn’t that red today. Still others would flat-out ask if it was contagious—a question which I could only interpret to mean, “Am I going to catch the ugly, too?”

It didn’t stop at my face, either. My scalp, too, was flaking, and leaving small traces of me on every surface I came into contact with. Black work uniforms and suit jackets became the bane of my existence, as I often had to explain away the presence of my dandruff. Mostly, people told me to just take a shower, in a similar fashion to how they said just washing my face would cure the acne that sat atop my itchy face. I must have just been so lazy, so unconcerned with my appearance that I had allowed this to happen.

My diagnosis came at age eighteen, when I could finally afford to go see a dermatologist with my own money. I had this itchiness, this acne, this shedding, for at least four years, and finally, I was able to have an actual doctor confirm that it wasn’t my fault: I just had dermatitis. All this trouble - this social isolation and internalized stigma - because of the overproductions of a few spores. Invisible microbes that everybody had become the miniscule villains that terrorized me for so long.

Others would flatout ask if it was contagious—a question which I could only interpret to mean, “Am I going to catch the ugly, too?”

Of course, with the medicine came the compliments. Suddenly, to the outside world, I was a functioning person because

my skin was clearer. While there was still the odd bout of acne or occasional flareup, people slowly began to just leave me alone. I felt all the eyes lift off of me, and it took me a few months of enjoying this

lapse of staring to realize why it had left.

I write this now as a person whose face is and will never be healed. There will always be acne, and there will always be flare-ups. My skin will always flake and shed and swell and I have realized that that is okay. My face will be one of the first things people will see of me—one of the first things people can use to make a determination of who I am—and it will be alright to have blemishes. While the “ugly” is not and should not be the defining factor of me, I refuse to let it be a hindrance. It’s my ugly, and I’m going to love it anyway.

Skin disease is not very relatable; it won’t become an internet sensation any time soon. It is isolating, and the good intentions of others whose words hurt can make social interactions exhausting.

Take that isolation and use it to learn to practice self-love. Use it to love the ugly.

It will always be there, it will always be yours, and it will always be worth more than you think. u

Barispol syncope Photo essay by Roman Shemakov

T

his September marks 9 years since my mother, sister, and I left Barispol International airport with a one way ticket to Phoenix, AZ. Out of the majority of my childhood, I remember 2009 markedly well. One night in August, my sister and I were pouring over an atlas of the world in our kitchen, counting the countries we would fly over and wondering if each one would stamp our passports. For us, America was an outline on a page, a web of thin white lines shaped like a

turkey leg whose cultural significance was little more than MTV, glass buildings, and long roads. It was all I needed to know, after all, immigrating wasn’t my choice.

I chose to return to Barispol for the first time this summer, still armed with the arsenal I left with: a thick accent, a backpack, and a naive optimism. I haven’t been able to name or recall what it felt like to become an immigrant again. In anticipation of seeing [meeting] my family for the first time in 9 years I kept returning to

Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. One line. “The break in my own destiny affords me in retrospect a syncopal kick that I would not have missed for worlds.”

Syncope is a good word because I don’t know what it means. In linguistics it’s an omission of a sound from the middle of the word; in music it’s a shift of rhythm and a change of accent; in medicine it’s a brief loss of consciousness. This is the home I left. These are the expectations that were not fulfilled.

This is my syncope. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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Obscured India Photo essay by Kaavya Arakoni

I

know what you’re thinking: traffic, pollution, cows, slums. Or maybe you’re thinking of naan, the Taj Mahal, chai, and colours.

Yeah, I’m not going to refute that in any way. But this summer, I saw places and experienced a culture that is far from that of my home city, Mumbai, or other parts of India you’re familiar with. I’ve seen poverty in my city. I see it in the chai-walas cleaning cups by the side of the road, in the beggars knocking on car windows, in the blue plastic roofs of the slums that span several kilometres. Even so, rural India is a whole other India.

More than lack of easy access to electricity, water, and health care, the mentality of the society is the major difference. A family will have eight children if they need to in order to have a boy. Parents can’t afford to keep daughters in the house past 15 years they don’t have the money, and they will always put their son first. It makes you question them, judge them, and look down on them, but their jobs aren’t easy either.

The women in these families work the hardest. They wake up at 1 am to walk three villages down to get water, quit school not because it’s hard, but because there’s no one around to take care of the house if their mothers are working in the fields, and despite all that they do, they still feel the need to introduce themselves by offering their husband’s name before their own. When I think of India, sure, I think of home. I think of the same things you do as well. But I also think of the parts that, yes, make me sad, but also make me proud to say that I’m from a country of resilient women, hardworking families, and communities that carry on no matter the obstacles. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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FICTION&POETRY The Memory Palace

FICTION

by Connor Hodge

I

walk in the front door. On the righthand side table are my keys. Each key has a number. Reading them in order gives my first boyfriend’s telephone. Next to the keys is a picture of my nephew, Samstein.

I walk a few feet in towards the kitchen table and look to see what there is to see. A big photo album, with Samstein’s little brother, Hugo, on the cover. It says “HUGO” in big children’s book letters.

Next to that is a bowl with last night’s supper — alphabet soup. The letters spell out “JASMINE”, the name of my sister-in-law.

Under the bowl is a newspaper for June 18th, 1963 — Jasmine’s birthday. On the other end of the table is a paper plate with a macaroni drawing of a dog named Garfield. Garfield is Samstein’s trusted companion, I remember.

This place is my mind palace. Walking through it, I see different objects, which help me remember details about my life.

I’ve had it for years, and it’s incredibly useful.

On the kitchen counter is a big silver mixing bowl, with three eggs inside. If I crack open the eggs — which I do — they reveal potential small talk topics with my boss. His spouse’s name, Alex, their cat Domino, and his favorite sports team: the Iron Pigs. This is why I’m here today.

I open my eyes. I’m sitting outside my boss’s office. I’m going to ask for a raise.

Can’t afford all those Christmas sweaters for Garfield on my current paycheck.

Inside, I ask how Alex is doing. Boss says Alex is doing great, but I realize I don’t know if Alex is a man or a woman. Maybe I could color code the egg yolk? We talk back and forth for a while. I can’t ask about the Iron Pigs either because I don’t know if it’s even the right season or what sport they play.

But Domino is doing well, reports Boss.

I say I just love cats, and Boss says Domino is a dog.

Oof. Major misstep. I try to salvage the conversation, but Boss doesn’t seem like he’s in a good mood. I end up not asking for

the raise. Later at home, I try to find Boss’s spouse on Facebook but can’t find them.

The next day my sister calls. I ask if she and Jasmine are doing anything for Jasmine’s birthday next week. My sister says

Jasmine’s birthday is actually in October.

It seems like something’s going wrong, so I write some random numbers on easter eggs and hide them around the palace. I write down the sequence on my real phone so I won’t forget.

A week later, I go back and find the easter eggs. The sequence should be 718-839.

My phone says 111-42, which isn’t even the same number of digits. Where did the extra egg come from? I open them all up, and one of them has got bright green yolk and says ALEX.

It seems like something’s going wrong, so I write some random numbers on easter eggs and hide them around the palace.

What is going on? I ask my therapist if she knows.

“I’ve been using the palace technique for

almost 15 years, and never had a problem.

I just don’t know what the issue could be,” I say.

She’s never heard of the mind palace, but suggests I see if there is distress in another part of my life. I say I can’t think of any distress.

That night, I go on a careful walk through the palace. I write down as much information as I can. My ex-husband’s social security number. Mom’s peanut butter cookie recipe. The PIN number to my squash club’s bank account. The processor document is almost a thousand words long.

