The College Hill Independent Vol. 39 Issue 8

INSIDE: JUROR COMPENSATION IN RI, THE ‘PSYCHEDELIC RENAISSANCE,’ AND REFLECTIONS ON HONG KONG

A Brown/RISD Weekly / November 15th, 2019 / Volume 39, Issue 08

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Indy

From the Editors

Contents Cover World Princess Part II Anastasia Chase News 02 Week in Unlikely Vessels Tammuz Frankel & Roxanne Barnes 05 Building Republic Erika Undeland Metro 03 A Jury of One’s Peers?

Olivia George 13 Making Ends Meet John Graves, Kshitij Sachan, & Nell Salzman X 06 Garden Bee Mitchell Arts 07 Making Dough Alana Baer Literary 09 Collected Poems Gemma Brand-Wolf, Jane Freiman, Catharine Hagbood, Sandra Moore, Kanha Prasad, Isabelle Rea, & Andy Rickert Features 11 23 Years in My Body Rachel Rood-Ojalvo

On Monday, Brown University’s Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies (ACCRIP) met to discuss Brown Divest’s proposal that the University withdraw its investments from companies whose products and operations contribute to and facilitate the Israeli government’s violence and abuses of Palestinians’ human rights. These companies include Boeing, in whose bombers the Israeli Air Force kill Gazan children and civilians, and Caterpillar, whose contracts with Israel provide the Israel Defense Forces with the bulldozers its soldiers use to demolish Palestinians’ homes and to construct illegal settlements.

At ACCRIP’s meeting, a group of students who claimed to represent “united Jewish students against Divest” delivered an inaccurate, Islamophobic, and unsurprising, yet deeply disappointing, presentation.

I’m not interested in spreading this group’s message by even printing its language, so I will respond directly here to two of its claims with which I take most personal issue. Firstly, Jewish students at Brown are not “united against Divest.” As a member of Brown Jewish Voice for Peace and the Brown Divest coalition, I have worked with fellow Jewish students who understand that the actions of Israel— and certainly those of American and British war profiteers—are not only open to criticism, but are, in fact, indefensible. According to the “united” Jewish students, Brown University’s Jewish community is united in its view that Palestinian resisters either are responsible for the actions of Israeli oppressors or are themselves terrorist aggressors. Not only is this portrayal of Palestinians dehumanizing, but this group’s attempts to enlist all other Jewish students at Brown in their campaign also betrays their lack of interest even in the “conversation” they claim to desire.

Secondly, “united Jewish students’” direct comparison of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement (which these students equate with Brown Divest) to the antisemitic actions of German citizens under Nazi rule in the years before the Holocaust was a contemptible and deeply antisemitic smear.

The legacy of the atrocity of the Holocaust is shared by all Jews, who use it as a lens to understand oppression of any group, past or present. But degrading the memory of history’s worst anti-Jewish crime to defend the systematic oppression of Palestinians at the hands of the government that claims to represent Jews around the world is not only reprehensible, but blatantly antisemitic.

I believe ACCRIP will recommend that Brown divest from companies that participate in Israel’s violations of international law. I can only hope that “united Jewish students” will come to understand that this campaign is not against them, but is rather targeting these companies to end oppression in Palestine.

-BB

News x Features 15 Reflections on Hong Kong Liana Chaplain, Miranda Van-Boswell, Anonymous, & Flo Li Science + Tech 17 Reality Check Gemma Sack

Mission Statement The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed

by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/ or classism.

Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.

The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.

Week in Review Gemma Sack News Jacob Alabab-Moser Izzi Olive Metro Victoria Caruso Alina Kulman Sara Van Horn Arts Zach Barnes Seamus Hubbard Flynn Features Mara Dolan Mia Pattillo Science + Tech Miles Guggenheim Matt Ishimaru

15 NOVEMBER 2019

Literary Catherine Habgood Isabelle Rea Ephemera Eve O’Shea Sindura Sriram X Jorge Palacios Alex Westfall List Ella Comberg Ella Rosenblatt Tiara Sharma Staff Writers Roxanne Barnes Alan Dean Muskaan Garg Ricardo Gomez Jennifer Katz Sophie Khomtchenko Emma Kofman

VOL 39 ISSUE 08

Dana Kurniawan Deb Marini Bilal Memon Kanha Prasad Nickolas Roblee-Strauss Emily Rust Issra Said Peder Schaefer Star Su Kion You Copy Editors Grace Berg Sarah Goldman Marina Hunt Christine Huynh Cherilyn Tan Design Editors Ella Rosenblatt Christie Zhong Designers Kathryn Li Katherine Sang

Illustration Editor Pia Mileaf-Patel Ilustrators Alana Baer Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Fatou Diallo Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stoll Eliza Macneal Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Owen Rival Charlotte Silverman Mariel Solomon Miranda Villanueva Stephanie Wu Art Director Claire Schlaikjer

Business Somerset Gall Emily Teng Web Ashley Kim Social Media Ben Bienstock Pia Mileaf-Patel

MVP Gemma Sack *** The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

Alumni+Fundraising Chris Packs Senior Editors Ella Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang Managing Editors Ben Bienstock Tara Sharma Cate Turner

@THEINDY_TWEETS

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

BY Tammuz Frankel & Roxanne Barnes ILLUSTRATION Cece Stewart DESIGN Christie Zhong

RUNNING ON WATER Last month, a pair of sneakers embedded with vesicles of holy water sold out within minutes of its release, despite retailing at a steep $1,425. Dubbed “Jesus Shoes,” the modified Nikes are purportedly a collaboration between Brooklyn creative agency MSCHF and INRI (Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum, or Jesus, King of the Jews). Beyond enabling wearers to walk on water—which MSCHF asserts is sourced from the River Jordan and has been blessed by a priest—the shoes come with Frankincense-scented insoles, a golden keychain depicting the crucifixion, and a box bearing an altered papal seal. “MT. 14:25,” or Matthew 14:25, the Biblical verse in which Jesus walks on water, is fashionably imprinted in tiny lettering on each of the sneakers.

MSCHF’s past work includes “Late Night Snap Hacks,” a website that posts to a user’s social media accounts at night to fabricate a rich social life, and “Times Newer Roman,” a version of the classic font that is 10-15 percent wider in order to increase page count. Most recently, MSCHF released an app called “Bull & Moon” that recommends portfolios of financial investments based entirely on astrological data.

“Jesus Shoes” share this sense of irony, treading a fine line between critiquing and exploiting the profitability of Christianity in late capitalism. Last week, Drake posted a video of his own pair on his Instagram story.

Consisting exclusively of him sloshing the water back and forth with no narration whatsoever, Drake’s video seems to border on a religious ritual. Celebrity adoption is a testament to the way prohibitively high pricing and excessively corporate marketing limit the accessibility of these shoes.

After selling out, the modified Air Max 97s (a shoe that typically retails for $160) soon rose again on sneaker reselling sites, where prices average above $2,000 before tax and tithing expenses. On October 20th, a size 15 pair went for $4,899, proving once and for all that men with large feet will stop at nothing to show just how big their cross really is. These high prices are representative of a broader trend of ludicrous limited-edition sneaker resale prices. For example, the Nike “MAG” self-lacing sneaker, modeled after Marty McFly’s shoes in Back to the Future II, fetches $28,000 on average. StockX, one of the largest online sneaker resellers and the primary marketplace for purchasing flipped “Jesus Shoes,” capitalizes on this phenomenon by offering stock market-like graphs of buying trends and variable pricing based on market demands.

At press time, StockX rates the volatility (the shoe’s predicted price deviation) of “Jesus Shoes” at 41.0% (for comparison, Apple stock over a similar period has a volatility of 0.19%).

In a press release, MSCHF explains: “The Vatican has mad style if you really look at it—dope engravings, crazy hats, everything blinged out with gold—so we wanted these shoes to allude to that.” Indeed, the release of the shoes comes at a moment when high fashion and popular culture are increasingly incorporating Christian iconography. Last year, the Met Gala theme “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” inspired attendees to wear outfits that playfully combined (read: blasphemed) various religious symbols. For example, Rihanna showed up in a minidress and a bedazzled, miter-like headpiece. More recently, Kanye West graduated from lyrically imagining himself as God Himself to running “Sunday Services” complete with Bible readings and a live choir.

In the Gospels, Luke quotes John the Baptist as saying, “I indeed baptize you with water; but one mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose” (Luke 3:16, King James Bible).

We at the College Hill Independent humbly acknowledge that we too feel unworthy of loosening, wearing, or, for that matter, even bidding on the “Jesus Shoes.”

-TF

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week in unlikely vessels

RODENTS IN CARS GETTING FROOT LOOPS Perhaps responding to the huge social crisis of rat mobility, researchers have finally taught rats to drive tiny cars. Scientists at the University of Richmond trained rats to navigate around using little mechanized food containers as cars in exchange for Froot Loops.

The act of driving, these scientists discovered, has the positive effect of reducing the rats' anxiety levels.

The tiny rat-mobiles are made of old plastic containers with little controllable motors. When the rats reached five months old—four and a half for a learner’s permit—researchers introduced them to the cars. The Richmond team spent weeks teaching the rats how to operate the cars via a little copper bar that they could press to move forward, backward, and turn.

After their drivers ed course, the subjects and their cars were placed at random locations within a habitat, with the goal of obtaining strategically strewn Froot Loops in their environment.

Study author Kelly Lambert stressed how the connection between rats and humans is such that a study like this is useful for understanding human behavior. Of mice and men, Lambert commented to Smithsonian magazine, “The rat is an appropriate model for the human brain in many ways since it has all the same areas and neurochemicals,” adding, “just smaller, of course.”

Researchers have drawn several useful conclusions from this experiment. They first found that rats that lived in more stimulating environments had an easier time learning how to drive. According to Lambert, enriched cages, meaning habitats with moving toys of different textures and colors, improve rat “hippocampal complexity and emotional resilience.” Within this richly stimulating home life, however, the rats that learned how to drive demonstrated lower stress levels than the rats without wheels.

The study did not appear to account for the effect that eating Froot Loops is also a really good stress reliever

in certain situations.

In order to determine whether the rats derived any relief from their vehicular freedom, researchers looked for a specific chemical in their feces. Parsing through the rats’ emotional dump, their second useful discovery was that the driving rats had lower rates of stress corticosterone and higher production of stress-relieving hormone dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA). Apparently, four months of joyriding cleared up the rats’ shit.

Hypothesizing about why the ability to drive would have chilled out the rats, Lambert commented that it was likely an increased sense of control over their own environments. Her team found that the cereal commute gave the rats “something like a rodent version of what we refer to as self-efficacy or agency in humans.” The connection to humans is more complicated than just saying driving and Froot Loops heal the soul, though both definitely have their place in mental health care.

Commutes in the United States definitely don’t relieve stress, regardless of how happy these hamster-adjacent drivers seem to be. In point of fact, Scientific American claims that every minute of a commute directly correlates to more health problems related to physical and mental degradation. However, if a loosely applicable takeaway is to be drawn here, the freedom appeared to be valuable to the rats, even in their highly controlled lives. The act of driving itself, whether by wheel or copper bar, is only the vehicle for the true stress-reliever at work here: autonomy. The rats with more tools to control their environments emerged happier, like people. But smaller, of course.

The Indy would like to add that, as an additional stress-relieving element of this study, watching videos of the rats controlling their tiny cars is also delightful and calming.

-RB

WEEK IN REVIEW

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BY Olivia George ILLUSTRATION Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN Christie Zhong

A JURY OF ONE'S

PEERS? How low jury pay limits court justice in Rhode Island

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METRO

15 NOV 2019

This was not the first time Senator Elizabeth Crowley had served on a jury, and, for the most part, she felt eager and proud to serve again. However, this was the first time she had served on a statewide grand jury.

While jurors in local courts typically serve for a couple of days, Crowley’s grand jury met periodically in Kent County over the course of six months, ending in April 2016.

