The College Hill Independent Vol. 36 Issue 9

THE COLLEGE HILL A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY INDEPENDENT

36 • 09 13 APR 2018

THE

INDY COVER

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 36 / ISSUE 09 APR 13 2018

Untitled I Tiffany Ng

NEWS

FEATURES

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Week in Review: Hot Takes Lucas Smolcic Larson, Jack Brook, and Marly Toledano

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Square Deal Natalie Lerner

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Nightmare on Grove Street Mariela Pichardo

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Petra-fied Jane Argodale

Stranger Than Paradise Wen Zhuang

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AI AI AI! Tiff Bushka

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ARTS Street Smarts Ella Comberg

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EPHEMERA

Out of the Park!

Ian Stevenson

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Matriarchal Memory M

LITERARY

METRO 05

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Groom Dry Lake Maya Bjornson & Brian Oakes

X 18

Stupid Earth Anna Bonesteel

FROM THE EDITORS:

MISSION STATEMENT

One of the unfortunate, burgeoning traditions of the Trump administration seems to dictate that April is the month we rediscover the consensus that Syria must be bombed.

While the script has been set, some of the actors have shuffled places—rabid war hawk John Bolton has replaced the only slightly less repugnant H.R. McMaster, blacksite torture guru Mike Pompeo steps in for Tillerson. And of course, we have the Greek chorus of centrist Democrats—Madeleine Albright demanding long-term “involvement” (read: occupation) in the region, pundit Jeff Glor calling for Syria’s “punishment” with an image of Iran ominously projected behind him, the list goes on.

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.

Perhaps most uncomfortable of all, those of us interested in a different future now find ourselves among strange and strained company. Anti-war rhetoric, if it can be heard at all, is voiced by people like Jack Goldsmith (NSA chore boy) or Tucker Carlson (slack-jawed bigot). Of course, their contorted reasons for adopting such a position are unsettling— Carlson fears exclusively for the Christians there, and Goldsmith wants to first make sure that the deep state has greater oversight in the matter. Even Laura Ingraham has chimed in, claiming that the real war should take place on our southern border.

Missing from this strange matrix, however, is any sense of the anti-war left. Apart from some disgruntled Twitter murmurings from the DSA and a few comments from the Intercept, no progressive voices have shown interest in anything but prolonged conflict in Syria.

April is the cruelest month— -JM

WEEK IN REVIEW Julia Rock NEWS Isabel DeBre Chris Packs METRO Harry August Erin West ARTS Nora Gosselin Cate Turner Isabelle Rea METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Eve Zelickson

FEATURES Ruby Aiyo Gerber Paula Pacheco Soto Wen Zhuang SCIENCE Liz Cory Tara Sharma TECH Paige Parsons Olivia Kan-Sperling OCCULT Gabriela Naigeborin EPHEMERA Maya Bjornson X Zak Ziebell

The Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

LITERARY Isabelle Doyle Fadwa Ahmed LIST Jane Argodale Alexis Gordon Fadwa Ahmed STAFF WRITERS Galadriel Brady Mica Chau Ella Comberg Mara Dolan Soraya Ferdman Liby Hays Anna Hundert Lillian Kirby Lucas Smolcic Larson Mariela Pichardo

Ivy Scott Marly Toledano Sara Van Horn Kayli Wren Kion You COPY EDITORS Shuchi Agrawal Grace Berg Benjamin Bienstock Seamus Flynn Sasha Raman Caiya Sanchez-Strauss ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Eve O’Shea Claire Schlaikjer STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Julie Benbassat

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.

SPRING 2018

Alexandra Hanesworth Kela Johnson Halle Krieger Sophia Meng Pia Mileaf-Patel Ivan Rios-Fetchko Ella Rosenblatt Kelly Wang Dorothy Windham Katya Labowe-Stoll Rémy Poisson

SENIOR EDITORS Jane Argodale Kelton Ellis Robin Manley Gabriel Matesanz Will Weatherly BUSINESS MANAGER Maria Gonzalez

MANAGING EDITORS Jonah Max Katrina Northrop Signe Swanson MVP Jane Argodale

WEB MANAGER Ashley Kim

DESIGNERS Bethany Hung Amos Jackson Laura Kenney Katherine Sang Mariel Solomon Ella Rosenblatt

SOCIAL MEDIA Fadwa Ahmed Pia Mileaf-Patel

DESIGN EDITOR Eliza Chen

ALUMNI RELATIONS Julia Tompkins

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN HOT TAKES

BY Jack Brook, Marly Toledano, and Lucas Smolcic Larson ILLUSTRATION BY Carly Paul DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

With Flying Colors

The Indy Goes Indy

When Nick Burchill arrived at Victoria’s Fairmont Empress hotel in April, 2001, he was carrying a suitcase full of “TNT Brothers’ Pepperoni” he’d brought all the way from Halifax to British Columbia. Burchill planned to give the pepperoni to his friends at the Canadian Naval Reserve base nearby.

Burchill’s company had sent him to Victoria to host a customer convention at the Empress. The luxury hotel is one of Canada’s most iconic, with suites going for upwards of $350 a night and a “world famous afternoon tea” drawing more than 400 visitors per day.

While admiring his ornate room, Burchill worried that the pepperoni was getting too warm after the transcontinental flight. He couldn’t risk damaging Brothers’ meat—it was old-world Polish pepperoni, containing an aroma of real hardwood smoke in its skin, a carnivorous delicacy. But for all its hoopla, the Empress’s room did not contain refrigerators. So Burchill opened his fourth story window and laid out an entire suitcase full of pepperoni on the ledge to let the chill spring weather cool his cargo.

After acquainting himself with British Columbia’s beautiful capital, Burchill returned to find that in his absence, a flock of over 40 seagulls had entered his room and commenced a furious ravaging. The birds looked at Burchill, and he at them. Then, chaos erupted.

The more excitable members of the flock attempted to depart through closed windows, while pepperoni strands scattered like shrapnel amidst a whirlwind of feathers, squawks, and projectile excrement powered

by Brother’s deluxe TNT recipe. Though most of the flock exited quickly, one audacious gull tried to re-enter to grab one last piece. In desperation, Burchill hurled a shoe at it, which flew out the window and landed upon guests partaking in the Empress’s Afternoon Tea. As feathers fluttered down, Burchill took in the remnants of his wrecked room. The lamps were knocked over, and the curtains torn. In the brief moment of repose that followed the mass departure of the flock, Burchill realized he had an important business meeting in a few minutes. And that he had only one shoe.

Retrieving the shoe from the tea party, Burchill began to wash it off. He turned on the blow dryer and stuck it in the wet shoe, only to have both fall into the sink full of water. The lights crackled, then went out. So did power in the rest of the vicinity.

A maid was sent up to clean the room; presumably, she still has nightmares about the carnage.

Shortly after, Burchill received a letter stating that he had been banned from the premises of the Empress for life. Seventeen years later, Burchill returned to the hotel with a formal apology letter and a pound of pepperoni as a peace offering.

“I have matured and I admit responsibility for my actions,” Burchill wrote. “I come to you, hat-in-hand to apologise for the damage I had indirectly come to cause and to ask you reconsider my lifetime ban from the property.”

The hotel manager accepted the apology and verbally pardoned him, though rumor has it the maid quit on the spot after seeing Burchill reappear in the hotel lobby.

We live in an age of media hegemony. According to Business Insider, 90 percent of what Americans read, watch, and listen to is distributed by just six corporations, the likes of which include Disney, Viacom, and Time Warner. The Independent knows its readers go to great lengths to maintain a balanced diet of independent content. Today it breaks free from the stranglehold of our urban media gatekeepers and brings you to Huntingdon, Pennsylvania (population 7,000). In Huntingdon, grassroots print journalism is alive and well in the Daily News, self-described as “Your Hometown Newspaper” and widely considered to be the nation’s foremost purveyor of hard-hitting citizen journalism.

In 1977, Daily News staff put out a call for local opinions, of any sort. One night a week, they set up an answering machine to record anonymous callers’ comments onto cassette tapes, to be printed each Saturday in what they called “The Opinion Line.” Twenty-seven years before Facebook, the Daily News made the first step toward mass media democratization. “Your thoughts deserve airtime,” they told their readers.

Anticipating the rise of corporate media, The Opinion Line’s editors vowed never to silence their readers’ voices. It continues to operate unfiltered, with modest exceptions for profanity. “Opinions may be objectionable to some readers,” says the Daily News in a bold entry into the free speech debate from a local stalwart. This week, the Indy’s investigative team has sifted through “The Opinion Line” to bring you the best in ultra-independent content.

Getting us started with some criminal justice news, one Huntingdon commenter says, “I’ve been watching a particular bus running stop signs. I live around the Blair building and when they come down the street on the left side, they stop if they see cars coming, but otherwise they go right through it. This needs checked into.” The Indy hopes this bold call for accountable law enforcement will be heard, in Huntingdon and throughout the rest of the country.

For “This Week in Washington”, another commenter reports, “Robert Mueller is an integral part of the Obama/Clinton organized crime syndicate. He was a bagman in the Uranium One deal, protected known Islamic terrorists from arrest and prosecution, and now attempts to railroad a sitting president via the biggest political witch-hunt and wholly dishonest enterprise in U.S. history.” The Indy speculates this opinion may have been sponsored by Russian spies, in a sobering reminder of the vulnerability of even this, our most democratic news-media institution: the local paper.

Concluding our wrap-up is a personal interest story from one Porter Township commenter, who writes, “I wish that my neighbor would clean up his yard and stop taking advantage of everyone in the neighborhood and stop being a jerk and trying to cause trouble for me.” The Indy believes this poignant cry for empathy encapsulates the radical everything-goes spirit of “The Opinion Line.”

Never losing sight of the mundane, it stands resolute as one of our few remaining truly uncorrupted media institutions.

-JB

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

“Mad” Mike Hughes for Governor According to one-third of 18 to 24 year olds polled by database YouGov, Pythagoras, Aristotle and Magellan might have made a huge mistake. It looks, feels, and sounds like NASA’s story about a round planet Earth might not hold true. And 61-year-old limousine driver “Mad” Mike Hughes has plans to prove it. In his homemade rocket, he intends to launch himself 68 miles into space and clear up growing doubts about the shape of the planet. “This is the king of the deceptions,” Hughes said.

“Once this domino falls, this is it.”

Hughes declares he does not believe in science. “I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about the certain size of rocket nozzles, and thrust. But that’s not science, that’s just a formula. There’s no difference between science and science fiction,” he explained. He has ridden two steam-powered rockets, made from salvaged metals, off of his mobile-home-turned-launchpad. His first flight— in a rocket painted with the words “Research Flat Earth” —took him a mile across the Mojave Desert, showing that while Hughes might not always agree with NASA, he does know how to build a rocket.

Hughes has not always been a believer in a flat earth.

He joined the community shortly after a fundraising campaign for a rocket of his earned only $310, a chain of events that elicits some doubts about his change in beliefs. After gathering information about the possible shapes of the earth, he started a new campaign to fund his rockets as a flat earther and reached his $7,875 goal.

In his most recent launch, which took place on March 26, Hughes skipped the countdown in his rush to get into space. He reached 1,800 feet, from which he returned to earth via parachute. The event, which took about a minute, was risky. Hughes nonetheless landed safely, although he complained about an aching back.

This journey was only part of a long term plan to take the photo that will confirm that the globe is not a globe at all.