Then I round the corner and see a monster. Its flesh is gray and gooey. Horns stick out from its spine. Its tongue flicks out and runs over its one eye, leaving a trail of clear yellow mucus behind. Skin from the top of its snout starts leaking down, over its mouth, and onto the ground. I open my eyes.

What?

I wasn’t really trying to imagine this thing. Why was it there?

I close my eyes again and walk through the palace, checking numbers and dates occasionally. But when I get to the bathroom, the monster is still there. It’s ripped the door off its hinges and is slowly chewing it.

I try to imagine it away, but it doesn’t work. I can’t move it at all. The monster regards me with its eye, re-applying mucus when needed.

I walk over and try to kick it, but my foot gets stuck in its melting skin. I can’t get out, so I open my eyes. When I go back in, the shoe is stuck in the side. A crater has formed around it, and smoke is pouring out.

Try as I might, I can’t move the beast.

Eventually I give up and go to bed. The next morning I go to check. The entire bathroom is gone, eaten and left with black nothing. The monster has moved on to the living room.

I never get rid of it. Within a week, it’s eaten the entire palace. When I try to imagine it now, I see only the monster in blackness. I never get the promotion either. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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Three Poems

by Gilbert Orbea

The sky’s response upon seeing the sun; loving in heat, though distance’s winter approaches

The air is still and so are you.

The sky has kissed the Sun goodbye long ago Yet there remains a hint of his glow.

A blue sky (in sadness) Marks upon itself a half-light of gold in remembrance Of his loved one, smasher of hydrogen, Amaterasu.

Hours pass by and the sky Doesn’t dare relinquish its amatory color In view of its love.

Then he comes.

The crimson blue of a sad starr’d dew Lightens to a youthful hue.

Kiss me again. u

My moon

My moon, I’ve loved you from the moment we watched the first humans crawl out of the mud.

They made 7,000 languages to speak your name.

You’ve learned to teach me how to warm oceans, give way to your smooth sea-pulling, just to cross at my horizon and kiss me, all the pink in our throats pouring color from our dance overwhelming the sky, while the humans gaze in wonder as we let our children know our lights are one, even if for the briefest of moments. u

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POETRY

A jealous, pink sun; the scent of spring

I stare so long at our clasped hands that I pick up the scent of spring.

Stop it!

Smile no longer at the ground— for it is night, and the Sun wouldn’t like it if the roses bloom for you instead, though they imitate me rather well! u

Two Poems

POETRY

by Zain Talukdar

154: Paying Homage to Birds “Art will always elude my grasp” is a lie I swore on until I soared with 26-feathered wings tucked cunningly beneath my worries.

There are no doubts this close to the clouds. u

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160: A Deconstruction of Backspace [Line] about frantically tapping my regrets away In sync with the anxiety protruding from my leg Space [Irony] of feeling aggravated with this idea and wanting to backspace it in itself [Break the fourth wall here] This poem is a product of its own environment An environment of remorse and weakness rasping in rapid taps [Explanation] As in it’s full of backspaces YOU won’t ever feel but I do?

[Continue breaking it]: Backspace gives you the power to deconstruct me See me for what I am see the process with the product [Truth] I’m lying to you.

What did or didn’t I backspace in this poem? What lies am I feeding you?

Space Ah but this doesn’t really make sense anyway it’s too complicated [Note to self] about who the true audience is Space [Cry for help] about the process being for me and the product being for us Backspace archives my goals But erases my growth Space [Reflection] about how I never grew to find comfort in what’s out there Can I tie this into my background?

Do I even need to or is everything I say just outbursts of background?

[Crossed-off accusation]How many times did I use backspace to make that sentence seem good for you, anyway?

Space [Later] Remember to backspace the strikethroughs u

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BOOKS Wading between the Personal and Public in Tracy K. Smith’s new anthology

REVIEW

by Tristan Beiter Content warning: Discussion of sexual violence

“H

istory is in a hurry. It moves like a woman / Corralling her children onto a crowded bus” (“New Road Station”).

Tracy K. Smith meditates on the nature and workings of history and on individual (especially Black) womanhood in her new book, “Wade in the Water.” Like Smith’s earlier “Life on Mars,” which won the Pulitzer Prize, this book combines politics

Wade in the Water

by Tracy K. Smith Graywolf Press, 2018 96 pages | $24.00 (Hardcover)

and the personal through a formally inventive and carefully considered voice.

In this book, Smith exposes the way little details have vital meanings. This is clearest in sections one and four, which are largely more personal and visually simple than the rest of the book. However, the complexity of the poems is not sacrificed. For example, the first poem of the book, “Garden of Eden”: It was Brooklyn. My thirties.

Everyone I knew was living The same desolate luxury, Each ashamed of the same things: Innocence and privacy. I’d lug Home the paper bags, doing Bank-balance math and counting days.

Even in this poem of her life, discussing therapy and shopping, where “the Garden of Eden” is the name of a store, Smith paints a picture of classed and raced experience in the context of late twentieth and early twenty-first century New York.

Sharp observations about contemporary life that echo “desolate luxury,” shame and awareness of the need for “innocence and privacy,” or “paper bags” and “bank-bal-

Cover art for “Wade in the Water,” courtesy of Graywolf Press website

ance math and counting days” are found in most of the poems in the collection.

Throughout the rest of these sections we see a necessary empathy in Smith’s tender observation of the everyday. “The Angels” begins “Two slung themselves across chairs / Once in my motel room.

Grizzled, / In leather biker gear.” “Charity” takes a woman “like a squat old machine, / Off-kilter but still chugging along” and declares that “I am you, one day out of five, / Tired, empty, hating what I carry / But afraid to lay it down.” “4 ½” describes a young child “like the sole / Incongruous goat tethered to the tree, / Smiling almost as you approach.” These moments are full of love for Smith’s fellow people and exhibit a precision of observation that gives that feeling clout and gravity.

At every turn, Smith expands upon the link between self and other, looking outward in poems like “The World is Your Beautiful Younger Sister” to an intimate

concern with other people and the world.

She wants to demonstrate connection and present it with beauty and strength, which she does by her honest observation and investment in the scene: “Or else she’s barging / Into my room, and leaning in close so / It’s her hair I wake to” (“4 ½”).

Smith refuses to let us go into the world complacent and inattentive. She turns her sharp eye and powerful voice on the little things so that we too notice them. No longer able to ignore what Smith is showing us, we are sent back into the world primed to care a little more about the daily experience of our fellow human beings. She asks us, at the end of “Wade in the Water,” “Is this love the trouble you promised?” and shows us both love and trouble in her poems.

The middle two sections of the book are more “public” in their direction. These poems address a wide variety of matters, focusing especially on Black history in SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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the United States. They are ambitious and innovative, often pressing at the edges of formal expectations. Section two is composed primarily of poems that draw directly—usually through quotation and erasure—on primary sources: legal documents and letters both official and personal. The tone for the middle of the book is set by the poem that opens section two, “Declaration,” an erasure poem taken from the Declaration of Independence. It opens with, He has sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people

He has plundered our— ravaged our— destroyed the lives of our— and ends with “—taken Captive / on the high Seas / to bear—” before you turn the page and come to the next poem, titled “The Greatest Personal Privation.” This title gives the preceding poem greater irony and force, as it is taken directly from the letters of slave owners about being without their Black slaves. The title is thus shown to have no right to belong to the slave-owning woman who originally wrote it. Instead, it finishes the “Declaration,” which is not of the independence of the United States from Great Britain but rather of the lived experience of Black Americans from the colonial period to the present day.

“The Greatest Personal Privation” also repurposes the language of those who kept slaves to write a poem of liberation. It begins “It is a painful and harassing business / Belonging to her.