During Crowley’s service period, it dawned on her that in Rhode Island, juror compensation stands at a flat rate of $15 per day, regardless of how long or in which court one serves. It could be worse—some counties in Alabama, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee pay $10; in Georgia, some pay $5. It could, however, be better. Connecticut requires employers to pay a juror for their first five days served, while Massuchusetts requires the same for three days. Both states compensate jurors $50 daily thereafter and have funding available for unemployed jurors. In Rhode Island, no such funds are available, and employers are not obligated to pay employees while they are serving on a jury.

Crowley’s service on the grand jury did not pose an acute financial burden, she admits. At that point, Crowley was retired—she had been a Central Falls City Clerk for 40 years—with a pension. She was also serving her fourth term in the state Senate, representing District 16, which encompasses Central Falls— the smallest and poorest city in the state—and part of Pawtucket. She knew, however, that the vast majority of her constituents were not in a financial position to disrupt their jobs periodically for a six month period only to be handed $15 in return at the end of each day.

Astounded, Crowley asked the Juror’s Commissioner Office how long compensation levels had remained at that level. Since 1983, she was told. If compensation had kept in line with inflation, current Rhode Island jurors would be paid more than $35 per day — what $15 in 1983 is worth today, according to the Consumer Price Index.

Today, Crowley, in her tenth term as a state senator, is a torchbearer for the small handful of elected officials in the Rhode Island General Assembly petitioning for an increase in juror compensation, introducing legislation on the issue in three of the past four legislative sessions. Despite her efforts, Rhode Islanders serving as jurors have not received a compensation increase in over three decades. “Almost 40 years!” she exclaimed in an interview with the College Hill Independent. “I can remember 40 years ago paying 59 cents for a box of pampers for my baby,” she joked. “It was a generation ago.”

The issue is not that low income communities are being forced to miss work to serve on juries, Crowley explains. Those summoned for duty can receive exemptions on the grounds of financial hardship. The problem is that low jury duty pay inhibits low-income residents from serving, creating a major obstacle to achieving diverse jury pools, she adds.

In a nation where racism and classism are often closely linked, juror pay has routinely played into the broader racial bias that pervades our criminal justice system. Racial homogeneity in juries is widely shown to perpetuate the harm the legal system inflicts on communities of color.

The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees each criminal defendant the right to a trial by an “impartial jury.” In a 1975 Supreme Court decision, an “impartial jury” was held to be one drawn from “a representative cross section of the community.” The principle is today widely synonymized by the phrase “a jury of one’s peers.” But Crowley emphasized that defendants who have a right to be tried by a jury of their peers may instead face a jury of people who can afford to participate in the legal process. “Are my constituents truly being judged by their peers?” she wonders. “Because many of them couldn’t afford to be on a jury, as much as they might like to.” +++ The Licht Judicial Complex, located at 250 Benefit Street, houses both the Superior Court and the Jury Commissioner’s Office. William “Bill” Maguire, Associate Jury Commissioner, has worked in the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Commissioner’s Office for 18 years. During that time, he has watched the compensation for federal jurors and for jurors in other states increase, all while Rhode Island has remained stagnant. “It’s almost embarrassing to tell people they will get $15 per day,” he told the Independent. “It’s a cause that has been dear to my heart for a long time.”

On any given Monday, some 200 people are summoned to the Superior Court for jury duty, while about 150 are summoned each Wednesday. The Court, which serves Providence and Bristol counties, is one of Rhode Island’s four Superior Courts. The group of potential jurors—the jury pool—is randomly selected from a list compiled from sources including voter registrations, state issued IDs and driver’s license renewals, Craig Berke, Assistant State Court Administrator, told the Independent. From those lists, summons are mailed. Berke added that the Court does not keep data on the number of people citing financial hardship as a reason for seeking exemption from their summons.

Affirming that the Court does not want “jury service to be a financial burden,” Berke added that data of this kind was “just not something that we have felt compelled to keep.” Each exemption request is reviewed on a case-by-case basis, he added.

Despite the absence of Court-collected data, Senator Crowley recognised that low compensation was affecting the ability of many of her constituents to participate in jury service. To this end, Crowley introduced legislation that would have raised juror’s daily pay to $35 a day in 2016. It was not perfect, she thought (knowing that both Massachusetts and Connecticut offered higher levels of compensation), but at least it was “a foot in the door.” The Rhode Island Senate passed Crowley’s legislation with a sweeping majority and was then referred to the House Finance Committee. There, the Bill died, never to be called for a vote on the House floor.

In 2018, Crowley tried again. This time, the legislation called for two incremental changes: the first to raise compensation to $25 per day starting July 1, 2019, then another a year later to $35 a day. Once again, the bill passed the Senate. Again, momentum fizzled once it reached the House; the Bill never passed the House Finance Committee. Crowley submitted identical legislation during the 2019 legislative session, calling for two incremental changes of $25 and $35 a year later.

Third time lucky, she hoped. After the Senate passed the Bill almost unanimously, it landed, once again, in the laps of the House Finance Committee. There, it failed again. Representative Marvin Abney, chairman of the committee, could not be reached for comment.

“The bill was considered in the context of all the budget priorities,” wrote Larry Berman, spokesman for Speaker of the House Nicholar Mattiello, to the Independent. The financial impact of the legislation counterbalanced its recognized merit, he added. “In a very challenging budget year,” Berman continued, referencing the 2019 finacial year, “the House Finance Committee determined that raising the pay for jurors was not something the state could afford this year.”

By Crowley’s calculations, implementing the increase would cost the state approximately an additional $500,000 annually. A worthy price to pay for increasing access to justice, she attests. “I am very adamant about this,” said Crowley. “Why would people want to hold back on the ability for other people to serve on juries?” Berman did not respond to further questions about whether Speaker Mattiello had considered whether Rhode Island’s low compensation had the potential to undermine the right to be tried before “a jury of one's peers.”

question of juror pay. King County, Washington, pays $10 per day, which is the lowest amount allowed by Washington state law. Plaintiffs allege that this level of compensation contributes to the systematic exclusion of low-income individuals and minorities from jury service. The ACLU of Washington and King County Department of Public Defense are among those who have voiced support for the plaintiffs.

And low juror compensation is just one way by which certain swathes of the population are tacitly excluded from juries without explicitly exclusive language, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Brown, told the Independent. Meager compensation compounds existing difficulties that restrict low-income community members from serving on juries: They cannot afford childcare, their employer is unlikely to offer compensation, and they may even fear losing their job if taking time off to serve, she added. “To have economic barriers that impact the poor disproportionately from serving on a jury seems to be particularly cruel,” said Gonzalez Van Cleve, adding that low-income people are disproportionately impacted by the criminal justice system and that defendants are therefore disproportionately poor. “It undermines this whole notion of jury of your peers,” she said. “This, to me, is a major issue in terms of access to justice.”

Financial impediments to jury service disproportionately affect people of color because people of color are disproportionately affected by poverty, said Gonzalez Van Cleve. And research has widely shown that exclusion of people of color from juries has a major impact on outcomes for criminal defendants of color.

A 2012 study led by researchers at Duke University, for example, found that in cases with no Black members of the jury pool, Black defendants were convicted 81% of the time, while white defendants were convicted 66% of the time. When the jury pool included at least one Black person, the conviction rates were far more comparable: 73% for white defendants, 71% for Black defendants. As Gonzalez Van Cleve and others stress, findings such as these demonstrate how materially crucial a jury of peers really is. Although increasing juror compensation can only do so much to address the racial bias—implicit and overt—that is woven into the fabric of our legal system, it is a necessary, and long overdue improvement.

Senator Crowley knows that increasing juror pay will not resolve all the inequalities that riddle the legal system, but maintains that improving compensation would give defendants “a little more of a chance” of being brought in front of a jury by which they feel represented. She hopes that raising compensation levels will gradually help ease the burden for those experiencing financial hardship who want to serve, thereby increasing the diversity of jury pools. “$15 just isn’t going to cut it,” she said.

Though the topic is often sidelined, for Crowley, improving juror compensation levels will be a vital step in the march toward equitable access to justice. She’s already pre-filled legislation for the next legislative session, and is currently looking for a sponsor for the House version of her Bill. “I will keep chipping away at it,” she added, “until I get this passed.”

OLIVIA GEORGE B’22 thinks that the House Finance Committee should count access to justice as a priority.

+++ Concern about jury compensation is not limited to the Ocean State. Across the country, courts have long acknowledged and affirmed the importance of socio-economically, and racially, diverse juries to ensure fair trials. In an exhaustive report examining the jury system in Washington state and published in 2000, for example, the Washington State Jury Commission called a compensation increase for jurors “its highest priority.” Almost two decades on, the Washington State Supreme Court is deliberating the

METRO

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BUILDING REPUBLIC

BY Erika Undeland DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

Kyrgyz Systems of Accountability On March 24, 2005, my mother and father cheered as demonstrators took over the White House of the Kyrgyz Republic. They listened to the impassioned address of the leader of the opposition, and watched as the protestors hurled furniture out of the windows, symbolically cleansing the building. No violence ensued, and my parents hosted a celebratory dinner that night. They popped champagne and invited all their friends and family, saluting the ousting of President Askar Akayev and marking the end of what has since been referred to as the Tulip Revolution. Akayev fled to Russia, and the Kyrgyz Republic was supposed to have entered a new phase in its adolescence, surpassing the growing pains of a new democracy.

Kyrgyzstan transitioned from a Soviet socialist republic to a democratic one in 1991, and has since faced instability typical of many new states. The West often refers to Kyrgyzstan as the liberal democratic oasis of Central Asia, due to the fact that its neighbouring post-Soviet states remain entrenched in autocracy. However, democratic statehood is still new to the people, and there are still procedures that need strengthening for the security of the country.

In Kyrgyzstan, coup d’états have been ad hoc mechanisms for political justice, mostly because the government has lacked the checks and balances to remove the president from office. The changes have had to happen through civil unrest. The Tulip Revolution was the first case of this phenomenon; the second was the violent ousting of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev in 2010. Where the 2005 revolution had been filled with immense hope for the future, the second revolution came with a kind of cynicism. For some, it trapped Kyrgyzstan in a paradoxical state of stagnation and flux: a country stuck in a cycle of wrenching change.

Semi-regular national upheaval and crisis had become a part of life.

After the coups, both Bakiyev and Akayev fled to other former Soviet countries. Though they both no longer hold positions of power in Kyrgyzstan, Akayev and Bakiev effectively avoided any real penance. However, recent events are about to introduce presidential accountability to the rule of law.

The Kyrgyz government, currently spearheaded by president Sooronbay Jeenbekov, is attempting to convict previous president Almazbek Atambayev of corruption. Atambayev’s potential conviction would be the first time a president faced punishment, and is thus a step towards strengthening the legal mechanisms of Kyrgyzstan. Presidential accountability is an important benchmark for Kyrgyzstan’s growth, yet the conviction does not necessarily indicate perpetual justice for the Kyrgyz people. This is in part because this new precedent does not have stable footing, since Jeenbekov still has the potential to create safeguards to protect himself from the same fate. +++ Atambayev’s Arrest Jeenbekov, a member of Atambayev’s Social Democratic Party, had initially agreed to stay allies with Atambayev, implicitly establishing a rotational system of president/prime minister analogous to the arrangement between Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev of Russia. During his presidency, from 2011 to 2017, Atambayev had strengthened the power of the prime minister in anticipation of his future role. However, Jeenbekov has done his best to prevent

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NEWS

Atambayev from reascending to power.

Over the course of June and July of this year, the former protegé passed a law stripping former presidents of immunity from prosecution, and charged Atambayev with corruption. This charge is grounded in the 2013 release of Aziz Batukaev, a Chechen crime boss. Batukaev’s wife falsified a leukemia diagnosis for him, and Atambayev’s administration granted him medical amnesty. Several top officials, including a deputy prime minister, resigned following the scandal.