The Flat Earth Society supports his mission and excitedly awaits more results. The group has been working to revive the belief that the earth is a disc surrounded by sea ice. Charles Johnson, the group’s leader, lost the organization’s historical documents in a house fire and in 2001, after his death, the society temporarily fell apart. In 2007, Daniel Shenton revived the group and achieved a significant following, including Kyrie Irving and B.o.B. (Believer of B.S.?), or, at least, significant attention.

For now, Hughes has to focus on his campaign for governor in California. He posted on his website, which calls Hughes “the last great daredevil,” that, “It is official, I am submitting my submission to run for governor of the great state of California.” We will have to wait and see if his campaign goes any further than his most recent rocket.

-LSL

-MT

WEEK IN REVIEW

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BEHIND THE BRAIDS Students, farmworkers, and the Fair Food Program

During spring of 2015, my first year at Brown, I participated in a campus-wide movement called #MoneyTalksAtBrown. This student-organized march and campaign took place in response to deplorable practices on the part of the school administration with regard to their handling of a sexual assault case that fall.

Specifically, two female students were drugged at a party at the now-defunct Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, after which one of the women was sexually assaulted. A Title IX case was brought forward, and in February 2015, all the charges against the accused student were dropped.

However, there was evidence of financial ties between the accused perpetrator and the Brown Corporation board of trustees, and after the charges were dropped, many students (including myself) believed that the financial interests of the University influenced their decision in this case.

Watching hundreds of my fellow students show up to decry sexual assault and the University’s unwillingness to prioritize the wellbeing of survivors over its own financial interests, I felt both deeply angry at Brown as an institution and deeply inspired by many of my fellow students. Some students carried mattresses, galvanized by the protest of Emma Sulkowicz at Columbia University, who carried a mattress around campus for a year in protest of Columbia’s handling of their sexual assault case. Most people in the crowd taped dollar bills with “IX” (for Title IX) written in red tape over their mouths.

However, while students showed up in solidarity and anger, the Brown administration remained unwilling to address the issues raised in this sexual assault case. President Christina Paxson issued a statement that appeared in the Providence Journal the day after the protest in which she commended the protest for being “respectful” and noted that Brown was making progress with regard to handling of sexual misconduct.

In addition, she ultimately did endorse many of the broader policy suggestions made by student organizers.

However, the case that sparked the protest was not addressed by the university, and students continued to speak out about the ways in which the university’s financial interests interfered with its ability to prioritize student wellbeing.

Since these events in the spring of 2015, I have come to realize that the relationship between financial interests and handling of sexual misconduct extends far

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NEWS

beyond Brown. In particular, watching the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) campaign to push Wendy’s to sign on to the Fair Food Program (FFP), I have been feeling similarly to how I did my freshman spring—both inspired and outraged.

The FFP is a partnership among farmers, farmworkers, and retail food companies that strives to ensure that farm workers receive fair wages and good working conditions. The FFP is a comprehensive and successful model that pushes for worker-driven social responsibility in the agricultural industry. Over the course of the past 10 years, all other major fast food companies have signed on. To accomplish its goal, the FFP has set forth the following standards: 1) Participating buyers agree to pay the Fair Food Premium (a penny more per pound) in addition to the normal price they pay for tomatoes to supplement farmworkers’ paychecks.

2) Buyers agree not to purchase produce from growers who do not comply with the FFP’s Code of Conduct, a set of guidelines around employment practices to which growers agree to adhere.

To ensure that these standards are met, the CIW holds worker education sessions across the Eastern Seaboard to inform workers of their rights, and also provides a “Know Your Rights and Responsibilities” booklet to newly hired employees, which outlines some of the tenets of the FFP. In addition, a bilingual investigator operates a 24/7 complaint line for workers to report violations of their rights, from which the Fair Food Standards Council (FFSC) conducts in-depth audits of the participating farms. This complaint line, along with the standards and processes the FFP has implemented with regard to sexual assault, are part of what makes the program so powerful and transformative. First, when a complaint is made, the FFSC investigates the issue, working in collaboration with the participating grower and with workers to understand the full picture in a given situation. In addition, the FFSC attempts to include an educational component within complaint resolutions, to make clear that complaints are handled without retaliation against workers. In this way, worker-driven accountability is encouraged. If the complaint is found to be true, in the case of sexual assault and harassment, the FFP terminates its relationship with the participating grower unless immediate corrective action, including firing the offender, is taken.

This process stands in sharp contrast to the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) model employed

by Wendy’s. The CSR approach emphasizes voluntary and aspirational standards with very little monitoring, instead of legally binding, obligatory commitments with worker-driven monitoring (as seen in the Fair Food Program). Brown’s institutional model is not far from Wendy’s CSR approach, in which the corporation or institution has leverage over the sexual assault survivor, rather than the other way around. In the FFP model, there is a clear process in which both the institution (i.e. the grower) and the perpetrator of sexual misconduct are held to account, whereas at Brown and Wendy’s, that has rarely been the case.

The FFP is not only a good model in theory, but has been shown to improve the experience of farmworkers across the board. Since 2011, the Fair Food Standards Council has resolved—often in a matter of days—nearly 2,000 complaints through their complaint hotline. The FFSC has conducted 20,000 interviews with workers by way of their seasonal announced and unannounced audits at participating farms. The United Nations has recognized the program, and the FFP has even won a Presidential Medal for its successes in combating the abuse of farmworkers. +++ On March 15, I, along with hundreds of other students from across the Northeast, converged in New York City to join in the CIW’s #TimesUpWendys march. This march, which came on the heels of a five day Freedom Fast, was part of a longstanding boycott of Wendy’s, and convened outside of the office of Nelson Peltz, Wendys’ board chair. Standing outside of Peltz’s office, surrounded by thousands of other protesters, I felt the incredible power, joy, and resilience of the CIW. This feeling, along with the knowledge of what the FFP has accomplished over the years, makes me even more shocked at Wendy’s refusal to sign onto the program.

Why is Wendy’s unwilling to sign, especially when all other major fast food companies already have? While companies like McDonald’s, Burger King, and Subway ultimately have listened to worker demands, Wendy’s has refused, despite tireless organizing on the part of the CIW. Why? On Wendy’s official website, one can find its “Code

APRIL 13, 2018

BY Natalie Lerner ILLUSTRATION BY Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

of Conduct For Suppliers", in which the company states that one of their core values is to “Do the Right Thing and Treat People with Respect.” Wendy’s says it believes its “success begins and ends with our people and the Supplier companies that have been thoughtfully selected to do business with us.” But if that is the case, it is odd that they have switched suppliers. After the implementation of the Fair Food Program throughout the state of Florida, instead of signing on, Wendy’s abandoned its tomato supplier and began to purchase tomatoes from the Mexican supplier Bioparques de Occidente, a company whose human rights abuses were reported on by the Los Angeles Times in December 2014. These abuses include the fact that many workers are not allowed to leave the large Bioparques, where they pick tomatoes for extremely low pay, receive insufficient food, and work under the threat of physical violence from camp bosses, particularly if they dare to ask for more food or resources for their families. In addition, multiple studies have suggested that 80 percent of female farmworkers experience sexual assault, and it is likely that these statistics also apply in the case of Bioparques.

This choice to source tomatoes from businesses with such inhumane practices blatantly contradicts Wendy’s “Code of Conduct For Suppliers”, which states that the company takes “all human rights and labor practices issues seriously and expect the same from our Suppliers.” Rather than just “expecting” their suppliers to behave in accordance with human rights and fair labor laws, Wendy’s should require its suppliers to meet its code of conduct. Otherwise, the company condones human rights abuses such as poor working conditions, sexual assault, and denial of fair wages. +++ One of the key successes of the FFP is its prevention of sexual violence in the fields—a principle Wendy’s Code of Conduct theoretically supports. However, if that is the case, why is Wendy’s spokesperson Heidi Schauer accusing the CIW of “exploit[ing] the positive momentum that has been generated by and for women in the #MeToo and Time’s Up movement to advance their interests”? In fact, it seems like the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements are exactly aligned with the goals of the Fair Food Program—and many of the leaders of these

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

movements agree. In response to Wendy’s statement, leaders in the Time’s Up movement—including Alyssa Milano, Caitriona Balfe, Amber Tamblyn, and Eve Ensler—came out in public support of CIW farmworker women and the Wendy’s Boycott. As Milano says, “To suggest that farmworker women—whose voices, power, and strength were on impressive display in front of the offices of Wendy’s Board Chairman all last week during their Freedom Fast—are somehow unwelcome intruders in the fight for dignity and safety for women is downright absurd and unbelievably offensive.”

In the height of the #MeToo era in which powerful male leaders in the film, tech, and other white collar industries are being held to account for sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, and in which millions across the globe are exposing this problem on social media with the #MeToo hashtag, women farmworkers are shining a critical spotlight on the ways in which this violence intersects with issues of labor and migrant justice. And yet, Wendy’s has chosen to remain on the side of violence and impunity, refusing to acknowledge and take action to reverse their own complicity in sexual assault and harassment against farmworkers. Instead of choosing to sign on to a program with a worker-based accountability model, which has been proven to reduce sexual assault against farmworker women, Wendy’s has shifted to purchasing from growers with a proven track record of violence against workers. It is clear that Wendy’s is prioritizing its own corporate interests over the safety and wellbeing of the people who pick its tomatoes. +++ It is now the spring of my senior year at Brown. As I think back to the events of the spring of my first year here, the parallels between financial interests and sexual violence in both cases are hard to miss. And we, as students, must take action, just as we have for issues of sexual assault on campus. Wendy’s regularly targets millennials and Generation-Z-ers in its marketing strategy: the corporation recently released a mixtape, revamped its marketing strategies, and its CEO has explicitly stated that the company has changed its PR strategy in order to appeal to a younger consumer base, saying, “The transformation of the Wendy’s brand is essential to establish credible relevance with the

Millennial generation.”

Therefore, it is on us as students, young people, and daily consumers to say that we will not stand for sexual assault on our campu or in the fields. We must protest, boycott, and speak out against Wendy’s failure to support the people who produce its food. We must elevate real, enforceable solutions to stamp out and prevent sexual harassment and assault in the workplace—and hold corporate giants like Wendy’s responsible for failing to rid their supply chains of human rights violations.

Last Thursday, on April 5, at noon, a group of students in solidarity with the CIW held a rally on the steps of Faunce. They read words from the CIW, shed light on the Wendy’s boycott, and called on Brown as an institution to take action in instances of sexual assault, no matter where they occur. This rally was a part of a larger national Day of Action put together by the Student Farmworker Alliance, a national organization that mobilizes students to act in solidarity with the CIW. This national Day of Action included rallies in more than 25 other cities, all organized by students or young people. It was powerful to hear my fellow Brown students call on Wendy’s, Brown, and other students to listen to and show up for farmworker women, and it was inspiring to know that, across the country, so many other young people were doing the same. While Wendy’s has not responded after the day of action, the CIW is not giving up. More actions are happening throughout the country, and media outlets and celebrities are continuing to discuss the CIW and the #MeToo movement, lending the campaign visibility and traction.

So what can we, as students, do right now? First, don’t eat at Wendy’s! Second, take to social media with the hashtags #ItsOnWendys and #TimesUpWendys.

Wendy’s has made a name for itself on Twitter and Facebook, and we can and should push back on these platforms, particularly as we are the company’s current target demographic. Finally, read up about the CIW online, talk to your friends about this issue, and keep an eye out for more upcoming events on Brown’s campus!

