The College Hill Independent Vol. 35 Issue 2

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THE

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY SEPT 22 2017

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COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

COVER

THE

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 35 / ISSUE 02 SEPT 22 2017

Isao Sophi Miyoko Gullbrants

NEWS

INDY

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Week in Review Julia Petrini, Eve Zelickson, Jack Brook

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Oh! Canada?

Paula Pacheco Soto

METRO

FROM THE EDITORS When a storm is on its way, I can tell from the dull ache I get in the bones that I broke in my left wrist in the mountains a couple of years ago when no one told me that the altitude fucks you up. I’ve been able to sense the exact percentage of humidity in the air, too, with the help of half-mullet.

The weather app lies but my bones and half-mullet sure don’t. When the short layer of my hair reaches a particular angle in relation to the long layer, I know that water will be dripping from the bottom of my car, forming a puddle that I will have to put my face into to make sure my car is more a cloud than a volcano or something.

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Rhode Island, Clocked Kanika Gupta

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Rebel with a Cause Caroline Sprague

ARTS 11

E-Cards from Neopia Theia Flynn and Annabelle Chace

FEATURES 09

Someone asked me yesterday, “This really seems like a lot of hurricanes, right? More than usual?”

Beyond the Grave Marielle Burt

SCIENCE

My response is, I do not know but I probably won’t stick my face into my next car puddle. Instead, I’ll try to find a different set of four songs to listen to on a loop for the next few weeks and think about the many hundreds of valedictorians who can’t win at powerball.

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Silky Smooth Paige Parsons Em-oceanal Baggage Ted Catlin

OCCULT

— FA

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Technophobia Jessica Jiang

LITERARY

MISSION STATEMENT The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism.

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EPHEMERA 12

Blue Maroons Griffin Smith

Border Jorge Palacios

X

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.

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OMW Jie En Lee

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.

Fall 2017

MANAGING EDITORS Jane Argodale Will Weatherly Robin Manley

ARTS Maya Brauer Ruby Gerber Jack Manoogian

TECH Jonah Max Liam Carpenter Urquhart

NEWS Jack Brook Isabel DeBre Chris Packs

FEATURES Zack Kligler Gabriela Naigeborin Julia Tompkins

OCCULT Sheena Raza Faisal Signe Swanson

WEEK IN REVIEW Eve Zelickson

METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Erin West

METRO Saanya Jain Katrina Northrop

SCIENCE Liz Cory Paige Parsons

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

LITERARY Fadwa Ahmed Isabelle Doyle X Liby Hays EPHEMERA Maya Bjornson

LIST Lisa Borst Fadwa Ahmed STAFF WRITERS Mara Dolan Soraya Ferdman Nora Gosselin Neidin Hernandez Anna Hundert Mariela Pichardo Paula Pacheco Soto Marly Toledano Kion You ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Gabriel Matesanz

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Anzia Anderson Julie Benbassat Alexandra Hanesworth Frans van Hoek Kela Johnson Teri Minogue Pia Mileaf-Patel Isabelle Rea Ivan Rios-Fetchko Claire Schlaikjer Kelly Wang Dorothy Windham COPY EDITOR Miles Taylor

DESIGN EDITOR Eliza Chen DESIGNERS Amos Jackson Sophia Meng Ashley Min WEB MANAGER Alyssa McGillvery BUSINESS MANAGER Maria Gonzalez SOCIAL MEDIA Fadwa Ahmed

SENIOR EDITORS Lisa Borst Kelton Ellis Sophie Kasakove MVP Paige Parsons THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN THE HOME OF THE WHOPPER

BY Julia Petrini, Eve Zelickson, and Jack Brook ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Will Weatherly

Burger Kremlin?

Burger Kings

A Meaty Severance

Step aside, loyalty cards. Cryptocurrencies are set to revolutionize reward programs by enabling trading of one’s accumulated assets online. This is one of the few (basically the only) aspects of global politics in which Russia is at the forefront.

