March 2019

T H E U N D E RG R A D UAT E M AG A Z I N E O F C O LU M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y, E S T. 1 8 9 0

THE BLUE AND WHITE Vol. XXV No. II

March 2019

Retaking Butler's Facade Students are reviving a late 80s protest in honor of Women’s History Month

What's Written and Said A conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen Also Ins

ide:

Black—The Bl

ue and

White starts its short fictio

n series

UFONOBONG UMANAH, CC '20, Editor-in-Chief ISAIAH BENNETT, CC '20, Managing Editor GABY EDWARDS, BC '21, Publisher GRACE ADEE, CC '22, Investigations Editor JACOB SNYDER, CC '20, Literary Editor ZOE METCALFE, CC '21, Online Editor EMILY WANG, CC '22, Online Editor SAHRA DENNER, CC '21, Senior Illustrator GIGI LEE, CC ' 22, Layout Editor ESMÉ ABLAZA, BC '20, Senior Editor JASMINE PARK, CC '20, Senior Editor RYAN MOHEN, CC '21, Senior Editor MALIA SIMON, CC '22, Senior Editor CASSIDY SATTLER, CC '20, Senior Editor MARY ELIZABETH DAWSON, BC '21, Senior Editor CAROLINE HURLEY, CC '19, Editor Emeritus Staff Writers Contributors AMAD ROSS, CC '22 BEATRICE DAISY SHLANSKY, CC'22 ANNIE ZAVITZ, BC '22 BENJAMIN DUBOW, CC'19 BANNON BEALL, BC '22 MADS KRISTY JENSEN, GS'19 MARK MARION GONDELMAN, NYU PhD BILLIE FORESTER, CC '22 DRAZEN MEDINA, CC '20 MATTHEW PETTI, CC'19 GABRIELLA FERRIGINE, CC '20 NICOLE KOHUT, CC '22 HANNAH LIBERMAN, CC '20 SEOWON LEE, CC'22 IONA TAN, CC '22 KATE IIDA, BC '19 Staff Illustrators KARA SCHECHTMAN, CC '19 AMANDA BA,CC '20 MICHAEL GAO, CC '22 JENNIFER ALLEN, CC'20 NORA MCSORLEY, CC'20 HELEN BECKER, CC '22 SANTIAGO COSTA PEUSER, CC '21 JULIA COBB, CC '21 TAMAR VIDRA, CC '22 MWANDEYI KAMWENDO, CC '22 SAM NEEDLEMAN, CC ' 22 KASSIA KARRAS, BC '22 ROSE KUAN, CC'22 KATE STEINER, CC '22 LEA BROUDO, SEAS '21 REA RUSTAGI, SEAS '22 SUSAN STEINFELD, BC '22 KELLIE ZHAO, CC'19

THE BLUE AND WHITE Vol. XXV

FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS

No. II

Columns

4 Blue Book 6 Blue Notes 8 Campus Characters 10 At Two Swords' Length 26 M easure for Measure 33 Digitalia 35 Campus G ossip

Beatrice Schlansky

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Features A R ace Against Time At the Library Decades of important archival media needs to make the transition to the digital age.

Mads Kristy Jensen

14 Black

The Blue and White starts its short fiction series with a story

about scents, perfume, and love

Drazen Medina

18 Control the Situation

Columbia can take a direct role in ensuring the safety of stu-

dents taking scheduled substances

Annie Zavitz

19 Ending the E xception

Professors discuss amending the 13th Amendment to

remove a troublesome clause

Ufon Umanah

20 The Long Game

Columbia students have debated Israel - Palestine for

decades, with little progress

Samuel Needleman Matthew Pettit

22 What’s Written and Said

A conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen 28 From Genocide’s A ftermath to a Literature PhD

How one graduate student’s experience in the Middle East

informs their scholarship

Nicole Kohut

30 R etaking Butler’s Facade

Students are reviving a late 80s protest in honor of Women’s

History Month

Kate Iida

32 Beyond Normal

Katie Kitamura discusses writing where the typical becomes atypical

theblueandwhite.org

f

Cover by Kate Steiner

a

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR At press time, I have no idea who the Bacchanal headliner is going to be. And yet, I’m still going to go.

Sure, I could probably spend my time better in Butler, browsing through the archives (p. 12), listening to a podcast (p. 5), or going through my seminar notes (p.

4). Columbia has as much an idea of how to run a concert (p. 18) as it does a housing lottery (p. 10) or how not to look dated (p. 28). And I’m probably better known on campus for preferring to sit through exhausting student council discussions (p. 20) and political lectures on both sides (p. 4, 19) than rocking out loud.

However, that focus on the political doesn’t capture everything about Columbia. Well, it misses what we do abroad (p. 30, 9), but it misses the dancers (p. 8), the writers (p 22, 32), and yes, the music, that make the years spent here not just memorable, but enjoyable.

Look, it’s one sanctioned night where the campus itself gets a day off, unlike the breaks where we flee campus. And while no one loses a head in this Bacchanal (cf. The Bacchae), it’s a time to disassociate with the academic and get in touch with our chill, relaxed selves before we return to applications and theses and finals.

But we’re still energetic about the performance, and being with friends, and the hope that Bollinger’s weather machine isn’t in the mood for an April flurry.

If you read one piece from this issue, read our first Shortcut (p. 14). It’s a new section we’re introducing to The Blue and White along with our Measure for Measure (p. 26), in line with our dual identity as a literary and journalistic magazine, and to say that we take both of those realms seriously. And in the same vein, I should take my personal time as seriously as I do my academic time.

So I’ll be at Bacchanal this year, rocking along to my meticulously researched playlist of hit songs and drab news (p. 33).

— Ufonobong Umanah

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TRANSACTIONS ARRIVALS A New, University Sustainability Plan Barnard’s New Initiatives For Supporting First Generation Low-Income Students Ethan O’Neal, A.K.A Oswald Fresh, as the Bacchanal Student Opener Robert Kraft, to Suspicious Massage Parlours DEPARTURES The Celibate Order of Undergraduate TAs The Integrity of Your Housing Group Desperate Student Hopes of a Snow Day

Come Again?!

“Just dance: Do you feel awkward going to parties because you can’t shake it like the rest of them? These five simple dance moves will help you impress all of your friends!”

— Overheard

The Blue and White

BLUE BOOK

Fourteen Innovative Styles of Titling Your Emails to Get Your Academic Counselor to Actually Open Them Are you tired of your Academic Counselor ignoring your emails no matter how thoughtfully-worded and important they are? The problem might be as simple as not choosing an attention-grabbing title. Try these fifteen new subject lines and clickbait your counselor into tending to your needs: 1. The Aeropostale Sale: You’ll Love This: My New Problems Are Here Plus 10 More From Last Season 2. The Right-Wing Youtube Clickbait: My Grades WRECKING my CryBaby Mental Health Watch as it Gets OBLITERATED 3. The Buzzfeed Clickbait: I Tried Switching to Dance Major for One Semester: Here’s What Happened 4. The College Admissions Office (AKA Insert First Name): Andrew: I Have a Question For You. 5. The Tragedy Juke-Out: I’m So Sorry to Have to Tell You This 6. The Irrefutable Tempter: Puzzle Inside 7. The Sarah Who’s Only 9 Miles Away: Wanna Meet Up?

8. The Appeal to Emotion: Hope You’re Doing Okay 9. The Personal Attack: At This Point, and I Think Many People Would Agree with Me, I’m Having a Huge Issue with Your Incompetence as a Personality Trait 10. The Sappho: but frankincense [ help ] 11. The Concerning Sexual Undertone: The Fire Inside Me Burns Today 12. The Mysterious Allure: Found a Thumbtack Today…

13. The Fuckboy They Haven’t Heard From in Months Who Just Lost his FWB: Hey Stranger Haha 14. The Lie: I Just Figured Out Exactly What My Course of Study Should Be

POSTCARD FROM MORNINGSIDE

March 2019

Postcard by Jennifer Allen

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BLUE NOTES

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he Columbia University College Republicans havemust stirred the most controversy per clubmember capita of any campus group. But their recent event featuring noted never-Trumper Bill Kristol was so tame that the cop stationed outside Schermerhorn 614 would have been more efficiently deployed as a guard for my Frontiers of Science instructor as she administered exams to irate firstyears in that same room just a few months prior.

Kristol, a neoconservative standard-bearer who founded The Weekly Standard, set out to address the “unusual situation we’re in.” He seemed intent to avoid defending his center-right critique of the president—his position, he intimated, was quite clear. He chose instead to conjure and pontificate on the ghosts of elections past, present, and future.

Audience members who watch CNN, where Kristol often appears as a commentator, could practically sing along to his predictable 2016 recap: both parties grew out of touch with their constituents, Trump tapped into something visceral, and the rest is history. Contrary to the dogma that seems to drive many of his cable-news colleagues, however,

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Kristol, with a cocked head and furrowed brows, made the case that things in Washington really aren’t as horrible as Trump’s ardent supporters and opponents alike often make them out to be.

“The Republican tradition is a good one. It deserves to move forward,” Kristol said, turning to 2020. He expressed concern about Trumpism’s lasting impact on American institutions, but he was enthusiastic about the GOP’s potential to cleanse their collective palette of pumpkintinted poison and enter the new decade afresh.

Many members of the smal audience—they couldn’t have filled more than five rows of the lecture hall—nodded in agreement. One student, seated in the front row, challenged Kristol’s assertion that Trump represents a Republican Party with “a shrinking coalition.” A left-leaning reporter leaned forward in his seat, awaiting a debate, then retreated as Kristol leveled a cogent reply. Immediately following the talk, the club’s board members gathered around Kristol for a photo-op. No hard feelings were visible.

— Sam Needleman

I

n a seminar called the “world summit on populism”

by Professor Bernard E. Harcourt of Columbia University, academics from several institutions came together to discuss the book For a Left Populism, written by University of Westminster professor Chantal Mouffe. In her book — which was intended as a political intervention rather than an academic text — Mouffe argues that the left should construct a strategic populist organization. She defines this as a type of grassroots political organization which would be a “broad coalition of all those who have been left out… not just the working class but also women, minorities, LGBTQ, immigrants, and other

Illustration by Rea Rustagi

The Blue and White

BLUE NOTES marginalized populations,” Harcourt explained.

The seminar was organized as part of the Praxis seminar series by the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical thought. Four of the five main panelists present critiqued Mouffe´s argument in some respect. Columbia Professor Seyla Benhabib said she was “deeply skeptical” of Mouffe´s argument due to the way in which populist movements, especially in Turkey, have attacked high courts and other institutions of democracy, leading to autocratic regimes. Columbia Professor Jean Cohen, also doubted the feasibility of Mouffe’s proposal, arguing that even left populism cannot avoid the trend towards authoritarianism inherent within populist movements. Professor Didier Fassin of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton further criticized Mouffe for failing to include a discussion of historical left populist movements in Latin America, which he said would have lent more nuance to her argument.

The conversation turned to current political movements in the United States. Several professors in attendance, including Professor Fassin, mentioned Donald Trump as an example of a rightwing populist. The scholars attending debated whether Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez could be considered left-wing populists, though they formed no consensus on this. On the whole, the scholars present agreed that Mouffe´s proposal was flawed: left populism of the sort she describes will not halt the rise of right populism, they said. The type of political organization which could stop right wing populism has yet to be discussed.

—Kate Iida

Y

ou may have spotted their space meme flyers around campus. But you may not know that in Columbia Space Initiative’s new podcast “This is Rocket Science,” these two first-year engineers guide their audiences on a journey through the cosmos from a DIY studio in their John Jay floor lounge.