NATALIE LERNER B’18.5 is boycotting Wendy’s.

NEWS

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PRICED OUT DARE's fight for rent stabilization

BY Mariela Pichardo ILLUSTRATION BY Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN BY Ella Rosenblatt

Federal Hill couple Butch and Madonna Trottier, aged 78 and 76 years old respectively, spent three months of the past year living in a house without heat. Nearly every night from October to February, they would pack into their car to escape the frigid air entering their home through its broken window. Despite paying $800 a month in rent since they moved into their Grove Street apartment two years ago, the couple says they spent months living with no heat, broken windows, and a rat infestation. “We kept telling the guy who came to collect the rent,” Madonna told Uprise RI in February. “He was right on time [for that].”

Their repeated requests for the landlord to address these issues were met with silence. Madonna noted that in November she was visited by a representative of the building’s proprietor who, upon feeling the draft entering their home, immediately promised to seal the window.

However, after allegedly taking off for Home Depot to purchase supplies, she never returned. In December, the Trottiers stopped paying rent in protest of their landlord’s negligence. They hoped this move would inspire the property owner to make the necessary repairs in their apartment. Instead, in late January, they received an eviction notice.

Thousands of renters in Rhode Island share the Trottiers’ experience, according to Providence-based advocacy group Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE). Unresponsive landlords, rising rents, and a lack of renter protection are all contributing to a rising exodus of low-income residents from communities they’ve lived in for years. DARE exists to organize and advocate for low-income families, particularly in communities of color, in order to achieve social, economic, and political justice. Shortly after learning of the Trottiers’ dilemma, DARE launched a campaign for rent stabilization.

Rent stabilization limits the percentage by which landlords can raise rent each year and provides renters with guaranteed renewable leases. It is often confused with rent control, which also seeks to protect low-income renters from hiked rent prices and guarantees tenants an opportunity to re-sign if they choose to. However, rather than allowing landlords to increase rents by a certain percentage on a yearly basis, rent control caps the amount rent can be raised to a certain number annually.

DARE’s campaign seeks to limit the percentage by which rent rises annually at four percent, which is the rise in cost of living as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index. +++ On March 14, the Tenants and Housing Association (THA), an offshoot of DARE committed to fighting against evictions and gentrification, announced its initiative at a protest against the Trottiers’ eviction. The THA’s membership consists of landlords and tenants alike.

At the event, the Trottiers’ son, Stephen Tobin, who lives in his own apartment on the second floor, revealed

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that he too was suffering from broken windows and poor heating, and that he had also received an eviction notice.

“We’ve talked to the landlords to make some repairs, but they refused to do anything until the lease was up,” Tobin said. “They’re moving in college students. And then they’re going to be raising rent.”

In late October, the Trottiers’ building, along with a property at 190 Knight Street, was acquired by the apartment rental agency Providence Student Living for $473,000. This agency is based out of Boston and headed by Brown University Medical School alum, Dustin Dezube. According to Providence Student Living’s website, the organization aims to ensure that students have exceptional off-campus housing experiences because they “know what it’s like to live in dorms” and “know what students need to make the most of their time.” While student-specific renting may meet the needs of undergraduates temporarily in Providence, it fails long-term residents like the Trottiers and Tobin.

It appears that Providence Student Living purposely neglected its responsibility to maintain newly-acquired properties in an effort to push its inherited residents to break their leases and leave early. This would expedite the process of remodeling the Grove Street building for future student renters.

Providence Student Living’s inability to meet the needs of its tenants while advertising to do just that for student renters suggests that they perceived the Trottier family as expendable. Due to their fixed income, they cannot afford to pay more than their rent of $800 a month.

However, by renting with friends or receiving financial support from their parents, many college students can pay upwards of $2,000 a month.

Rental costs in Rhode Island are at an unprecedented high, according to RI Housing’s annual rent survey, and anticipated to continue increasing in the coming years.

The cost of housing has been steadily rising since 2012.

From 2015 to 2016, studio units saw the greatest increase, 11.1 percent, or from $855 to $949.91 per month on average, followed by two-bedroom apartments which experienced a 4.1 percent increase, or from $1,288 to $1,340.81 per month.

While these rising rents are beneficial for landlords and property owners, they are devastating for low-income residents, many of whom may soon have to move out of communities they have lived in for their whole lives. “Providence Student Living is an example of how gentrification is actively working in our city right now,” THA member Alexis Trujillo said at the February protest.

In an interview with film collective Signs of Providence following the agreement, Madonna revealed the increasing likelihood that she and her family would soon become homeless. With less than two weeks to find an apartment and move out, it seemed her family of three would soon be living on the streets. “I never thought I’d see myself in this situation,” she said. “Never.”

An inability to find an apartment led the Trottiers to make another deal with Providence Student Living.

For the total amount of $1,500, the Trottiers and Tobin could remain in their respective apartments until the end of March. After that time, if unable to pay the full costs of their apartments, they would be required to move out. Due to a GoFundMe campaign created by Signs of Providence which raised over $4,000 in a single month for the family, they were able to cover the cost of remaining in their Grove Street apartment until May, when their lease ends. This is a rare gift and one not often available for people in their predicament. While the Trottiers no longer have to worry about being able to pay their rent or being evicted, this sense of relief is only temporary. Next month, whether they find an apartment or not, they will not have the opportunity to renew their lease. +++ The THA’s campaign seeks to add rent stabilization to the Providence voting ballot in November. According to the Providence City Charter, DARE must submit a copy of its proposed legislation and a petition of 1,000 signatures from registered Providence voters to the Providence City Council. Following the review and acceptance of these signatures, the organization must submit an additional $5,000. Though this process may seem daunting, THA is confident it will be successful. “The topic of housing instability resonates with so many tenants throughout Providence and people, including local, small-scale landlords, [who] are tired of absentee slum landlords’ negligence,” Trujillo told the Independent.

If the THA reaches its goal and Providence residents vote in favor, renter protection measures will be enacted, prohibiting landlords from raising rents more than once per year. It will also establish a nine-member board responsible for determining and limiting the city’s annual rent increase percentage. This group will consist of one Providence Department of Planning and Development member, one Providence Department of Inspections and Standards member, one Rhode Island Housing Board of Commissioners member, three tenants, and three landlord representatives. To prevent the possibility of the board having conflicting interests and members leaning in favor of landlords for their own financial gain, only the three designated landlord representatives will be allowed to own, manage, or profit from residential property in Rhode Island during their time on the board.

The rent stabilization initiative will guarantee Providence renters a renewable year-to-year lease, allow tenants to continue renting their apartment for as long as they choose, and ensure livable housing by settling any disputes between tenants and landlords through adjudication. This will be especially beneficial to those who otherwise have no access to a lawyer and cannot afford to go through a civil case. Presently, for renters who are dealing with the issue of inactive proprietors, the only way to hold landlords accountable is to sue them. If a

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landlord fails to maintain required services such as fumigation for pest outbreaks, tenants can apply to the Rent Board for a rent reduction.

Unfortunately, renter neglect, rising rent prices, and displacement stretch far beyond the smallest state in the Union. Throughout the country, particularly in California, low-income individuals are being forced out of their homes. This has led eight West Coast cities— Long Beach, Inglewood, Glendale, Pasadena, Santa Ana, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, and even Los Angeles—to start rent regulation campaigns similar to the one currently underway in Providence. “People are tired of having to choose between food, healthcare, and a decent home,” Santa Ana community organizer Hairo Cortez said at a rent control rally in March.

In January, the California State Assembly reviewed residential rent stabilization legislation which would provide municipal legislatures more flexibility in implementing rent control policies by repealing the Costa Hawkins Housing Act. This 1995 legislation prohibits rent regulation policies to be implemented on single -family homes or condominiums, prohibits cities that establish rent control after 1995 from expanding rent control, and prohibits municipalities from implementing vacancy control. The Costa Hawkins Act limits local governments’ ability to protect renters by prohibiting caps on rent increases and allowing landlords to retain the ability to raise rent on an apartment to market rate after a tenant moves out. To the dismay of rent control activists statewide, the California State Assembly ultimately upheld Costa Hawkins in a 3-2 vote by the Housing Committee.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Regardless of discouraging trends in renters’ rights nationwide, DARE believes passing and implementing rent control in Providence is more than plausible, as over 60 percent of Providence residents are cost-burdened renters, or paying over 30 percent of their income in housing costs. However, the organization has faced widespread misunderstanding regarding the purpose of rent stabilization. While collecting signatures, some volunteers say, they have encountered landlords who refuse to sign in support of the ordinance because they believe it will have negative consequences for their business.

“The goal of the Rent Control (or rent stabilization, more accurately) campaign is to encourage good landlordship and create some protections for renters, with a focus on protecting low-income or cost-burdened renters.

We plan for the legislation to only negatively affect bad landlords.” Trujillo said. “We wrote this bill by looking at good landlords around the city and simply writing some of their best practices into this policy.”

The bill sets the initial rent price for a housing unit at market value and only regulates increases thereafter.

It allows landlords who make substantial improvements to their properties to pass along 50 percent of the cost to their tenants over ten years. It also allows those who want to evict tenants to do so by selling properties, demolishing buildings, or complying with government orders.

However, landlords must present a legitimate, legal reason to evict their residents. Otherwise, they must pay two months worth of rent and additional money to seniors, persons with disabilities, or tenants in families with children under 18 to help with moving costs. Tenants who experience a rent increase are also eligible for financial relocation assistance.

Currently, Rhode Island has no legislation mandating year-long leases. As a result, landlords who choose not to offer year-long leases have the ability to raise prices as they see fit. If a consistent renting price has not been established in the tenant’s lease for a predetermined duration of time, renters can at any time be faced with a rise in renting costs; they must either come up with additional funds to meet their new renting price or move out. +++ The Providence communities most affected by rising rental prices are the South Side of Providence, Olneyville, and the West End, says the THA. Currently, these historically Black and Brown neighborhoods are experiencing the displacement of hundreds of their community members; many residents within these areas straddle the poverty line and are unable to meet the increasingly straining demands of the Providence renting market.

As rents continue to increase and the availability of affordable housing units continues to decline, people within these communities face the ever-growing threat of homelessness. According to Alexis Trujillo, the communities most affected by these issues are low-income populations standing “at the intersections of marginalized identities,” like immigrants and LGBTQ+ people. For these already targeted groups, homelessness would exacerbate their vulnerability. The essentiality of housing lies not only its ability to provide physical protection, but also a holistic sense of security.

MARIELA PICHARDO B‘20 wants secure housing opportunities for people everywhere.

METRO

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THE WOMEN WHO REMEMBER On matriarchs and memory

content warning: sexual violence Someday your memory will leave the inside of my eyelids and I promise you will not exist in my children’s eyes.

-Farah My grandmother grew up on a small farm in Missouri, a piece of worthless bottomland given to her father when he was 26 years old. New to town with nothing to his name, trying to earn the respect of the wealthy family of a girl he loved, he nurtured the land until it was teeming with pecan groves, a vegetable garden, and a few cattle.

It was beautiful land, and she would live there her entire childhood. +++ My grandfather—papaw, to me—died in 2014 from cancer. In sickness and in health, my grandparents completed each other. As my papaw’s body failed him, his mind stayed the course. As my grandma’s mind began to betray her, her small body remained strong. They leaned on each other. They needed each other. Together, they were still whole.