Atambayev disobeyed the court summons three times. On August 7, 2019, the Kyrgyz Special Forces descended on Atambayev’s house in a suburb of Bishkek to arrest him. This proved to be disastrous; not only did Atambayev escape, but his guards murdered one officer and took six hostages during the incident.

Atambayev claimed that he himself was shooting from his rifle. The Special Forces successfully detained him the next day, and the national security services alleged that Atambayev was conspiring to overthrow Jeenbekov, plotting a third revolution. Immediately afterwards, about 1000 protestors violently clashed with police in the center of Bishkek, and the rumble of unrest grew louder. +++ Legal Fallout After the protests following the most recent arrest, the Kyrgyz people waited with bated breath for the next series of coup attempts. I flew into Bishkek on August 12, and the conversations I had with my family alternated between my academic concentration and the potential for another revolution. Our cousins in Italy were planning on visiting later in autumn; some relatives recommended that they delay their travel plans in case of another violent change in regime. The default system of accountability for presidential misconduct had become, to many, popular uprisings.

No such revolution came, mostly due to the weakness of Atambayev. At the moment, the charges against him have been mounted to murder, attempted murder, inciting mass riots, taking hostage, and threatening the authority of the Kyrgyz government. Atambayev is refusing to sign documents, but he cannot escape à la Akayev or Bakiyev. Jeenbekov’s administration is currently in the process of getting him to court.

The set of legal arrangements enacted by Jeenbekov, including the stripping of immunity of former presidents, as well as the detainment, are setting a precedent for a punitive system for corruption. However, the actual arrest and potential conviction of Atambayev is only a small provision of justice.

The Kyrgyz court initially charged Atambayev with corruption, for the release of Batukaev. Yet Atambayev released him due to false documentation claiming a terminal illness. Much of the unlawful behavior was conducted by Batukaev’s wife, and Atambayev categorically denies awareness of the forgeries. Though the legality of the release is questionable, it is not to the scale of corruption committed by former president Bakiyev, whose son embezzled $35 million, nor that of Akayev, whose family received around $100 million through government contracts. Atambayev’s misbehavior was relatively less significant in terms of its damage to the country, and therefore his arrest bears greater importance for its political implications, instead of justice.

Ultimately, this is a ploy by Jeenbekov to retain

his own power. Both Jeenbekov and Atambayev were members of the Social Democratic Party of Kyrgyzstan, but this means little in Kyrgyzstan. Parties are largely nominal and experience frequent turnaround. This mostly has to do with a lack of ideological conviction amongst politicians, which means that political campaigns have flimsy platforms. Instead, Kyrgyz citizens often factionalize themselves according to regional divides: the Russo-educated North and the conservative South. Though these factions result in prejudice, they do not necessarily translate into differences in vote share or allegiance. Individuals in power often transcend political boundaries, whether parties or regions, just to maintain a stronghold.

This has created a campaign culture centered on the personal qualities of candidates. During the 2017 electionst, Atambayev, a northerner, endorsed southerner Jeenbekov because he was most likely to help Atambayev retain power. He disparaged Jeenbekov’s opponent and fellow northerner Babanov, who was Atambayev’s first Prime Minister. Party or regional cohesion in Kyrgyz politics is rare, and differences in policy or ideology along party lines even moreso.

Jeenbekov continues this tradition of personalistic politics as he tries to eliminate Atambayev’s allies.

He purged his cabinet of Atambayev’s loyalists and arrested several. Even if Atambayev were to attempt a coup, his allies are just as, if not more, powerless. As Jeenbekov paves the way for the first sentencing of a Kyrgyz president, he is strengthening his own power.

This places a shadow over his motives, and raises the question as to whether the new legal framework would apply him, should Jeenbekov exploit his power. It is fully within his right as the President to reverse the legal system he’s created to convict Atambayev, and given the evidence of his aggressive consolidation of power, he may do so before the next election. +++ A New Stability At the moment, Kyrgyzstan is in a period of stability as it awaits Atambayev’s compliance. Though he is not cooperating, he does not have the means to incite another upset. The Kyrgyz court has extended his detainment to December 26, keeping him firmly in the hands of the government. Putin has allied himself with Jeenbekov, implying that Russia will not intervene on his behalf. This is of critical importance given the fact that Kyrgyz policy is largely deferential to the Kremlin, a relationship that dates back to the Soviet Union.

The establishment of accountability systems is a key milestone for a new country. Though the perpetuity of these systems is in question, that does not negate the fact that the Kyrgyz government is indeed strengthening its institutional capacity, a necessary framework for the future provision of justice and accountability. An improvement in the rule of law results in greater presidential oversight, which would improve the stability of the country. Civil unrest as a mechanism for change may become passé to the Kyrgyz population as they begin more heavily relying on the government. A conviction would mean only a life sentence for Atambayev, but it has revolutionary implications for the stability of the country.

ERIKA UNDELAND B'21 would like for you to google Kyrgyzstan.

15 NOV 2019

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06

MAKING DOUGH

BY Alana Baer ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Anna Brinkhuis

Thoughts on Mika Rottenberg’s surreal videos

A kneaded piece of dough slides through a hole in the wall. Flattened bright-red fingernails are flattened.

Human tears drip through an opening in the floor and evaporate into sweat.

Artist Mika Rottenberg features these images in the assembly lines of her surreal, provocative short films. Rottenberg, widely acclaimed in the art world, currently works out of New York City, where she recently had a solo show at the New Museum. Now 43, Rottenberg was born in Argentina and raised in Israel by parents who were involved in the country’s labor movement. Likely inspired by her upbringing, Rottenberg’s work addresses themes of labor and consumption through a Marxist lens. She has been transparent about her inspiration, explaining to Border Crossings magazine that “the whole body of work started when I was reading Marx.”

I was first introduced to Mika Rottenberg by a sculpture professor last year, who told me that she understands Rottenberg's videos to be sculptures that the camera moves through. I gave her videos a watch. Their absurdity made me laugh. I was drawn to her beautiful, disturbing fictions, interested in all the images of labor, but left confused by the fruits of that labor. +++ A typical Rottenberg factory plays out in her seven minute video-loop titled Dough. Women knead a long piece of dough, feeding it through holes in the floors and roofs of small, claustrophobic rooms. One woman rotates a lever, powering a fan that sits behind a vase of flowers. The fan blows pollen from the flowers toward another woman. This causes her to produce allergic tears, which drip down her body and through a hole in the floor. That hole leads into a lower level room where the tears are fed through tubes and evaporate into steam. This causes the dough to rise. Together, these women form an assembly line, with its traditional features of repetitive, individualized, and monotonous tasks. By the end of the video, the combined, uniform labor of the women produces tightly packaged, tearrisen globs of dough.

But in many ways, Rottenberg’s videos are far from the assembly line. The camera shifts between rooms

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ARTS

and intrudes on bodies. The scale of both the rooms and the bodies is out of whack. The imagery, and what it implies, is otherworldly. Rolls of fat on people’s bodies become luxurious folds of fabric, and the camera seems confident that there is nothing strange about these shrink-wrapped, tear-embedded pieces of dough. Every frame spills over with detail, and colors deviate from the soul-sucking blues and grays of traditional factory depictions. Rottenberg’s refined palettes consist of beiges, as in Dough, and pastels, as in Mary’s Cherries. She does not fabricate dull, mechanical, fluorescent-lit factories, but decorative, fantastical ones. She places the magical and the mundane right up against each other, inventing a setting equal parts beautiful and disturbing, reminiscent of both a dollhouse and a workplace. +++ In Rottenberg’s Rube Goldberg–like machines, human bodies do not just run the machines, but function as the machinery itself. In Dough, tears allow dough to rise.

In Mary’s Cherries, a woman’s fingernail clippings are rolled into cherries. The success of the assembly line depends on drops of tears and clips of fingernails; these physical extensions are both commodified and exist as pieces of machinery. In Mary’s Cherries, food fuels the bodies, and thus the machinery. We see a burger travel along a conveyor belt for one woman to eat while she pedals a stationary bike. The consumption of the burger is integrated into the machinery, allowing for uninterrupted production. This choice reads as satirical in the current context of tech companies and their extensive dining services, where efficiency is maximized, and the line between home and office is perilously blurred. The bodily exploitation inherent in material labor is taken to its logical extreme: Bodies are machinery, and bodily parts and fluids are packaged into products. And these bodies are extraordinary ones. Among those cast in these two videos are a bodybuilder and a six hundred pound woman.

Rottenberg’s selective casting could be seen as exploitative, since she aestheticizes and profits from physical features that our society marginalizes. When questioned on these ethics, Rottenberg often points to the fact that every woman she includes in her videos already “rent out their bodies” online, capitalizing

on the fetishization of long-hair or contortionist abilities. But Rottenberg’s comment is not a justification so much as an explanation of a convenient way to find and cast these non-normative bodies. The gaze in the videos is a fascinated one, a managerial stare. The camera does not capture these women fully, and is instead intensely focused on their atypical qualities and the task they perform. Perhaps these non-normative laborers stand as symbols for the disproportionate exploitation of vulnerable people—who are vulnerable not for their weight or height, but for their class, race, and age—in sweatshop labor. +++ In these videos, Rottenberg engages with the idea of use. In Marx’s foundational text, Capital, he discusses concepts of use with “labor-value” and “use-value.”

Rottenberg’s dough holds some “labor-value,” as its production necessitates labor. But the dough lacks any apparent “use-value,” as in, tangible features of the commodity that fulfills some human want or need.

While Rottenberg’s dough contains valuable material, it fails to fulfill any reasonable human want or need. And this idea of use does not exist in a vacuum.

Rather, it is socially and economically constructed.

The concept of use is complicated by who and what our society finds useful, in terms of consumption and capital. This forces the idea of what is useful towards just that—consumption and capital—and away from creativity. In that way, regular dough fulfills the human want to eat bread; it logically holds more “use-value” than a piece of dough soaked with tears and sweat.

Productivity adds another layer to the concept of use, taking account of efficiency too. Marx points out that productivity depends on the “values and interests people have.” These non-normative bodies are cast as unproductive in our broader social context, considering the collective “values and interests” placed on conventions of beauty and desire. And these female laborers seem to also be cast as unproductive in the context of the factory, with their ‘excessive’ height or weight requiring additional accommodation.

Rottenberg’s camera capitalizes on these bodies that are regularly cast as unproductive. And the performance of these workers is sanded down to individual tasks. These tasks do not maximize the functions of

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the body, inasmuch as the smashing of a fingernail does not make use of the strength of a bodybuilder. The intense interest and disgust that the gaze of the video displays toward bodily excess appears to be grounded in a similar capitalist logic that is, at times, subverted in her videos: We are supposed to be disgusted by that which is not useful. While Rottenberg’s work investigates the relationship between the laborer and the factory, it also explores the relationship between factory and the idea of use.

+++

presented in factory-like alcoves, taking the viewer out of the crisp-white gallery walls and positioning them in a space more reminiscent of that which appears on the screen. These cardboard boxes, which are conventionally useful, are deemed useless in the traditional sense in the art-space that is the gallery.

Rottenberg forces these labor forms, industrial and artistic, to rub up against each other in other ways, too. Her assembly lines are aggressively physical, relating to the physicality of art-making itself. Both forms of making involve repetitive acts of manual, alienated labor, making use of the body and its capacities. But the geographic, racial, and class borders divorce the two, and the conditions involved with each makes their comparison nonsensical. Art is often dependent on ideas, encouraging individual thinking.

Industrial labor maximizes efficiency, rejecting ideas and thinking on an individual level, alienating people from their humanity, vitality, and individuality. Art tends to differentiate people from machines, while industrial labor tends to reduce people to machines.

Rottenberg brings these labor forms—artistic and industrial—close together, but does not suggest any equivalence between the two.