Henry Manelski, SEAS ‘22, pitched the podcast to the board of the Columbia Space Initiative (CSI) as soon as he joined the board last fall. Manelski, an avid podcast listener and space fanatic, hoped to spread his love of astronomical phenomena to a more general audience. “I wanted to reach out to new people who hadn’t necessarily been involved in space before,” he said.

Manelski, along with his friend and co-host David Tibbits, SEAS’22, accomplish

March 2019

this goal by weaving expert interviews, strange and surprising space facts, and audience questions into their biweekly 30-minute episodes.

Since they started recording last October, they’ve had some pretty impressive guest appearances, including Columbia professor and former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino. “He has actually been in space a couple of times,” Manelski noted.

But the podcast is no one-sided lecture: the questions are often just as important as the answers. Tibbits, though not initially a space enthusiast, is an award-winning rock collector; he chimes in with questions on geology that add an additional layer to the program.

Another crucial element is the “live studio audience” —people from their floor who wander into the lounge to listen to the recording process. “When they sit in for five minutes, suddenly they’ll think of a question,” Manelski said. “And I love those questions because they’re always so…. to me, as someone who has dedicated my life to space, I think, wait, I never thought about it that way. It helps me make interesting connections.”

Starting in March, they’re going to start getting questions from an even wider audience.

The podcast is now distributed to New York City public schools through CSI’s partnership with the Sophie Gerson Healthy Youth Foundation. “We have a decent amount of elementary school teachers who assign it as homework,” Manelski said. “As of a few days ago, the kids started to send us questions, and we’re compiling them so we can answer.”

It’s all about bringing the magic of space to people who might not think about it every day. As Tibbits explained, the study of space isn’t all about equations and facts. “We need people to write descriptions, write stories,” said Tibbits, “to inspire the imagination.”

—Grace Adee

Illustration by Kate Steiner

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Campus Characters You might not know the following figures—but you should. In Campus Characters, The Blue & White introduces you to a handful of Columbians who are up to interesting and extraordinary things and whose stories beg to be shared. This issue, we bring you two people with interests in their Columbia class pages. If you’d like to suggest a Campus Character, send us an email at bweditors@columbia.edu..

Michelle Shen

“

I would say my music falls into the singer-songwriter genre,” Michelle Shen began, sitting across from me in the dimly lit back room of Max Café, sipping on an iced chai latte. “…That genre is defined by presenting a certain narrative in a very honest way through rawness and simplicity, and I feel like that's what a lot of my music is… at the core.”

Michelle, a senior at Barnard College, writes, records, and performs her own music in venues around New York City. She started performing when she arrived at college, and spent much of her first year in Morningside Heights performing in open mics on and off campus. In the past few years she has begun performing in shows around New York City booked through Artery Showcases, a grassroots booking platform for up and coming New York City musicians. She has performed in more odd-ball environments than she can count, and most notably, a six-day long summer music festival organized by Brooklyn Wildlife, the largest indie arts collective in Brooklyn. Michelle also releases

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her music on Spotify, under the artist name Miesh.

Michelle places specific emphasis on personal connection in her music, and she strives to bring this out in her live shows. “Shows are about connecting to the people while they´re there,” she explained enthusiastically. In her most recent live performances, Michelle has started improvising, using the last section of her act to create songs with the crowd. She invites the audience to give her some words, and builds a song around those contributions.

“Improvisation… is just in the moment and it only exists in the moment and then it´s gone…. That is a means of connection to people,” she said excitedly, recounting a memory of the first time she improvised at a show and had to create a song on the spot using the words elephant, ferris wheel, and isolation.

Before seriously pursuing her passion for music, Michelle swam competitively and danced. She spoke about how both activities, dance especially, have influenced and helped to shape the way that she creates music today.

“I used to dance very seriously,” Michelle explained, “… I did ballet for 12 years (and) I did all these different kinds of dance like jazz, tap, (and) modern… I´ve always loved watching dance and being a part of it, so music has always been tied to the movement and to the body and to the whole spiritual experience of being in a flow.”

Michelle balances her life as a New York City musician with taking classes and completing the last semester of her sociology major. “I love looking at the way that social systems and structures intersect with people's lives, (especially) the dimensions of race, gender, class but also more complex things that come with that, in terms of who has privilege, and power dynamics in situations,” she said, her eyes lighting up with excitement. Though Michelle said she loves analyzing social and political race dynamics in an academic context, she rarely brings

Illustration by Julia Cobb

The Blue and White

any explicit discussion of these topics into her music.

She does view the two as interconnected, however.

Her work in sociology has reinforced her belief in the importance of human connection, which she strives to create through her music. Though she focuses on more personal, emotional experiences, especially surrounding love and relationships in her music, she views her emphasis on honest emotion as another type of social and political statement; a political statement that can empower women.

“Love and desire are political,” she said.

“Men are given the space to philosophize about love and intellectualize about it, and when they intellectualize about love it´s suddenly valid. (But) when women want to talk about relationships, it’s viewed as just being a girl, just being a woman, being irrational, being kind of weak. Love is a profound force… that really connects people on a deep level.”

—Kate Iida

Phoebe Forlenza

P

hoebe Forlenza immediately strikes one as an easy-going and friendly person. She credits her parents with teaching her to show “respect and empathy” towards people from all walks of life, a lesson she embodies in each day. After she graduates from Barnard in May, Forlenza intends to work for at least two years and then—if it should prove necessary in her mission to help the global community—obtain a law degree.

Forlenza transferred to Barnard College as a sophomore in the fall of 2016, seeking a university and city that could provide her with more opportunities to engage with political activism.

She briefly joined the student government, working to help other transfer and international students on campus, as well as the Columbia Democrats.

In the spring of her junior year, she traveled to Milan where she helped people at the Comune di Milano’s Center of World Cultures, creating lasting change in the lives of refugees, and migrants who benefitted from her Italian translation skills, as well as her dedication to personalized support.

Early on, by virtue of growing up with an Italian father and an American mother, Forlenza developed a global world view; but whereas before she had always evaluated herself “in the context of American social equities,” her experience in Milan placed her “in a kind of a realm of migration” that challenged her to consider practical solutions for those who did not have the same advantage of being white, financially secure, or American.

March 2019

Her job at the center revolved mainly around helping migrants explain their situations to the Italian social workers, as well as explaining the visa application process and their housing situation to the migrants themselves. While fluent in Italian, Forlenza occasionally struggled with technical words, accents, and communicating with migrants who spoke neither Italian nor English. The immense responsibility of her job—at times, her translation was a determining factor in whether a migrant could stay in Italy— was an additional layer of stress and difficulty. Yet she never let it deter her from returning to work.

One particular case stands out for Forlenza: that of a Nigerian migrant seeking asylum in Italy.

The man ended up departing the center in open frustration and anger, leaving Forlenza disheartened. She explained, however, that this “absolutely stressful” exchange served not only to deepen her appreciation for her work, but to reveal the “dynamic” complexities of social justice. The poor outcome, she further clarified, was not the single fault of the social worker, the migrant, herself, or even the Italian government: “It was a crazy combination of all those things,” creating a mess for which she struggles, even now, to think of a solution. Since learning to accept the rarity of “simple solutions” , Forlenza remains no less committed to contributing to the global community. She envisions a robust career working alongside politicians and advocacy groups to help protect the vulnerable.

Nearing the end of our interview, Forlenza offers one final piece for her fellow students, particularly those studying abroad: “I would say try to push yourself out of your comfort zone in every way you can. Although it’s easy, and it seems fun to just fall in with the rest of the crowd…. Meet new people.

Go places. Go to new cities. Go to new places on the weekends, but also find your own outlet. Find something, whether it’s service learning, volunteering, or anything else that gives you the opportunity to grow.”

—Jennifer Allen

Illustration by Helen Becker

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AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N GT H

Will You Take W

ith you? My roommate of already the past encrusted East Campus. Whoopdeefuckindoo. Can three years? Of course! How could I not want I offer you a hot plate in these trying times? to double with you? Again! For the fourth time! As Ugh, sorry for being such a cynic — you seniors! know that’s how I deal with my emotions. Yeah

I mean I won’t lie, I really had my sights set yeah. Emotional incommunicability. For a Columbia on a single in our EC suite next year -- after all, you student. Groundbreaking. know I recently decided to start treating my love life What I really mean to say is thank you. For more seriously since we’ve reached the threshold of being the person I’ve shared the last three years of acceptable ages for becoming engaged. But no, it’s my life with, the person who’s ushered me into adultso fine! Just expect the ‘shared’ aspect of our shared hood (literally, you dragged my lifeless carcass home living space to also apply to the marriage potential I after unlimited margs on my 21st last weekend), and glean from Tinder and plan to have over regularly. the person who I will, God willing, probably see very

Really though, it’s totally okay. There are infrequently for the rest of my life. It is you my, uh just so many upsides to living in a double as a senior. friend, who I get to spend the waning days of artificial I even made a list of the pros! True, life in academia with before headit’s substantially shorter than the list ing out in to the loneliness of single of cons that I had prepared in my adulthood in New York City.

Notes app for when this inevitably And so here we are, united in happened, but here they both are: solidarity, at the beginning of the

I get a built in friend! Sure, end of our time at this gloriously godthat’s essentially been the case for the forsaken institution. On the precipast three years, but we’ve come so pice of braving, if not yet the real far from the painful icebreaker date world, the bass ackwards system that our moms set up for us at Hungarian is the housing lottery. And the time during NSOP. We’re basically insepwill come to face what lies beyond arable! How could we not be when 114th through 120th, because if you never leave the fucking room.

I’ve learned anything from this ffirmative Of course I don’t care at all. Your place it’s that goddamnit that time presence is so calming, especially will come and its name is: “I’m

By Gi Ferrigine when you excessively sleep fart durAn English Major With Minimal ing your three hour midday naps. to No Experience in Finance But And I’m sure I can look past all the times you ate my My Uncle’s Friend is the CEO So Please Hire Me gummy multivitamins (don’t think I didn’t know you So I Have Something to Tell to My Aunts at Family did this), if you can get over me texting you “That’s Parties Other Than That I Wrote for Columbia’s life. Or I guess death, lol” when you told me your dog Blue & White Magazine. Did I Mention I Went to died last year. Stanley, was it? Honestly though, it’s Columbia?” Yeah. like we’ve circumnavigated Columbia Housing all So when we are ready to take on the real over again, just to find that, big surprise, we’re get- world, the world where days start with weak coffee ting screwed over. But not by each other, silly. That’s and subway rides next to a guy telling you that his only 4 out of 7 days a week. By Big Alma — don’t cat is a wizard, and end with three PBR’s, leftover forget who your real enemies are.

Chinese, and really bad sex... at least we’ll be in it

We get to live in the oh so coveted, laun- together. And maybe that time around it’ll be in a dry lacking, hot n’ heavy party hosting, black mold studio apartment and not a 190 square foot cubicle.w

A

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Illustration by Mwandeyi Kamwendo

The Blue and White

AT T W O S W O R D S ’ L E N GT H

the Double?