For every rouble spent at a Russian Burger King, customers will now be able to claim one Whoppercoin. One Whopper can be redeemed with 1,700 Whoppercoins. By the rouble-to-dollar-menu conversion rate, this means: buy approximately five Whoppers, get one free. Now, instead of laboriously digging through the Burger King Russia Mobile app for coupons, customers can use the Whoppercoins in their digital wallet for juicy savings.

Burger King Russia has released an initial supply of one billion Whoppercoins on the blockchain platform Waves, redeemable for approximately 400 million calories in Whoppers. Though we encourage you to have it your way, talk to your doctor before embracing the Whoppercoin diet.

In a statement to Waves, Burger King Russia’s head of external communications, Ivan Shestov, said, “Eating Whoppers now is a strategy for financial prosperity tomorrow.” He added, “Now Whopper is not only [a] burger that people in 90 different countries love—it is an investment tool as well. According to the forecasts, cryptocurrency will increase exponentially in value.” Though there is something to be said for portfolio diversification, this appears to be the most unparalleled investment opportunity for your trust fund since the Chicken Fry. On the surface, the currency appears valuable to only Tendercrisp fanatics and money launderers, but the ability to be traded for different cryptocurrencies sets Whoppercoin apart from standard loyalty programs. In the future, other corporations are expected to issue cryptocurrencies in lieu of their current reward programs, creating an online market for brand-specific coins.

McMoney coming to a Golden Arches near you!

The Russian government has been indecisive on the prospect of coin offerings. In 2016, the Finance Ministry proposed jailing Bitcoin users, citing how the anonymity of the cryptocurrency enables illicit activities. Following Putin’s meeting with the founder of Ethereum, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, the ministry announced their plan to regulate cryptocurrencies like securities instead of prohibiting them entirely. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov announced, “The state certainly understands that cryptocurrencies are a reality, there is no point in prohibiting them.” The Independent certainly hopes the Russian state also starts to see the consequences of its overbearing regulation in less charbroiled concerns.

Burger King Russia has existing iOS and Android apps, but they are expected to release Whoppercoinspecific apps in the coming weeks. It is unclear whether new app, like the original, will also be rated Mature 17+ on the Google Play Store.

Last Friday, dusk creeped slowly across the small town of Denville, New Jersey. The warm orange light glistened through the windows of the Burger King off Route 80.

Inside, the workers were winding down, tending to their fryers, re-stocking Purell machines, and taking turns flicking condiment cups onto the spikes of a forgotten cardboard crown. Suddenly, an angel appeared before them. It said, “Don’t be afraid, today a baby boy will be born in this Burger King. He will be the King’s own son and his kingdom will never end.” They were confused by this and wondered what the angel meant.

A few hours later a car screeched into the parking lot. A woman explained that she and her husband had traveled very far to reach the town of Denville and deliver their baby, but the traffic was too dense to reach the hospital. The workers, beside themselves that the angel’s prophecy was coming true, helped the woman deliver her baby in the parking lot with the Denville Fire Department. When the baby boy was born the workers presented him with gifts of Mello Yello, chicken nuggets, and honey mustard, and placed a cardboard crown on his head.

The following evening, as the workers took turns seeing who could mix the best concoction from the Coca Cola Freestyle Machine another angel appeared before them. This angel, more covered in crumbs than the first, exclaimed, “Don’t be afraid, today a baby boy will be born in this Burger King. He will be the King’s own son and his kingdom will never end.” The workers responded, “Look angel, you got the wrong place, we already helped birth the baby king.” The angel looked perplexed, rubbed its belly, snatched a chicken parm sandwich, and dipped.

A few hours later a car screeched into the parking lot. A woman was experiencing severe contractions and had no time to travel to the hospital. The workers rushed out to the parking lot and helped deliver the second child in the backseat of the car. The workers could not believe a second king had been born! They swaddled him in scratchy paper towels and single-ply toilet paper and placed him in a King Jr. meal box.

In their excitement the workers decided to create a new menu item to celebrate the two new kings. Thus came the Whopper Jr. and the continuation of a long, prosperous, and greasy reign.