We have had trouble enough.” Out of the literal text of a letter concerning the sale of enslaved women comes a complaint from those women about the “privation” of be-

ing enslaved—practically without any sort of reference to specific treatment. It is the “Belonging” to anyone that is the “painful and harassing business” not the “belonging to her” specifically.

Section two is crowned by the longest poem in the book, “I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It.” This poem, as articulated in Smith’s note at the end of the book, is pulled from an assortment of “letters and statements of African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and those of their wives, widows, parents, and children” (77). These writers speak for themselves in Smith’s poem, coming to life on the page with all their originally nonstandard misspellings intact and with enormous humanity. The poem culminates in, “My correct name is Hiram Kirkland. / Some persons call me Harry and others call me Henry, / but neither is my correct name,”—a moment that crystallizes the trouble of African American soldiers in the war as they tried to determine their positions, hold on to their identities, and claim the rewards they were promised for enlisting in the armed forces.

Section three brings the politics forward in time to the present day and the near past. For example, “Theatrical Improvisation” displaying a variety of relatively recent news stories, which Smith notes in the back of the collection, in an elegant and intense “performance” of contemporary tribulations, especially sexual and racial violence: “Finally, a woman stands.

Her body tightens. / She wrings her hands.

At first, I didn’t think / I heard it. Then I saw his face and understood.” The poem ends with a haunting image of our uncertainty when faced with the horrors of racist and misogynistic violence: “A single person claps. // Then erupts a panicked / Applause that doesn’t know how to end.”

Section three also showcases the fabulous “Watershed,” another poem that

draws on techniques of erasure for its creation, this time from an article on the effects of industrial farming and personal narratives of near-death experiences.

Smith uses form and space intensely in this poem, having sections of prose, sections of dialogue almost like a play, and a careful control of the white space on the page. Here is one of her descriptions of the cows in the DuPont plant: cows with stringy tails malformed hooves lesions red receded eyes suffering slobbering staggering like drunks It don’t look like anything I’ve been into before. (“Watershed”) The play with space forces us to slow down and attend to what is happening. Individual gaps help in visualizing the awkward and forced positions of the cows in the factory barns as well as the surreal— almost disjointed— aspects of the neardeath experiences described. Smith brings disjunction forward into the text without making the poem too difficult and instead generates an attention to both synthesis and analysis as operating in understanding at the individual and political level.

These poems bridge between history and the present and between the everyday and the momentous in a collection comes highly recommended, and for good reason. I really enjoyed this collection and it allowed me to situate myself more fully in the political landscape of the United States’ history. The emotional depth and the rawness with which Smith engages the violence of this subject matter—class, race, the history of slavery, sexual violence—are difficult to read but well worth the effort if you have the ability to engage with such weighty topics.

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Poems visually reproduced to be as similar as possible to original print, courtesy of Graywolf Press

Bearing witness to Rape Culture: A review of Roxane Gay’s “Not That Bad”

REVIEW

by Olivia Smith Content warning: discussion of sexual assault and rape culture.

“N

ot That Bad” is heavy. In short, it is an essay anthology centered around rape culture and the intimate experiences of thirty individual writers published in May of 2018. Edited by Roxane Gay, a writer that published her own collection of essays on twentieth

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century feminism titled “Bad Feminist”, the anthology brings silenced issues to the forefront and champions survivors as well as those who experience sexual harassment on a daily basis. While rape culture and sexual violence are either shied away from in mainstream literature or hyper-sensa-

tionalized to the point of only perpetuating stereotypes, “Not That Bad” makes the conscious point of showing us that sexual violence is an undeniable and present reality in our lives. In light of Swarthmore’s Organizing4Survivors movement to eliminate rape culture and sexual violence on

g

to

campus, “Not That Bad” offers insight into exactly how deep rape culture runs even in a place like Swarthmore. We see rape culture in traditional social scenes like fraternities and dorm parties, systems of support that aren’t trauma informed, and certainly in the structures designed to bring justice to survivors of sexual harm.

Not That Bad

by Roxane Gay HarperCollins, 2018 368 pages | $26.99 (Hardcover)

By naming and validating the overwhelming reality of rape culture and sexual violence, “Not That Bad” sets us on a path to begin fighting these systems. In one of my favorite sections, Elissa Bassist aptly quotes writer Rebecca Solnit, “The elephant in the room is the room itself.” We cannot address rape culture and begin to break down its roots without tearing apart all the walls of the room apart. Change at this scale means slowly rebuilding the society we live in virtually from the ground up.

To highlight a few more central lessons from the book, the collection finds itself orbiting around themes of body ownership, expectations and reactions to trauma, and the intersectionality of both survivorhood and victimhood.

Aubrey Hirsch, a writer and professor,

a body is a possession that can be lost or stolen. In this way, the book teaches that sexual harm done to the body gives you a whole new take on what your body can mean to yourself.

I additionally applaud the perspective Jill Christman offers in “Slaughterhouse Island,” where she surfaces reflection on different types of assault. She explains how if a cyclist hits you on the street, or you get beaten up at a party, your body is still your own. Nonetheless, these instances are often treated much more seriously than sexually charged instances like a catcall, an unwelcome grope, or a date rape.

In a section called “All The Angry Women,” Lyz Lenz illustrates the frustration women have trying to find a place in their lives for their reaction to rape culture—especially the feelings of anger, depression, and thoughts of suicide. Women are often denied a space for this kind of emotion, especially when it originates from rape culture or sexual trauma. Women are seen as the nurturers, the comforters and the absorbers of others’ pain; when they have pain of their own, where does it go?

There is often nothing more to do but to keep walking on the sidewalk where you have just been cat called, keep living in the home of your abuser, keep studying on the campus where you have been assaulted, or keep suffering through the PTSD alone.

For some writers, the anger and pain

Portrait of “Not That Bad” author, Roxane Gay, courtesy of Google Images

dives into survivors’ relationships with their bodies in her piece “Fragments” as she questions whether or not it is better to resolve that “I am body” or that “I have a body.” Ultimately, neither phrase feels appropriate to her, and I agree; the first is too reductive and objectifying, while the second is scarily dissociative, implying that

was almost treated like a disease or an affliction; they had undue pressure to get better and forgive their assailant. This became especially true in stories reflecting on the complexities of intersectional identity in rape culture. One writer expressed gratitude that their assailant “at least” acknowledged their trans identity and another felt

the need to forgive their assailant in order to avoid the “broken black family” stereotype. “Not That Bad” shows that the ways we deal with and work to heal from rape culture are inextricably tied to our own identities.

I would argue the book does a good job of checking a lot of boxes: the writers are diverse in identity and point of view and each chapter brings a new style and voice without throwing cohesion out the window. One minute I found myself reading about a mother in Brooklyn facing the hostility of daily catcalls and the next I was reading about sexual assault as a good used in “trade” at international borders.

The diversity in story ordering and style also levels the playing field for the writers; no longer are there only cisgendered white women speaking only about their sliver of the discord with the patriarchy.

Although allyship is not specifically addressed in the anthology, the collection can be a way for allies—individuals who have not undergone sexual harm themselves but wish to support those who have—to learn about sexual assault trauma without hounding survivors and, in effect, retraumatizing them. Although allyship is not specifically addressed in the anthology, it does not alienate allies. They can be a part of the conversation too, and reading this book as an ally will help immensely in efforts to be sympathetic, understanding, and supportive.

With that being said, discussion in the book does tend to rely often on the gender binary, but it certainly does not cling to it unnecessarily. After all, rape culture is high on the list of institutions perpetuating the binary in the first place. The book has a diverse range of storytellers, but the catcallers and the perpetrators still operate on stereotypes and gendered assumptions.