I

really, really wish I could say yes. Like I’d literally use out of my neighbors’ ‘90s-Era hand-me-downs love for my every waking moment (minus those or the clothes I’ve “borrowed” from my grandma over when I’m dozing in Butler or running to class the years. Oh, don’t get too freaked out about the 10 minutes late) to be spent in the presence of air-quotes. It does make it look like I steal from my another human just as easily annoyed and strung grandma, doesn’t it. Don’t worry! She’s way too old out as me, but sadly, I think I have to decline. It’s to notice and honestly, who wore it better grandma? for your sake, really; I’m looking out for you. I’ll What can I say? I’m just your classic be the first to admit it, I can be a lot sometimes. old-soul. And you’re what, again? Pisces, You see, I have this weird thing. I don’t know right...I knew this was going to be tough. if there’s really a name for it per Also, just a heads up, I’m se, but it involves sleep screaming? starting to do this weekly purge It’s really not that big of a deal. I thing where I go 2 days–no guess if you’re cool with waking sleep, 5 days–all sleep. It’s like a up intermittently throughout the gradual cleansing experience; night thinking you’re next on the super rewarding. My goal, fingers chopping block in an ‘80s slasher crossed, is to get to a whole movie then yeah, no biggie. But week of no sleep. I feel like that some people don’t necessarily might not fit with your schedule, dig that. I know, I don’t get it though. You can totally try it with either. But hey, if you feel that me, but it might be tough for us. way too, I totally understand.

Gosh, when I put this all Hey, along the lines of together I sound like a total drag! movies, what’s your favorite again?

I’m really not the absolute worst Right, right, the sinking ship. to be around. But to live with?

Well, mine’s Die Hard and I have That’s debatable. I don’t mean to to watch it at least once a day. It be annoying and I know you don’t really just keeps these bland and really want to live with Sally #basic days interesting. And no, because she smells like raisins.

I’m not exaggerating the once It’s not that I have anything egative a day thing; if anything, I’m against you, honest. I would

By Nora May McSorley underestimating my tolerance for seriously love to fall asleep each all things Bruce Willis. So the night knowing your head is point I’m trying to make is: if we’re going to be exactly 10-feet away from mine and your shoes are roomies, you should probably try to get on board inching dangerously close to my side. And those with the whole Christmas-Eve-terrorist-take-over- accidental glances right as you’re taking your towel thing. It won’t be that hard once you’ve memorized off, god I’m going to miss those! But I have to put the thing line by line like me. It never gets old! my foot down. I don’t want to “figure it out later” If you’re somehow cool with all that stuff, and I don’t want to hear it will “all work out in the hopefully this stuff flies too! I am what some people end.” You’re not Gandhi and even if you were, I still would call a ‘compulsive sharer’. And by ‘share’ I wouldn’t want to room. I need my space this year. And mean I take it upon myself to borrow out of other yeah, I know you have a boyfriend and you’ve never people’s closets because I just assume they are doing had a single before and you beat me to dibs, but… the same with mine. Not that they would get much Fine, let’s flip a coin.w

N

March 2019

Illustration by Mwandeyi Kamwendo

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T H I S S PA C E I S N ' T M Y S PA C E

A Race Against Time At the Library Decades of important archival media needs to make the transition to the digital age.

By Beatrice Shlansky

I

t’s hard to imagine a time without access to media in a matter of seconds. However, before solid state hard drives and Google Drive, libraries kept anything involving audio or moving images -“Time Based Media”– on over thirty different storage and file devices, many of which are now obsolete. While libraries still hold onto such media, they don’t necessarily house the technology that can play or retrieve that media for viewing. Such technology becomes obsolete or difficult to maintain over time. As libraries have been discovering in recent years, they require a new archival process and cataloging system so this old media is not lost to the inevitable progression of time and technology.

Columbia may not have the resources of the Library of Congress, which has constructed separate facilities staffed with various engineers and equipment to work on the retrieval and uniformization of content. However, the university has recently undertaken a similar project, called the “Time Based Media Project,” which aims to complete the archival of some 77,000 items in nothing short of six years and millions of dollars in funding. However challenging, the process has sparked reform and provided insight into the way the library functions as an institution.

The rediscovered media holds incredible value

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for scholarship. As Sean Quimby, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library director recounts, these are “materials that exist nowhere else.” A recording of Robert Frost reading his work in 1933 or a

Illustration by Sahra Denner

The Blue and White

T H I S S PA C E I S N ' T M Y S PA C E Corso and Ezra Pound reading at Spoleto are just two examples of media highlights from the collections already. Items such Frank Lloyd Wright’s home videos, Edward W. Said papers, Tennessee Williams papers, or even media from the 1968 Columbia protests are all slated to be “unhidden” for use by faculty and students by the end of the project as well.

But how did Columbia get this much media?

Columbia’s archivists often acquire large collections from estates and other sources. But as Quimby notes, while archivists have tried to catalog what was coming in real time, there wasn’t always the infrastructure to record or preserve it. New collections and items would arrive as archivists acquired them, but without proper management techniques, the items piled up.

As a result of the pile-up, the collections are not only vast, but also disorganized. As Vice Provost and University Librarian Ann Thornton notes, the retrieval of media presents a disappointing process at times: “You never really know until you've actually digitized. We didn't know if there was anything at all on them until we sent them to the vendor to be digitized. And then what we got back was either blank, maybe it was never recorded on it.” Problems as simple as mislabeled or mislocated media can also deliver frustration and archival confusion.

Even worse, the media itself is deteriorating at an astonishing rate through a process archivists call “information loss.” Copying files into other formats can even result in a degradation of file integrity. Furthermore, certain file formats, such as magnetic media formats (i.e. audio cassettes, reel to reel tapes, etc.) are vulnerable to degradation. When degraded, these file formats produce a vinegar-type smell, and lose their ability to be recovered.

The academic value of the media, combined with its fragility, sets the stakes high for the project as a whole. “Our faculty really made it very clear to us that one of the most important contributions the library can make to the academic mission of the university is to let the world know what we have as quickly as possible,” Thornton recounts, “And the faculty have really encouraged us to speed up that process.”

Once the library is able to retrieve content off of obsolete media, the library then must find a way to get the information into an effective, accessible system. Choosing which mainstream file format to use is important, since the library must

March 2019

choose technology and file formats that will hopefully continue to be in use for years to come -- or else develop a way to change file formats with time.

Undergoing such a large-scale process requires that the library develop methods to handle any potential projects like this in the future. The library has developed new workflows that deal with handling incoming archives so no such backlog may ever accumulate again.

“It's not only important to preserve them, it's important to make them accessible, right?”

Thornton poses. To that end, the library has had to develop and create software that allowed for students and faculty to access the media with ease. Through a Carnegie Foundation of New York grant, the library was also able to build a synchronizer program.

This program allows for someone to watch or listen to media while following alongside an in-sync transcript. Researchers can then search transcripts and media with ease. Thornton also hints to later integration with courses in a future partnership with CUIT.

Columbia plans to send its media away to vendors who specialize in different types of file migration and media recovery. There is a hefty amount of and the project has required meticulous planning and funding. But between their good relationships with vendors and Columbia’s location, the “Time Based Media Project” seems that it will be completed on time, and will have a great impact on scholarship.

“This is a big project, but it’s very doable,” Thornton remarks. “It's stretching us in some new ways and we're really doing something I think is really quite important - the record of humankind.”w

In the first issue of volume XXV of The Blue and White, we reported in “We Don’t Have the Money” that Columbia was considering a plan to raise tuition by $600 a semester in order to cover the cost of textbooks. This information was incorrect. While student councils debated the proposal based on the $600 a semester figure, the proposal was actually to raise tuition by $600 a year, or $300 a semester. This number is closer to the number ESC felt more comfortable paying for– $200 a semester. We cannot verify how this number changes other parts of the proposal, but we’ll update you as soon as we get this information.

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T H E S H O RT C U T

Black The Blue and White starts its short fiction series with a story about scents, perfume, and love

By Mads Kristy Jensen The Blue and White strives to publish excellent creative writing alongside journalism and satire. As part of a continuing initiative to expand and deepen the magazine’s literary content, we will now publish student works of short fiction under the new The Shortcut section. If you would like to submit your short fiction of 2500 words or less for consideration, please send your work to Jacob Snyder, literary editor, at jbs2240@columbia.edu.

The first time I began to understand the power of scent was when I smelled Comme des Garçons fragrance, Black. It was late August in Los Angeles and I’d just been kicked out of the apartment I shared with my boyfriend because I’d nagged him too early in the morning. A few weeks back, he had learned that the beginning of our relationship overlapped with another Las Vegas fling.

“Do you still not trust me?” I asked, brushing his long tangled hair aside to reveal a set of big brown cow eyes.

“Let’s talk about it later...” He said.

“We’ve been living together for eight months and I feel you still resent me... I only want to know that you trust me, if you’ve forgiven me?”

He rolled over, groaning, “I’m not in the mood to talk about that right now.”

“But—“

“Leave!” he screamed, knocking over the side table we fought tooth and nail for at a swap meet.

For a moment, I lay there, clutching our grey duvet in a daze- and then he grabbed my ankles and pulled me off the bed.

My tailbone hit the floor first. Next came my head, which bounced off the wooden floor, making me see stars. I curled in on myself, crying. A pathetic little fetus watching him throw everything I ownedclothes, notebooks, plants, and grandmother’s jewelry- into jumbled piles. Everything was broken, in disarray.

I don’t know how long this took, I barely recall walking out to my stuffed up clown car, but I do remember turning on the ignition and reaching into a pile of cassette tapes I'd gotten for free from Circus of Books as it was shutting down. Pressing one into the stereo, John Lennon’s "Imagine" rang out. Imagine there's no heaven/It's easy if you try/No hell below

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us/Above us only the sky... I sat there, sobbing to this song in utter defeat- until something caught my eye.

In the midst of this pity party, a creature had hopped onto my steering wheel. Standing before me was a bright green praying mantis. Unmoving, I watched this thing. Could've sworn this thing looked right back at me. A showdown in hundred-degree heat, tape skipping in the background. Slowly a grin began to grow on the lower half of my face.

First hesitating at the side, then sauntering up to the center. And finally, beaming all over. This wise insect looked at me- no, watched over me- with an all-knowing calm.

It’ ll pass like it always does. Like the clouds, there’s always blue behind.

I wasn’t surprised when this bug spoke. This was in part due to the fragility of a mind weathered by rotten love, but also because I’m inclined to believe in ridiculous things. In my adolescence, I believed that refraining from premarital sex would earn me my own planet, one over which a future husband and I could reign over as god and goddess when we died, if we were righteous. Well into high school, I’d leave my window open in case Peter Pan came to whisk me away to Neverland. Three years later, at nineteen, it surprised no one when I fell in love with a man I’d met on Tinder, packed all I owned into two super-sized Costco garbage bags, hopped on a Greyhound bus, and drove twelve-hours from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles to pursue him.

I felt impossibly excited and grown up, leaving Utah at last. Of course, I realize now Itraded in one fantastical belief, Mormonism, for another: love.

“You’re wrong!” I told the mantis. “It’s all ending! I’ve got nowhere to live! No job, no friends. I should’ve never left home!”

Remember the sun. Leave the fucker behind.

The Blue and White

T H E S H O RT C U T

An irreverent gleam in the bug’s eyes as he hopped to the other side of the steering wheel. Gazing up at the window of my old apartment- one that was never really mine at all- I decided it was finally time to go, and so the mantis and I took off down Sunset Boulevard. I smoked, alternating between sobbing and smiling, while the mantis bobbed its head to John Lennon.

Over the last several months when there were other fights with my boyfriend and I didn’t know where to go or just felt plain lonely, I’d go to an all-women's AA meeting at Silver Lake Community Church. I was no alcoholic, merely an interloper, but they gave me the only community I had.

That’s how I met Anastasia.

Upon meeting her and pronouncing her name incorrectly (Ana-STAH-sia) she shot me a glare, taking a long drag of her cigarette. “It’s AnaSTAY-sia.”