When he died, my mum and her siblings began to visit more frequently, trying to take on the role papaw played for my grandma. Was she locking the door at night? Was she remembering to eat breakfast? Did she leave the burner on when she went to sleep? My mum stayed in Missouri as her mother’s various illnesses progressed, overwhelming both her body and mind. She withered to a mere 85 pounds and began forgetting which of the granddaughters I was. Every conversation began to start with, “Grandma, it’s me, remember?”

The night before she died, I was thinking about the catfish in the lake behind her now empty house. Who was feeding them? I was far from home, and I borrowed a prepaid phone from a friend to dial my mum in Missouri.

She was at my grandma’s bedside in hospice, and I could feel the ocean between us as we spoke. Her sigh was so, so tired.

I couldn’t come home for the funeral, because of money and time and the temporality of bodies—they are fragile and impermanent and do not wait for those who want to say goodbye. I watched the funeral on a VCR tape two months later. The sound broke halfway through, and I watched it on mute without wanting to. I still felt an ocean away.

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+++ The matriarchs of my family are powerful. They are peaceful women, but fiercely loyal. Family is everything, humility is preached like gospel, and our roots matter. My grandma was a hoarder, saving everything from the letters written between her parents to the dolls she played with as a child. My mum saves things too, with thick books of photos and report cards and my backwards ‘B’s’ when I was first learning to write. My life in material form, with my mother as the storyteller. These collections of physical memories are the stories we will keep, she tells me. I’ll be grateful for them one day.

Now I save things, too. I save memories of my family as innocent and untroubled, when the women of my family were sisters, mothers, daughters. Not survivors. The instinct to save these memories—however wrong they are—is an instinct that runs in my blood. My grandma saved memories, guarding them close to her chest. Hers were also material, shared with her daughters, like the photos of her on the farmhouse porch, smiling on her father’s lap. These memories were shared with us, among us, for my entire life. Memories are genealogies and must be preserved, my grandma told us. They are our history. They are what connect us.

My mother tells me when I am nineteen. We have just watched The Keepers, a series on Netflix about a group of older women who experienced decades of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of the Baltimore Archdiocese.

Most of the women have repressed memories—moments that have been hidden from their memories by the power of trauma, but later reemerge. The pain is too overwhelming, too consuming to be contained forever. They will inevitably resurface, and for these women, it was 40 years later. This recollection hurts, and we can feel it through the screen. It clearly shakes my mother.

She tells me a story about my grandma with a strange emotional distance that I find troubling and unfamiliar.

My mother cries at everything, and she is the worst liar.

But when she tells me this truth, her cheeks stay dry.

We’re sitting on the couch and her hands are clasped in front of her. I’ve never noticed how she rubs her thumbs together when she is nervous. I stare at them as she speaks to me.

My mother tells me that my grandma was raped by her father for most of her childhood. My mother tells me it’s because he promised he wouldn’t touch her sisters if she didn’t tell. My mother tells me that no one in my family knows, and that my grandma never told a soul until she was married. And she only told my mother recently. My mother tells me now.

How do you rewrite your understanding of someone to include the violence they endured? How do I reconcile that my memories—constructed from knowing her in times of peace—are incomplete? +++ I was sexually assaulted for the first time three years ago, but my family wouldn’t know this for a while. This was a secret I saved for myself, too. I share everything with my family, and this was the first thing I had hidden from them.

How do I acknowledge the darkness that runs deep into my grandmother’s narrative, and now runs into mine?

I kept thinking back to my mother, and how she didn’t cry. I think about her fingers rubbing together, the friction creating heat that keeps her present. My own thumbs have calluses now, but I only noticed this recently. They are pieces of strong skin near my palm, where the side of my thumb rubs against the side of my first finger, mindlessly and mechanically. When did this begin?

I only cry alone, until I learn that my two sisters have lived the same pain. I begin to cry with them, and it feels like the women of my family are wrapping each other up in our arms and love and anger. We are crossing the oceans to hold each other. I feel almost whole.

I am sitting in a lawyer’s office, speaking about “my options.” The lawyer is seated a bit too close, in a leather chair that squeaks when she moves. She is so close that I tuck my hands under my thighs and my shoes under the chair, wanting to sink further into the seat. I want space, but she reaches her hand even closer to me. She offers me a large, grey rock, to squeeze in my hands. “It will keep you grounded, because … it’s from the ground,” she tells me. I want to laugh, but my body doesn’t feel like it.

I save this memory for later, though, because I know at

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BY M ILLUSTRATION BY Eve O'Shea DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

some point in my life I will find it hysterical. The rock has small grey veins running across its surface, and it reminds me of my mother’s hands. I rub my thumbs across the rock’s surface, and I feel a bit of heat. It’s pretty quiet, and it seems like she’s waiting for me to say something. She asks me if I want to have my parents here with me. I tell her, “I’m fine, thank you.” My family has had enough of this, to be honest.

“Do you have a history of sexual violence in your family?” +++ For exactly six days, I use concealer to cover the bruises on my neck. I counted. On the fourth day, a friend teases me, asking if I have a hickey. I want to throw up.

Did my grandmother cover her bruises? Did she have lies to tell her sisters, her friends, her mother? Did she smile, bile rising in her throat?

How do you add pages to a life story that you thought was complete? Not just pages, but an entire chapter of thick, painful, dark words. Or endnotes, that no one takes the time to read. It’s like writing scribbled notes in the margins, when the story deserved beautiful, thoughtful, full pages to speak.

I wish I could talk with her about it. To do justice to this story. About the pain of sexual violence that is our genealogy. That crosses the divide of decades, with different men and bodies and places, but that still connects us. I would speak with her about the women of my family who have fiercely guarded their memories of trauma, enduring a second form of new, slow violence as these memories emerge from repression.

I want to ask her, in my weakest moments, how she stayed her course. How did she keep this secret from us all? How did she trust the next man who touched her?

Did she feel alone? Was she anxious? How did she learn to feel at home in her body again? How did she raise her daughter to feel safe and strong?

I want my grandmother’s words of comfort. But I also want to feel free and whole in my limbs and belly and flesh. I’m not sure my grandmother can give me this.

+++ As I age, the memories I have of my grandmother have begun to fade. Blurry and unclear, crowded out by these constructed memories of her life I have only just discovered. There is one that I have been trying to remember for a while, from when I was seven and we were hiking.

I tripped and my knee ruptured open, spilling blood as I began to wail. My grandma knelt over me and said something sternly, stroking my leg. She said something about my body, something about fragility, something about tears.

I am so, so tired. This piece is a rewritten life story, my own confessional, and a love letter. It is what I want to tell my grandma, over tea at the dining table, where we say grace and I have to ask permission to be excused. It is what I want to tell my grandma, throwing handfuls of

catfish food from our tin buckets into the lake behind her house. It is what I want to tell my grandma, back when she could look in my eyes and know which granddaughter I was. Back when my body felt all my own. Back when I thought all of our bodies were our own. Back when the matriarchs of my family were untouchable, and all that I wanted to be.

To my grandma, You are fierce, sturdy, strong. Strict, witty, compassionate. You are vivid in my memories. You are the first chapter of my origin story. You are deeply rooted in my spine as I straighten it every day. You are in my fingers, rubbing together to generate heat, to keep me present.

You are in my mother. My daughters will know of you, but I hope they will not know our pain.

M is of Missouri.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FEATURES

08

THE SHAME OF THE CITIES There’s an image of the proposed Providence streetcar that keeps me up at night. It depicts the corner of Empire and Washington Street at twilight. A restaurant is illuminated for Christmas, and if you squint you can see those cream-colored wicker chairs that crowd Paris’ outdoor cafes; the awning reads “brasserie.” Masses of people congregate as they might in a European plaza, but the street’s small scale makes this imagined Providence feel all the more pleasant. At the heart of the urban vision is a sleek, red streetcar. If you ignore RIPTA’s beachy logo (still emblazoned on the side of the modernized vehicles), the scene begins to vaguely resemble Saint Petersburg, Russia, where the trams are red and the buildings are similarly white and ornamented. An amalgamated ‘Europe’ takes root in Providence as the streetcar pulls into town.

But, of course, Providence streets are never this crowded (save for the occasional WaterFire). And if you look beyond the intensity of the rendered corner, you’ll see a remnant of much of downtown Providence’s current un-Photoshopped reality: a windowless parking garage. +++ The image first appeared on the front page of the Providence Department of Planning’s 2014 application for TIGER funding, a grant from the US Department of Transportation that supports transit infrastructure improvements. The city scrapped the project, which would have cost some $100 million, but the JPEG is still floating around the internet. It consistently pops up in my professors’ PowerPoints (sometimes in jest, other times not) as a representation of what Providence could be with a little TLC, federal money, and the right lighting. The rendering is as ridiculous as it is romantic and as implausible as it is memorable; I seem to mentally conjure the image every time I walk through downtown Providence.

There’s so much to love about the city in its current iteration, but I can’t seem to shake this image of Providence’s potential future. In a visual side-by-side, the present pales in comparison to its fictional sister.

Thousands of images like this one exist: renderings commissioned by hopeful, maybe naively progressive planning departments. Some projects scrape together enough cash and after a few months (but usually years) finally come to fruition. Others, like the streetcar, exist only in image and imagination. Inherent to all these renderings—for projects realized and otherwise—is a sense of ideal urbanism. Even if the projects themselves are practical and well-planned, the renderings tend to insinuate a near-impossible future brought on by good design. These images silently propagate an urbanist paradigm that goes something like this: dense buildings flanked by public transit bring people into the street, and with people in the street, cities thrive. Indeed, before the Providence streetcar project was shot down, countless proponents pointed to its ability to “catalyze development;” businesses would, they argued, pop up along the streetcar route, and crowds like those depicted in the rendering would follow. Even without mouthpieces, the renderings speak volumes: trees are always more mature than they would be in a new development, buildings appear nearly translucent, figures have been blurred in long-exposure fashion as they happily explore their pristine city. It never rains in the rendered urban future.

As digital renderings have become more lifelike and aesthetically appealing over the past decade, they’ve moved out of the offices of architecture and planning firms and into the mainstream. Even for those entirely uninterested in city planning and development, visual

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Renderings, reality TV, and obsessive urbanism

representations of the work done in these fields are unavoidable. Renderings are plastered on plywood walls outside of construction sites as a sign of what’s to come; they appear alongside every news article about a new apartment building; they even accompany Craigslist listings of soon-to-be-finished renovated apartments.

Blueprints—in their monochrome two-dimensionality—still guide construction, but highly stylized digital renderings do the work of garnering public support. The $100 million Providence streetcar would have been strikingly unconvincing had the planning department not produced full-color, laser-printed poster boards to prop up at community meetings.

As images of ideal urban spaces have become commonplace, urbanist ideology—which once sat picture-less in books like Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities—has gained a valuable visual aid.

But if Jacobs’ 500-page volume was, in 1961, able to delineate urbanism in an extensive and nuanced fashion, the renderings that now constitute so much of our urban imagination are immensely simplified. Like Jacobs, today’s renderings favor density over sprawl and public transit over cars, but they do so without comment or question; a complicated, multifaceted urbanism—probed in thousands of texts beyond Jacobs’ seminal writing— has been reduced to a utopian vision. Install a streetcar and call it a day.

In its simplification, a once lofty ideology has become broadly appealing—perhaps to a fault. Urbanism is now popular, and it has begun to take the mold of the popular.