They are highlighted as problematic, but that still leaves them at the center of many essays.

While the heartbreaking details of sexual assault and harassment are valued and absolutely necessary to this read, what kept me coming back to this book was not the actual events and examples that the writers recounted, but the incredibly uplifting yet realistic moments of reflection. Actress Ally Sheedy expresses her hopes that the #MeToo movement will bring to light not just glaring examples of rape culture like Harvey Weinstein’s actions against women but also the structural mess lurking beneath, while Anthony Frame ends his piece declaring that though he may not be strong now, someday he hopes he will be. For a survivor, and simply a woman SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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on planet earth, reading stories of others’ experiences with trauma and healing is assuring and validating.

I want to come back to the incredible fact that this book uplifts a diversity of experiences and responses to rape culture. This is important to me because I constantly feel that my own assault was ‘not that bad’— almost to the point where I felt like I was appropriating survivorship.

I had the privilege of my identity to lean on throughout my healing process. I am a cisgendered white woman who was assaulted in my assailant’s dorm room after meeting at a Phi Psi party. I left, and I got home safe. It was not until later that I had a conversation with a fellow student, and a

founder of Organizing for Survivors, that I learned that there is a spectrum of sexu-

This is important to me because I constantly feel that my own assault was ‘not that bad.’ al assault. There is no single, ultimate way to experience sexual harm, and nothing about an experience of harm should in-

validate it. So, for me, the most important lesson from “Not That Bad” is that there is no “super-survivor” and sexual assault is not a monolith.

Our campus still has a lot to learn about what it means to live in a world where rape culture and sexual harm are so prevalent.

We are each impacted by their presence differently. The best way for us to grow beyond rape culture and patriarchal traditions as a truly unified community requires us to have the hard discussions, the lessons in respect and understanding, and the commitment to lifting up the voices of survivors silenced by our own indifference and ignorance. No experience is “not that bad”.

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A mother’s work: A review of “How Mamas Love Their Babies”

REVIEW

by Alexis Riddick

W

ith an emphasis on uplifting and destigmatizing sex work, “How Mamas Love Their Babies” focuses on the various ways mothers work How Mamas Love Their Babies

by Juniper Fitzgerald and Elise Peterson Feminist Press, 2018 36 pages | $13.56 (Hardcover)

to provide for their children. A newly released children’s book published by the Feminist Press, the book features an expansive, inclusive, and intersectional presentation of motherhood.

The book begins with some adorably illustrated introductions. On the left page, the first page of the book, there is a mother and her daughter. The mama has reddish hair and is holding the knee of her

daughter while looking at her. The caption begins: “Babies love mamas…” and ends on the next page with “and mamas love babies.” On the right, there’s a mother wearing a red saree, holding her baby (who is wearing a matching saree) and kissing their cheek. The book then poses the question: “How do mamas love their babies?” As the combination of words and photorealistic illustrations of mothers with their babies shows, the answers vary. However, the common thread is that mothers provide physically for their babies -- from their own bodily fluids to their occupations. One page features a picture of a mother breastfeeding their child while the words read, “Mamas use their bodies to care for their babies in many ways.”

This is an especially impressive and radical image, allowing children to see mothers breastfeeding in public. Overall, the book focuses on mothers’ bodies, and the many ways that mothers use their bodies to sup-

“How Mama’s Love Their Babies” page scans courtesy of Amazon Books 40

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port their babies.

The book then delves into a timeline of parenting, talking about caring for babies before and after they’re born. This timeline includes exercising while pregnant and taking children to protests. Considering this is a picture book, the images themselves tell important stories in addition to the words written. A set of protest images was particularly striking. There is a black mother holding her child up on her shoulders with a sign that reads, “We Shall Overcome.” The mama wears an afro, a white shirt, and green bell bottom pants. Just below them, a white mama has her mouth wide open as if shouting. Her baby is holding on to her and they both hold a sign that says, “We Need Day Care Centers.” Lastly, there is a mama with her daughter clinging to her yellow beanie.

Their sign says, “We are the 51% minority,” a sign for women’s rights. From this context, caring for babies means fighting for their rights.

Building up its plot, “How Mamas Love Their Babies” next transitions to talking about general aspects of mothers’ work and uses pictures to add specificity to their experiences. The book, for example, goes into the different ways mamas work. Some stay at home. Some create art. Some clean, create, farm, and more. It uses this as a bridge to talk about the kinds of clothes and uniforms different mothers with different jobs wear.

Fitzgerald and Peterson then move on to exploring mothers who do sex work.

“How Mama’s Love Their Babies” page scans courtesy of Amazon Books

“Some uniforms even have special shoes,” it reads, accompanied by illustrations of two different pairs of heels. Then, “Some mamas dance all night long in special shoes. It’s hard work!” and provides an illustration of a person holding one of their feet to soothe it with a sign reading, “Unfair to Strippers. All we want is a bare living” in front of a sex shop with selections like “Adult DVDs” and “Booths.”

After spending a couple pages on sex work, the book reminds its audience -namely, parents and children -- how this work is very similar to the other types of jobs described and displayed previously in the book. For example, “Mamas who dance, just like other mamas, have bodies that love their babies.”

The book ends with a final question, possibly posed to continue the conversation between parent and child. “What are the special ways that your mama cares for you?” The illustrations are of a mother in a wheelchair next to a child holding a small sized work of art in front of their face.

The final pages feature mothers playing with their children. There is a child skateboarding with their mother, a child being pushed on the swing by their mother, and finally, a baby touching their mother’s chin and the mother appears to sing.

Firstly, what I appreciated most about this book was the diversity of mothers presented, at least in terms of race and ethnicity, religion, age, and ability. I was pleased to see black mothers with afros, one of whom holds her child on her shoulders while she holds a “We Shall Overcome” sign. Towards the end, there is an image of a mother in a wheelchair. There is a mama wearing religious attire, posing with her kids in similar attire, hugging them. It was also very useful to present mothers both historically and currently, as if to say that mothers have always been working—and that includes doing sex work—to provide for their children.

Juniper Fitzgerald with her words, and Elise Peterson with her images demonstrate that there is no correct mother or

correct motherhood. There are mothers who clean other people’s houses and stay at home, mothers who fly planes and write, and of course, mothers who dance and strip. No one is presented as the ideal. No one is presented as a horrible parent. This book validates and empowers all mothers, working and not working, in highly stigmatized as well as highly respected fields.

The images also present women protesting with signs such as “We Shall Overcome” and “We Are the 51% Minority.” I cannot stress enough the importance of having a diversity of women presented. There was no white woman in a bandana on the cover with a slogan attempting to represent all feminist causes.

While the diversity is what I appreciated the most, the book nonetheless might be hard for children to appreciate so young and requires a substantial amount of explaining on the part of the parent. This book is terrific for parents who are already caught up on feminism, anti-racism, and other social movements. As a young person studying history, society, and education, and who is quite familiar with intersectional feminist movements and various histories, this book made so much sense to me. However, in order to do this book justice, the parent must also be equipped with their own annotations to the material--especially for the sex work section. Parent education is imperative for children’s education. Children are not the only ones who have learning and growing to do, and in fact, their parents’ willingness to learn and grow directly aids their children’s.

I completely understand the importance of making language simple and conveying the experiences in a simple manner so children can read on their own or be read to with few linguistic barriers, for the English-speaking families at least. However, my second critique—or rather suggestion—is that I hope the Feminist Press prints this book in multiple languages so that the multitudes of women they portray could, in real life, share this with their children as well. Importantly, no book can do

it all and I still strongly admire the work that went into making this children’s book more in-depth and inclusive than even some young adult or adult works.