With these beautiful, funny assembly lines, Rottenberg comments on the many layers of use and consumption in factory, art, and body. She suggests that art is often interested in uselessness and capitalist consumption is often interested in usefulness. The bourgeois art world, and its conceptual art movement, has long been interested in ideas of use. An absence of “use-value,” even if that absence is contingent on its position in a gallery space, distinguishes consumer products from art objects. That is what makes Duchamp’s Fountain a readymade art-object, and not just a urinal. But Rottenberg is defiant in conflating the usual boundary between processes of creation and conceptual-art objects. Her work is unruly in its absurdity, and for just how bizarre it seems that someone can make their living off of the production of these surreal videos. Rottenberg shows us that art itself is capable of rebelling against obsessively profit-oriented concepts of consumption.

Rottenberg’s industrial spaces are decorative. The vase of flowers in Dough appear to exist both as décor and for its pollen, and in turn, the production of tears.

But the flowers prove to ultimately have little use in both of their supposed purposes: as ornament and as a tear-generator. In this way, Rottenberg plays with function in a Goldberg-like conception, producing that which is ultimately “dysfunctional” again.

This simultaneous subversion, rejection, and +++ embrace of ‘use’ has other layers, too, extending to the exhibition spaces of her videos. With her video What is most suggestive about these assembly line Tropical Breeze, for instance, the screen is surrounded ALANA BAER B’22 can finally admit that she likes to scenarios, for me, is the uselessness of the objects that by cardboard boxes. Others of her videos have been cry into globs of dough. are produced. What purpose does a vacuum-sealed and tear-risen glob of dough serve? Or red fingernail clippings molded into maraschino cherries?

Rottenberg’s assembly line characters work tirelessly— biking, crying, kneading, cutting—to produce ultimately inconsumable items.

So I wonder why she fabricates factories for futile products. Perhaps in a world where it is ordinary for a six-foot-nine woman to retrieve a piece of dough entering the room through the roof, it is also ordinary to go to your nearest convenience store and buy that ingestible but likely sickening tear-embedded dough.

Maybe these strange commodities are on par with the alien aesthetics of her set design. Maybe these products could be read as practical in the world to which this factory belongs. But Rottenberg does not just create aesthetically strange parallels to the traditional images of sweatshop labor. It seems that these dysfunctional objects say something about the idea of use itself.

While Rottenberg’s assembly-line products seem utterly inconsumable, the productivity of these laborers is pushed to an extreme. They become more machine than human. They don’t even have time for lunch breaks. But these overworked laborers seem to subvert the dough’s “labor-value” with their production of objects that contain no “use-value” at all. In Capital, Marx explains that “all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labourtime.” Though Rottenberg identifies as a Marxist, her laborers seem to satirize, or even oppose, this Marxist claim that the more labor it takes to produce a product, the greater its value. The kneading of the dough may be seen not just as an act of industrial labor, but considering the dough’s ultimate futility, as dysfunctional labor too. Alternately, the kneading of the dough could be seen as an act of artistic labor, and the packaged tear-embedded dough as an art-object. In either case, these laborers’ joint production counters the very reason they are meant to be there.

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ARTS

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Collected Poems (no theme) Shades of Sick I woke up, sick of today, still a golden caterpillar, high as balls on buttery dreams.

My open eyes deceased the dreams, I forced myself awake, and I didn’t let me snooze again, or as I used to say to mom, my human morning alarm, Hindi for ‘just 5 more minutes’.

I knew I had to start producing Work, Food, Friends, Words, In other words, that necessary nectar that lay liquid, beyond the horizon of this hive.

But today I was sick with fear, that no friend would volunteer to bring me soup.

The idea of my forehead as warm enough and worthy to colonise a purple square on your calendar was meme worthy, given your attempts to outrun sprinting time.

You Can Buy Squishies Online Everywhere I go, all I can see is mothers and daughters. My mother has a pizza dough belly, soft and stretchmarked. I liked to point it out, squeeze it, to remind us both that this is where I once existed, that I am one of the three reasons her belly droops in grayish purple sashes. I pressed my toddler hand into these folds, hoping they might disappear me into her once more.

That winter I was quite sad. The custard comes in beautiful cylinders that shivered when you tipped them out of the plastic shell. I dug my spoon in and it tastes like a grayish purple on my tongue. The spoon carves its hollow. Sometimes I wonder, can’t we ever just experience our pain without learning from it?

There is a hand resting on my stomach, on the warm black velvet pulsing with it velvetly, skin bumpy like velvet, grass cool like hot velvet. The hand on my belly is my hand. I won’t know its exact give and take, the way its folds sink and grow and sink and grow. If I can see a leaf falling from a tree, can notice its curve like a hip, like my hip that I’ve inspected in the mirror, that aches, maybe one day I too could have a human body.

-Jane Freiman

I was so sick, so I was one with the bed, the pillow the north pole to the south of my head.

I peeked awake through glass and skinny tree towards the sky, frustrated with her sense of style, changing her clothes, over and over, the dresses darkening and darkening, shades of blue.

-Kanha Prasad

(three separate poems) Villains in sheeps’ clothing Naked sheep They all look like they are enjoying themselves Seeing things in things We love to prove me wrong “Mine own eyes deceived me” They bump into each other, sadly Lots of laughing It was a lot of things that affected me, clicky clicky -Isabelle Rea

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Epilogue [Marie Antoinette] trod inadvertently on the executioner’s foot. He said “Oh!” as if in pain; and, in that supreme moment, she apologized with queenly courtesy: “Pardon Monsieur, I did not intend it!”

I am only guilty of taking that which I was given: the chandelier sways before settling, the curtains collapse under their own weight, the baker stoops against the cusp of a blade you mistake for dawn. I never stoop, only bend, if I choose to. What else do you want me to say? The horses you freed know no other home, together they’ll starve alone; eventually the wheel must return to where it began.

–Andy Rickert

Argument Over Text Message If you need a change of perspective, you can google search “Pygmy Things” or order a swing-top trash can on Amazon, and when it comes, it will be five inches tall.

You can pull a cushion up to the television and watch the weather channel.

You will realize that whether or not you have a birthday party to attend, the rain will come in buckets from the sky.

You can swim naked around Aphrodite’s Rock at midnight and then, you will have eternal beauty.

But what if it is twelve oh two or eleven fifty eight?

What happens then?

You are naked and your heart is a mallet on the inside of your chest and all of a sudden it engulfs you, the everything of it, and all of a sudden, there you are, naked and treading water, a small head bobbing in the waves, letting your eyes go out of focus and then letting them come back in.

Displacement you need to keep track of the house when we are gone, because of robberys [sic] // read two weeks ago, replied to Mom never, the alarm on my phone says Dad forgot to disarm; a cat ran across the motion field of lights flashing on, pooling, a month of shadows displaced from drying, drying dead growth, the roses my father tended to shattering from want of water why is sandra even in this group chat she isn’t even going // said sister, i promise when you and dad and mom are trapped in a metal prison 35,000 feet in obdurate clouds for sixteen hours, my eyes won’t leave the sky praying for the tin rust bucket to touch down safely and that i am spared from the tragedy of flying is my prerogative but my staring eyes trail tears; i won’t be there for the gusting winds of Bagan through clay pagodas quakecracked, faith-swept, made gold by leaf and honey, made sweet by time and memory; i won’t be there but my eyes won’t stop watching please don’t dye your hair rhian not for this family trip said my mother because my sister wants balayage purple, flush from tip to scalp and it would break the portrait mom wants for our family but there is already craquelure on the oil paint, ah-may, we have not had entangled roots for decades there have only ever been three of us in Burma anyway and the poltergeist of the fourth trailing behind. we are gossamer threads of a frayed tapestry— and the slow unravelling bleeds color until my sister’s hair turns platinum and our cheeks are waxy white, the defensive lie of our bodies is unsubstantiated, but my sister and i are painters still we need to find someone to pick us up from home and drop us off at the airport (five in the morning) // from father “home” as pure rhetoric as if the lack of presence was maintenance in its own— my home’s mouth opened and its soul escaped left for 7,000 miles away got swept out to starry seas and entangled in siren nets of sound but landed on verdant Burma where i realize that the cracked and craggy facets of my home fit better, better in here, where the landscape trembles from the force of my parents coming home -Sandra Moore

-Catherine Habgood

-Gemma Brand-Wolf THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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BY Rachel Rood-Ojalvo ILLUSTRATION Laura Jaramillo DESIGN Christie Zhong

23 YEARS IN MY BODY content warning: eating disorder, bulimia, sexual violence i.

Recovery

is

not

Reflections on a Civil War

couldn’t handle not knowing my weight. I fell back into my bulimia, worse than ever. linear.

At a salad restaurant one afternoon, I wanted to run away from the table. I hadn’t factored it into the mental list of food for the day that I went over hundreds When I was in 4th grade, I was friends with two girls in of times in my waking hours. I was scared of a salad.

5th grade. As a sign of friendship, the three of us chose Miserable on the long flights home, I waited to nicknames for each other. They decided mine would find out how much weight I had gained. The limbo was be Blubber, like a whale. excruciating.

I stepped onto the scale. I had lost weight. How had ii. my mind so completely lost touch with my body?

My senior year of high school, I shaved my head. I had read all these online blog posts written by empowered vii. women who found it meaningful and worthwhile to Back for my freshman spring semester, I went to learn how to still feel pretty once they shed a tradition- the Flatbread Co. with a friend for dinner. The next ally feminine characteristic. I learned that the word morning, I saw on the scale that I had gained a pound, “still” did not apply for me. or maybe it was just a few tenths of a pound. I went on my longest ever binge. I spent all day searching, iii. eating, vomiting, seeking out foods that I loved, and The summer between my gap year and college, I craved, and deprived myself of, and felt guilty about. started going to the gym with my mom. We swam a Searching, eating, vomiting. The next morning, the mile together every morning, and she taught me how number had gone down one pound again. to use the Weight Watchers point system. I weighed myself each day, not realizing that as the number on viii. the scale went down, my attachment to it went up.

Crying on my dorm room bed, I called Health Services and asked for help. I wanted to get better, but I didn’t iv. know how to do it alone. Weeks later, the nutritionist My freshman fall, some friends held a potluck brunch was the first person I ever told. When I finished sharing outdoors. I ate an amount that would have been a lot my story, I asked if my case medically qualified as an before I lost weight, but that, after I lost weight, was eating disorder. I cried when she said yes. way too much. My stomach hurt. I went to a library bathroom and put my hand down my throat. I was not ix. thinking about losing weight or being thin, only about Two young women, in the span of one week, told me getting rid of the pain. It was the first time I ever made that I looked great and thin and could I tell them my myself throw up, and I did not understand the danger, secret for how to lose a couple pounds? could not conceive of the slippery slope, had no idea about the spiral. x.

The day I actually became bulimic (falling into a Recovery pattern of binging and purging) was on Thanksgiving. is

linear.

A few weeks after the brunch incident, I again ate an

not amount that my new, shrunken body could not hold.

Conveniently, I was pet-sitting for our neighbors. Sometimes I binge ate just to show myself I could eat Between dinner and dessert, I excused myself to feed a lot and had the willpower to keep it inside my body. their dogs. This time, I had found the answer: self-in- Other times, I relapsed, finding myself in yet another duced vomiting would help me keep losing weight, bathroom, leaning over yet another toilet. would let me eat all the foods that I had told myself In early April of my freshman year, I made a pact were off-limits without facing the consequences of with my parents and my brother. If I didn’t make myself their calories, would let me return home with room for throw up even once until the end of May, my parents dessert. I promised myself I would never make myself would buy me a one-way plane ticket to Colorado to throw up in my parents’ house. join my brother on his road trip home to New Jersey. I succeeded, and by the time we arrived home, I knew I v. would never make myself vomit again.

I broke my promise. I put my phone on the bathroom counter and played the pop song “Stitches” to drown xi. out the sound.

During my summer in New York City, a guy from Tinder complimented the blowjob I gave him: “That You watch me bleed until I can’t breathe was amazing. Do you even have a gag reflex?”

I’m shaking falling onto my knees I faked a laugh and nodded. He insisted there was no way. I wanted to cry, unable to explain why I was vi. positive that the answer was yes.