Obsession with physical urban improvement is now as much a valuable credo as it is a guise for doing to cities the kind of makeovers we once reserved for people and houses. At times, we imagine new cities in our renderings not because there’s anything wrong with the look and feel of our cities today, but because it’s fun, like watching a home makeover on television. Detached from the grueling work of planning—of securing public funds (or a spouse’s approval)—we watch the gutting of kitchens and cities with fascination. And so, just as our own homes and bodies feel inadequate when viewed in the context of their post-makeover potential, we become dissatisfied with today’s cities when surrounded by images of what they might look like in the near future. We can’t be happy, it seems, until everything looks like the High Line.

+++ I often worry that I’m complacent in the reduction of cities to an urban aesthetic. When I was in middle school, I watched HGTV shows about home renovation in my friends’ carpeted basements. Now, I listen to two-minute clips from the design podcast 99% Invisible with titles like “Road Signs Suck, What if We Got Rid of Them All?” and read CityLab articles about dockless bikeshare. There’s more substance to this kind of media consumption, I hope—an underlying sense of common good in public street design that isn’t present in the multi-million dollar flippage of a Cape Cod bungalow.

But recently, I’ve been feeling a creeping sense that my tweenage obsession with home renovation has morphed, with age, into a young-adult passion for urbanism.

Retile the bathroom, repave the street. Update appliances, modernize transit. Two sides of the same coin.

My guiltiest pleasure is Curbed, a website that, in a grating irony, posts weekly profiles of the newest luxury apartment building (and “What You Can Do to Get Past the Co-op Board”) along with the occasional long-form story lamenting, say, the hyper-gentrification of the East Village. Their “About” page reads, “Unlike a glossy shelter magazine, we see homes, streets, neighborhoods, and cities as inextricably related.” The editorial board knows, it seems, that idealizing the midcentury villa is, on its own, insufficient; the availability of affordable urban housing is more pressing than California modern.

But if tours of 432 Park Ave are published among criticism of unreliable MTA service, the aesthetic call of high modernism and the political charge of low urbanism dissipate into a certain form of acceptable pleasure: spectatorship of the “built environment.” When buildings bleed into streets and neighborhoods into cities, as Curbed calls for, the disparate spaces of the public sidewalk and the private living room are suddenly understood as a singular, built whole in opposition to the natural, unbuilt environment.

Interest in urban planning and design, then, feels inoffensive because it’s lacquered with the inherent politics that all cities possess. Our present urban obsession is predicated on the notion that because infrastructural

Image from Providence Department of Planning and Development

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BY Ella Comberg DESIGN BY Katherine Sang

New York City subway, 1973 improvements (like those to public transit) aren’t glamorous, to be interested in them is to be socially-minded.

But the renderings of these changes to the city tell a different story—one in which infrastructure actually is glamorous. We love the streetcar not because there’s anything particularly compelling about a new kind of vehicle, not because physical changes to the city are able to accomplish dramatically more than policy changes (labor laws, property taxes, school reform), but because we love to fantasize about a European-inspired Providence. Likewise, we watch reality television shows about wardrobe makeovers and home renovation not because we are sympathetic to the implications that these changes might have in a person’s life, but because physical change is endlessly compelling. “I can’t believe he lost all that weight”; “I can’t believe the house used to look like that”; “I can’t believe how much the city has changed.”

In an urban context, the ‘fun’ of watching change comes in part from the aesthetically stunning nature of renderings. But it also derives from the fact that a visualized, physical urbanism is more digestible than social urbanism. As a white elite repopulates the literal innercity, and as public perception of ‘urban’ becomes less racialized, we’ve begun to pursue one-size-fits-all physical urban solutions rather than the careful, personalized solutions that less visual (that is, unrenderable) problems necessitate. What we might ten years ago have called ‘urban problems’ (gun violence, drugs, literacy) are now frequently eclipsed by transit-oriented development, railpark conversion, and opening up the waterfront. If those older urban dilemmas are horrible, unsolvable, and hopeless, the newer questions posed by Curbed and the like are fixable with good urban praxis.

And so, as Curbed churns out home/street/neighborhood/city content; as Vox Media buys the site for some $30 million; as the conglomerate starts to produce short videos about how Brooklyn’s DUMBO came to be; and as 70,000 people join a Facebook group dedicated to ‘urbanist memes,’ I come face-to-face with the shame of today’s cities: our contemporary urban fixation lies not in people, but in space. 70,000 college students aren’t obsessively posting in a Facebook group about public school funding; they’re posting pictures of well-engineered streets in Scandinavia and calling for international implementation. Both urban planning and urban policy are important forms of urban interpretation, but the built city—especially when idealized in digital renderings—is more fun and more manageable than the social city with its ceaseless social problems.

+++

+++

I do not want to ignore the pressing reality that the built environment and the social world (with its social problems) are intimately intertwined. As Heinrich Zille, the German artist, once said in reference to tenements in Berlin, “You can kill a person with an apartment just as well as with an axe.” Zille’s hyperbole is commonly used in architecture circles to dismiss bad design, but city space has more literal implications, too. I’ve read no more compelling account of the connection between racism and designed urban spatial confinement than Rashad Shabazz’s Spatializing Blackness, which details, among other things, how public housing architecture in Chicago aimed to blur the line between home space and prison space. A quick scan of the proximity of power plants to low-income neighborhoods where people of color live will reinforce the ever-true notion that the physical space—and indeed, the calculated planning—of cities has life-threatening implications for those it rebuffs.

In many ways, the potential to reverse spatialized inequality is what makes urban planning a compelling field to young people today. Urbanism wouldn’t be in vogue right now if it were understood as a purely aesthetic ideology. We like cities without highways through their cores because we hate federally-sponsored displacement, not just because on-ramps and overpasses are ugly. But even if urbanists—both those who work professionally in architecture and planning and those who, like me, obsess unprofessionally—care about social issues, the design projects that take up the bulk of architecture and planning firms’ time—those that pervade Curbed and my Facebook feed; the things we render in high definition—aren’t the kinds of projects that might mitigate rising rents. For every high-quality mockup released for a new public health clinic, it seems there are hundreds of luxury apartment buildings in the works. In fact, meticulously designed urban space can be understood as an indicator of soon-to-come or alreadybegun gentrification (the antithesis to the equitable city).

Take the proposed Providence streetcar: even if the line would have serviced Rhode Island’s low-income, publictransit riding population, its larger project was to “catalyze development.” The essence of the project was not to move people—travel times might have been reduced, but not dramatically. Instead, the streetcar harnessed a nostalgic aesthetic (think: San Francisco’s trolleys) to earn property taxes from nearby land.

There are photos of New York in the ‘70s and ‘80s that people, including me, love to look at. Curbed publishes an article with a variant of the title “20 Photos That Capture New York City's Free-Spirited Seventies” almost weekly.

The most memorable of these photos, I think, are those astounding ones of the inside of subway cars covered in graffiti. There is an immense pleasure in seeing what space you know well looked like before you were there.

I like to look at photos of Brown in the ‘70s, too; but the New York City subway ones are so uniquely compelling because, aside from the graffiti, the cars look basically the same. All I can think about when I see them is the transformation between then and now—the wiping off of the tags and the passage of a few decades. I see a before and after.

We retrieve these from the archives so frequently not for nostalgic purposes, but to indicate just how far we’ve come. One Business Insider article, for example, is titled “New York City Used To Be A Terrifying Place [PHOTOS].” If the photos of graffitied subway cars are a ‘70s-era “before,” then today’s almost graffiti-less MTA is the “after.” But as today’s outcry over the MTA’s inadequacy indicates, even the “after” is unsatisfactory.

The same might be said of digital renderings. They’re as interesting to look at as photos of New York before its sanitization, but they’re disingenuous in suggesting that any urban solution will be sufficient—that any aesthetic change could possibly alleviate the ailments of a post-industrial American city. If New York post-sterilization is any indication, “clean up the city” projects in all forms (those that sought to remove graffiti from the subway in the ‘80s and those that today seek to replace well-functioning busses with sleeker streetcars) might do more to further impoverish marginalized groups than they do to improve public transit.

I continue to obsess over the streetcar rendering because of its reality TV-like pleasure and because I know it is not enough. Even with a streetcar, poverty in Providence will persist. As urbanism has become popular, such a self-evident truth has become necessary to state.

I spend my days reading and writing about physical urbanism because I believe deeply in its social implications, but when I do so, I withdraw from the social world of the cities I inhabit. When I look at Kennedy Plaza and all I can think is, “Wouldn’t it make more sense to move the westbound bus lane to the north side of Washington street?” I am failing to see the people in front of me. I am seeing, instead, the static people who will inevitably appear in a rendering of this project, frozen as they board a bus.

ELLA COMBERG B’20 wants to live in the real world.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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SOFT POWER Petra Collins and the problem with the female gaze

BY Jane Argodale ILLUSTRATION BY Ella Rosenblatt DESIGN BY Bethany Hung Two women press their cheeks together, with dark hair falling in their faces and lips parted to reveal the radiant white tips of their top front teeth. The girl on the right is looking at the camera, the other gazing down. The look on both of their faces evokes the classic suggestive, come-hither look of a covergirl on a men’s magazine, but Instagram’s square frame zooms in on the point of contact between their skin, cutting off the rest of their bodies and the outer sides of their heads—there’s nothing to leer at.

A ray of sunlight seems to be casting through the mesh of their conjoined hair and a soft yellow glow illuminates the glossy peach-colored makeup on their eyelids and lips.

The image seems to be capturing a fantasy, but what that fantasy actually is feels unclear. Elements of the image suggest sexual tension, but the photograph’s subjects don’t really acknowledge one another, making an erotic interpretation both tempting and just far enough beyond reach to feel out of line. They are physically close, but nothing about their relationship is indicated by the image.

This image is typical of the work of Petra Collins, the Canadian photographer and artist. Most of the subjects of Collins’ photographs are cisgender women, in seemingly relaxed or unguarded poses. When there is more than one woman, they are often touching or holding each other closely. Sometimes the intimacy between women in Collins’ photos is platonic, sometimes more explicitly romantic or sexual, but most often it’s indeterminate enough to elude a queer label. By far the most distinguishing visual feature of these images is the frequent use of colored lights to wash her subjects in an ethereal blue, purple, or pink glow. In any case, the palette skews towards soft pastel shades, the quality of the image always somewhat faded or blurred. Looking at a Petra Collins photograph or watching one of her videos is like looking at the world through foggy, pink sunglasses.

At 25 years old, Collins has already achieved remarkable success, with her work being displayed at major galleries and museums around the world. Her work has been featured in major fashion magazines including Vogue, Dazed & Confused, and i-D. She’s directed a music video for Selena Gomez, and more recently a video for Cardi B’s single “Bartier Cardi.” Perhaps most significantly, she has over 700,000 followers on Instagram. Clearly, there’s a widespread popular appeal to her dreamy aesthetic beyond the insular art and fashion worlds. +++

Many publications, including the New Yorker, have called Petra Collins’ work emblematic of the ‘female gaze,’ in contrast to the male gaze that has been predominant in centuries of Western art. The idea of the hegemonic male gaze is perhaps most famously summarized by the art historian John Berger in his 1972 BBC series Ways of Seeing: “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting ‘Vanity,’ thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.” Under the male gaze, there is no woman without the implied man looking at her and dictating how she gets to be seen.