Ana-sta-shia was five-foot-ten, an asshole, and was set to leave an apartment in Koreatown to intern in New York for a month. Desperate, I impulsively traded $650 for a key to the apartment, sight unseen, on the spot. I moved in that night.

Anastasia hadn’t bothered to clean the room. Little whirls of grey dust, glitter, crumbs, and auburn hair padded every corner. On the walls were pinned little plastic bags full of hair clippings, each a different color. Taped up by Anastasia’s desk were about a dozen fake IDs- some foreign, others from various Midwestern states- each flanked with flanked with a yellow Post-It notes covered in inscrutable Russian script. For some reason, these things looked powerful and I was envious.

I took it upon myself to clean the room. I swept, I scrubbed, I piled. I looked through every single shelf, drawer, notebook, makeup box, and crevice. I tried to cobble together some idea of this girl’s identity from the artifacts of her room and social media scraps.

Her Twitter informed me of her propensity to engage in political jousting, her primary weapon being pseudo intellectual, progressive Internet Girl rhetoric. Her Instagram revealed that she enjoyed running and taking selfies. (A sample caption: Selfies are an act of self love- a revolution,) From her journals, written alternatively in English and Russian, I pieced together that she was an aggressive art student from Moscow who, as a fourteen-yearold, told her parents she was at a sleepover when

March 2019

she’d really taken the train to Berlin for a punk show and gotten trapped in another country. I learned that Anastasia was not going to New York for an internship, but to make money sugar babying. I gleaned that, in her spare time, she liked to track her fiber intake and design retro websites with ‘90s interfaces.

In the drawers near her bed were condoms and various surveillance cameras I recognized as the kind installed by the B-list actor’s trophy girlfriends for whim I nannied. In another drawer of Anastasia’s were bright markers and about a dozen packs of Russian cigarettes. The packs’ lurid images of decaying teeth and dead babies made me appreciate my light blue American Spirits with their rather stoic, pipe-smoking American Indian.

Pawing through this girls’ stuff- “cleaning” as we’ll call it- I came across a near-empty perfume bottle in the garbage.

I’d never been particularly interested in perfumes or cologne. I found them frivolous, expensive, unnecessary; after all, they just disappear and

Illustration by Sahra Denner

15

T H E S H O RT C U T you’ve got nothing for it. To the point, I had only experienced my mother’s perfumes, ones with titles like “Sugar” or “Angel”. I may have also caught a whiff of Chanel on my aunt Lena, who works at Vogue and laughs at me when I fail to recognize the names of Big Designers. I remember the heady blend of black licorice and decaying roses on my grandmother as I sat at her bedside, holding her hand, singing to her The Sound of Music’s Edelweiss, her all-time favorite.

Sometimes when I’m in that liminal space between sleep and wake, this scent returns to me.

I suppose that up until my first night at Anastasia’s apartment, I had yet to notice my stark awareness of smell, how much it mattered to memory.

I became aware of much I missed my boyfriend’s musk: sweet sweat, black coffee, cigarette smoke.

There was an earthiness to him that was grounding to someone like me, someone who has the tendency to float up, up, upand talk to insects.

It was an uncanny process, this going into someone’s space. A space so foreign and full and trying tentatively, respectfully, to dig out enough of a place for myself while simultaneously fighting the urge to pee on everything, to mark my territory with plants, books, masturbation, and the sound of carefully-curated playlists. Without roots or territory, without the scent of my boyfriend, what was I? Where was I?

I was a sad girl in an apartment in Koreatown. A temporary inhabitant of a room in a building marked all over with MS13 tags. I was a girl without friends, without a college degree, without a lot of things. Most importantly, I was a girl about to huff a near-empty bottle of trash perfume.

The packaging was rather simple: a black rectangle hugging a cylindrical glass bottle. Bold white script spelling out the words “Comme des Garçons: BLACK”.

Standing on pastel pink bathroom tile, hunched over, my long hair tangled because I hadn’t

showered in days, I became overwhelmed with a dumb premonition that I was about become at home in myself.

My ex had always remarked that my “dual natures” were at constant war with one another.

On one side was a sweet Mormon girl who desired nothing more than a traditional relationship- spending nights watching old movies, cooking wholesome meals, kissing during orgasm. On the other was a young woman with mischievous inclinations to have threesomes and toss dollar bills at dancers doing backbends at Jumbo’s.

My ex was always saying I wanted to “have my cake and eat it too.” And I thought, first, what a dumb phrase and, second, what’s so wrong with that? After growing up with nothing but rules, restraint, control, was it so wrong to explore the other side? To eat all the goddamn cake and ice cream and macaroons?

What's so wrong with duality? Can’t one be sweet and devious?

I never understood why freedom and being in a relationship were mutually exclusive to him. And for some strange reason, smelling Anastasia’s perfume gave me permission to trust in my own duality and get over those hang-ups. The scent shifted every hour as it mingled with my body chemistry. At first, it was bold, even obvious, with spice and incense and some sort of brown alcohol, before smoothing out to a sensual earthiness. The fragrance was reportedly designed to counter “the general negativity engendered by the recession [and] feeling of things being blocked or stopped because of the crisis”. The perfume is reassuring, guerrilla-like: pure olfactory emergency-response.

Three days after I started wearing what was left of Anastasia’s discarded perfume, magical things started happening. Days opened like rosebuds, hit me like the blood-rush to the head after a morning cigarette. In the beginning, I’d often fantasize about taking a month off of my juice store barista gig to

“Taped up by Anastasia’s desk were about a dozen fake IDs— some foreign, others from various Mid-western states—each flanked with yellow Post-It notes covered in inscrutable Russian script. For some reason, these things looked powerful and I was envious.”

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The Blue and White

T H E S H O RT C U T hole up in this new room, only leaving for occasional smoke breaks on the roof.

I bought a keyboard and committed to only wearing prairie dresses. My ex felt a million miles away.

Moving to Anastasia’s room and wearing her perfume made everything shift, somehow. I met people free from my past narrative: a 7-Eleven cashier down the street, a teen mom with fashion-design aspirations, a trust-fund dilettante, and, my favorite, the fifty-sixyear-old host of a comedy show at The Hollywood Improv. Anastasia’s perfume infused my life with a kind of danger and newness that was exciting and sure. Wearing BLACK, I learned what it was like to live alone. To be with no one but myself.

One evening on the last week of my sublet, I posted up on the roof, fuzzy off saké, and decided to submit an application to Columbia University. For encouragement, I smashed open Anastasia’s perfume bottle to use its last dregs. I bought a one-way ticket to New York.

I admit that a whisper of longing for my ex, ever tenacious, still clung.

How can you tell when someone stops loving you?

I thought I’d felt it happen before. But it was different then… after a fight there would always be a collapse in love and exhaustion or maybe it was giving up? Either way, the love never left. I always had the understanding that it was him only, even after the most terrible fights. I knew that the morning after, if I was quiet, that I could sniff him while he was still sleeping. But of course, this time was different.

My first night in New York, grief dulled me to the point that I paid $40 to visit with a psychic.

All I remember from the session was this: “You can’t make someone stop when they're already gone.”

The next morning, I walked to the West Chelsea Comme des Garçons store and, with my first check from hosting at the Waverly Inn, I bought my very own BLACK. Later that night, out dancing

to celebrate the purchase, I met a boy who had the words “Consensual Violence” tattooed on his wrist, a detail I found both dumb and amusing. When I said I thought I wasn’t beautiful, he choked me against the wall of the bar, an act which I also found to be dumb and amusing. Smelling my neck, his fingers slid down my yellow Kill Bill pants and then into his own mouth.

“You’re either going to start your period in three days, you have a UTI, or you’re pregnant,” he said in conclusively, a holistic test.

I didn’t really need him to tell me. I felt it when my lower abdomen ached during the plane ride to New York. I wondered what the kid would’ve looked like? Probably beautiful with my exes complexion and maybe my hazel eyes with the black spot on the right side.

While the boy and I made out against the wall, a ringing in my ears got higher and higher, the ceilings moved and I was left feeling all minty. Not a dull, blooming rose sensation but the fresh tingle of mint. Not warm- cool.

When the night was over and I arrived back home, I saw a shadow moving in the corner of my bedroom.

I braced myself for the worst. What’ll it be this time? Cockroach, mouse, rat? Switching the lights on, what I found was no creeping critter but the bright green praying mantis, perched on my windowsill.

I asked the mantis if it wanted anything.

Some tea would be nice.

Green tea steaming beside us, we sat on the fire escape like a couple of old pals - or, perhaps, victim and onlooker at a crime scene.

“Didn’t expect to see you again,” I said.

I’m always here should you need me.

The mantis handed me a white pill that I took with tea and for the next day I bled crimson as we listened to classical music and baptised the room with Comme des Garçons. By the end of the day, I forgot who my ex was or that he ever existed and could create whatever I wanted. Life went black.w

“Standing on pastel pink bathroom tile, hunched over, my long hair tangled because I hadn’t showered in days, I became overwhelmed with a dumb premonition that I was about become at home in myself.”

March 2019

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S A F E T Y AT B AC C H A N A L

Control the Situation Columbia can take a direct role in ensuring the safety of students taking scheduled substances

By Drazen Medina

In thy light, shall we see darkness?

It’s 3 a.m, and your best friend is getting CAVA’d after one too many vodkas. Most likely, as long as they comply with University, CAVA, and hospital personnel when being treated, they will not receive an infraction for drinking too much alcohol.

Most students take this relatively lenient alcohol policy for granted. But what many do not know is that it stands in stark contrast to the university’s strict policies of suspension and expulsion for other drugs, particularly scheduled substances.

The Monitoring the Future Project conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan is an ongoing project surveying different age groups about their use of drugs both in the past and currently. According to data collected in 2017 on a group of people aged 19-30, 61.0% had used marijuana at least once in their life, 8.6% had used LSD at least once, 13.1% had used MDMA at least once, and 12.3% had used cocaine at least once.

In addition to these statistics, the lifetime prevalence of using these drugs increased for people living in a “Very Large City,” besides a decrease in some drugs like PCP and inhalants. It is not a significant leap to assumethat many college students, especially those living in the most populated city in the United States, come into contact not only with alcohol, but these drugs as well.

Something that unites each of the drugs listed above (marijuana, LSD, MDMA, cocaine) is that they are all unregulated and illicit. There are a variety of concerns associated with unregulated drugs. In particular, synthetic cannabis provided a legal alternative to marijuana for some years before it was banned federally. Synthetic cannabis, spice, or K-2, can lead to intense hallucinations and paranoia; its toxicity varies per user and can sometimes permanently affect a user. Drugs like LSD are usually sold in the form of a “tab,” broken off of a piece of blotter paper. Since this paper can absorb any chemi-

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cal, many dealers can mix in whatever they want, and sometimes these added chemicals can be dangerous or toxic. Similar problems arise in MDMA, with dealers mixing different chemicals for a higher yield and calling their products by different names like “molly,” “X,” or “ecstasy.” These drugs are usually used recreationally by students on campus, especially during events like Bacchanal. A difference between MDMA, LSD, marijuana and cocaine is that cocaine is used both recreationally and as a “study drug.”

According to data gathered in the past few years, fentanyl, a synthetic opioid “50-100 times the potency of morphine,” has been found in “heroin, cocaine, and counterfeit pills.” In New York City alone, “the rate of fentanyl-involved overdose deaths...increased almost 3,000%...from 2014 to 2017.”