I promised myself I would stop when I went to Thailand over winter break to visit my brother and his girlfriend xii. who were living there.

At my annual check-up, I updated my doctor on my I broke my promise. That trip was the first time in health over the past year. She told me, “People don’t six months that I didn’t have access to a scale, and I lose weight from bulimia.”

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I wasn’t sure how to respond. Was she telling me I hadn’t lost weight from bulimia? Of course I had. Did she know how many tears I shed alongside the pounds?

I hesitated. After all, she was the trained professional.

Now, I know the term gaslighting. xiii.

My first post-bulimia Yom Kippur was difficult, full of reflection I was unprepared for. Listening to my stomach rumbling as I fasted, I was shocked back to all the times I had made myself hungry on purpose, had told myself I didn’t deserve to eat, had thought my body wasn’t worthy of taking up space. xiv.

In my fiction class, a student wrote a story about a young woman who counts everything she eats and makes herself throw up. During our in-class workshops, the professor always called on a student at random to summarize the story we were about to discuss, both to refresh our memories and to make sure we had done the reading.

“Rachel, can you tell us what this story is about?”

I should have said, Actually, this story was triggering for me; is it okay if someone else summarizes it? But I froze, and the words did not come.

I should have said, This story is about me. It is about me and it should have had a content warning because I was sitting in the library doing my homework and I was not ready.

Instead I said, “It’s about a young woman who counts everything she eats and makes herself throw up.” And then I fell silent for the rest of the discussion.

When another student mentioned the character’s bulimia, the author stated that the protagonist didn’t have an eating disorder, just “some unhealthy habits.”

I thought, Does she have personal experience? How can she not call this an eating disorder? Where does an author get the authority to write?

I didn’t have the words to say, We need to talk about trigger warnings and authors’ obligations to their readers and what fiction even is and whether an author needs to have direct experience with the content they write about.

I wish I said, We need to talk about all these things and more but I don’t know if I am ready and I don’t know if I will ever be ready. xv.

My brother Josh and I decided to run a half marathon together over Thanksgiving. He is six feet tall and a natural runner. I am five foot one and not a natural runner. I knew I would have to take care of my body if I wanted to be strong enough to run 13.1 miles, so I committed to nourishment instead of punishment.

A month before our race, Josh ran a half marathon in New Mexico. He finished with a great time, and I called to congratulate him and tell him it was okay if he wanted to run the Philadelphia race faster than me. He replied, “RJ, I ran the half marathon in Albuquerque to see how fast I could do it. I’m running the half marathon in Philly to run with you.”

We crossed the finish line side by side.

That Thanksgiving was the one-year anniversary of the day I became bulimic.

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xvi.

While I was home for the long weekend, I hung out with some friends from high school. We played a stupid drinking game where one of the team challenges was to see how far people could fit a beer bottle down their throat, a joke simulating oral sex. My best friend Will looked at me and understood immediately that I couldn’t participate. Without anyone else even noticing, he went a second time so that I wouldn’t have to.

“Stitches” came on the radio on my drive home.

Got a feeling that I’m going under But I know that I’ll make it out alive xvii.

While cleaning my sophomore dorm room, I found a notebook I kept while I was in Thailand. In it, I had recorded a scene that I must have blocked from my memory, because I had no recollection until I read it: me, alone, late at night, in the dark, making myself throw up by the side of a dirt road.

I haven’t kept a journal since.

I find it more manageable to write pieces like this one: a carefully-planned essay that gives me a sense of agency, an ability to control my own narrative. The journal from Thailand haunts me, like I have lost some privilege of living without fear of my past self, and with this piece I say: Look, I am choosing to write about this, to reflect on this. I will not let it sneak up on me. xviii.

Recovery

is

not

linear.

Recovery was thousands of times harder than being bulimic.

My therapist once told me that while recovering from any addiction or unhealthy habit is hard, eating disorder recovery is unique because we all have to eat multiple times a day every day. I cannot abstain from food the way I might abstain from alcohol or drugs. I have to face it, all the time, over and over. I have to live in my body, this battleground, and I have to eat.

I told my therapist that some of my friends make themselves throw up when they drink too much alcohol and don’t want to have a hangover. She looked worried and said, “You know you can never do that, right?”

how disrespected I felt in those moments, how awful it feels not to be listened to or taken seriously, how hard it is to learn that I need to ask more not just from others but for myself. How deserving I am of everything that I ask for.

But also, I didn’t make a big deal out of it because part of me—the part of me that used to struggle so deeply with body image that I thought the solution was to make myself vomit—was flattered that these guys were sleeping with me at all. The sexy one with the stupid Barstool Sports t-shirt from the bar in LA, the Spanish massage therapist from Tinder. Part of me was “honored” that they “picked” me.

I have stopped actively harming my body, but I am still learning to love it. I do not need to feel flattered, and I will not make excuses for those men. xxii.

I got ghosted last month. Or, almost ghosted. My suspicion is that he would have ghosted me if I hadn’t asked for him to return a book I lent him.

I was excited about him, excited about the way he kissed me goodnight at the end of our first date and said he was eager to see me again, excited about the text he sent me when he got home to say, “Thanks again for tonight, I had a great time.” Excited about the way he described me as smart and cute and loud and big-hearted, excited when he texted the next day to ask if he could see me again before leaving for New York for the weekend because he didn’t want to wait.

Excited when he told me he had already mentioned me to friends and his parents.

After a week of silence, I asked for my book back and he texted me the feeble explanation that “interest kinda fizzled.” I cried and told him to leave the book in my mailbox.

I fought my gut reaction to the text rejection, not allowing myself to think, If only I were hotter/thinner/ prettier, he would still be into me. My therapist told me to consider negative thoughts just as harmful as putting my hand down my throat. I cried when she said that, wanting to think that my progress has moved me far away from self-harm.

His fizzled interest says nothing about me or my body. I have to tell myself this over and over. His fizzled interest says nothing about me or my body.

I am grateful that it no longer takes so much energy for me to think about food. And I made the active

decision not to put so much energy into wondering why this guy changed his mind and disappeared. Instead, I am taking the energy that I might have spent on him, and putting it back into myself: into caring for myself, loving myself, building myself up, and reshaping the narratives that I tell myself. This guy might not deserve my energy anymore, but I do. I do.

I found the book in my mailbox; he didn’t even text me to say he’d driven over, climbed my front steps, thank you for letting me borrow it. xxiii.

Recovery

is

not

linear.

I don’t call myself “in recovery” anymore. Loving myself is still hard – I’m told it’s a life-long process. But I don’t treat my emotions with food. I let myself feel, I let myself cry. I let my body take up space. I skip gym days, I eat dessert. I try to be more confident, to think kind thoughts, and not to take rejections so personally.

I devote time to more important things, like enjoying my last semester of college and all the wonderful people and learning that fill it. I have spent 23 years in my body, and it has been three and a half years since I made the decision to take care of it. It/me.

People tell me I seem happier, and my loud laughter has returned. These are signs of my healing. Growth is long and slow and trying and exhausting, but the civil war is over. There is no voice inside my head telling me that an eating disorder will save me. I wear a ring engraved with the words no one is coming to save you.

The civil war is over. My mind and body are on the same side now, sometimes in tension, but we are moving forward together. Instead of fighting against myself, I am fighting for myself.

Recovery

is

not

linear.

RACHEL ROOD-OJALVO B’19.5 encourages Brown and RISD students who need help or support to call BWell Health Promotion at (401) 863-2794 or RISD Health Services at (401) 454-6625.

xix.

My junior fall semester, I studied abroad in Cameroon to improve my French. On the program, meals included about ten million carbs, which I was uncomfortable with at the time and still labeled “negative.”

Sometimes lunch at school had potatoes, rice, plantains, yucca, and beignets. Sometimes they served sandwiches with a side of extra bread.

I got sick, and the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Two or three times a week, I woke up in the middle of the night experiencing nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Medical tests revealed nothing, and antibiotics didn’t help.

Looking back, I am certain my illness was psychosomatic. With all the carbs and the lack of exercise, I was (subconsciously) terrified of gaining weight. A year and a half after my initial recovery from bulimia, I would never have dreamed of making myself throw up, but I believe that my body did what my mind wouldn’t consider carrying out. xx.

Last January, I went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. I sat with myself, by myself, stuck in my head and in my body with little else to focus on, for ten days.

I did my body scans, moving slowly like dripping honey, and I did not want to run away. The depths of my mind didn’t scare me, and I was content there in my body, which I consider great progress. xxi.

Two guys I had sex with last summer didn’t use condoms, even though I very clearly asked them to. I told my friends afterward, “Other than the fact that they didn’t use condoms, they were really fun one-night stands!” until it dawned on me that that sentence didn’t make much sense, that the first half of it might negate the second. It took me a while to process

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FEATURES

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Rows of shelves, stretching from the floor to the high ceiling, hold hundreds of pallets of everything from canned beans to boxes of pasta. Workers operate heavy lifts, shuttling overflowing crates from one shelf to the next. The Rhode Island Community Food Bank is located in south Providence in a large building, that was once the home of the Bro Jacks grocery store. In total, the Food Bank facilities contain 77,000 square feet of floor space, and 54 employees to go along with the 80,000 volunteer hours each year. All of these resources makes food assistance possible across the state.

54,200 households in Rhode Island are food insecure, meaning they don’t know where their next meal will come from. There is no easy solution to this problem, due to the fact that food insecurity is caused by deep systemic issues of poverty and unemployment.

The impacts of food insecurity are disproportionately felt by Latinx and Black Rhode Islanders, who are two times more likely to use food pantries than white Rhode Islanders. And the problem of food insecurity in Rhode Island is not getting better—in fact, there are reasons to believe it could get worse.

The Rhode Island Food Bank is trying to find new food sources to meet the demands of the state. “There is what’s called a meal gap,” Samuel Howard, the Food Bank’s communications coordinator, told the College Hill Independent. “The gap has shrunk over the years that I’ve worked here, but it’s still there.” While progress has been made, there is a risk that the gap could expand in the near future due to lack of affordable housing, federal cuts to welfare programs, inflation of food prices, and less food waste from grocery stores for the Food Bank to distribute.

The Food Bank does all that it can to fill the gap between the food people need and the food they have access to, working with 168 food pantries and meal sites throughout the state to feed those in need.

It collects food from larger companies, supermarkets, local community farms, and food drives before processing it at a central warehouse. Fleets of trucks then ship out the food to whichever pantries need it the most, including the West End, Better Lives, and Good Neighbors food pantries. Churches, community centers, and schools serve as food pantries where people pick up their food for the month. Although the Food Bank distributes food to over 50,000 people each year, 63 percent of food pantry visitors still feel they lack the funds to cover their food needs, even after assistance from federal funding and food pantries.

Food pantries are doing all they can to provide as many resources as possible to those that need them, even beyond food. They are integral parts of the community that empower those who need their services. They provide social welfare programs like housing assistance, applications for citizenship status, and legal advice. As opposed to the short-term solution that food pantry assistance provides, these are long-term solutions to food insecurity and poverty

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METRO

more broadly. The core of their mission is to make sure other businesses donating food that otherwise would that those who need food feel comfortable using the have gone to waste. This method is becoming less reliservices. They do this through programs that destig- able, though. matize the need for food assistance.

“Grocery stores are becoming more efficient, as places like Stop and Shop, and other retailers track +++ everything you buy,” Howard explains. “This means there is less guesswork and less food waste, but also less Better Lives of Rhode Island food pantry highlights the food for us to pick up.” In addition, community support reasons that the meal gap is at risk of increasing. Set in has started to regress. “As the economy recovers, the basement of Sanctuary Church, Better Lives has there’s the viewpoint from the community that there’s operated since 1974 and has grown to provide food to less need for our services, which leads to a decrease in over 4,000 people a month, becoming the most visited donations. And that doesn’t really match with reality.” pantry in the state. On Mondays, the busiest day of the All of these factors could lead to a growing meal gap, week, 50 people sit in rows of plastic chairs that have which would only worsen the food insecurity crisis in been set up to face tables loaded with food, waiting to Rhode Island. be called by their number.