At first appearance, the Whopper is a thoroughly unappetizing product, as food goes: a quarter pound of beef slapped on some soggy mayonnaise buns, with a bunch of other toppings that loosely constitute edible products, containing 660 calories and approximately 52 grams of fat.

Apparently, however, the Whopper is more than just a murdered cow packaged for consumption. Indeed, it appears that the Whopper, invented in 1957 by James McLamore in Jacksonville, Florida, has become a transcendent force.

Burger King recently announced that customers could now receive a free Whopper if they included that they had been fired from a job in their LinkedIn profile —an edible severance package.

The world was abuzz. Social commentators and political analysts took to the Intra-web to voice their opinions and support. Frank McHale, a self described “Constitutionalist, Patriot, Libertarian, Liber8r, and Social Moderate” with a Reagan background photo, was one of two people who tweeted using the official promotional hashtag (#WhopperSeverance).

One can only imagine Frank’s joy. Here, finally, was the private sector stepping in to help the economy and those in need with tangible benefits. Who needs a welfare state? Only people who shop at the IKEA Marketplace for their meatballs. The Swedes may get unemployment insurance, but in America, when a citizen is down on their luck, they get a Whopper, and Barack Obama (uh, is he still President?) is not even wasting federal government dollars to pay for it.

There were a few vegetarians who objected. Natacha Pizzini, a long time Burger King critic said that “I would rather get fired twice than get a Whopper as severance.”

However, because ‘Burger King critic’ is a profession few people aspire to, it seems like she’ll seldom have to face a kind of job insecurity loaded with iron and B vitamins.

Nevertheless, the Burger King promotion appears to have touched the cholesterol-clogged heart of many a ’Merican. A man named Tony Quinn (whose Twitter bio proclaims, “I have been in affiliate marketing now for almost a year. I haven’t made that much money yet, but who does at first?”) took immediate advantage of the promotion: “I got fired. I want a free whopper,” Quinn tweeted.

At the time of print, it remains unclear whether Tony Quinn’s desire has been satiated.

But if he wants that burger, he ought to to update his bio.

-EZ

-JB

-JP

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

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SPREADING SANCTUARY Queer refugees and the LGBTQ+ asylum process

BY Paula Pacheco Soto ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Tiffany Bushka

content warning: anti-queer and trans violence, torture.

There is no clear sense of when the raids began. Human Rights Watch suggests that the violence started in the last week of February, but for Ali, a Chechen man in his thirties, it is hard to pinpoint his own kidnapping in a larger series of hidden abductions. As Ali told the New Yorker, at some point he was taken from his apartment in the Chechen capital of Grozny to a basement at an unknown location, where he was held captive, interrogated, and tortured until he disclosed his sexual identity. After being held prisoner without food for several days, Ali was released. When, after several weeks, his persecution didn't seem to end, he contacted the LGBT Network (an interregional, non-governmental human rights organization) and found refuge in a safe-house in Moscow.

The persecution of queer men in Chechnya earlier this year ignited outrage in the international community.

Last April, Novaya Gazeta, a prominent Russian newspaper and opponent of the Putin administration, exposed the Russian federation administrative unit’s violent targeting of queer people. The paper confirmed the outspread detainment, torture, and disappearance of over 100 gay men throughout the region. While the Kremlin has increasingly targeted the LGBTQ+ since 2012, this particular wave of violence, carried out by local policy, has been attributed to the policies of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov.

The circumstances in the North Caucasus constitute an unprecedented type of violence even in a state historically unsympathetic to sexual minorities. Chechnya’s close relationship with the Kremlin has provided the local government with vast political autonomy and legal immunity, aiding Kadyrov’s project of “purifying” the Republic in its most morally rigid sense. So far, the Russian federal government has continuously dismissed questions regarding the issue. Yet the Russian LGBT Network has established that LGBTQ+ individuals are being targeted both through “on-the-spot persecution by police officers, resulting in blackmail” and “so-called ‘honour killings’ by relatives.”