What the female gaze entails isn’t as defined, though it can loosely be understood to mean the absence of the ‘male gaze,’ with women instead deciding how their

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bodies are presented. Petra Collins’ first solo show, Discharge, mostly featured photographs of her friends that she had taken starting at age 15, during her middleclass upbringing in Toronto. Many of these images had been originally featured on the online teen girl magazine Rookie. In an interview about the show, Collins explained to the Cut, “I try to create images of things that aren’t necessarily spoken about, or what we would want to see—not the clean version of teenage girlhood that we usually receive. We’re taught that women have to live these weird double lives, like once you get your period and once you start growing hair, you have to immediately hide it.” When it’s women rather than men doing the ‘gazing,’ there’s less of an urge to hide the unsexy parts of womanhood.

Many of the images in Discharge do convey a special intimacy: three girls smoking weed on a bed with distant looks on their faces; a girl resting her head on a table, looking wearily off to the side; another girl looking down at her phone at a party, seemingly ready to escape.

Everyone looks good, but no one is being made to look sexy or perform for some imagined male audience.

+++ Another indicator of Petra Collins’ conception of the female gaze can be found in her insistent preoccupation with bodies as harboring feminist power. In a 2013 HuffPost article, Collins recounts how her Instagram account was deleted, because of a photo that showed a closeup of her hips in a bikini, pubic hair peeking out from its edges, bathed in green lighting and sparkles in typical Petra Collins fashion. Of the incident, Collins wrote, “Through this removal, I really felt how strong of a distrust and hate we have towards female bodies. The deletion of my account felt like a physical act, like the public coming at me with a razor, sticking their finger down my throat, forcing me to cover up, forcing me to succumb to society’s image of beauty.”

Collins’ language here suggests that her act of presenting her body in this way is a sort of defiance. The language is in keeping with what curator Aria Dean calls “selfie feminism,” in an essay in The New Inquiry, which she defines as the idea “that the control afforded through the act of self-imaging is invaluable; nothing less, in fact, than the primary feminist tool for resistance.” Dean adds, “the claim follows a logic in which circulation of personal narratives through Instagram and other social media platforms is supposed to provide points of identification for all women, everywhere.” Dean critiques this assumption of a universal womanhood, with particular regard to its racial politics: “Intuitively, the selfie still feels valuable, but the compounded male, white, and colonialist gazes that work so hard to blur Black women and femmes into oblivion have too much force behind them to leave me with enough agency both to politicize a topless mirror selfie and to believe in that politicization one-hundred percent.” For Black women, trans women, nonbinary individuals, and all others who have been “blurred into oblivion” to varying degrees, simply being visible seems like a shallow goal.

In this vein, there’s something suspect about a thin, conventionally attractive, white, and cisgender woman like Petra Collins positioning the display of her pubic

hair as such a vicious battleground of the patriarchy.

It’s true that social media websites arbitrarily delete or flag content in ways that betray deeper prejudices, but Collins’ article went viral and her Instagram account was restored. It’s difficult to believe that her account’s revival and the attention she gained in the process accomplished anything for anyone besides Petra Collins. +++ Still, Petra Collins’ work is undeniably pleasing to look at. The new “Bartier Cardi” video showcases rising stars Petra Collins and Cardi B at their finest. Rows of sculpted and glistening men obediently chant Cardi B’s name, the rapper in red lingerie and Swarovski-encrusted corsets raps into her fiancé’s face, and a duo of beautiful women fasten 21 Savage’s neck in a leather collar—all awash in those blurred, soft shades of blue and violet and pink and green. “Bartier Cardi” seamlessly blends the acerbic qualities of Cardi B’s music and persona with Collins’ trademark aesthetic of soft femininity. In an interview with the VICE blog Garage, Collins explained that her main concern in directing the video was “wanting every single woman in every scene to be like, a goddess.”

In a sense, what Collins has done here is flip the male gaze entirely: women are goddesses, with all the power and control, and it’s the men who are objectified and gawked at. It’s proof that she very much has her finger on the pop cultural pulse, which has embraced a feminism that celebrates strong, singular female icons like Cardi B. It can’t be stressed enough that watching “Bartier Cardi” is incredibly satisfying to the deep cultural craving to see women wield any sort of power, even in a three-minute music video. But beyond that, there’s little political meaning in turning Cardi B, who is already famous and widely admired, into a goddess. There are no “points of identification” to be found in making someone who is already seen as beautiful even more beautiful. That isn’t to detract from the significance of Cardi B’s success or the fact that the label of feminism is now something that’s aspired to rather than rejected, but to rightfully designate the feminism present in this sort of work as purely aesthetic.

This is a persistent theme in Collins’ photography and videos, from her recent, more polished work for Cardi B and campaigns for Gucci, to her oldest work in Discharge.

The title of that show is meant to evoke an unsanitized depiction of the body, but one of its featured images shows an impossibly clean red lace bikini discarded on the floor. Her subjects may never be outrageously sexualized or exploitative, her images never crafted to please men in a straightforward way, but they don’t do much for women or nonbinary people either—that would require more reckoning with her subjects as people, more confrontation with traditional notions of beauty and femininity, and a less undiscerning celebration of power.

Many people in the world never get to be beautiful, but in Petra Collins’ visual universe, no one ever gets to be ugly.

JANE ARGODALE B’18 is searching for good selfie lighting at this very moment.

APRIL 13, 2018

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EPHEMERA

12

HOME-FIELD DISADVANTAGE The PawSox take a swing at the State House

BY Ian Stevenson ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

Three years after plans for the construction of a new Minor League Baseball stadium in Providence fell through, the State House is once again embroiled in a battle over baseball. This time, the clash is over legislation for a new stadium in Pawtucket. The conflict centers on the Pawtucket Red Sox, a Minor League Baseball team affiliated with the Boston Red Sox, who want to play in a new park.

The team, the city of Pawtucket, and the state of Rhode Island concluded that basic renovations to the current McCoy Stadium would cost $35 million. “There’s an expansion joint that has started to come apart that is causing major water damage to the facility,” Bart Harvey, special assistant to the chairman of the PawSox, told the Independent. Adding new amenities and re-configuring the stadium’s seating would cost $68 million, while razing McCoy entirely and replacing it with a new stadium at the same location would take $78 million.

In January, after extensive public hearings, the Senate passed bills to fund the construction of a stadium at a new site in downtown Pawtucket, where the abandoned Apex department store currently sits. This current plan includes 50,000 square feet of space around the stadium for businesses, according to Harvey. The site is also adjacent to the Slater Mill, a former cotton mill that is on the National Register of Historic Places. Cost projections for the Slater Mill park come out to $83 million, with $45 million invested by the team’s ownership, $23 million by the state, and $15 million by the city. That legislation, which has already drawn the support of Governor Gina Raimondo, is now pending in the House. Each point in this drawn-out process has drawn the attention of local media outlets and exacerbated tensions within the State House and between labor and local organizers.

On a sunny, cold day last Saturday in Pawtucket, children played cornhole as a musician strummed a guitar and sang from underneath a blue-and-white carnival tent in front of McCoy Stadium. As fans filed in, the Pawtucket Red Sox prepared to take on the LeHigh Valley Pigs in the opening game of the team’s 2018 season. Paying for his ticket, Tim Weir, wearing a Red Sox hat, looked up at the cashier. “We gotta keep this team in Pawtucket,” he said.

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+++ McCoy Stadium rests east of the Seekonk River in central Pawtucket. Nearby, bygone industrial sites sit across from pale-colored clapboard houses with concrete walk-ups and white painted iron railings. Many houses have chain-link fencing surrounding their yards, some with brown vines woven into the links. Just outside the stadium, across from the Right Spot Diner, the neighborhood begins.

Aside from the costs for renovation at McCoy, Harvey said the site, even if developed, isn’t in a commercial area that could attract much business or foot traffic.

“What we, meaning the PawSox and the city and the state, recognized was that [developing McCoy] was not going to be a strategic use of public funds.”

Instead, the PawSox are supporting the legislation in the State House, which would bring the team about a mile and a half away to downtown Pawtucket. Many state legislators and union representatives see a new stadium as an opportunity to revitalize a struggling city by heralding a wave of new business to the area. “The city has beautiful bones,” said Harvey, “but it’s been in decline.”

Union representatives and state legislators sometimes have similar interests, which can encourage legislators to support bills that would provide local laborers with well-paying jobs. In some cases, these two groups have an explicit connection: the Senate President, Dominick Ruggerio, recently retired as an Administrator of the New England Laborers Labor Management Co-op Trust.

Parties interested in the deal, like union leaders and the governor, are also concerned that if the city doesn’t build a new stadium in Pawtucket, the PawSox will decide to move elsewhere. They are particularly worried that the city of Worcester, Massachusetts has expressed interest in the project.

“If you drive by that Apex site ten years from now and it’s still an abandoned Apex site and the PawSox are in Worcester, I think we are all going to regret it,” Raimondo told the Providence Journal.

Despite the sense of urgency in securing a deal, Larry Berman, House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello’s spokesman, told the Indy that these standing offers from Worcester

and other cities have yet to find financial backing.

“Worcester has not guaranteed or even offered a dime yet,” he said. “We don’t know if the PawSox are using Worcester as a bluff or what.”

David Norton, a resident of Pawtucket who recently ran for state Senate and opposed the new stadium in Providence three years ago, agrees.

“They’ve got nowhere to go,” he told the Indy. +++ The team has consistently emphasized that its offer to fund 54 percent of the project is more than twice what most farm teams have been called to invest in their own publicly owned ballparks. Still, $15 million is a sizable investment for the city, which has an annual budget of just under $124 million. Much of the city’s funding for the project would be provided by new revenue from property taxes at the site, according to an economic analysis commissioned by the Pawtucket Foundation.

Though the foundation is a non-profit with broad goals of promoting economic development across Pawtucket, few have failed to miss that the PawSox are one of their trustees. Moreover, some Pawtucket residents are worried that any financial figure is too much for the city to bear, especially given what else the city’s money could fund.

“Pawtucket shouldn’t be building this [stadium] for a bunch of rich guys while our schools are falling apart,” said Norton. This critique, in recent months, feels particularly apt, as one Pawtucket elementary school has closed multiple times because of insufficient heat from its 100-year-old boiler.

In addition to those in Pawtucket, the state’s Republican Party is vehemently against tax dollars going towards a new stadium and has devoted many of its recent press releases to the issue. “While our children attend schools in need of repair, Raimondo has prioritized spending millions to build a new PawSox stadium to please her donors,” the party’s Chairman Brandon S. Bell said in a statement in September. Last May he noted that Raimondo had “pushed for cuts to social services to balance the budget” while offering to fund a new ballpark.

As the legislation sits in the House, the spotlight is on House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello, a representative

APRIL 13, 2018

from Cranston. Following protests and a well-supported petition three years ago, Mattiello was the one ultimately responsible for burying the proposal to move the PawSox to Providence. After this public outcry against the deal in Providence in 2015, Mattiello appears to be proceeding cautiously this time. He has already halted movement on legislation in January because of a poll from this past fall that showed a majority of Rhode Islanders opposed the deal, according to GoLocalProv.

Since Mattiello won his Cranston district in 2016 by a mere 85 votes, his prudence is perhaps predictable. Last fall, the PawSox and the city of Pawtucket collaborated on a flier they dropped in Mattiello’s district in support of the Slater Mill park. Soon afterwards, union leaders— who see a new stadium as a strong and needed employment opportunity for their members—began boycotting Mattiello’s fundraisers, looking to shift the debate away from the possibility of a popular referendum. To bolster their argument for a new stadium in Pawtucket, some of these same union and construction leaders released a poll—four months after GoLocalProv’s poll—claiming that a majority of Rhode Islanders, after being told that the “park would pay for itself,” wanted to keep the team in Rhode Island and supported the current deal. In light of this new poll, Mattiello postponed meeting with PawSox executives until mid-March.