Despite these serious concerns, Columbia has rid themselves of responsibility for the safety of their students. At some universities, the administration takes direct action for situations like these. For example, during Spring Weekend (an event equivalent to Bacchanal) at Brown University, the Students for Sensible Drug Policy are allowed to check drug samples provided by students for the absence or presence of LSD and MDMA. The service is anonymous and free. A service like this could improve the peace of mind of the student body, but more importantly, could potentially save lives.

Columbia University prides itself on its classicist quality: it is a place for the knowledgeable and the enlightened. It provides a curriculum and faculty to provide the experience of learning, but its affinity for traditional practices provides students more fear than it does reassurance. Its structure for handling situations concerning drugs has proven obsolete and inadequate, but this does not mean students should suffer or die. It is time for Columbia to confront their mishandlings.w

Illustration bySahra Denner

The Blue and White

DESPICABLE 13TH

Ending the Exception Professors discuss amending the 13th Amendment to remove a troublesome clause

By Annie Zavitz

Amend the 13th: “A Conversation about Ending Legalized Slavery in the United States and Abolishing the Prison System As We Know It” took place on Friday, Feb. 22, 2019 and was organized

by Citizens Against Recidivism, Inc. and Columbia University Staff. It was moderated by Flores A. Forbes from Columbia’s Office of Government and Community Affairs. The panel consisted of Sheena Wright, President and CEO of United Way of New York City, Professor Kendall Thomas of Columbia Law School, and Mika’il DeVeaux, Ph.D., founder of Citizens Against Recidivism. Each panelist discussed the current incarceration system in the United States as it relates to their specific area of work.

The event launched with a discussion of the importance of historically oppressed groups receiving education. For speakers, education has historically been seen as a gateway out of oppression for people of color, said Wright. Her work shows a significant connection between literacy and incarceration rates, allowing Wright to conclude that they are “inexorably linked.”

“The purpose of the education system in the U.S. has been to prepare its populace for work and productivity and to maintain distinct social and economic class structures,” Wright explained. This makes it all the more important to continue educating systematically oppressed groups, especially African Americans. As Thomas stated, educating “black and brown children is revolutionary in itself.”

Thomas also explained the significance, from a legal standpoint, of actually changing the 13th Amendment by removing the Exceptions Clause. The section in question states that “slavery” and “involuntary servitude” is illegal under the U.S. Constitution “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Though the 13th

Amendment was established in order to abolish slavery, it actually creates a loophole in which slavery can still be committed within the U.S. According to Thomas, this loophole was created to continue “controlling black bodies.”

“Eliminating the Exceptions Clause is a tool in getting to a democratic justice,” Thomas said.

He argued that while the removal of the Exceptions Clause would play a significant role in fighting racism, it wouldn’t be sufficient to stop there. Once that goal is reached, there will be more work to to be done in combating racism as a social issue rather than an on-paper issue as it has been seen in the past.

The Exceptions Clause allows for a system of legalized slave labor within incarceration to which millions are still subjected. Forbes and DeVeaux experienced this system first-hand, having both been formerly incarcerated. According to these panelists and audience members that were also formerly incarcerated, they were forced to work for wages ranging from 7 to 60 cents an hour. This, Thomas said, creates a “racial capitalism,” based on the “exploitation of black labor within prisons,” and establishes an “underdevelopment of racial democracy.” It is racial, he argued, because of the systemic roots of the prison system, the U.S.’s history of exploitation through slavery, and the mass incarceration crisis that targets African Americans.

“Slavery,” Thomas said, “is an economic system that still goes on today.” So it is imperative that this system be fought from as many angles and “fronts” as possible. “Pivoting,” to attack other groups attempting to reach the same goal is a “distraction,” said Wright in response to two audience members accusing the panelists of not being “revolutionary” enough.w

Interested in writing or illlustrating?

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March 2019

19

THROUGH THE YEARBOOK

The Long Game Columbia students have debated Israel—Palestine for decades, with little progress

By Ufonobong Umanah

O

n March 10th, the Columbia College Student Council hosted its second debate on Columbia’s engagement with the Israel-Palestine conflict. As a practical consequence of the size of the Lerner Hall’s Satow Room, seating was limited, much to the chagrin of students who had been camped in line all day to debate the question at hand from Columbia University Apartheid Divest: “Do you support Columbia’s divesting its stocks, funds, and endowment from categories of companies identified by CUAD’s campaign (i.e. divestment) – a tactic which CUAD’s Statement to the Columbia Community says is embedded in the BDS movement?” The March 10th meeting marked the third consecutive time student councils have debated the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement. And yet, it’s extraordinarily unlikely CUAD’s electoral defeat, 17 - 20, will alter the discourse. In fact, the Columbia community has disagreed on this subject for decades, and while the conflict itself has changed, the debate at the University hasn’t for a long while.

In tracing the origins of the modern IsraelPalestine debate, Students for a Democratic Society provides a good starting place. In the Columbia annals, SDS is best known for its association with the 1968 protests that froze campus and captured global attention for years since. However, by October of 1970, SDS as an organization wanted to “make people think more objectively about the Middle East," since in their view "most people are cramped into a Zionist interpretation of the Middle-East crisis.”

That October could be considered a difficult month for the forefront activist group. On the 7th, SDS led protests against David Fahri, then a professor at Hebrew University in Israel speaking at the Men’s Faculty Club at Columbia. SDS also clashed with members of the Jewish Defense League, which in 1970 had a Columbia chapter. The JDL has been widely denounced today, and their violent tactics led the moderate pro-Israel lobby of the time, Kadimah, to condemn their actions.

That didn’t mean that Kadimah and SDS got along, quite the opposite. Later, on October 29th,

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the two organizations agreed to what the Columbia Daily Spectator described as a heated debate. A former president of Kadimah, Steve Cohen, insisted that Israel had a “right to exist as an independent, sovereign nation state,” and that even with the country’s flaws, “do they warrant the destruction of Israel?”

A SDS spokesman, Barry Sautman replied that “the Zionists have turned their state into a racist state” in a speech that ended, according to the Spectator, with Sautman alleging “that there was Nazi-Zionist collaboration during World War II.” One member of the audience drew laughter and applause by challenging “Barry, what kind of Jew are you?”

The anti-Semitism that this debate tends to invoke, as the testimonies in Satow on March 10th would indicate, appears to be very present in the 70s. In 1971, a letter to the Editor describes a flyer designed by the Columbia Anti-Imperialist Movement which featured “a tasty looking pie labeled 'Palestine'...surrounded by an American 'pig' waiting eagerly to carve it up,” and “a grim skeleton wearing an eyepatch and bearing a Star of David on its chest, its greedy hand the only one in the pie.”

While C.A.I.M apologized that their depiction of Moshe Dayan, then Minister of Defense of Israel, had upset people, they defended the image as a critique of Israel’s role in securing US oil interests. For a representative of Kadimah, however, the depiction was “where the flyer stops being political and degenerates into the worst kind of anti-Semitic propaganda.”

However, the 70s also show the beginnings of intersectionality between pro-Palestinian activists and other identity groups on campus. Take, for example, a letter to the Editor from the Barnard Organization of Soul Sisters in 1973, which starts with the assertion that “Israel is a imperialist” and continues to say that Zionists in Israel removed “the native Arab population of Palestine in the same way that Indians in America and Africans in South Africa were removed.” Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students argue to this day about the relevance of both Native Americans and South Africans to the state of Israel. It is worth noting that when Columbia

The Blue and White

THROUGH THE YEARBOOK students protested Henry Kissinger in September 1978, the march was sponsored by the Committee Against Investment in South Africa, which within a week would also campaigned for “affirmative action, dismantlement of the TRIGA reactor, gay rights and student housing demands.” Those four things aren’t directly involved in South African politics. But their sponsorship of the march seems to indicate a level of intersectional solidarity in the South African divestment campaign that pro-Palestinian students seemed to have in 1973.

That also seems to be where the differences end. In May of 1978, the University Senate voted in favor of selling stocks from corporations with South African holdings that showed ‘indifference’ to apartheid and divestment from banks that lent money to the South African government, according to the New York Times. What indifference meant in this context was unclear, speakers worried that the proposal would cripple Columbia’s fragile finances and scare investors, and the Senate narrowly voted down a proposal that would have divestment from companies that refused to remove their South African holdings.

But it was a victory that the Trustees upheld. The quick trajectory of a win on South African divestment, which started in September 1977, dwarfs the progress CUAD has made in the same time period, and even the struggle for Palestinian rights starting from the early 70s.

That isn’t to say the fight ended in 1978.

Readers might be more familiar with efforts in 1985, which eventually led to full divestment from South Africa, though a year before Congress would authorize sanctions against the country. A new group, Coalition for a Free South Africa (CFSA), arraigned a blockade of Hamilton Hall after being disappointed with Trustee inaction. At its height, protesters were able to keep a thousand students maintaining the blockade at all times. However, victory on South Africa said nothing about situation in Israel...until 1986.

“The Palestinian and the South African people are fighting the same war. Our oppressors have come together under the umbrella of the United States of America.” These were the words of a Jeanne Butterfield in a March 1986 event titled “Racism in South Africa and Israel,” two semesters after Columbia divested from South Africa. CFSA was a co-sponsor to the event, along with the Arab Club of Columbia. The comparison drew arguments from both sides, with pro-Israel students, in and outside

March 2019

Columbia, dismissing the comparison of a free Israel to an oppressive South Africa, and pro-Palestinian writers arguing that it was a open question “whether one can be pro-Zionist without being anti-Palestinian.”

For our purposes, we get a clear crystallization of the shape of the pro-Palestinian coalition in 1988. The Columbia Jewish Office wanted to spark discourse between the Arab and Jewish communities on campus by inviting Israeli Judge Advocate General and retired Brigadier General Amnon Straschnow to the Law School. The protest that would shut down this event was led by a coalition of the “Student Committee for Palestinian Human Rights (PHRC), the Arab Club at Columbia, Columbia Students in Solidarity with Nicaragua, Columbia/ Barnard Democratic Socialists of America, and the Black Students Organization.” The Black Students Organization still exists today and remains in support of the CUAD campaign, along with 15 other left-of-center and identity organizations.

The point of all of this isn’t to religitate the past for one side or the other. Both sides can draw on Columbia’s history to argue that they either have a mandate to resolve this issue consistent with Columbia’s history of respecting human rights, or that invoking this issue will inevitably bring forth anti-Semitic dog-whistles and bullhorns. What’s true is that the discourse has stayed in a holding pattern for decades, apropos of adjacent student campaigns, campus discourse, and at this point three referenda results.

In a Senate plenary on March 8th, University Senators introduced a town hall model for controversial topics, spurred by a controversial speaker series hosted by the Columbia University College Republicans and unrelated to the history described here. There’s no telling whether a town hall hosted by the University Senate would avoid the pitfalls of either the CCSC debates or the October 29th debate.

However, the reality is that with CUAD failing to get two-thirds majority for a referendum in CCSC, activists are running out of options to demonstrate broad student support, one of the criterion for recommendation from the Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing. An open-ended town hall, with no immediate conclusion or controversial referendum item on the table, might be the only way to get one of the University’s most powerful governing bodies to pay attention in a controlled environment where anti-Semitism can be nipped in the bud.w

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N

What's Written and Said A conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen

By Sam Needleman Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016, will deliver the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at the Italian Academy in April. The lecture’s title, “Out of Place: Refugees, Immigrants, and Storytelling,” alludes to major themes in Dr. Nguyen’s writing, teaching, and contributions to public discourse. Dr. Nguyen spoke with Sam Needleman, a staff writer, from his office at the University of Southern California, where he is University Professor; Aerol Arnold Chair of English; and Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature.

This interview has been condensed.