Food insecurity stems in part from the crisis of +++ affordable housing in Rhode Island, and many visitors to Better Lives experience this first-hand. Currently, Although there is a high priority on getting more more than half of all Rhode Island renters are cost-bur- food to pantries, there is also a focus on ensuring dened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their that food pantries are welcoming places that people income on housing, which has increased in price by feel comfortable going to for assistance. The West 38% over the past fifteen years in Rhode Island. As End Community Center takes particular pride in its housing prices climb, the demand for pantry services welcoming atmosphere. Open since 1975, West End is increases even further. Rhode Island’s minimum wage an unassuming building located a few miles south of ($10.50 per hour) is not enough for many people to be Better Lives. The entrance looks like a pediatrician’s able to buy food after paying rent. office, with colorful floor tiles and cream-colored walls.

Further, many of the patrons at Better Lives are There is a large multipurpose room on the left, which aware of proposals to cut federal welfare programs has small plastic chairs and school tables. At the end of like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program the hallway, nestled away in the corner of this building, (SNAP). These proposed cuts would worsen the crisis is the food pantry. It’s small, no bigger than the size of of food insecurity by forcing 12 percent of the state’s a bedroom. recipients off the program. Even before the proposed This pantry provides food to 10 to 15 families per cuts go into effect, current SNAP benefits only cover day. Jacky Song, one of the workers who restocks the about half the cost of a healthy diet for a family of four shelves, smiles at people as they come in and ask for in Rhode Island. “Folks get their SNAP benefits on food. Song grew up in the West End, and went to the the 1st, and by the 15th people start to run out,” said middle school across the street. Song’s mom picked up Samuel Howard, the communications coordinator for food here when he was a child. the RI Food Bank. “Pantries will start to see a lot more Throughout the day, Song provides at least people after the 15th.” Further exacerbating the issue, three meals worth of food to families. Anyone with a the price of food has increased faster than wages in membership card, which provides proof of low-income Rhode Island. From 2016 to 2018, the price of food has status, can come in and get food once a month. While increased by 15%, but wages have only increased by 5%. the food pantry never runs out of food, Song wishes As a result, SNAP recipients can’t purchase as much they could give more to people who come by. A large food on SNAP. delivery from the Food Bank comes twice a month to Robert Perry picks up food from Better Lives restock the shelves. every two weeks. Since serving in the military, Perry In order to create an inclusive atmosphere, West has been in and out of jail, volunteering at the pantry End also meets other needs of its visitors beyond food for the last 6 years. Perry, like many, is on SSI (Social assistance. It serves as a daycare, assists in finding Security Income) and SNAP benefits, but he uses the housing, and delivers food directly to households. It pantry to get odds and ends that he couldn’t afford on even helps undocumented immigrants file for citizenSNAP like cuts of meat and fruit. However, if inflation ship and collects forms such as birth certificates for in food prices continues, and the government moves those that have misplaced them. Many food pantries forward with cuts to SNAP, Perry might become reliant have similar programs. on the pantry on a regular basis.

Denise Greene, director of the West End, overPantries such as Better Lives are also finding it sees the food pantry as well as its other social service harder to meet the demand for food. Traditionally, programs. She networks with different organizations nearly half the food distributed by the Food Bank in Rhode Island to make the food pantry a one-stop comes from the food industry, with grocery stores and shop for everyone. People can now come in and pick

15 NOV 2019

MAKING ENDS MEET

BY Kshitij Sachan, John Graves, Nell Salzman ILLUSTRATION Natasha Brennan DESIGN Christie Zhong

Food insecurity food insecurity food insecurity food insecurity

up diapers, clothes, shampoo, soap, laundry detergent, bleach, toothpaste, tooth brushes, and paper towels in addition to food. “How about the treat of a roll of paper towels?" Greene asks. "When you are poor, you don’t buy paper towels. But everybody wants paper towels!”

The pantry is trying to expand the population they serve. They’ve started purchasing more canned spaghetti and ravioli for the large homeless population that can’t take home a box of pasta to cook. For children, they now give away decorated kid boxes—a healtheir equivalent of a McDonald’s Happy Meal. Greene says that children now don’t have to feel ashamed when their families ask for food because they’re excited to open their boxes. “I can send them home on Friday and know that they’re eating all weekend,” Greene boasts proudly.

Greene’s biggest goal is to destigmatize food insecurity and get people excited to come to the food pantry. That starts with getting tastier, higher-quality food. “When you give away cheap food, people know.

We’re not picking up ham anymore, we’re picking up center-cut boneless pork chops,” Greene says. The pantry is also starting to offer delicious snacks such as Entenmann’s donuts—indulgences that low-income families might not be able to otherwise afford on SNAP benefits. Most food pantries provide staples such as beans, rice, and frozen turkey. West End, according to Greene, is focused on not only providing food, but also on making sure that people enjoy it. +++ Diana Burdett, the director of Better Lives, has been working there since 2003, when it was a much smaller organization. “This job is just making my hair turn white,” she says.

In addition to managing the largest food pantry in the state, Burdett puts aside time to manage cases for low-income individuals. She helps them find housing, file for citizenship status, and get legal representation.

“You can’t choose what family you’re born into. You just sort of take what you can get. So we try to be their support system. We are their support system, when they don’t have one,” Burdett says.

The RI Food Bank provides the necessary resources for the people like those that Diana works with every day but acknowledges that there are bigger societal problems that are beyond the scope of their assistance. “We know that no one is ever just hungry.

Hunger is a sign of scarcity and hardship. We want to find innovative ways to address the multiple problems faced by food insecure families and create a gateway to other services that will increase self-sufficiency.”

The Food Bank is a safety net for people who face food insecurity each year. Without it, thousands would go hungry. For this reason, it is important for organizations to recognize its impact and help support it. +++

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Student groups at Brown University have taken some steps to address the issue of food insecurity. The Food Recovery Network works with dining halls and local businesses around campus to collect excess food that otherwise would have been discarded. The food is then donated to homeless shelters and meal sites around Providence. While these efforts are a step in the right direction, Brown’s administration has the potential to make a much larger difference. As a non-profit, Brown is not required to pay taxes to the city. Brown opts to pay $6.7 million to the city of Providence, which is less than half of what it would otherwise be required to pay in taxes. Given its large endowment and ample resources, Brown can do more.

At the end of every year, many Brown students on the full-meal plan often have extra points and meal credits, leading to food waste as students spend in excess to not waste points. HOPE (Homeless Opportunities for People Everywhere), a student organization on campus, tries to take advantage of these left-over resources by allowing students to donate small food items like granola bars to local people in need. However, students can only spend two meal credits an hour, which makes this an inefficient use of time and resources. A more organized system would help solve these issues on a larger scale.

Swipe Out Hunger, a non-profit which has helped implement swipe donation at 85 colleges across the country, provides an example of a more organized way to tackle food insecurity. A typical Swipe Out Hunger program allows students to go into any dining hall on campus and donate a set number of unused swipes to a swipe bank.

There are some schools that have partnered with Swipe Out Hunger to donate the monetary value of meal swipes to organizations beyond their campus.

Both Pepperdine University and the College of William and Mary have partnered with Swipe Out Hunger to give half of their donated funds to organizations working to support those facing homelessness and poverty, with Pepperdine raising over $5,000 in 2018.

Other colleges such as Emory University and Carleton College use the same catering company as Brown, Bon Appetit Dining Services, and have already partnered with Swipe Out Hunger. This means the process of setting up a donation program is even easier than ever.

Most of the current Swipe Out Hunger programs have a cap to limit the number of swipes students can donate per semester, which lowers the cost for the university. Pilot programs tested at five colleges in the last academic year allowed students to donate anywhere from one to five meal swipes per semester, with a plan to raise that cap in the future. This resulted in anywhere from 400 to 4,000 swipes donated per year at a single college.

There are multiple reasons to believe that Brown’s dining revenue will increase this year. For the past few years, the price of meal plan has been steadily

increasing. This year, the price increased by $400 to $5,912. Additionally, as a result of the policy requiring sophomores to be on meal plan, more students than ever before are paying for food. Yet it’s not clear where the extra money is going. Multiple attempts were made in the writing of this article to access a more detailed dining services budget, but it was difficult to get in contact with anyone who could provide this information. Responders to budget inquiries pointed to the University’s donations to the E-Gap program, providing limited emergency resources to low-income sBrown tudents. They also brought up a working group, specifically addressing the topic of food security, that could provide the opportunity to discuss and strategize about this proposal in the upcoming months. +++ The workers moving the boxes at the RI Food Bank walk over 7 miles a day, transporting food around the facility. This food is eventually delivered to food pantries like Better Lives and West End to keep their shelves stocked for the local communities that rely on them. However, there’s risk in coming years that these boxes will not be enough. Rising housing prices, cuts to SNAP benefits, food price inflation, and increases in grocery store efficiency threaten to increase the meal gap. Without further assistance, more people will struggle to find food.

Brown University has the opportunity to help decrease the meal gap and assist food insecure Rhode Islanders across the state. This starts with discussing the possibility to implement a program like Swipe Out Hunger’s and should extend into a larger conversation about addressing the systemic causes of food insecurity.

KSHITIJ SACHAN B‘22, JOHN GRAVES B‘22, AND NELL SALZMAN B’22 want more people to learn about the RI food bank.

METRO

14

Reflections on Hong Kong

BY Liana Chaplain, Miranda Van-Boswell, Anonymous, Flo Li DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

This week, Features and News collaborated to invite four students from Hong Kong to reflect on the country's ongoing and escalating pro-democracy protests. The mass movement was triggered in early summer by the Fugitive Offenders amendment bill, an attempt by the Hong Kong government to allow local authorities to detain and extradite criminal fugitives to mainland China. +++ If all politics is personal, then the politics of rebellion is the most personal of all. No amount of news clippings or sensationalist broadcasts can displace one's own lived experiences. Even on the ground, no amount of slogan-shouting or flag-waving can completely capture the collective emotions of seven million people rightfully concerned by the future of their home and rightfully shocked by never-ending episodes of police brutality.

In the span of a few months, what we used to know as Hong Kong has transformed from a safe and secure community into a battleground where not even the right to human life or dignity is respected. The young, old, poor, rich, radicals, moderates, students, teachers, Chinese, and South Asians have never demonstrated such unity before, but all came to defend their rights and the quickly dissolving promises once made by their new masters in Beijing. The most radical of them had never before thought a violent thought, but now sacrifice their weekends to fight for the scraps of a future and for the last of the light that appears so dim. It was not their intention to risk arrest or risk jeopardizing their futures. But they were faced with no clearer choice when authorities reacted with a policy of zero tolerance.

For many, the situation has evolved into a demand for justice. Justice against the incessant counts of police violence towards the people. But the demand for justice comes from a position of utter helplessness.

Proper and complete justice can only be delivered by an authority that works for the interests of the people.

That authority is nowhere to be found. In its absence, people grow desperate against the superior firepower of the death squads once known to "protect and serve," and take matters into their own hands, whether those hands wield sticks, bricks, or cameras.