At the meeting, Mattiello expressed his concern to the team’s ownership that if the team were to vacate the new stadium due to bankruptcy, the taxpayers would be “on the hook” for its costs, Berman said. As the current deal is debated in the House Finance Committee, Mattiello has further asked the team to “mitigate some of the risk [away from] the Rhode Island and Pawtucket taxpayers.” Last week, the PawSox owners sent over a counter-offer that may address some of the Speaker’s concerns. While still reviewing the counter-offer, the Speaker remains skeptical that development around the stadium would actually occur, knowing how quickly the idea of large-scale public projects sour in the mind of taxpayers. Acknowledging the union-backed poll, Berman argued that it’s only “when you throw in all the cookies [the public] says ‘OK, maybe that’s a good idea.’”

If deciphering the public’s wishes isn’t difficult enough, any moves to direct public funding to a private

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

entity are under increased scrutiny these days. The memory of the state’s catastrophic 2010 financial investment in 38 Studios, Curt Schilling’s failed video game company, still lingers in many people’s minds. Schilling— who, coincidentally, last played for the PawSox during an injury rehab assignment in 2007—received $70 million in financial backing from the state, as they hoped the funds would lure 38 Studios to set up its headquarters in Rhode Island. Two years later, the company was bankrupt and taxpayers owed the loan’s bondholders almost $90 million.

“We began to call it 38 Stadium,” Norton said. “It fits the same bill.”

Proponents of the new stadium, predictably, disagree. “Anytime there’s a public-private deal [in Rhode Island], people are going to invoke 38 Studios as a blanket comment,” Greg Mancini, the director and general counsel of Build R.I., a non-profit trade association who commissioned the February poll, told the Indy.

“That was a video game. This is bricks and mortar.”

+++ To many in Pawtucket, the team means more than just economic revitalization. “The PawSox are an institution that have been a part of the fabric of the Pawtucket community for a long time,” said Sandra Cano, a Democratic Pawtucket city council member who won a special election for state Senate in Pawtucket this month.

For a city that’s come up against hard times, she said the city should jump at the team’s offer to invest $45 million in a public venue. In contrast, her Republican opponent, Nathan Luciano, as well as Norton, one of her Democratic primary opponents, positioned themselves against the stadium deal. Norton said people in Rhode Island want the team to stay at McCoy “because it’s affordable and because it has history, in the same way that Fenway Park has history.” He said people call McCoy a “gem” and that he thinks negotiators involved in the potential stadium deal “balloon up” the price of repairs to make it look less feasible.

To Norton, much of the stadium’s draw is for families, and he’s concerned that moving the team would inevitably raise ticket prices. The PawSox said they are

aware of this issue, as they are consistently deemed the most affordable team for families in their Minor League tier. In light of this, if the deal goes through, the team pledges to freeze ticket prices for at least five years.

In addition to their affordability, the PawSox have emotional significance to Rhode Island, a state with no major-league sports franchises to call its own. Pawtucket “could lose the PawSox, and I think that’s devastating,” said Norton.

Although no time table has been set, Berman said there will likely be a resolution on the matter by the end of the session in June. +++ Tim Weir spit sunflower seeds onto the pavement outside McCoy Stadium. He gestured up at the stands. “This is a dump, everybody knows it, but it’s got a lot of character,” he told the Indy, shifting his feet. “The state’s hurting,” he said, adding that the opioid crisis in the New England region has only worsened already existing economic woes. He trailed off and grimaced, chewing seeds stored in his cheek. He said he looks at other Minor League teams, at their new stadiums, and he wants something similar for his state.

Driving south on I-95 from Pawtucket, the interstate passes right by the abandoned Apex department store, just before the highway crosses the Seekonk River. The empty parking lot, rusting white street lamps, and blemished building can be seen from the highway.

“If they put [the stadium] there it’d be like a shining jewel,” Weir said. “It would be a shot in the arm to Rhode Island.”

IAN STEVENSON B’18.5 bunts against the shift.

METRO

14

STRANGERS AMONG US Story for a dweller, a stranger, and a daughter

BY Wen Zhuang ILLUSTRATION BY Kevin Dong DESIGN BY Ella Rosenblatt Land’s end. But there’s water, O my heart. And salt on my tongue.

The end of the world. This is not the end of the world.

— Susan Sontag, “Unguided Tour” To preface: I grew up in a two-parent household, where a safe space was always available for me to grow into my own, whatever that was to be. Any lamentations thus put forth by an ultimately undeserving me have little to do with the character of my parents and the quality of their care. Nor do they seek to undermine all that comes with a healthy two-parent household, under a roof much larger than needed.

That withstanding, returning home feels much like dragging my nails down an unending chalkboard, though unsure whether I am being dragged or dragging. All things can go in any direction, every meaning can either mean what it means or mean what it doesn’t. Either way, the feeling is equivalent to 500 screams stifled. I’m left unequivocally bound to navigating this mid-ground, where the goal of a ‘whole’ is long abandoned— whole meaning, whole understanding, whole communication and eventually, a whole home. Like 10 inches of snow in April, or having to pee on an airplane while seated next to a sleeping giant. Situations that garner frustration— an excessive amount—but not strong enough to warrant any concrete reaction. Circumstances you are affected and altered by but seem too large to be subjective. Like the weather to my body or the seat-assignment to my space.

They’re my parents, and thus I am bound to them—in promises much graver than vows—in sickness, health, agony, disappointment, irritation, even in inevitable breakage, we remain contracted.

My parents are hardworking to a fault. They grew up with just enough—on farms in the northeast of mainland China where one bedroom would always be crammed with too many heads for the number of cots. They came to America in their mid-30’s with even less than that: enough to spend on a temporary two-door rental and a studio barely fit for them and a then 6-year-old me. That one-bedroom grew into three, then four, as we moved from the San Gabriel Valley to Orange County. Our neighbors were now mostly Caucasian and our house built within the past year—my parents had no friends, but we amassed a large archive of pictures in the years following, mostly posed and poised in front of our house. There were two dining rooms—one for ‘formal gatherings’ and another for dinners. Now the space we share is split by something much larger than three feet across the dinner table, or the 4 bedrooms for 3 heads, or even the 3,000-plus miles across the ocean—there is so much lost in translation, and even more untranslatable. One might assume a need for translation would mean there was content already existing—not in this case. We don’t make conversation. I

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arrived home on a red-eye Monday morning and left on a red-eye that Friday night. In all that time, we exchanged enough words to fit a page, single-spaced. What we try to translate becomes the scooting around near walls, the setting of bags on tables, the frail eye contact, the thickset emotions we’ve held and those that we’ve forgotten we were feeling. Feelings we’ve continued on living with for so long, there’s a stench—almost poison.

My parents aren’t Trump supporters nor are they closeted homophobes. They didn’t mind that I smoked a cigarette at age 14 and wanted to travel alone to China at age 12. They sent me off to art school with no dissent. On paper, they’re pragmatic and easy-going, especially for a culturally-traditional Chinese household. As much as I am sure that they aren’t all of the above, I am just as much doubtful that they could be. The fact of the matter is: I don’t know them and I couldn’t. Their selfhoods, unlike mine, aren’t weaved through with chosen political identifications, niche preferences for food, art, and culture, or a beaming resume of this venture and that. There never existed much choice and thus, no room for much nuance or individuality. They were only allowed one homogeneous face. One of migrants, of travellers—all contingent on this new place, their journey. Everything was thus decided solely around, for, and because of this circumstance. I try hard to convince myself their decisions were intentional, and that they would be here with or without me. But I know, from observing my grandparents, my aunts, and now my newly pregnant cousin, that the Chinese live until their children begin to. I think of the tale 孟母三迁 (Meng Mu San Qian) where the mother moves three times in order to find the appropriate place to raise her son. There never was a question as to where she came from, where she would’ve liked to go, or where she was on her way to prior to this son. She, like my parents, had her freedom sacrificed. This circumstance has left me heavy with the weight of three. I fall asleep nightly to the worries of these offset breaths. How can I even begin to ask who I am? Who, if anyone, do I owe myself to?

A week back home is a boot-camp in empathy and negotiation, as much with my parents as with an internal shadow of myself—one who lives at home, and who cannot freely act in the way that I can because of that fact. She has to empathize and negotiate her language in order to communicate. Though oftentimes, the motivation for her communication is unclear. I think back to my friend, the sleeping giant—I empathised with his discomfort, how his seat must have felt as though it were built for a toddler—and he with me—living with a tempestuous bladder. But our empathy could go only as far as just that, a feeling. Something that strikes a few chords in my heart—though mostly in my mind—and draws me to act, faking ingenue. An inherently selfish state of affairs: my efforts in extending our conversation veiled

this crass and callous girl looking for some comfort in her impending requests to use the lavatory every half-hour. I left the airport knowing all that and much more: a debrief on his fear of parrots, why his first marriage didn’t work, out among others. Whether it was this shadow that was holding in her pee, pressing on about this strange giant’s odd case of ornithophobia, or whether it was a genuine interest, he remains a body I had to negotiate with only because I had been demarcated within his limits.

It might seem aberrant to place my parents, who could have never been strangers, in the same context as this friendly giant. But I wonder: who would we be to each other if there ever was a choice? He was ignorant to this shadow of mine, or maybe he wasn’t. I was ignorant to his double entendre—why share the fact about his odd fear of parrots? Did he feel I was trustworthy enough to know? Was he some narcissist who felt every personal detail necessary to make a point of? Was I being used, while I used him? As he and I had been guessing and gauging, so are my parents with me and I with them.

Or maybe he never had any such double entendre and maybe my parents don’t think of me.

When you don’t know a person, your mind wanders off and wades in ambiguous, often scary waters. My parents and I are encircled in this ring of half suppressed bitterness, half suppressed love, where we collect what we can decipher and prick at each other in hopes that one sees through the other. In the case of my giant friend and me, the state of affairs lasts the duration of the plane ride.

But how can I even begin to issue a forthcoming date of termination to home, to family?

I sleep with my Mama when I’m home—my parents have a king bed and it’s extremely firm. She doesn’t hear me turn, and quieter are my fears, though they leave my dreams largely disquieted. I fear for the day where the gap between us draws so far, nothing will be left of our relationship aside from a gaping black hole of all things lost and indecipherable. For the first three years of college, she used to message me at the end of each semester and inquire on the results of my tests—as in, how well did I fare on the grading scale? I would respond and tell her I got straight A’s but that it didn’t matter so much as we weren’t graded by multiple choice quizzes and things like that—wondering if she forgot she allowed me to go to art school. She might have not known, just trusted I knew what I was talking about. She congratulated me and I said thank you, and next year we repeated this thread.

Sometimes when we sleep, both my arms are wrapped around her and other times, I’ll cry into the pillow. I am and fear I shall invariably remain unsure as to where I feel this sadness from or why I do. I try to decipher it by pinpointing a dominant emotion and situating it within a recent context, but as I’m writing this, I’ve only been home three days. I’ve only seen her for one. Where

APRIL 13, 2018

then, is it from? Why does it come? Maybe even more important, how strong is this sadness? An act precipitated by sadness—how much load can it bear? I ask this in a near fit of panic—fearing that this sadness has seeped into the fabric of our relationship and the life that my parents have built for us gave way to this sadness. One brick in the architecture of it all. And lots of mortar. I hope for my sake that this sadness is strong.