The book is an age-appropriate representation of mothers and sex workers, but I would also be curious to see a second book or even a different book that explores gender identities within motherhood. There may be mothers of trans experience illustrated or represented, but it seems to focus on cis-motherhood or just does not specify. When it comes down to it, the mama holding the “Unfair to Strippers” sign was still a white-looking person. Sex workers are vulnerable, disrespected, and often in danger because of the way people ignore their boundaries. Within that population however, women of color, trans women, and black trans women have specific, marginalized experiences.

“How Mamas Love their Babies” does an incredible job of normalizing and destig-

There was no white woman in a bandana on the cover with a slogan attempting to repesent all feminist causes. matizing mothers’, their work, and their bodies. And most importantly, it is a book for children. We often think children are not developmentally ready to understand racism, sexism, ableism, and particularly sex and sex work. The truth is, children are capable of learning and understanding anything that we can as older folks.

As long as the language is intelligible for them or things like photos are brought in to make the material more easily understood, they can understand. We need more books like this. If we continue to wait until it’s too late to educate our children, they will join the masses of people thinking certain people are not deserving of rights or that sex work is illegitimate and morally incorrect. We can and should continue to teach and challenge our children. I would love to see an addition of this book where they could really hone in on the multitude of experiences that mothers who do sex work have, and not just sex work as one aspect of those multitudes of motherhood.

Our kids can learn, and they are yearning for it.

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MUSIC Syncretic soul Tom Misch distinguishes himself in a sea of young producer talent with debut album “Geography”

Review

by Shruti Pal

I

n the history of modern music, some of the most groundbreaking artists have been ones that have found themselves between sounds, drawing from influences not only across generations, but also across genres as a whole. Tom Misch distinguishes himself in a sea of young producer talent by doing just this-finding a marriage not just between old school hip-hop and soul, but also twenty-first-century jazz, funk, and indie rock.

It is with this sound that launched Misch to international prominence by the age of nineteen for his self-released and self-produced collection of songs, “Beat Tape 1,” with which he proved his production intelligence and instrumental talent with harmonic masterpieces such as “Your Love,” “Watch Me Dance,” and “Beautiful Escape.” Having held off on releasing a full length album for years, a lot was riding on his April debut, “Geography”.

“Geography” starts with a spoken voice reciting over a sustained violin note and mellow guitar plucking. The voice says that you need to make music not for money and not to pay bills but instead “because you love it, because it’s your morning coffee, because it’s your food, that’s why you become an artist.” As if awoken by the words, in comes a jazzy drum and bass beat which fleshes out an easy listening jam, which eventually leads into the first full track of the album, “Lost in Paris.” This introduction does well to set up the context for the album. Misch aims to prove how high-stakes music production is for his own life, thus increasing his perceived authenticity as a true musician.

Although a catchy song, it doesn’t exhibit the same level of instrumental excellence as previous openers “The Journey,” “Crazy Dream,” or “So Close.” GoldLink’s staccato rap fits in well with the song but doesn’t lift it to any new level, and thus his feature seems to work better as a name drop than as an organic collaboration.

The next song, “South of the River,” which was released last year as a promo for the album, is an upbeat jam that his

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fans have already fallen in love with. A no frills ode to the diverse music scene of his South London hometown, where a plethora of new artists are making waves in the footsteps of Nadia Rose and Fat White Family, every layer of the song is brilliantly crafted. From the intricate violin overlays to the keyboard solo, the dancey jam is “signature Misch”, reminiscent of his other well crafted groovey anthems such as “Watch Me Dance.” Later in the album we get similar “signature Misch” songs with “It Runs Through Me” and “Disco Yes”–both fully leveraging their features–Poppy Ajudha’s soft voice and De La Soul’s warm groove.

“Movie,” also previously released, is a romantic slow waltz. With an intro from his sister, singer Polly Misch, and heartfelt lyrics that delve into the deepest cracks of heartbreak, Misch’s vulnerability peaks: “Can’t ignore that time may have changed your ways: does my record still hang on your wall? What a sentimental way to groove, I hope it still touches you. Baby, come back to me, come back to me. It kills me to see you leave, so I came back and wrote this beat…” We are reminded that beneath his clever beat making and virtuosic instrumentation, Misch as an artist is able to achieve the lyrical excellence that truly separates simple producers from full-fledged songwriters.

I can imagine that “Tick Tock” is perhaps the most underrated song of the album, as its long intro may leave some lis-

“Geography” cover art, courtesy of djbooth.net

teners bored and compelled to skip the song entirely. If one sticks around, they’ll be taken on a trip with eccentric build-ups and come downs, and a compelling bass line which funk to a T. The dissonance of the synth makes for a mysterious eeriness that breaks through the upbeat groove.

Another surprising standout is “You’re On My Mind”–a catchy romantic tune that has not only made its waves on the radio but also snagged a feature on Britain’s most watched summer reality show “Love Island” (much to Misch’s dismay).

If Tom Misch said he was going to do Stevie Wonder, it probably wouldn’t surprise those familiar with his music, as it goes right with his vibe. What one wouldn’t expect is a stripped down guitar solo. His cover of “Isn’t She Lovely” draws us into his musical mind as we follow along his licks and fills, as he puts his mastery of his primary instrument on display. Also stripped down is his cover of “Man Like You”–which is said to be the first song he ever performed for his family. It finds a nice place for itself on an album that is packed with a good amount of sentimentality. Although “Disco Yes” is rather awkwardly placed in between these two tender grooves, it doesn’t take away from the success of any of the three songs.

It wouldn’t be a Tom Misch album without a Loyle Carner collaboration, as some of his greatest hits have been written with the rapper. Although “Water

Baby” is nowhere in the same league as “Crazy Dream” or “Nightgowns”, perhaps because of a rather awkward melody that doesn’t allow for the song to achieve virality, it was nice to hear the duo together again.

“Geography” is a funky, soulful and heartfelt album. It has its hits and misses, but as a whole makes a solid, albeit

not very daring, debut. Some collaborations work, and others do not, just as some songs are intelligently crafted and others seem to miss the mark. All in all, even if not consistently, the album carries itself forward with enough greatness to showcase some of the best aspects of Misch’s instrumental talent, production intelligence and sentimentality, thus es-

tablishing his name in a sea of electronic production talent. “Geography” is an accessible album that has been justifiably well received and will continue to be successful, possibly attributable to the fact that it can be appreciated by both snobby music junkies and “Love Island fans” alike.

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“Nostrum Grocers” as Black Militant Gospel Underground rappers Milo and Elucid as a case study of contemporary black revolutionary music

by Luke M.A.

I

’m skeptical of people who believe that art is a form of revolutionary praxis. However, I do think that we need soundtracks to a movement.

Years ago, it was people like the Last Poets, Amiri Baraka and dead prez. As neoliberalization of our economy has made the sound of the record labels and the radio more homogenous, the Internet has democratized music. I believe that rap music is the most revolutionary music in our current moment, and I think most folks would agree. However, I don’t go to Kendrick or J. Cole (lauded by mainstream press as examples of socially conscious art) for music with true revolutionary potential. What is the black revolutionary music of our period?

Where do we find it? Given that record labels control what plays on the radio, we must look instead to the rappers who came up through Bandcamp and SoundCloud hype—folks like Jpegmafia, milo, SLUMSNYC, and Crashprez, MCs rapping about black existence in America over strange non-industry beats. These folks are the Last Poets, Langston Hughes or Baldwins of our times. As an exercise, I’m going to talk about how the latest Milo/Elucid collaboration, Nostrum Grocers, fits into this canon of black revolutionary music.