-Anonymous

Stand with Hong Kong, not with American Ears for Hong Kong imperialism In August, Chairman Mao’s official portrait artist, PSA: Trump and Ted Cruz do not stand with Hong Wang Guodong, passed away. Few people know of Kong. Hating China is not the same thing as being Wang, because he was never allowed to sign his work. in solidarity with the people of Hong Kong. It’s frus- But this is the man responsible for what some consider trating to know that, in some ways, bipartisan U.S. the most iconic painting in China—the portrait of Mao support does seem to aid Hong Kong. Pressure from that hangs above Tiananmen Square, and once had a the U.S. government might actually help keep Beijing place in every home, school, factory, and government accountable, considering the leverage they hold in the office in the country. trade war, and many protesters themselves have waved the American flag, believing foreign aid to be neces- In 1973, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, the sary. But is this attention motivated by the protection artist found himself under attack for portraying Mao of people or the preservation of “western values”? from an angle that showed only one ear, implying that the leader was a poor listener. For this, Red Guards I’ve felt especially uncomfortable hearing white accused Wang of ideological impurity and sent him Americans condemn China while subtly—and maybe to work as a carpenter in a framing factory. But Wang unconsciously—using language that points to a stereo- continued to paint the massive oil portrait (this time typical, monolithic idea of Chinese people. South with two ears), which now lives at the Gate of Heavenly Park received attention and praise for their jab at Peace. Exposed to the elements, the 15- by 20-foot the Chinese government, most coverage ignoring painting is replaced each year on the eve of October 1, the show’s notoriously racist depictions of people of China’s National Day. color. Contemporary echoes of Cold War rhetoric and imagery not only promote U.S. imperialism, but also This past October 1 marked 70 years since the founding endanger the diasporic community—of which both of the People’s Republic of China. In contrast, Hong Chinese Americans and most Hong Kongers are a part. Kong now commemorates that as the day 18-year-old Tsang Chi-kin was shot in the lung, the first time the The protests in Hong Kong continue to call for change police opened fire on protestors since the pro-democfrom their own government, and that of one of the racy movement began in early June in response to most powerful countries in the world, despite such the proposition of a controversial law. Although her authorities constantly shutting them down. When city was in its 18th consecutive week of protest, Hong Hong Kongers criticize China, it is an act of resistance. Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam spent the holiday The same critique, coming from a nation where this attending festivities on the mainland, as is customary. stance is welcomed, and even considered patriotic, has While Lam, President Xi, and other ministers presided a very different weight, legacy, and power dynamic. over a carefully choreographed military parade in Beijing, thousands of protesters fanned out across In reality, the core of the Hong Kong protests do Hong Kong to express exactly how they felt about the not align with the US Right. You cannot advocate public holiday. for democracy in another country while encouraging voter suppression in your own. You cannot be Before her departure to Beijing, Lam held her first pro-HK without being anti-police, and you cannot community dialogue session, where she delivered the fight for freedom without fighting against all forms of speech ‘Hong Kong, I Am Listening’. This was received oppression.

110 days after the first major protest, and with much irony on the part of the public. In short, Lam made no -LC commitment to the overwhelming demand to launch an independent inquiry into police brutality, and tempers flared toward the end of the session, which was described as little more than a PR stunt for Beijing and the world.

Since I have been away from Hong Kong for nearly a year, it has been challenging to watch this situation escalate from afar. My admiration runs deep for the protestors who continue to innovate new forms of resistance despite their demands being consistently ignored. In my head, I see young students clad in black, sprawled on the ground between the metro doors, swiftly diffusing tear gas bombs by hand and beaming powerful blue lasers to scramble facial recognition cameras and confuse police. I see a grandpa wielding his cane in defiance at the “Silver-Haired Sit-in” and yellow-vested housewives running into the pandemonium to pour saline into protestors’ eyes, soliciting the names of those being handcuffed to ensure that they later receive legal assistance.

But I am also conscious of the movement’s blind spots.

For example, who does the sense of ethnonationalism attached to “Hong Kong identity” marginalize? The exclusionary ideology not only manifests in anti-mainland Chinese xenophobia, but also applies to the 400,000 South East Asian migrant domestic workers

15 NOV 2019

(5 percent of the island’s population, 98.5 percent of them women) living in Hong Kong. These are the people whose work enables so many families to be involved in the protests. With childcare, for example, the housewives mentioned earlier have the flexibility to easily transfer their labor to less privileged women and volunteer on the frontlines themselves.

Many migrant women are paid extremely low wages and are subject to abuse and exploitation in their employers’ homes, where they are required by law to both live and work. More than 80 percent of these migrant workers are in debt but choose to stay in difficult working conditions in order to support their overseas families. In many cases they are the sole family breadwinner. Furthermore, unlike other foreign expatriates who are eligible to apply for residency after seven years, domestic workers have no legal route to citizenship, although many have lived in the city for decades. But this facet of Hong Kong’s immigration system should not stop the movement from advancing its understanding of what it means to be ‘local’ in order to fully confront the city’s deep injustices.

Communicating between a leaderless, self-organizing movement and a Chief Exec whose people call for her resignation is in itself a colossal challenge, but addressing issues within the movement is critical as well. For many, this may require an uncomfortable examination of the ground upon which we stand. This fight has now expanded far beyond opposition to a single controversial bill. But if this is a struggle for the liberation of all of Hong Kong society, we must ask ourselves: who are we listening to, and who are we leaving behind?

-MVB

"Official" portraits of Carrie Lam and Mao Zedong

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

A Timeline 1. I was born on June 28, 1997. Unexpectedly, I was born two months early. The Handover took place on July 1, 1997. I grew up having no experiential frame of reference for what life before the Handover, or before British colonialism ended, was like.

2. When I was 13, I was sent to boarding school. Since then, except for the month or two in between semesters and school years, I have essentially lived away from home.

3. Last spring, I took the semester off with the aim of about how pro-democracy voices have gradually working in Beijing and travelling around Mainland been sidelined in government. About how many China. It was a way for me to reconnect to the part young people in Hong Kong feel hopeless about of myself that I severed by internalizing judgment their future, about how the government seems and inferiority I felt at boarding school for being more interested in the CCP’s wishes than its own Chinese and seen as not-Western. It was also a way citizens’, about how Hong Kong’s future itself feels to reconnect to another part of myself that I buried precarious. as a way to avoid my shame for not feeling Chinese 14. I was just saying how I really feel. enough, for feeling too Western for a Chinese 15. I decided to spend the summer working for person in Hong Kong.

Camp RYSE (Refugee Youth Solidarity through 4. Going to Beijing and immersing myself in Education) in Providence. It was a way for me Mainland Chinese culture felt like an opportuto settle into Providence before the school year nity to nourish this part of myself, to discover and began, and a way for me to teach, something I have explore a culture that has both vast differences always wanted to try. and similarities to Hong Kong. Over winter break, 16. The night before my flight was the 30th anniverI found a job working for an artist in Beijing. My sary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Every Mandarin was rusty, so I took lessons to brush up. year, on June 4, a vigil takes place at Victoria Park 5. On January 26, 2019, my brother Nicholas unexin Hong Kong. Growing up, I wasn’t taught about pectedly and suddenly passed away. what happened on 六四 (direct translation: six 6. Doing anything other than spending time at home four, a euphemism for the Tiananmen Square with my family felt unfathomable. I cancelled my Massacre), and by the time I had learned about plans to spend time in Mainland China and immewhat happened, I was never at home to see it. diately moved back home, indefinitely.

17. This year, for the first time, I went, candle in hand, 7. It was the first time I was going to spend so long at to the vigil. Despite the torrential rain a few hours home in years. prior, the park was packed, teeming with people 8. I needed to get out of the house and desperately and the flickers of candlelight. Wading through needed things to do. None of my friends were the mud, we chanted slogans, sang hymns, and home, so I could not rely on them for company. I stood in silence, vowing never to forget. According spent the next six months working at a cookie busito the organizers, over 100,000 people attended. ness, sleeping, reading childhood books, weeping, 18. The energy was palpable. weeping, and weeping.

19. Four days later, on June 9, a protest against the 9. I spent these six months grieving. extradition bill took place. Over a million people 10. But I also spent these six months at home in Hong participated, which is roughly one in seven Hong Kong. With myself, I weaved in and out of the red Kong residents. glow of taxi lights, trees with vines and roots larger 20. On June 9, I was already in Providence. Grasping than my wingspan, shopping malls, the occamy phone, I scroll through the news updates, sional wild boar and, of course, the ever-present watching closely. humidity—to work, to see my grandparents, to visit my brother’s grave, to the flower market, to -FL return home.

11. In May, my friend Stella visited for a week. I felt a swelling pride to show her where I had spent my childhood, to show her where I had spent the past six months.

12. The day before Stella left, I took her to 蘭芳園， a famous 茶餐廳 (cha chaan teng: Hong Kong–style diner). As we split a 波羅油 (pineapple bun with butter—a Hong Kong delicacy), our fingers sticky with sweet flaky pastry, butter and the condensation from our Horlicks glasses, Stella asked, Do you think you will move back here after you graduate?

I paused, put down my drink, and thought for a moment. Something I never thought I would utter came out of my mouth: Yes, I think I would.

13. As I walked home, I thought about how Hong Kong would change after 2047 (the year Hong Kong will officially be ‘handed back’ to China), about how I had and still have no idea what this will look like,

NEWS X FEATURES

16

REALITY CHECK

BY Gemma Sack ILLUSTRATION Mariel Solomon DESIGN Anna Brinkhuis

In 1956, psychiatrist Humphry Osmond wrote to 1960s, Congress had outlawed almost all psychedelic his friend and correspondent, author and philoso- research, largely due to reports of unethical experipher Aldous Huxley: “To fall in Hell or soar Angelic, mentation by both academic researchers and the US you’ll need a pinch of psychedelic.” In combining government and emerging accounts of its recreational the Greek words psyche (“mind”) and T (“manifest”), use within the counterculture. In 1971, President Osmond coined the term most commonly used today Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances to describe the mind-altering experiences induced by Act, rendering psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, and other hallucinogenic drugs. In his own words, Osmond saw psychedelic drugs illegal. the psychedelic experience as one of “enlargements, burgeonings of reality.” However, the wider commu+++ nity of American academic psychiatrists was not ready to accept this vision of the hallucinogenic expe- In the past few years, the scientific establishment’s attirience—neither the term “psychedelic,” nor its spir- tude towards psychedelics has shifted radically. After a itual, consciousness-expanding premise. Academic near total ban during the early 1970s, the United States psychiatry did not yet have adequate language Food and Drug Administration began approving a regarding mental illness, psychosis, and altered states select few studies of psychedelic substances in the of consciousness to capture the experience of using 1990s, but on the condition that they were subject to hallucinogenic drugs, and thus such experiences often rigorous experimental controls and ethical standards. seemed beyond classification within traditional para- By the mid-2000s, a small but growing number of digms of Western medicine. scientists were beginning to challenge the mythos of By the mid-1950s, American psychiatrists had begun the danger of psychedelics. using hallucinogenic drugs, which they believed Perhaps most emblematic of the scientific induced a model psychosis, to study mental illness in establishment’s increasing acceptance of psychea controlled laboratory environment. But the history of delics, in September of this year, Johns Hopkins medicinal uses for hallucinogenic drugs does not begin Medicine opened its new Center for Psychedelic and with American scientists in the 1950s. Indigenous Consciousness Research, the first in the United States peoples in the Americas have used substances such as and the second and the largest in the world. Scientists ayahuasca, psilocybin, peyote, and ibogaine as part of at Johns Hopkins had been early leaders in the psychehealing practices for centuries—long before Osmond delic studies of the 2000s, and with $17 million from theorized about manifestation of the mind. Unlike private donors and a foundation, they plan to expand Western academic psychiatrists, Indigenous medic- the scope and depth of their research into psychedelics. inal practitioners treat hallucinogenic experiences as The Center’s website lists among its current projects: beyond the psychological, viewing sickness as related “Psilocybin and Smoking Cessation,” “Psilocybin to spiritual rather than only physical forces, and thus and Depression Study,” “Psilocybin and Alzheimer’s attempt to use psychoactive drugs to access the spiri- Disease Study,” “Psilocybin and Anorexia Nervosa tual world. In contrast to Osmond’s terminology for Study,” and “Religious Professionals Study.” such transcendent experiences, many Indigenous This progress in the field of psychedelic studies has healers prefer the term “entheogens” (implying reli- accelerated rapidly since the mid-2000s. An article gious inspiration for sacred use), rather than “psyche- published in the journal Drug Science, Policy and Law delics,” to reflect their alternate understanding of in September claimed that 2018 marked a “watershed hallucinogenic drugs. year for psychedelic science,” citing advances within Within a Western framework of medicine that bifur- the scientific field, increased public interest, and regucates the religious and the curative, hallucinogenic latory changes around psychedelics. Indeed, research drugs—with their “psychedelic” or “entheogenic” institutions seem to be publishing a steady stream of properties—inherently challenge this paradigm. As studies touting the therapeutic potential of psychehistorian Steven J. Novak explains, Osmond’s psyche- delic drugs. Some psychiatrists are even calling this delic vision, tinged with spirituality, mysticism, and recent revival a “psychedelic renaissance.” transgressive notions of consciousness, “declared war Studies published in scientific journals have told on academic psychiatry.” The scientific establishment an overwhelmingly positive narrative about developof the 1950s and 1960s was not kind to mystically-in- ments in psychedelic science. “Psilocybin produces clined scientists, like Osmond. And by the end of the substantial and sustained decreases in depression

17

SCIENCE + TECH

and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer,” claimed a 2016 study authored by researchers at Johns Hopkins. In 2017, some of the same researchers published a study on the psilocybin as a treatment for smoking addiction. Here they stated that “psilocybin holds considerable promise in promoting long-term smoking abstinence.” A 2016 paper published by researchers at Imperial College assessed psilocybin’s potential to cure treatment-resistant depression; it concluded by suggesting “preliminary support for the safety and efficacy of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression and motivates further trials, with more rigorous designs, to better examine the therapeutic potential of this approach.”