The structure stands firm but my family’s history with this life is short and its details are largely unattended to. We don’t ascribe to many traditions, but one that my Mama has always championed is sharing a meal at the end of the day. She grew up on a farm, where she had five ai-yi’s, six biao-jie’s, three ge-ge’s, and many village neighbors. Familiar faces were abundant and one could never imagine being left alone to attend to one’s meal. For me, it’s always been just the three of us, and the meals were largely quiet, still alone but together. My Baba is 50 years old, speaks enough English for his previous job at a warehouse, and my Chinese, though fluent, is slow. We make do. Sometimes that means beginning many conversations and ending none. On this particular Friday, I had taken portraits of my Mama before dinner. I hadn’t asked my Baba because I was assigned to study a subject, and that subject needed to be one I felt most akin to in life. Mama is head of the house theoretically, but my Baba is head of the house by way of history, culture, pride. She cooks, cleans, and has single-handedly put me through school loan-free. My Baba engages in most of the yardwork and has taken years to turn his anger into self-congratulatory pride. I felt more akin to my Mama because she rose strong where my Baba fared weak and conversations with her carried a more comfortable, easier succession, as each word didn’t need to follow with its prescribed definition. Despite all else, I love my Baba—I feel the blow to his heart; one-third of me is him. Though he has looked largely defeated in recent years, he still retains a good amount of his dry wit and brash humor. He joked around for a moment—about my earlier photoshoot with Mama and how I wouldn’t have had the money to afford him as a model anyway. Or that Mama is extremely dumb for working for free; she should charge! And lots of it! This was another one of those conversations that began and met no end, nor even precipitated any continuation. At 50, he has accepted things as is, but is fearful to expose his failure to be a man. Due to this, he hasn’t made one friend in the past 18 years, and will sometimes text me photos of our cat, and other times he’ll tell me he feels lonely and has just woken up, half-past one in the afternoon. This is the extent of our exchanges, but the guilt never ends.

I’m guilty because I’ve stripped him of himself, but like with sadness, how strong is guilt? Can all of my successes henceforth be the result of it? How viable is it to be motivated by guilt? Who do I ask these questions to?

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

I ended up taking a few pictures with my Baba included. If Walter Benjamin was right about the camera, that it would introduce us to “unconscious optics and thus instigate unconscious impulses,” then I was to see what I would otherwise be unable to. I never once shot a full frame of my Mama’s face. I was less apprehensive when it came to my Baba. I shot him full-faced, in the background, in his pajamas. I, like Sontag once said, nearly positioned the camera as a sublimation of the gun—“to photograph someone is a subliminal murder—a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time”—but who was the camera pointing to? Who is the sad, frightened one? If there exists too much life within me for one, would it still be considered murder? I advance the roll and compliment my Mama’s figure and tease my Baba that if he was serious about modeling, maybe he should shave. I leave fearing what the uncaptured might show, and how soon might it.

I study a medium that some might posit as mechanical. It’s never devoid of a divine responsibility to truth and an ethical representation of it. I sometimes feel like I am actually studying to become a soothsayer. Truthbuilding comes first with a breaking down. As much as home is a practice in empathizing, it is also a practice in gauging. I am always plagued with the task of: “How am I supposed to assess this situation?” It’s similarly mechanical, equally as deductive. What emotions should I show and what might these emotions warrant? Events that happen at home conjure feelings that are definite and discrete yet difficult to contend with—all feelings that would be completely and totally left as forgotten, readover, until I am made to remember them. If there ever were to exist an act of remembering that constituted a hitherto unborn memory, if ever our past can be devised with as much clarity and fervidity as we put towards our future—that would be the event of returning home. It seems I am always a beginner here. Always at a loss—not just for words, but for any trace of who I am when I am not trying to not be me—I read a poem following dinner:

How people respond to them yet know them not, How there is something relentless in their fate at all times …

And how the same inexorable price must still be paid for the same great purchase

have hoped, to read a book or watch a movie that’s far from what they might understand. But I am comforted knowing that even in the face of complete separation from those closest to me, I might be able to conjure up new places where I could feel whole and grounded. Even if those spaces are lonely. Even if they exist on pages, in text, or behind a screen. Comforted, also, thinking my parents might have created these spaces for themselves, too. They might still be.

The thought of loneliness reminds me that my parents chose to remain strangers, continuously bound to beginnings so that I might be subject to a different fate.

I am eternally indebted to them. In the face of so much progress, I forget that one might never be able to drain the strange out of a stranger, the foreign out of the foreigner.

I still stand as one, prouder to be a stranger than the nervous six year-old me had been, but one I still stand.

In the homes of my friends, in the classrooms, on paper and in the psyche of this large American landscape, I am no less foreign. I now must stand strange even in front of parents. I couldn’t bare them this truth though, I couldn’t watch them rebuild a broken heart.

We moved in 2003, when I was six and they were 33. In truth, we were all mute, fearful toddlers, unsure and without a common language. My poems might be read horizontal and theirs vertical, there might never be an adequate translation of an idiom like 好书如挚友 without a dire case of oversimplification: ”Good book, good friend.” But what failed communication and insufficient translation might make way for is some new form of understanding. We are reading words, whether horizontal or vertical. But can a rose be a rose when one is one word and another is three, 玫瑰花(méi guī huā)?

I fear, perhaps, that the real severance will happen when words no longer need spaces in between to be coherent: aroseisaroseisaroseisarose. Until then, my parents and I can at least nestle in what we have in common; vertical or horizontal, English or Chinese, American or not, we are still allowed the emptiness left between the words. We might still find comfort in these blank white spaces, even just to breathe.

WEN ZHUANG RISD ’19 is vying for the lone-seater at any restaurant.

I blanked on the second to last line of this Whitman poem. I wonder often about the “price” and the “purchase”. It’s a poem built on mostly rhetorical questions that end with periods, about 10 lines long. It doesn’t matter, as I am not reciting it to anyone. Whitman is a stranger to my parents. Benjamin, Sontag, all tonal bites, same as Cat, Apple, Candy. I feel a slight tinge of guilt whenever I excuse myself earlier than they would

LITERARY

16

OF A FIELD OF A FIELD

BY Tiff Bushka

23 1. a woman of a woman of a field of a field 2. a cat sitting on top of a plate of food 3. a cat sitting on top of a plate with a computer 4. a cat sitting on a bench on a bed 5. a cat sitting on top of a wooden bench 6. a black and white cat sitting on a wooden bench 7. a cat sitting on top of a wooden table 8. a black and white cat sitting on a wooden bench 9. a cat sitting on a wooden bench in front of a window 24 1. a man on the air on the street 2. a man on the air on the side 3. a white plate with a sink on it 4. a white plate with a toilet on a table 5. a person sitting on top of a desk on a table 6. a fire hydrant sitting on top of a bed 7. a close up of a banana on a wooden table 8. a close up of a yellow fire hydrant in a room 9. a bunch of bananas sitting on a table 26 1. a man standing on the side of the snow 2. a woman sitting on top of a wooden table 3. a group of people sitting on top of a table 4. a person sitting on top of a wooden table 5. a close up of a person holding a cell phone 6. a close up of a person holding a banana 7. a close up of a pair of scissors on a table 8. a close up of a pair of scissors sitting on a table 9. a person holding a pair of scissors on a bed 28 1. a man is on a field with a field 2. a close up of food with a table 3. a close up of a table with a sink 4. a woman sitting on top of a desk with a laptop 5. a white fire hydrant sitting on top of a bed 6. a close up of a person holding a banana 7. a close up of a vase with flowers in it 8. a close up of a vase with flowers on it 9. a bunch of scissors on a table in a room 29 1. a man with a woman with a table with a table 2. a train is sitting on top of a building 3. a large blue truck with a blue and white sign 4. a large blue bus with a blue and white sign 5. a red fire hydrant on a city street 6. a red car is parked in a parking lot 7. a red and white photo of a truck in a parking lot 8. a red and white photo of a truck parked in the street 9. a car parked on the side of a road in the street 37 1. a group of people are sitting on a table 2. a man is sitting in front of a bed with a laptop 3. a couple of people are sitting on top of a bed 4. a man in a black shirt and a tie 5. a man in a black shirt and a black dog 6. a woman is holding a cell phone in his hand 7. a woman is holding a cell phone in a hand 8. a man holding a cell phone in a hand 9. a woman holding a cell phone in front of her face 38 1. a man sitting on a bench in a room 2. a man is holding a skateboard in the water 3. a man is holding a dog in a room 4. a couple of people standing next to each other 5. a black and white photo of a person in a small room 6. a black and white photo of a person in a white lot 7. a close up of a banana on a table 8. a close up of a fire hydrant in a window 9. a bunch of scissors sitting on top of a wall

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LITERARY

APRIL 13, 2018

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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Friday 4.13 Ivy Film Festival official selection block 1 4:30–6PM, Martinos Auditorium (154 Angell Street) It’s that time of year! Come see some cool student films.

Free registration on Eventbrite~ Saturday 4.14 Taking others straight to hell warehouse show 8:30PM, location TBA (check Facebook event) It’s been postponed repeatedly for the last 2 months, so honestly, it might be postponed again! If it actually happens, I’m sure it’ll be fun though. $5 cash or venmo~ Sunday 4.15 The 14th ASM Conference on Candida and Candidiasis 7:30PM plenary session, 8:30–10PM welcome reception It’s the opening day of a conference on an issue near and dear to LW’s heart—the Yeast Infection ;) :p Registration is over $1000 unfortunately; guess this is why they’re so far from eradicating it !!

Monday 4.16 The Leyden Jar Project 5:30–7:30PM, John Hay Library (20 Prospect Street) A poetry reading by Cole Swensen, then a demonstration of an interactive book sculpture by Karen Randall. Wine and cheese reception after that. Free Tuesday 4.17 WWE Smackdown Live 7:45PM, Dunkin’ Donuts Center (1 La Salle Square) LW is still traumatized by every boy in 3rd grade who owned a WWE t-shirt but they know this is their own cross to bear and if this is your thing you should go!

Tickets $20–115~ Wednesday 4.18 Lecture by Matthew Barnes on Viking Ships 6–7PM, Joukowsky Institute (60 George Street) This man restores old boats at Mystic Seaport, where, at the age of nine, LW went to a sailing camp where they rapidly developed a crush on a 12 year old boy who they followed around everywhere then never saw again. If you’re reading this, Casper, I’m a hot 22 year old now, I still love you, and please email me!! Free Thursday 4.19 Brown Bag Series in Archaeology: Katherine Brunson 12–1PM, Joukowsky Institute (60 George Street) Come eat free pizza and listen to a postdoctoral fellow talk about her research in oracle bone divination. Mmmmmmm A S T R O L O G I C A L W E A T H E R If you have fallen into a routine of wallowing in star-induced self-pity, it is time to pick yourself up off the fucking floor! At the end of this weekend, Mercury goes out of retrograde and there is a New Moon in Aries.

(Translation: Old things will combust and you have to run)! This actually isn’t going to be so bad; it’s just going to be a lot of change all at once after a period of moldy stagnation. As long of you don’t try pulling any of your old shit, you’ll be fine, though probably very confused. Maybe if WWE isn’t your thing (I’m not sure if I’m assuming or hoping that it isn’t), you should check that out? I might go in a wrestling suit — I need a new goddamn identity after this month.