“Nostrum Grocers” cover art, courtesy of Bandcamp

I just got into Milo recently. I had listened to his album “When the Flies Will Come” and some of his older, nerdier stuff. He started off as a nerd rapper making songs with witty Lord of the Rings references, although I think his content has transitioned. I had not listened much to Elucid before listening to the Nostrum Grocers album. The line that drew me to this new album was a line from “’98 gewehr,” where Elucid raps: “They dragged Stokely cross the hospital floor and he sang / ‘I’mma, I’mma tell God how you treat me!’”

This line references a specific moment in history where activist Stokely Carmichael was brutalized by prison guards after an arrest during the Civil Rights movement. He began to sing a negro spiritual condemning the guards. Stokely is an iconic figure within the black freedom movement for his militancy and use of the term “Black Power.” Elucid cements their place in the canon with this knowledge of black movement history. In addition, I had been reading a biography of Stokely when I discovered this album.

I think I try to ground myself in the black radical tradition that Stokely represents, so I find commonality with Elucid. When I speak of a black radical tradition, I am talking particularly about a history of militant resistance to white supremacy in the state. I would consider events like slave revolts or groups like the Panthers to be integral to this idea. I found myself first drawn to these ideas initially after watching the Baltimore Uprising live on CNN. Celebration of militant resistance to white supremacy with an emphasis on direct action rather than electoralist or integrationist approaches is sprinkled throughout this album. Elucid acknowledges his role in the black radical tradition in the next line as he states, “New negro poet USA, we know the way.” I think that this release epitomizes the variety of different feelings and intricacies

ESSAY

within black liberation movements at our current time. Milo and Elucid express a variety of views and ask questions critical to movements in our time and before.

Within Elucid’s rhyme work are black feminist, abolitionist, and nationalist sentiments. The new black liberation movement is contemplating questions of abolition and feminism that the movements before us didn’t. The Black Panther Party and other black nationalist groups have influenced this record. Elucid discusses “What does a world without pigs look like? / New myths, who lives, who dies / Who shifts, who thrives.” The internal questions within movements are what build them and in this work, Nostrum Grocers are asking those questions. Black revolutionaries are really struggling with the question of police and prison aboli-

CNN coverage of 2015 Baltimore Uprising, courtesy of Youtube

tion right now, and the music is asking it as well. What happens when get rid of the police? Who suffers? Who prospers?

Increasingly, I think that the abolitionist strain within the black movement has been gaining traction. However, many activists still find themselves faced with questions regarding what happens to the people that commit harm in a world where we don’t have prisons. I’ve had conversations with a homie I met in jail after a demonstration about this. We were discussing how police and prison abolition cannot simply be freeing everyone inside the prisons. Abolition is about a process of creating new worlds and safe communities beyond the threat of violence represents by police and prisons.

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harm within the movement that has been put forward through black feminists like Angela Davis.

Elucid also addresses the question of feminism within the movement. “Socalled God blather about nation building ad nauseum / And never once mention black women” is a defining line from the track “where’ing those flowers.” The question of where feminism must lie within black movements is integral and Elucid challenges the hoteps who speak of nation building while not caring about black women. The question of the role of black women in social movements is especially relevant in our current moment.

Historically, black liberation movements have excluded black women or pushed them into subservient roles. The Black Panther Party, an important historical part of the black radical tradition, had many members who were very misogynistic and pushed a misogynistic agenda.

Eldridge Cleaver, a highstanding Panther member discusses in his memoir “Soul on Ice” about how he practiced rape on black women. In addition, there are countless examples of women being excluded from leadership positions and being physically abused by men within the party. I think this contrasts especially with major organizations in the current movement being lead by black women and organized from queer feminist lens. A good example of this is BYP100. This contrasts with how hip hop has always had misogynistic elements that objectify and degrade women. Frustratingly, in both of these cases, addressing misogynoir as it exists is important because a black movement must interrogate these questions while not depicting black masculinity as “dangerous or criminal” as that plays into white supremacist stereotypes.

Another classic question within black movements is what the role of white folks is supposed to to be. Elucid mentions how he is gonna “let them white boys shoot it out” and that “you can’t call yourself an ally if we don’t.” I see these lines as having something to do with questions of anti-fascist action and how actually the intentions of antifascists may not be as pro-black as they might seem.

Letting the “white boys” shoot it out may be a reference to white anti-fascists fighting white Neo-Nazis. Several Black Lives Matter organizations have chosen not to participate in militant demonstrations against Neo-Nazis in the past year. I’ve had conversations about how antifascism can be in many ways very performative and surface level in terms of movement 44

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work. Although, I think that gaps are beginning to bridge between anti-fascist activists and the black abolitionist movement, I think the views expressed by Elucid are fascinating. The term ally is totally fucked up. Democrats who vote for mass incarceration candidates use the term. I think it’s important that Elucid brings it up because he really is articulating an almost black nationalist view that you can’t simply claim ally-ship. Furthermore, the use of internet music critic Anthony Fantano’s voice saying “blackness” articulates how conversations about the role of black music have been opened up to white people and how strange that is. As I mentioned before, the mostly liberal white press has lauded people like Kendrick Lamar for explorations of blackness and identity. I suppose I have trouble

Milo and Elucid, courtesy of the artists’s Bandcamp

with Kendrick Lamar and a lot of other mainstream “woke” rappers because I don’t see much of their music as overtly political. Explorations of identity are fine, but I’m skeptical of them as being harbingers of revolutionary change. The first really political album that I listened to was “let’s get free” by dead prez. It was a pan-African socialist call for action with lines about “throwing molotovs at the precinct” and “organizing the hood under I-ching banners”, very different from Kendrick’s work. I’m still a fan of Kendrick’s work but I don’t think his message (I’m still not sure what it is despite all of the editorials trying to tell me) is a message of black revolution in that Milo’s is.

Discussion of black militancy is a particular, albeit subtle, theme that Milo

discusses frequently. Milo raps significantly less about black political goals but he still understands his role as a black poet. I think particularly what was interesting about Milo’s album were his verses regarding black militancy. Elucid and Milo rap about how “The best fertilizer is the plantation owner’s foot.” This line, however, subtle inspires visions of slave revolt, dead slave owners and a new beginning with the slave master’s body being used to fertilize the plants. One of the songs, “’98 gewehr,” is a type of gun. He raps about how he is in the city by vesper or evening with the ’98 Gewehr. This inspires imagery of black urban rebellions with rifles. Nostrum Grocers “is spawning connoisseurs of machetes... black brilliance” according to Milo. They are building black militants (with dual weapons of black pride/machetes) with their verses. They aren’t to be messed with.

Milo discusses how “you lack resilience and it show,” and he may be referring to fellow radicals or the opposing white supremacists. His lyrics about the black American gun club cement his militancy: “Black American Gun Club / And in the back is a pool / Your baby’s too young / Get them babies swimming / There’s a black American gun club / And in the back is a pool / If you baby’s too young you can / Free swimming lessons in the back / Don’t give me no money” First, the idea of a black American gun club is inspiring to any young black radical with a historical knowledge of black liberation movements. It evokes visions of the Panthers and milo emphasizes the need to return to form. I think that the following lines about the free swimming are actually more interesting. According to the lies of white supremacy, black people don’t swim. In reality, black folks don’t swim because pools were segregated. However, there’s a pool in the back of the Black American Gun Club. It matters that Milo is talking about a pool because he is envisioning a center that subverts white supremacy by training in self defense and providing free swimming lessons. This is liberatory praxis. Milo is challenging the listener or even himself to engage in praxis to build this future.