Other research has suggested psychedelics’ efficacy for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol addiction, and other mental illnesses. So much data has suggested psilocybin’s potential that in 2018, the FDA declared psilocybin-assisted treatment a “breakthrough therapy” for depression. In September 2019, two Harvard psychiatrists published an article in Current Psychiatry wondering if hallucinogenic drugs could be “‘miracle cures’ for patients with mental illness.” +++ But the ‘miracle cure’ narrative of the ‘psychedelic renaissance’ does not paint a complete picture of contemporary perspectives on psychedelics within the scientific establishment. A number of researchers within the scientific community have raised concerns about the approaches, exclusions, and erasures of contemporary research. These critiques, however, are often subsumed under a larger story of optimism and revolutionary therapeutic potential.

One of the most prominent researchers suggesting the potential for psychedelic treatments is RobinCarhart Harris, head of the Psychedelic Research Group within the Centre for Psychiatry at Imperial College. He has explained the effects of psychedelics on the mind with the “entropic brain” hypothesis, arguing in a January 2019 article published in Current Opinion in Psychiatry that psychedelic drugs destabilize normal systems of order in the brain, resulting in a “cascade of neurobiological changes that manifest at multiple scales and ultimately culminate in the relaxation of high-level beliefs.” Carhart-Harris contends that “Psychedelics are, by definition, ‘mind-revealers.’”

These explanations—of the relaxation of beliefs and entropy within neural systems—have been widely

15 NOV 2019

cited by other scientists as credible or authoritative the case that this whole mystical experience thing understandings of psychedelic experiences. might be, if not vacuous, just not as important as we Other psychedelic researchers are not so convinced think it is,” he explains. Indeed, narratives of mystiby the entropic brain explanation. Manoj Doss, a post- cism equate psychedelics with religious ecstasies, a doctoral research fellow at Johns Hopkins studying much more palatable characterization than disruption the cognitive, emotional, and neural mechanisms of of neural systems, disorientation or psychosis. psychedelic drugs, told the College Hill Independent Within the scientific establishment, preferences that he has come to realize that “most cognitive for these rosy narratives that confirm experiential research with drugs is pretty bad.” He explained that mystical accounts tend to suppress alternate explamuch of the evidence that scientists cite supporting nations of psychedelic experiences. Doss references the entropic brain hypothesis is taken from one study psychedelic scientists in Switzerland whose work of only 12 subjects—the 2016 paper mentioned earlier has supported the idea of the psychedelic experience suggesting the potential for psilocybin to cure treat- as a model psychosis, as American scientists in the ment-resistant depression. “This is what's known mid-twentieth century had suggested. “The group as salami slicing,” he explains, “where you're just in Switzerland has done the best psychedelic work publishing loads and loads off of one data set.” Doss out there, as far as looking at it from a really rigorous says he is not alone in doubting the ironclad validity of point of view, and they're the least cited,” he explains, the science surrounding the entropic brain hypothesis: because “all their initial studies they framed in terms “I might be the loudest person,” he says, but “everyone of psychosis, which doesn't sound as sexy as, ‘Oh, else also has issues with their work.” mystical experiences are just going to help the world.’”

These ideas of “relaxation of high-level beliefs” and Even the story of psychedelics’ radical therapeutic revelation of the mind have prompted researchers potential may be omitting some doubt, or at least overwithin the scientific establishment to reconsider the stating the efficacy of such treatments. While findolder understanding of the place of mysticism within ings suggesting psychedelics’ ability to treat mental psychedelic science. Mystical experiences are often illnesses are promising, they should not be accepted characterized by ineffable feelings of interconnected- without question. “There's definitely a massive potenness, ecstasy, transcendence of time and space, and tial for there to be a placebo effect,” cautions Doss. “I sacredness, or as philosopher Walter Stace describes, imagine that the effects are going to get much smaller “the apprehension of an ultimate nonsensuous unity in the larger clinical trials,” he speculates. “Setting in all things.” Despite a long history of mysticism in people's expectations,” he explains, is “the heart of the Western religions, in contemporary American usage, process” at Johns Hopkins. Patients come in primed the term evokes coded references to Eastern and with expectations of the psychedelic experience and Indigenous spiritual practices, often fetishized and narratives of countercultural mysticism, and hope that aestheticized within the American counterculture. this might be the ‘miracle cure’ they need.

In a radical departure from the 1950s and 60s, when academic psychiatry marginalized spiritual or mysti+++ cism-sympathetic psychedelic scientists, contemporary researchers, especially at Johns Hopkins, have Other scientists are critiquing what they see as the openly embraced not only the idea that mystical expe- silences in the dominant narrative of the ‘psychedelic riences could be induced by psychedelic drugs, but also renaissance’ from a different angle: antiracism and that such experiences could be crucial to psychedelic anticolonialism. Similar to Doss, they are drawing therapy’s treatment potential. attention to flaws in the science itself and the biases Much of this research has been directed by Dr. Roland of psychedelic researchers that have compromised it.

Griffiths, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center. In In an article published by the Chacruna Institute for 2006, Griffiths and colleagues published a landmark Psychedelic Plant Medicines, clinical psychologist Dr. article in Psychopharmacology titled “Psilocybin can Jae Sevelius argues that “current psychedelic science is occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial driven by a Western medicalized framework, and thus and sustained personal meaning and spiritual signifi- reflects all of the same limitations.” cance.” This publication was followed by a number of By nature of its participants, current psychedelic other studies from the Center linking mystical experi- research reproduces, rather than challenges, existing ences to treatment outcomes, including a 2018 article power structures. In an article published in the Journal in Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences in of Psychedelic Studies, Jamilah George, PhD candiwhich Dr. Griffiths and his colleagues proposed a func- date in clinical psychology, and colleagues explained tional neural model of mystical experiences. Citing that white people are overrepresented in psychedelic descriptions of “interconnectedness” in “‘naturally research, both as patients and as authors. In their own occurring’ mystical-type experiences,” they argue that review of 17 psychedelic studies conducted between such states are “strikingly similar to profound spiritual 2000 and 2017, the authors found that 82.5 percent of experiences occasioned by hallucinogenic substances.” subjects were non-Hispanic white. Only 2.2 percent These scientists claim that mystical experiences can of subjects were Black, and only 4.7 percent were be understood empirically and quantified as a set of Indigenous. Additionally, they claimed that psycheneural processes. To measure such experiences, they delic practitioners who are women or people of color propose the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (or both) are less likely to be considered leaders in their (MEQ), a set of questions that reduce specific factors or fields. In fact, the authors found that the editorial board dimensions of mystical experiences, asking subjects to of the journal that published their study itself is 78 assess factors like their “experience of pure being and percent male and predominantly white. This exclusion pure awareness (beyond the world of sense impres- helps explain why psychedelic researchers have largely sions).” But in attempting to describe transcendent ignored race: Robin Carhart-Harris has claimed that feelings, such questions seem to flatten them. “psychedelic therapy can treat a pan-diagnostic pathoDoss, the Johns Hopkins post-doc, is skeptical of physiology,” citing a wide range of disorders without these narratives of psychedelically-induced mystical regard for the fact that people of color experience and experiences. He believes that much of the research express mental illnesses (such as depression, anxiety, focused on mystical or emotional responses to psyche- and PTSD) differently because of racial discrimination delics has been influenced by scientists’ personal use and historical trauma. of the drugs: that they set out to confirm their own And the current ‘psychedelic renaissance’ also mystical-seeming experiences in their research. “I fails to recognize its indebtedness to the psychedelic think a lot of people just basically did psychedelics,” he healing practices of Indigenous peoples. Griffiths explains, “and they get this weird illusion that they're and Carhart-Harris do acknowledge Indigenous onto something about the mind that these drugs will psychedelic treatments in their publications. But reveal something about the mind to them.” But as the fundamental structure of the American medical Doss argues, “it's so obvious that it has biased their establishment arguably cannot encompass or honor work and it produces garbage science.”

Indigenous healing practices.

And Doss is not convinced that scientific underWestern medicine by nature privileges medical standings of psychedelically-induced mystical experi- doctors, a profession historically most available to men, ences are linked to the drugs’ therapeutic potential, as despite the traditional status of healing as women’s some have claimed. Citing studies on the psychedelic work, particularly among Indigenous peoples. And the therapy for treatment-resistant depression, he says approaches of current psychedelic research are defined that “depressed subjects don't always have a good by what George calls “Westernized hyperindividutime” during their psychedelic experience. “But yet alism,” which emphasizes the substances’ universal they're seeing benefit from it,” so he wonders if it is applications rather than cultural contexts, and “makes “necessary at all to have the mystical experience.” “I for an isolated experience removed from its social feel like some people might be afraid that it might be context and the communal environment.”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Psychedelic therapies do have revolutionary potential to improve treatment outcomes across different populations, these critics claim, but only if we reconsider and revise current frameworks and methods.

“We need to be willing to question how we use power and privilege,” Sevelius claims, “because it is holding back the science. In order to be generalizable, we must be able to demonstrate that these therapies are applicable to different types of people.” In fact, it is psychedelics’ long history outside of the scientific establishment that provides these distinctive radical possibilities: “As a field whose history is deeply rooted in non-Western traditions, the psychedelic science movement has a unique opportunity to acknowledge and resist the replication of existing structures of power,” George argues, “thereby improving the lives of the marginalized and setting an example that can be replicated more broadly within medicine and society.” +++ Psychedelic drugs cannot be the revolutionary treatment that many in their growing field hope until scientists reckon with the failures of current paradigms to critically examine who is participating in the research and what narratives are silenced for the sake of telling a cohesive, publishable story. Perhaps what is most groundbreaking and vexing about psychedelic drugs is the threat they pose to Western science itself. These substances that Humphry Osmond could only call “psychedelic” challenge scientists to find empirical or quantitative explanations for experiences that have persistently eluded description, to subject these experiences to the rigid norms of laboratory controls, and to validate ways of curing and knowing they have long marginalized.

But the most prominent voices of the ‘psychedelic renaissance’ have been telling a limited story that pushes boundaries and challenges existing paradigms, but only to a certain degree. “There's something to be said about science being able to tell a story,” says Doss.

“There's also telling stories on very little information.”

The challenge, then, facing psychedelic scientists is to find a more comprehensive, suitable, and inclusive way to tell the story. Only then can psychedelics be subversive. By complicating perceptions of reality, psychedelics can also challenge oppressive realities.

If GEMMA SACK B’21 has experienced ultimate nonsensuous unity, her description certainly won’t do it justice.

Psychedelics, mysticism, and the American scientific establishment

SCIENCE + TECH

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STEREO

BY SETH ISRAEL