The Blue and White: You’ve spoken with greater interviewers than I about your life and work, so I was wondering if we could focus on the lecture—as well as its namesake, Edward Said—that’s coming up. I’m wondering, when did you first encounter Said’s work, and what has it meant to you?

would eventually manifest itself briefly in my novel The Sympathizer, where I joked about having my character write a thesis on Graham Greene. And then, later on, I would read more of his work: Culture and Imperialism, Reflections on Exile, Representations of the Intellectual, and his work on Palestine as well,

Viet Thanh Nguyen: I first encountered Edward Said’s work when I was an undergraduate at U.C. Berkeley, and I read his book Orientalism, and that was actually quite a life-changing book for me because it offered a completely different understanding of my place as an Asian, as an AsianAmerican in the world, but also as a student and a scholar. And, you know, I was influenced by that book in the same way that many other people who were doing work with colonization were influenced by Said, and reading Orientalism was the instigator for me to write one of my senior theses, which was a critique of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, and that

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Illustration by Sahra Denner

The Blue and White

T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N After the Last Sky, and other things. So he’s always been a major figure for me in terms of the ideal scholar, activist, writer. The major reason I agreed to give the talk at Columbia was simply because it was the Edward Said lecture.

VTN: I think, for me, the term intellectual is something that should be applied to people rather than proclaimed by themselves.

B&W: Of course, a major part of Said’s legacy, as we often remember here, was his tenure at Columbia.

You’ve been teaching, I know, since the late ‘90s. Will you tell me a little bit about your role as University Professor at USC, and how that’s shifted since The Sympathizer in any capacity?

VTN: I think, also, that’s why it took me a very long time to consider myself as a writer—because, you know, when I was in college, I knew a lot of people who called themselves writers, and they were all annoying. So I didn’t want to be one of those people.

When people call me a writer, then I can accept that term. So I think that the idea of the public intellectual has always been important to me, ever since I was a student. You know, I studied Antonio Gramsci, and his idea of the organic intellectual, which also has a public component to it, and there was always a sense in which I believed that scholars, artists, and writers could be public intellectuals, carrying out their work with the hope of impacting a larger public outside of their own disciplines. And so I hope I can do that. Let me make it very clear, I’m not proclaiming myself to be one of these people, but I think the work of public intellectuals is really crucial.

VTN: Well, since The Sympathizer—and, in particular, since the Pulitzer Prize, rather than The Sympathizer—I think my role has shifted at USC because I’m aware that the prize carries a lot of symbolic weight with it. It is a university, so I think it likes to foreground me a lot more than it used to, and more students are drawn to my classes, and all that is fine. I think that when I was aspiring to be a professor, I looked up to certain professors, who had been deeply influential on me, both as scholars and as teachers, and I always wondered if I could something of the same impact as some of these people. And if the Pulitzer has enabled some greater impact for me in the classroom and in venues like writing op-eds for The New York Times, or in my scholarship, then I’m happy to take that opportunity.

I think, again, talk about Edward Said—he certainly was a model in the sense that he was also a public intellectual. He took his work about Palestine seriously, but he also took his work about being a cultural critic whose work was deeply political very seriously, too, and I always admired that public profile that he had.

B&W: Fair enough.

“I believed that scholars, artists, and writers could be public intellectuals, carrying out their work with the hope of impacting a larger public outside of their own disciplines.”

B&W: I’m curious about the term ‘public intellectual.’ Do you think that the meaning of that term has shifted at all since it was applied to Said? Do you identify as a public intellectual as well?

March 2019

B&W: Here at Columbia, especially in the College, we’re always discussing the Western canon, as it applies to our Core Curriculum—what books we’re reading together, what books are on the syllabus.

What do you think an undergraduate humanities curriculum ought to look like today?

VTN: I think an undergraduate humanities curriculum has to do more than it might have had to do fifty years ago, for example. And I say this because I actually do believe in the idea of core concepts, major texts, traditions, and so on—I believe in those things, and I think Said did, too. I’ve read a lot in the Western canonical tradition, and it’s helped to make me the kind of writer that I am. At the same time, I think that whatever we consider to be a canon or a Core Curriculum, has to also adapt. The Core

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T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N Curriculum and the humanities have to both address traditions, but also contemporary needs as well. And I say this as someone who always felt that he had to do both. And I think that many of us who would be considered so-called minorities in any dominant society have always felt that we need to know both. We need to know what the so-called majority thinks, and its conception of tradition and the canon, and yet we also have to know what we want, and what our particular cultures have done as well. So there’s always been a double work imposed or self-imposed on the socalled minorities, or people of color, or the colonized, or whatever term you want to use. And I think part of the controversies over the canon and the humanities are from people who are defensive, who don’t want to know more than the dominant tradition. I have no sympathy for those people, because I think that, again, we live in more complex times than we did fifty years ago, not in the sense that we’re dealing with new issues, but in the sense that people who have been suppressed in the articulation of their concerns are much more vocal—that’s what part of what makes things more complex. Hopefully, a canon and the humanities are preparing people both for traditions and challenges like this.

be considered canonical. They’ve had enough time that’s elapsed—20 to 50 years where we’ve made some kind of assessment that they belong in some kind of—at least, American— canon. If we are to talk about a course that might address something immediately urgent, like if I were teaching a course, for example, on contemporary American literature, who might I include? I don’t know if these writers would be considered canonical in 20 or 50 years, but who would I teach now, besides Baldwin or Morrison, for example? I think Tommy Orange’s There There is a brilliant novel. I think Luis Urrea’s The House of Broken Angels is a brilliant novel. These books take up different aspects of what it means to be American from the indigenous and border perspectives. They’re doing really, really vital work. If we’re talking about an international curriculum—and I think we should talk about whether a Western humanities curriculum should include people from outside the United States—I’m recently a fan of Han Kang, the Korean writer, best known for The Vegetarian right now, but the book that I’m citing in a talk that I’m going to give soon is the book Human Acts, which is about Korean military dictatorship and its suppression of the Gwangju Uprising in 1980, where the Korean army killed hundreds of civilians. And these, Han Kang says, are human acts—not inhuman, but human. We’re living in an age in which a lot of these human acts are taking place. We’re living in an age in which there are a lot of military dictatorships, or just the temptation of fascism that arises. We need to read people like Han Kang, who has something to say about what’s happening now—within the last 30 years, up until the present.w

“I think that whatever we consider to be a canon or a Core Curriculum, has to also adapt.

The Core Curriculum and the humanities have to both address traditions, but also contemporary needs as well.

And I say this as someone who always felt that he had to do both. And I think that many of us who would be considered so-called minorities in any dominant society have always felt that we need to know both.”

B&W: In the literary realm, do any recent texts from marginalized or subjugated voices come to mind that really ought to be read, as an example of what you’re talking about?

VTN: I think that there are two aspects of your question: what would be considered canonical, and what might be considered necessary to read now. I draw that distinction because, yeah, you could say, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, these people should

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The Blue and White

PAY I N G T H E B I L L S

Book Culture 536 West 112th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Monday-Friday 9am-10pm Saturday 10am-8pm Sunday 11am-7pm 212-865-1588 Book Culture 2915 Broadway at West 114th Street Monday-Friday 9am-11pm Saturday 10am-11pm Sunday 10am-10pm 646-403-3000 bookculture.com

March 2019

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M easure

for

M easure

Broken for Love I saw the Taj Mahal before it saw the Sun and noticed, in the fragile light of dawn, that it was crying.

“Why, O Taj, do you cry,” I asked.

But the Taj did not answer, for it is made of stone.

Rather than ask again, I closed my eyes and listened. Beneath the stomping feet and chirping birds, I could hear it: a slow and somber song, just a hum away from silence.

Like the song that all things sing—only different. I hummed along, adding my own tune to the mix. We stayed like that for a while, the Taj and I, when all of a sudden it opened one eye and stared into my soul.

“You sing the song of silence softly, Little One. How did you learn this tune?”

“I listened, O Taj, to the sound beneath the sounds.”

It rumbled in response; I held my silent hum. And then it spoke once more.

“I cry because I love the Moon,” it said, just as the Sun started peeking out the sky.

I paused.

“But it’s only a day till you see her again,” I then answered.

It sighed.

“Half an eternity is still an eternity. And, I must confess, that is not the true problem.”

It paused. I held my breath. It blinked and then continued: “She and I, we both are made of stone, you see. And yet while she is always on the move, always changing, here I am, perpetually at rest.”

“Was not it always so?” I asked.

“No. Before my bones were broken from the earth, I moved in concert with the Moon—slowly, yes, but still I moved. In increments. But now, from myself divided, I cannot so much as scratch my ear.”

“Do you have an ear in need of scratching?” I asked.

“No,” it said, “but still.”

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— Benjamin DuBow

The Blue and White

M easure

for

M easure

Afternoon Bus Ride I wake up to my head on your shoulder the heat of your body persistent above my ear.

Branches hit the windows, sunlit panes unveil pressed fingerprints, and in the stumble-rock of the school bus I don’t remember how I’m here or who I am or how I am or who I’m here but you hum that song that we’re both listening to and I close my eyes again.

You asked me once if I could spot you in a crowd.

I think I could now (maybe with my glasses on).

I feel your shoulder just there for me to lean on can trace the dip and rise of your taut breaths, it is afternoon, it is spring, it is you and me and the motion of my body just fell into yours.

— Seowon Lee

March 2019

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E I G H T I M P O R TA N T W O M E N

Retaking Butler’s Facade Students are reviving a late 80s protest in honor of Women’s History Month

By Nicole Kohut

H

omer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, Vergil.

These eight names are plastered on the front facade of Butler Library–arguably the most iconic landmark on Columbia’s campus. Nine other names wrap around the west and east sides of the library, including Dante, St. Augustine, and Voltaire. Eager freshmen and Columbia College alum will immediately recognize these names from their Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilizations syllabi.

Another thread of connection? They’re all white men.

In 1989, Laura Hotchkiss Brown, a student enrolled in General Studies, decided to do something about Columbia’s lack of female representation on campus. With four friends by her side and a detailed plan consisting of design layouts and mechanical strategies, Brown hung a banner with eight n​ ew​ names above the pre-existing one’s on Butler’s forefront during 1989 commencement week. For the first time, Butler’s exterior would feature all women.

Almost immediately, Columbia ordered a tear-down of the banner, causing students to question the administration’s commitment to recognizing and celebrating the achievements of its female population. Students, however, rejected the university’s actions. Brown’s statement made the majority of the student body realize that the men listed on Butler’s walls didn’t accurately represent their university.

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The banner lit a small, but still fervent fire that finally pushed Columbia to widen their patriarchal origins, only this time under the administration’s authority.

Columbia administration announced that, in order to celebrate Women’s History Month in March of 1994, they would formally hang a banner of prestigious women. That is, women whom Columbia administrators deemed prestigious. Neither Brown nor her supporters were involved in the reformed banner. Instead, twenty students were elected underthe-radar by various Columbia officials, and the selection process for the eight names that would be displayed on the banner was kept under wraps. It came to be known as “The Butler Banner Project.”

It’s no surprise that the project failed. With Bacchanal right around the corner, Columbia’s lack of promotion for the project, and a handmade banner that ripped after a couple of hours, it was impossible for the event to pick up much steam. Instead of stitching the banner back together or rescheduling for a later date, Columbia abandoned the project. Like the women that appeared ever so briefly on Butler’s facade, the Butler Banner Project faded quickly from Columbia’s agenda.