The perpetrators seemed to have no limits: “We were forced to lie on the floor with our bottoms up, and each person in the cell would hit us with a pipe three times ... there were already 18 LGBT people being detained and tortured...we were not allowed to wash. Some detainees developed open-cut wounds, and the cell smelled like rotten meat.” According to an extensive report produced by the Russian LGBT Network, as part of the purge, police forces have used severe beatings, torture by electric current, lack of water, malnutrition, and lack of sleep as ways to degrade detainees. Victims were forcibly imprisoned for up to a month, often held despite critical physical and mental conditions.

The international spotlight has focused on stories of queer men who have managed to escape Chechnya,

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NEWS

while overlooking the victimization of queer women in the North Caucasus. Due to the preexisting normalization of violence against women by both Chechen communities and governmental institutions, the persecution faced by these women has been largely ignored in the media.

While this violence is perpetrated mainly by male family members, the Chechen government is complicit in queer women’s subjection to beatings, rape, forced hospitalization, and execution. By neglecting to cover violence against queer women the media has also failed to hold the Chechen government responsible.

The European Union, United States, and Canada have demanded the Russian government condemn the targeting of LGBTQ+ people within its jurisdiction, and work to protect them under international law. In the US, a bipartisan resolution introduced by representative Eliot Engel called on President Putin to “respect and promote the dignity of all persons and provide a safe haven for all those fleeing such horrific persecution.” Canada—in cooperation with Rainbow Railroad, a national LGBTQ+ non-profit organization—revealed a program to facilitate the immigration of asylum-seeking Chechen men. So far, the refugee process has provided sanctuary for 22 queer men. Western media outlets and human rights activists have praised the program, considering it an example of Canada’s commitment to human and LGBTQ+ rights. In the words of Tanya Lokshina, the Russia Program Director for Human Rights Watch, the program is “certainly exceptional. Canada clearly has done the right thing here.”

As reported by the The Globe and Mail, this initiative has allowed the Canadian government to circumvent conventions of international asylum law. Because of this, the Canadian initiative does not directly address the systemic failings of international norms related to LGBTQ+ persecution. To solely focus on the benefits this program provides for Chechen men is to ignore the institutionalized failure of the international system to protect sexual minorities living under homophobic regimes.

Russia is not the only country complicit in persecution of queer people globally. At the moment, 78 countries criminalize homosexuality or ‘gender variant behaviour’ through various forms of legislation. Thirteen countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, and Mauritania, punish homosexual acts with the death penalty. Of course, statistics on legal persecution do not encompass the violence that is often perpetrated by families, institutions, and communities. The extent of the violence in Chechnya, which has shocked the international community, is already a reality in many other parts of the world.

The danger faced by gender and sexual minorities worldwide is exacerbated by the process of refugee and asylum protection itself. The UN definition of a refugee (as established by the 1951 Convention) does not explicitly refer to persecution on the basis of sexual orientation as a grounds for obtaining refugee status. In the refugee

status attribution process, the burden of proof falls on the applicant. While the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) establishes that “sexual orientation and/or gender identity are fundamental aspects of human identity that are either innate or immutable” proving one’s sexual orientation or gender identity can be a painful and sometimes impossible process, especially given the very fluidity of such categories.

“Refugees are invited to present themselves in ways that are easily understandable to their adjudicators in order to increase the likelihood of succeeding with their claims,” Johannes Lukas Gartner, Program Director of Humanity in Action Germany, said as part of the 2014 Humanity in Action Diplomacy and Diversity Fellowship. The asylum process requires applicants to adhere to Western conceptions of “being out,” meaning that belated disclosure or nondisclosure of sexual identity delegitimizes an individual’s claim of persecution. At the same time this very secrecy is often required to ensure their survival in their home countries. This dichotomy is manifested in Canada’s refugee and asylum policies. The success rate for sexual orientation and gender identity claims is considerably lower than for other categories like political refugees or persecuted religious minorities.