I am excited for the next release from these folks. I can’t wait for what they have in store for us. We need more black militant music. I think it is appropriate that they are underground rappers because they are building an alternative radical culture.u

Yaeji, courtesy of @chesterburrrd

He’s not Frank Ocean, he’s Choker

REVIEW

With “Honeybloom,” Michigan’s enigma stakes his claim

by Tiyé Pulley

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t’s impossible to reference Choker without discussing his enigmatic persona—a carefully constructed savant from Michigan who subtly dropped one of the best produced independent pop records of last year. “Peak,” a dense and lush self-produced exploration of Choker’s wide vocal range and technical expertise, received critical acclaim from a number of media outlets. It also received a fair share of comparisons to Frank Ocean’s “Blonde,” which isn’t surprising considering Choker’s knack for triplet heavy mumble-singing, scattered voice message samples, and intense beat switch-ups. Amidst this reception, Choker has stayed fairly quiet, with only an interview with underground music blog Pigeons & Planes and a handful of Reddit fans to show for his efforts. No tweets, no Instagram, and no live shows.

While nothing new, this kind of dedication to being incognito is especially remarkable in an age where most artists rely on social media clout for exposure. Choker’s silence has only added to his mythos, strengthening his cult-like following, and allowing him the space to work on his follow up project—“Honeybloom.”

“Honeybloom” cover art, courtesy of nothingmag.tv

It’s tempting to write “Honeybloom” off as another “Blonde” rip-off—or tribute piece—but it’s neither of these. Despite remarkable similarities to Frank’s signature croon, Choker has his own distinct voice.

He lilts between falsetto cries and backing vocals before settling into deeply muttered spoken word raps—tangents, really—before crescendoing back into impassioned refrains. This kind of pattern is reflected through most of the tracks on the project,

with Choker ripping through one emotional state and dragging the listener back into another with distinct and playful visual imagery. “Drift,” the opener track, establishes the album with its lush and bubbly production, which later gets stripped back to a repeated, raw claim: “I’ma do me, I got new goals, I got new goals, I got new goals.” “Honeybloom” is not “Peak,” it’s not “Blonde,” it’s not Frank—it’s Choker, settling into his self-created sound.

“Honeybloom” booklet, courtesy of choker.cc

The 14 tracks cover Choker’s dealings with stardom—or lack thereof—and his struggle to establish self-identity in the wake of critical acclaim and expectation.

With additional production by Michael Uzowuru and Jeff Kleinman (of Little Dragon), both of whom have worked with Frank Ocean and Kevin Abstract, Honeybloom nestles into the kind of production we expect from self-affirming emotional black pop musicians. Because Choker is working with producers who also collaborate with his most-compared contemporaries, it may very well seem that there’s no attempt to break from the comfort zone of ethereal R&B/rap/pop. But with Choker’s own touch, this sound becomes distinct in its own right.

Tracks like “Starfruit NYC” exemplify his ability to vocally layer a catchy, repetitive chorus, incorporating a highpitched chipmunk autotune over his dreary, slurred mantra “New York is a airport with no walls, never pop the bubble.” This sound becomes incorporated into a pulsating instrumental that thumps into gear with each repetition of the chorus, blooming into bigger and brighter synths before retreating back into blank, white noise by the end. Over these spacey instrumentals,

Choker has the room to explore his feelings without saying too much. Understatement is key, and each production switch-up fills whatever emotional fog Choker conjures with crisply crescendoing bliss.

A number of tracks, like “Arboretum,” play with Choker’s romantic and familial relationships. His lyrical ability is subtle yet profound: “We smoking power in your father’s den, I think it’s weird your father has a den, my father got an apartment where I haven’t been since who knows when.”

While many of Choker’s scattered musings work as clever one-liners—“at the DMV, thinking this would be the worst place to die” (from “Daisy”)—he often aims with each song to build an emotional punch as the music works with him. “Daisy,” the album closer, implores the listener with its whispered introduction over light but resonant chords: “It’s not coming as simply as I’d like/When I’m speaking, you listen, but don’t let me off the hook/Offer perspective before answer.” Choker’s pulls us through another episode in his world, as the instrumental builds into 808s, hi-hats, and an orchestral synth with auto-tuned vocals. It’s almost as if he’s trying to get the listener to let him off, distracting from the quiet poet-

Choker, courtesy of Pigeons & Planes

ry with increasingly complex production.

But by the end this all gets stripped back again, and when the line hits again “don’t let me off the hook,” it only rings more true.

This approach can at times seem formulaic, but Choker refines this pattern so well it’s hard to even notice changes in the tracklist. “Honeybloom” offers a seamless series of majestic highs and sulking downs.

Despite no clear resolution to the journey, it seems like an assurance that this album is far from Choker’s last creative effort. If it takes another year or two of total isolation, it’s worth it. Choker can come and go whenever he wants. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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MOVIES & TV Ms. Incredible smashes the glass ceiling

REVIEW

Gender trouble in Pixar’s newest release

by Kat Capossela

F

ourteen years. For fourteen years Pixar Animation Studio made our generation wait for the return of Elastigirl and Jack-Jack. In that time, Apple released 18 different models of the iPhone. NASA discovered water on Mars. Justin Bieber got engaged. In that time, even we, Pixar’s faithful OG fans, achieved a lot. We graduated middle and high school and many of us gave an arm and a leg in order to attend a decent college. Now we’re semi-fledged adults. So, if you saw “The Incredibles 2” over the summer, congratulate yourself.

You demonstrated a level of loyalty to an animation studio that Trump couldn’t demonstrate to any of his three wives.

Needless to say, we went through a lot, and so did Pixar. They taunted us by ending the original 2004 film with the wild moleman cliffhanger. So, we waited. They tested our confidence in their empire by dropping unfortunately bland movies like “The Good Dinosaur” and “Brave.” They vandalized their legacy by releasing mildly regrettable follow ups to “Cars,” “Monsters Inc.,” and “Cars” again. Throughout these mini-catastrophes, Pixar also delivered homeruns like “Ratatouille” and “Inside Out.” Pixar put us through hell with such inconsistency. But, like all good fans, we stayed faithful. After a decade and a half of pent-up anticipation, we shelled out with $180 million opening week of their newest release.

Again, congratulations.

The booming box office sales also reflect the quality of the film. Offering an excitingly paced and humor-filled reflection of a modern day family, “The Incredibles 2” fits snugly next to Pixar’s other successful franchise repeats, like “Toy Story 2” and “3,” (“Finding Dory,” maybe). In the two-hour flick—Pixar’s longest to date—Elastigirl borrows the spotlight from Mr. Incredible, who is not entirely comfortable with the role reversal. Now, he manages domestic affairs while his wife brings home the bacon.

Pixar craftily navigates the intricacies of this 21st century situation; we watch Bob’s emotional and physical struggle with being a stay-at-home parent. He can’t keep up with Violet’s high school boy turmoil, Jack-Jack’s 46

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xxxxxxxx SPOILERS BELOW xxxxxxxxx wacky sleeping habits, and Dash’s new math homework (“I don’t know that way! Why would they change math? Math is math!”).

Meanwhile, Elastigirl is kicking ass.

Sponsored by wealthy sibling duo, Winston and Evelyn Deavors, Elastigirl must save

her city from Screenslaver, a super villain who uses technological device screens to hypnotize their victims. Before she even meets this mysterious figure, Elastigirl saves a train from derailing, an ambassador from a crashing helicopter, and she tracks down the villain’s lab (all of this is televised and watched at home by her itchingly tense husband, Mr. Incredible). While zipping in and out of traffic to catch the runaway train, Elastigirl finds time to take Dash’s call about the location of his high-tops. Afterwards, she checks in with the civilians on the train, which Bob failed to do in his train showdown in the first film. She genuinely cares; she doesn’t just save the day for the fame, but for the integrity behind her work.