If you tried to find more information on the Butler Banner Project, you’d stumble upon two lonely resources. The first, an uploaded photo from the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library that shows Brown’s original banner from 1989. The second, an archived Op-Ed from Columbia Daily Spectator staff writer Lauren M. Rosenblum CC’96 that, at best, mimics a Google Calendar invite, including the date of event, names on the banners, and location. The article is wrapped up with a quote from Sharon Brous, CC ‘95, who criticized the banner’s lack of ethnic representation, stating that while it is a celebration, it is also “a way to acknowledge that something is missing.”

Now, 25 years later, the project has bubbled back to the surface of Columbia’s exclusive radar. But how and

Illustration by Helen Becker

The Blue and White

E I G H T I M P O R TA N T W O M E N for what reasons, nobody can be quite sure. Elise Fuller, a member of this year’s resurgent banner project, doesn’t hold the answer to these questions either.

When I got a chance to sit down with Fuller, she arrived eager to share the message this year’s banner aims to proclaim to students. Reminiscent of Brown’s notes and sketches from 1989, Fuller whipped out a gargantuan Google Drive containing spreadsheets, notes, diagrams, archival photographs of the original banner, and top-secret steps to set the project into motion. When asked about the changes the project wanted to make from the original banner, Fuller emphasized their goal to be more representative of our community–and this doesn’t just mean including women of color.

Even though the final list is still being revised, you can expect to see Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston plastered proudly over Butler in March. Like Sappho and Christine de Pizan, these two contemporary authors appear on core syllabi and are well-known throughout literary communities. However, their cameo on Butler shows us that writing literature in 610 BCE isn’t a requirement for prestige. If you’re lucky, one of the women with a reserved spot on this year’s banner, Gayatri Spivak, a Columbia professor, could be teaching your literary theorism class in the fall.

The fact that the women chosen for this year’s banner don’t reside in the ancient Roman hilltops like the men currently engraved on Butler’s walls fits perfectly with the committee's vision–to be more representative of our community, all genders and ethnicities included, ​today​. This not only means incorporating women who have produced modern-day work, but also having the banner reflect Columbia’s current student population.

Compared to the 1994 administrationdominated committee, which included twenty female students from Columbia College, the 2019 committee is smaller in number, composed of roughly twelve students. However, this committee is vastly more representative of our campus than its 1994 counterpart. Barnard, Columbia College, and SEAS students are all directly involved with the project, but this doesn’t mean they’re the ones making the final calls. Instead, as Fuller informed me, they sent out a campus-wide survey asking students to suggest

March 2019

which female literary scholars they wanted to see on the banner. With over 180 submissions, each with roughly six suggestions, it’s safe to say that student voices are heavily intertwined with this project, a big departure from the last banner effort. This year, the banner won’t just represent the ideals driven from the canon of Columbia founders. Rather, the hope is that it will better represent o​ ur​campus, our students, our ideas, and our goals.

Despite the excitement and effort fueling the project, I was surprised to learn that students on this year’s committee weren’t fighting to make the names, or any form of female memoriam, permanent.

According to Fuller, it wouldn’t be right to have something forever engraved on our walls because we’re constantly evolving as a community, and there are new women who deserved to be recognized each day. As Fuller bluntly put it, “Virginia Woolf did black-face, and she was on the 1994 banner.”

Although a banner can always be taken down, the names of men engraved in Butler aren’t going anywhere. When we walk past Butler, for better or for worse, we recognize those men as a part of our school, maybe even part of our identity. The contemporary women who will appear on Butler’s facade come March will give us an opportunity to see how our campus is represented in 2019, not 1754.

In 1994, Laura Hotchkiss Brown and her banner should have hit a nerve in Columbia, but they didn’t. Even though the political climate in 2019 is a reflection of recent uproar in student body activism, we may never know what drove the revamping of the Butler Banner Project. Twenty-five years later, we’re still struggling to get the on-campus representation we deserve–but at least we’re starting somewhere.w

Illustration by Helen Becker

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R E P O RT I N G F R O M M O U N T S I N JA R

From Genocide’s Aftermath to a Literature PhD How one graduate student’s experience in the Middle East informs their scholarship

By Matthew Petti

“

I’ve been jumping around for twenty years. I don’t think I’ve lived in the same place for more than two years at a time since college,” Andrew Slater laughs.

Over Italian coffee at V & T, he tells me about the dizzying array of jobs he’s had over the past two decades: soldier, master’s student in literature, university instructor, war correspondent, aid worker, and most recently, PhD candidate at Columbia.

Before studying at Columbia, Andrew was most recently employed at an NGO called Yazda, created in the immediate aftermath of the genocide against the Êzîdî minority of Mount Sinjar, Iraq.

Andrew’s ultimate goal is to work on education in the Arab world, but he’s taken quite a few detours along the way. While studying international relations at Dickinson College, he enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training Corps. It was a way to pay for college, but for Andrew, it was also a way to do “some kind of service,” as his grandparents taught him.

In the years leading up to 9/11, the decision to enlist was much less “political” than it is now, Andrew says. He claims that joining the Army “wasn’t endorsing a particular conflict,” but just a way for young men to serve their community, as the US was not as visibly embroiled in foreign wars.

After the 2001 attacks by al-Qaeda, the US soon found itself involved in two different wars. The intervention in Afghanistan to root out al-Qaeda “made sense to me,” Andrew says, but he thought the war to oust the government of Iraq was a “terrible idea” from the beginning. In fact, Andrew believes that “everything that happened in Sinjar had its roots in the American invasion of 2003,” which led to years of violence between Iraqis along ethnic and religious lines.

After his first tour of duty as an infantry platoon leader in Afghanistan, he gave up leave in order to be redeployed early, just so that he wouldn’t be sent to the impending fight in Iraq. Nevertheless, Andrew ended up serving three tours of duty in Iraq as a special forces officer. His second tour was

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only six months after Sunni extremists massacred Shi’a Muslim pilgrims at the Askari Shrine north of Baghdad, setting off a chain of brutal reprisals.

This violence foreshadowed the later rise of ISIS, a Sunni extremist group that cut its teeth at the tail end of the US occupation.

After a decade in the military, Andrew qualified for free graduate education under the Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008, also known as the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill. Since he “always loved literature,” he decided to pursue a master’s in the arts, eventually returning to Iraq as an English lecturer at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani.

He began to see that “if you teach in the Global South, there are major ideological conflicts you have to think about.” Through his teaching, Andrew found himself drawn to comparative literature through how students approached “this problem of the Arab world’s relationship with the West and Western knowledge. It’s a problem [the students] have to navigate on their terms.”

“Part of that negotiation takes place in literature,” Andrew says. “Literature’s what I love teaching.”

ISIS’s conquest of northern Iraq in the summer of 2014 sent him on a wide detour. Then reporting on the war as a freelancer for The Daily Beast, Andrew was worried for his Êzidî students. The indigenous Êzidî people have long been maligned as “devil worshippers” for their unique religion, and ISIS announced its sectarian intentions by massacring hundreds of Êzidî and Shi’a prisoners in June 2014.

Those intentions came to fruition on August 3, 2014, a date that’s burned into Andrew’s memory.

That day, ISIS attacked Mount Sinjar, the home of the largest and oldest Êzidî community in the world.

By the time the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) crossed the border from Syria and Turkey to evacuate the survivors, ISIS had killed two thousand Êzidî men and kidnapped up to five times as many women and children.

Hearing the reports of massacres and sexual slavery—and sympathetic to the students whose entire

The Blue and White

R E P O RT I N G F R O M M O U N T S I N JA R community was being destroyed—Andrew volunteered his eclectic mix of skills to Yazda’s documentation program. Initially, he and a Êzidî colleague named Ali ran a studio for recording the testimonies of survivors. Andrew and Ali got advice from Taylor Krauss, who ran a similar program called “Voices of Rwanda” in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Southeast Africa.

Ali and the nine-person local staff were invaluable, especially because Andrew did not speak Kurdish fluently enough to conduct interviews. But collecting witness statements “took a big toll” on the workers, especially the women who managed the cases of escapees from sexual slavery.

Andrew’s next project, mapping the physical geography of the genocide, was even more grim.

Local fighters showed him sites where they had found mass graves and individual corpses—many of them victims of heatstroke, as thousands of children and elders had fled into the sweltering August heat without food or water.

And the violence was not entirely over. The front lines with ISIS were still active until summer 2017; booby traps killed several Êzidî returnees.

The PKK also had enemies other than ISIS, and Andrew was in the area when Turkish jets struck alleged “PKK positions” on the mountain in April 2017.

I’m surprised at the matter-of-fact tone Andrew uses to describe the dangers and horrors he was surrounded by. But people had directly tried to kill him in Afghanistan and Iraq, he explains. Being a bystander was much less scary. And his training had taught him to separate scary situations from “real danger.”

From New York, Andrew is currently working on his report on the events of August 2014. He says that Iraqi Kurdish authorities prevented him from publishing it, because it accuses them of abandoning Mount Sinjar to ISIS. In January 2017, those same authorities temporarily shut down Yazda for meeting with local leaders allegedly linked to the PKK.

March 2019

Andrew says that the focus of his PhD (the contemporary fictions of Iraq and Syria) is “tangential” to the mostly oral culture of rural Mount Sinjar. But it’s clear that Andrew thinks they’re being threatened by similar forces. He decries the effects of “Europeanstyle nationalism,” which demands centralization and black-and-white categories, on the cultural diversity of the Middle East. In the same vein, Andrew claims that the local version of “American-style pedagogy” favors a small English-speaking elite, while distancing these elites from their own literary culture. The stakes are vastly different, but the root cause is the same.

Andrew is optimistic about the possibility of a better world, “taking what’s useful from Western education without developing a hostile disposition towards your own culture.” He says that he could never teach Arabic literature like a native speaker, but does “understand the literary background of [the] students, and can situate Western literature within their body of knowledge.”

He cites the example of Professor Muhsin al-Musawi, his role model at Columbia. Professor Musawi teaches Arabic literature, but often drops references to the Western canon while teaching Americans. “Everything he talks about, he can situate in an Arabic conversation and a Western conversation,” Andrew says.

From behind a gun—and later a microphone— Andrew witnessed Iraq fall apart. In the classroom, he wants to do his small part healing its wounds.w

Illustration by Rea Rustagi

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IN THE ZONE

Beyond Normal Katie Kitamura discusses writing where the typical becomes atypical

By Kate Iida

A

s part of the Creativing Writing Lecture series, Katie Kitamura, author of the New York Times Notable Book, A Separation, spoke at Columbia on the night of February 20th. As the topic of her lecture, she explored the idea of a “zone” in fiction.

Specific to fiction writing, Kitamura defined a “zone” as a place on the edge of society where normal rules of behavior and conduct change or break down. Zones are set apart from normal life and operate with different rules. They exemplify society´s underbelly, often containing elements of resistance to the standard culture.

Zones can be both literal and metaphorical in fiction. Kitamura first gave an example of a literal zone, showing a clip from the 1979 Russian sciencefiction movie Stalker, directed by Andrei Tartovsky and based on the science fiction novel Roadside Picnic. In this clip, the character of the Stalker leads two of the main characters into a space called The Zone. This space is at once both an idyllic place of natural beauty and riddled with danger and evidence of contamination, in this case the remains of extraterrestrial activity. Kitamura stated that these dual characteristics of contamination and beauty often exist within zone spaces. Exploring these contradictions in fiction allows authors greater freedom to explore the nuances and paradoxes within their own characters.

Kitamura also discussed her own use of metaphorical zones, especially in her first book, The Longshot, as well as in her most recent work, A Separation. The Longshot follows a personal trainer and a world-class mixed martial artist in the days leading up to a major competition. Kitamura said she was initially drawn to exploring mixed martial arts in fiction because of the way the fighter´s ring operates as a type of zone—with its own inherent rules and logic completely distinct from normal society.