Furthermore, officials often rely on stereotypical conceptions of sexual minorities in order to determine the validity of individuals’ claims. To ensure sanctuary, queer individuals must provide concrete proof of their same-sex desires through texts or photographs—proof they would not normally possess, on account of a lifestyle of secrecy in their home countries. In theory, the applicant’s “testimony can be sufficient to sustain the burden of proof if the testimony is credible,” according to Immigration Equality, but the standard of credibility in terms of sexual identity claims seems to differ radically case to case.

The failures of international law in this respect are plentiful. This year in Sweden, a 28 year-old Kenyan woman faced deportation after failing to prove she was a lesbian. Being posed with questions like, “When do you feel that you became sexually interested in other people?

How do you think about this?” Lucy Murugi’s answers failed to satisfy the expectations of immigration officials.

According to BBC News, she was denied asylum even though she has been outed as a lesbian in in a list—bearing the headline “Exposed”—published by one of Uganda’s most prominent newspapers. Even when applicants manage to prove their identity to immigration officials— emigrating from countries where same-sex relationships are strongly criminalized—it is not always sufficient for refugee status. In cases such as a Cameroonian lesbian woman in Canada and an Afghani gay man in the UK, it has been concluded that as long as the applicant remains “discreet,” the risk is not sufficient for their claim to be accepted.

In this case, the conception of Western “receiver” states often proves to be no more than a self-flattering

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017

ideal. More generally, the failure of the international community to validate sexual orientation as a relevant identity for refugee status claims allows immigration authorities to advance arbitrary requirements for asylum.

The violence that queer asylum-seekers aim to escape is exacerbated by the international community, whose stringent and outdated immigration policies ignore the severe risks queer refugees experience. Although the Canadian government is clearly making a crucial difference in the lives of some queer Chechen men, the country’s lack of long-term commitment regarding LGBTQ+ asylum claims reveals the hypocrisy of Canada’s moral indifference and exceptionalism—a hypocrisy representative of more general Western attitudes about asylum.

Considered alongside the hundreds of cameras—indeed, the presence of Prime Minister Trudeau himself—that greeted the Syrian refugees at the airport in 2015, the asylum program for Chechen gay men begins to feel more like a public relations strategy than a commitment to the protection of human dignity.

Canada’s policy of aiding gay Chechen men facing persecution may not warrant a broad condemnation, but this effort must become part of a greater push to center the violence that LGBTQ+ people encounter as a valid basis for asylum and refugee status. As the possibility of a long-term compromise to increase sexual identity-related asylum seems rather unlikely, it is also necessary to scrutinize why the Chechen case is particularly relevant for the Canadian government. The exceptionalism of this case, in comparison to the regular response of countries to sexual identity related asylum claims, speaks to how refugees and asylum seekers have become objects of a larger matrix of political interests and maneuvers.

To portray the Chechen case as the sole call to action in the context of defending LGBTQ+ rights worldwide feeds into the hypervisibility of Russia in Western representations of international politics, while erasing the injustices suffered by others whose experiences aren’t as appealing to Western media and governments. Our obligation to protect the rights of Chechen gay men that are being targeted should reflect a commitment to recognize and respond to the upheaval of LGBTQ+ rights internationally. This requires dismantling the arbitrary, traumatizing, and endangering obstacles that LGBTQ+ individuals currently encounter as they flee for their lives.

PAULA PACHECO SOTO B’20 wants you to support queer human rights by donating to the Russian LGBT network at help.lgbtnet.org/en.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

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KEEPING TIME

Changes at the RI Historical Society

BY Kanika Gupta ILLUSTRATION BY Eve O’Shea DESIGN BY Will Weatherly

Phoebe Bean walked past the library on 121 Hope Street in Providence every day while attending Brown University, yet never had any idea what was inside. Now, 25 years later, she is the head librarian there at the Mary Elizabeth Robinson Research Center, and maintaining over 500,000 manuscripts, books, photographs, and historical archives.