Illuminating the rise of Elastigirl makes “Incredibles 2” a feminist film. Only “Finding Dory” and “Brave” also boast a powerful female lead, but the context of “Incredibles 2” sets it apart. Unlike the protagonists

of the former two movies, Mrs. Incredible does not need to prove herself or struggle with fragility. Here, Mrs. Incredible is not a goofy fish suffering from memory loss or a princess working to undo a terrible mistake. She is a superhero. She is powerful, badass, and a wonderful person. She no longer fights against the patriarchy—because there isn’t one in her book.

Easily passing the Bechdel test, “Incredibles 2” also exhibits strong female dialogue.

Elastigirl’s conversations with the other female leads Evelyn Deavors (read that name with an “eeee” not “eh” for a spoiler) and Voyd (another female super) are about their work and their goals, not men. Evelyn reveals she’s the brains behind her family’s billion-dollar company, while her brother is just the pretty face. Much like Shuri from “Black Panther,” she is the one designing all the modern gadgets for Elastigirl and the tech genius behind the villain Screenslaver.

Evil(yn) aside, she takes over the traditionally male character of a computer genius.

By breaking away from traditional gender roles, she bonds with Elastigirl: a beautiful example of empowered women empowering other women. And at the end of the film, even our boy-crazed Violet leaves her dream man at the movie theater to go save the world. There is hope for us all.

In addition to championing women in a contemporary manner, “Incredibles 2” offers viewers a reflective note on contemporary technology. Screenslavers’ ability to hypnotize anyone and control anything— citizens on a street, a high-speed train, Mr. and Mrs. Incredible—highlights our societies deeply ingrained reliance on technology. Everywhere we go, we use it. Everywhere we go, we see it. It’s inescapable, and the exceptionally intelligent Evelyn wields the abundance of screens to her advantage. Our country has allowed the tech industry to expand into our everyday lives in pursuit of convenience and efficiency, while also understating the potential misuse of such newfound power. Screenslaver is nothing short of Big Brother, harnessing recent technological advancements to promote an evil agenda and strip citizens

of their agency. Hypnotism is an extreme example of this, yes, but isn’t a far cry from the immense misuses of power that come from the technological revolution. It’s an issue, like the lack of strong female leads in cinema, that our beloved animation studio

pushes our society to address.

Where does this leave us? Will we see an “Incredibles 3” before we die? According to director Brad Bird in an interview with “EW”, “If past is prologue, it’ll be another 14 years—and a lot of people will proba-

bly need oxygen to make a third one.” So, don’t hold your breath. Maybe by that time, we will be bringing our kids to the movie theater. Or space theater. Or maybe you’ve smashed your screens out of fear for the next Screenslaver.

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Wishing for Apocalypse Now

REVIEW

Anomie in Sundance fave, “Min Börda”

by Josh Geselowitz

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iki Lindroth Von Bahr’s 15 minute short film “Min Börda” (The Burden) is an amalgamation of multiple genres typically used for younger audiences: the animation and the musical—not to mention an all-animal cast. Upon close examination, the award-winning Swedish film shown at festivals like Sundance and Cannes offers a depressing look into the disconnectedness and isolation of the 21st century workplace.

The film examines four workplaces along a single stretch of highway whose animal inhabitants are faced with escalating challenges. All of the animals carry a burden; all of them are isolated. Fish, who reside in the hotel, are lonely and without love because they fail to meet societal expectations. Pigs, tasked with cleaning a fastfood chain after hours, tap dance to avoid the boredom and monotony of working a service job. Monkeys in a call center lament that they, too, have dreams that are being held down by an oppressive work schedule. A dog working at a grocery store describes a nightmare he dreamt the night prior - [briefly describing the dream] - only to realize he’s living that nightmare. Simultaneously to the animals working at their jobs, the stretch of highway they occupy is drifting into the void of space. The apocalypse is coming.

The film presents a situation in which the animals have lost control of their lives.

The monkeys in the call center sing about the product they sell, almost like they are reading off their script: “Great prices, no exclusions!” But they are in an awkward situation: they must understand the situation and problems of potential buyers in order to sell to them, but none of the customers want to understand the lives of the monkeys. This leads the monkeys to sing out, “We have dreams too!” The monotony of their jobs combined with the isolation of having only one-sided conversations leads to their proclamation that “life is slipping by.” They have lost agency over their lives, an idea reinforced by the dog working as a shelfer in the supermarket, who sings about a nightmare where the items he stacks immediately fall

off the shelves.

Sonically, the film is beautiful. Whereas many songs are often filled to the brim with instrumentals and voice, the soundtrack to the film is best characterized by its spaciousness. The soundtrack has little instrumentation, but rather only a few occasional chimes of bells and quiet autotuned Swedish vocals.

This emptiness matches the muted, melancholy tone of the film as a whole. Interestingly enough, the loudest, most full part of the soundtrack occurs while the island floats into the void of space. If the spaciousness and calmness of the music is meant to represent the monotony and dullness of the everyday lives of the animals, then the fullness and richness of the melody must represent the excitement of moving into the void.

“Min Börda” is not a musical celebrating our ability to turn mundane situations into joyous ones. The animals try that. The pigs’ and monkeys’ dances are accompanied by a brief interlude of a more traditional musical score, yet both scenes end on a low. The pigs shoulders slouch after they examine the mess they have made during their dance.

While they were able to briefly escape the reality of their job, it was at the cost of their work. Now, they must spend more time cleaning up. When the monkeys finish their dance, they awkwardly hold their final pose for a few seconds, not knowing what to do.

They are fully aware of how unusual what they just did—breaking into song in the middle of a workday–was. That’s the realism of the film. Singing and dancing offer a brief distraction from monotony and isolation, but the escape is always temporary. Nothing fundamentally changed.

It is only when a sinkhole emerges in the ground that the dog’s spirit begins to lift.

“Min Börda” presents a situation in which the apocalypse is not terrifying but relieving. At this point all animals together break into chorus singing, “one day our burden will be lifted” while the camera pulls back to reveal that their small strip of road is in fact not part of a larger world but is merely a small island floating through the void of space. Are the animals aware of this? Will the burden be ended because they are able to escape their low wages, their crushing

hours, and their personal flaws which prevent them from finding love? Or will floating off into the void lift their burdens? Is that the only way the burden can be lifted?

“Min Börda” paints a picture of despair by offering no solutions; it only suggests that there are no easy, immediate fix-me-ups.

The animals, just like us, cannot just ignore their problems. Real action needs to be taken, and when it’s not, all there is to do is wait for some miracle (or in the animal’s case, an apocalypse). This is not always easy or even possible. The animals, once again just like us, need money to live. Perhaps the film falls flat in that it does not provide an answer. But I think that’s what makes the film powerful. It’s a tough question that I, much of Swarthmore, and most people have to grapple with. Do we pursue our passions or more ordinary and financially stable lives?

Min Börda depicts those who have chosen the latter option, and they don’t seem happy with their decision. But would it even be possible for the animals to pursue their passions? The pigs like to dance, and the monkeys like to sing, but there was no cabaret on their stretch of highway. Maybe Min Börda is a film for adolescents. It certainly taps into the fears of those growing up and deciding what to do with their lives. Disguised underneath the claymation animals and comedic singing are the fears of our generation.

“Min Börda” is a horror film—and a good one at that.

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