In A Separation, Kitamura set much of the drama in a hotel. In doing so, she explored how hotels can function as zone spaces. Set apart from the normal routines of daily life, hotels become places where characters are free to explore other aspects of their

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personalities and live by different rules.

Kitamura concluded her talk by discussing the novel Signs Preceding the End of the World

by Yuri Herrera. This novel details the journey of a young girl from Mexico to the US in search of her brother, leading her to cross the border on foot.

Kitamura described how Herrera turns the border towns of the United States into a zone: for his narrator, these areas are foreign, dangerous, frightening, and confusing. When she enters the first border town in the US, Herrera´s narrator remains constantly alert, observing every detail of this different, dangerous space. Herrera´s prose in this section communicates the paranoia of his narrator as she occupies a space in which she does not know the rules. In zone spaces, Kitamura said, questions of who is in and who is out, who has free passage within the zone and who does not, become instrumental.

In the current political climate, with refugees, asylum seekers, and Trump´s proposed border wall, discussions of zone spaces in fiction become incredibly charged. Because of this, it is even more important for authors to explore these types of zones and border areas in their fiction, Kitamura explained to conclude her lecture.w

Illustration by Sahra Denner

The Blue and White

Digitalia Columbiana What's typed on your computer and said over the internet is becoming integral to our daily lives. Here we document some digital moments of interest to Columbia students. We encourage our readers to submit their Digitalia finds to us, via email, to bweditors@columbia.edu_

On March 7th, The Eye magazine, published “Access Denied: Columbia Clubs and Their Struggle for Inclusivity” which reported on the difficulties students face getting into extracurriculars at Columbia University. The topic was touched on in the first issue of the XXIV volume, in an article titled “CCSC Targets Exclusive Student Groups.” David A. Lee, who would have graduated from Columbia in 2019, posted a comment on the Columbia Daily Spectator’s Facebook post, which we reprinted below.

Frankly, this is one of the reasons I dropped out of Columbia, although I think my personal reasons go a bit deeper than the lack of inclusivity in clubs, and instead due to the economic class hierarchy, vulture competition, and the aspiration towards prestige (eg working on Wall St. or Silicon Valley) that the capitalist system inherently breeds.

After dropping out, I’ve spent my time working in left-wing politics and local community organizing in Queens. My decision to completely shift my career from science to grassroots politics was largely motivated by my miserable Columbia experience. I’ve been so fortunate to work with and alongside some really incredible people, with organizations like Democratic Socialists of America, who helped elect Ocasio-Cortez, fought off the horrible Amazon HQ2 deal, and now trying to elect Tiffany Cabán as the most progressive District Attorney the country has ever seen.

But one thing was true in all of this — we truly strive to be an inclusive and intersectional community, and everyone’s attitude has always been “great to meet ya, come through and help organize!”

None of this corporate interview or resumé bullcrap — if you wanted to help the cause, you were in. It’s without a doubt been the most beautiful and empowering experience of my life.

Had I stayed at Columbia I would I have graduated this May. I wish things could have been different, but I honestly can’t see truly revolutionary change occurring unless we succeed in fully dismantling the structures that uphold classist AND racist hierarchies, and questioning the very concept

March 2019

of exclusivity in educational and vocational opportunity. e

On March 10th, during CCSC’s second debate of a referendum from Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the two senior University Senators for CCSC referred to decisions and comments made by the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, in the lead up to general elections on April 9th. His comments on Instagram were in response to comments from an Israeli actress and TV presenter, Rotem Sela, criticizing Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev. Sela’s and Netanyahu’s comments, translated by Haaretz and confirmed by Mark Marion Gondelman, are republished below.

Miri Regev sits there and explains to Rina Matzliach that the public needs to watch out, because if Benny Gantz is elected he'll need to form a government with Arabs. Rina Matzliach stayed silent. And I ask myself why Rina doesn't ask her in shock – 'and what's the problem with Arabs???' Oh my God, there are also Arab citizens in this country. When the hell will someone in this government broadcast to the public that Israel is a country for all its citizens. And every person was born equal. Arabs, too, God help us, are human beings. And so are the Druze. And so are gays, by the way, and lesbians, and…shock…leftists.

Dear Rotem, an important correction: Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the Nation-State Law that we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People - and them alone. As you wrote, there's no problem with the Arab citizens of Israel – they have the same rights as us all and the Likud government has invested in the Arab sector more than any other government. Likud only asks to sharpen the central point of these elections: it's either a strong right-wing government led by me, or Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz's left-wing government with the support of the Arab parties. Lapid and Gantz have no other way to form a government, and a government like this will undermine the security of the state and citizens. The decision – another month at the ballot

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D I G I TA L I A box. Have a nice day. e Beto O’Rourke CC’ 95 decided to run for President of the United States last month. Reuters has discovered that O’Rourke was part of a hacker group, the “Cult of the Dead Cow” and wrote some fiction under the pen name “Psychedelic Warlord.” The following was one of his first works, written at age 15, Visions From the Last Crusade. O’Rourke has said he is “not...proud” of his early work.

The catacombs of my head produce the most wonderful dreams and visions. I feel that I am one with my intellect and my soul. It was during these dreams and visions that I concocted a notion. It started as something small at first, but after every dream it grew stronger, until the urge had become too great.

No longer could this strong desire in my mind be suppressed. Recognizing this fact, my one and only goal in life became the termination of everything that was free and loving. Only I could realize the true value of loving and expression. Only in my dreams.

This feeling pervaded everything in my life, yet the first few months after realizing my goal, I had done nothing. Then one day, as I was driving home from work, I noticed two children crossing the street. They were happy, happy to be free from their troubles. I knew, however, that this happiness and sense of freedom were much too overwhelming for them. This happiness was mine by right. I had earned it in my dreams. As I neared the young ones, I put all my weight on my right foot, keeping the accelerator pedal on the floor until I heard the crashing of the two children on the hood, and then the sharp cry of pain from one of the two. I was so fascinated for a moment, that when after I had stopped my vehicle, I just sat in a daze, sweet visions filling my head. My dream was abruptly ended when I heard a loud banging on the front window. It was an old man, who was using his cane to awaken me. He might have been a witness to my act of love. I was not sure, nor did I care. It was simply ecstasy. As I drove home, I envisioned myself committing more of these "acts of love", and after a while, I had no trouble carrying them out.

The more people I killed, the longer my dreams were. I soon quit my job, and stayed at my house in an almost comatose state. My dreams grew longer and more vivid. They kept me alive and proved to be the only thing to live for. I had killed nearly 38 people by the time of my twenty-third birthday, and each one was more fulfilling than the last. I was

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never really surprised at how I evaded the police. My dreams had taken over my life, and they guided me through the right path, and I never had need for fear of police. Or anything, for that matter. e

Julian von Abele landed an interview with The Atlantic three months after delivering a rant widely considered racist. He insisted in the article based on the interview that he wasn’t racist or a white supremacist, like he did in his apology letter to the Associated Press. However, during the government shutdown over the border wall, he wrote statements like “I can say without a doubt that the cultural values transmitted to many Muslims are a danger to the world today,” which sounds very Islamophobic. The point of the Atlantic article, written in March, was to warn readers about the dangers of presenting, and forcing people into, a binary between an identitarian left and an identitarian right, the latter of which an ordinarily “classical liberal” or “universalist conservative” like von Abele might fall into. For full transparency, here was the full tweet thread from January.

“No fence! We need a BIG CONCRETE SOLID WALL to keep America safe! Tell Trump not to give in and build a BIG SOLID, AMERICAN WALL! To anyone who questions TOUGH immigration...just look at what happened to Germany, France, Scandinavia, UK (Rotherham etc)...immigration can be good but you MUST ENSURE that they share your basic values… I have no problem with Muslims, but a culture based on Islamic values does NOT belong in America. Trump should declare a national STATE OF EMERGENCY and have the military build the wall instead of taking the Democrat’s deal that will do nothing to combat dangerous immigration...To be fair, there have been and there are today many great Muslim scholars and thinkers...the Sufis come to mind...and making blanket statements is difficult, but I can say without a doubt that the cultural values transmitted to many Muslims are a danger to the world today. Every resident of the US should be allowed to practice any faith of their choosing, as long as they do not harm others. But when it comes to immigration, the admission of new citizens into our country...I think we should take their cultural values into full consideration. And the admission of people who can assimilate into a free and open society should be prioritized. And pragmatically this means prioritizing Christians over Muslims.”w

The Blue and White

CAMPUS GOSSIP Those arrested in the college admissions bribery scandal were not alleged to have tried to get their kids into Columbia University. However, The Key Worldwide, the consulting company at the center of the elite admissions crisis, bragged about getting applicants into Columbia. Specifically, in an archived version of the site, the company reportedly got students enrolled through Columbia Baseball in 2009.

Those students would have graduated in 2013 and now have fulfillingly compromised careers. e The Liberty Gala, the Columbia Political Union’s annual political celebration hosted at Low Library, will cost $5 to attend this year after two years of being free for students. It appears that the hosts of the event believe that ticket prices do not affect student attendance, and that students will come for the chance to party in Low. Even in previous years when it was free, however, the event has been poorly attended. e “I’m pleased to announce that my single triumph as Provost of this University has been to order that we not send out 17,000 letters that are unnecessary, and we’re saving a lot of trees,” joked now-retiring John Coatsworth at the March Plenary of the University Senate after describing the paper-heavy process in which faculty members used to get their salaries. At the same plenary, senators disapproved of the listing of the “President’s Report” on the agenda since Bollinger rarely attends plenaries these days, and the Provost answers questions in his stead. e Early in March, Columbia Daily Spectator columnist Anna Lokey chastised readers for their poor hygiene habits in “Why do Columbia students smell so bad?” but some students noticed, and were critical of, her use of African American Vernacular English as a white person. Regular readers of the op-ed section have also have remembered that a few days earlier,

March 2019

Austin Dean wrote about the use of AAVE by white people and while he, as a white person, felt it wasn’t his place to say whether or not the practice was right or wrong, but did say that “when non-black Columbia students appropriate Black English, we’re participating in a system that actively upholds a white speech form and degrades a black one.” When we brought the case to Columbia Linguistics Professor John McWhorter, he wrote that in general, Lokey’s introduction was an innocent way to deliver the point of the introduction, Columbia students need to practice personal hygiene, in a softer, non-abrasive tone with a “a patina of affection, humor.” Besides, “ordinary, running conversation among non-black young people today has countless examples of what Lokey did. I wonder if a lot of white women today know that the "swivel neck" gesture they do to indicate recreational resistance or disapproval was an "appropriation" from black women 25 years ago ... people will mimic one another, upwards and downwards sociologically, whether we like it or not, I'm afraid.”

Yes, “black people can be seen a dim for using Black English where whites can be seen as ‘hip.’” However, this is “evidence of American English expanding and changing, in sociological ways that languages always have worldwide for tens of thousands of years,” and it’s difficult to put a hard ban on the use of Black English as a whole. e At the 10th annual Athena Film Festival held at Barnard during the beginning of the month, some attendees were turned away from screenings for which they had already purchased tickets due to the festival’s policy of prioritizing seats for VIP passholders. e Valedictorians are being phased out of Class Day speeches after last year’s valedictorian gave a honest speech about her mental health struggles instead of the speech she gave to Columbia.w

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E AT I N ’ G O O D I N T H E N E I G H BO R H O O D

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The Blue and White