The Rhode Island Historical Society (RIHS), which owns the library, was founded in 1822, making it the fourth oldest historical society in the country. Its mission, since its founding in 1822, has been to “publish and diffuse information” about Rhode Island and to “promote the study of history by lectures and other means.”

Lots of residents, however, still don’t know what RIHS is, where it is, or how it works. As the Society swiftly approaches its 200th anniversary, they have vowed to take their mission one step further: increase access to the history of Rhode Island by expanding the scope of communities reflected by and regularly visiting the archive. +++ Bean sits in her rolling desk chair, glasses falling low on her nose. She’s working on her latest project: restructuring the library’s 195 year-old catalog, which encompasses over 400 years of history. It’s certainly not a small feat, but a necessary one, she claims.

The Society’s collections are growing exponentially, she says, gesturing at the stacks of new material on the office desk in front of her. The Society receives contributions daily. In some cases, the library cultivates decadeslong relationships with donors before they give up a relic, while others come to the library from second-generation Rhode Islanders looking to clean out their attics after relatives pass on. Due to an uptick in the latter, there has been a recent influx of World War II antiques that will soon be on display.

However, the curatorial choices of the past three centuries, as well as most artifacts accumulated and donated, generally catered to a Catholic, upper-middle class audience, and in turn largely depicts the history of the wealthy, white, male population of Rhode Island.

Relics pointing to the lives of indigenous people, women, people practicing other religions, people belonging to a variety of socioeconomic groups, and people from different cultures in the state were underrepresented in the collections.

The curatorial interests of the RIHS’s library in the past decade have been shifting to the history of women in Rhode Island, Rhode Island’s South Asian community— who mostly immigrated to the state in the 20th century— and its African American communities, just a few of the groups which have been previously left out of the RIHS’s narratives about the state’s legacy.

Although the RIHS as an institution is certainly making strides towards representing a fuller and more inclusive history of Rhode Island, it still does not present a complete picture. What the organization chooses to accept and preserve determines in some part how Rhode

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METRO

Island’s history will be remembered, especially by those who rely upon state institutions for research. However, there is a lot of generational memory—memory within communities that has been preserved through other means—not necessarily preserved in archival work.

The RIHS and other state-level historical societies are not the only organizations keeping track of these histories. Projects like the RI Rhythm and Blues Preservation Society; Nuestras Raices, a RI Latinx History project and blog; the Tomaquag Museum in Exeter, RI, which teaches indigenous history, culture, and arts; and the Hmong Studies Journal—among many other Rhode Island based social movements and oral history workshops—represent longstanding efforts by such communities to bring their individual histories in the state to light. +++ Alongside considerations of expanding to include a more diverse set of communities’ representations of history, the RIHS also faces a challenge to close the gap of students’ access to the subject of history itself. This is particularly urgent in the context of recent cuts to federal funding for professional development opportunities for history teachers, as well as hiring and salary freezes for teachers that followed from the post-recession budget crises. And unlike literacy or math, social studies—including subjects such as history, geography, economics, and civics and government—is not tested at the state level, so teachers have less institutional incentive to devote adequate time to the subject.

Charmyne Goodfellow, Director of Finance at RIHS since 2001, says the finances of the Society in the last 15 years show this decline in the value of history as well.

The Society has several sources of income, mainly state funding, grant funds from the RI Foundation, money raised in various educational events and exhibits, and the Annual Fund, supplied by donations. They primarily use the Annual Fund to help students and teachers across Rhode Island who have fewer than 30 minutes a week dedicated to history, geography, and social studies.

The Society has been given numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), ever since both organizations’ creation by President Johnson in 1965. When asked about the recent threats of cuts to the NEA and NEH in the Trump administration’s proposals for an annual budget, Goodfellow said it would most likely have an impact over the long term rather than creating immediate effects, as they receive grants every five to 10 years. Goodfellow also mentioned that their membership rates are dropping, leading to fewer annual donations overall. Diversifying their funding base— whether it be by expanding demographics they draw on for their member base, or shifting who the RIHS appeals to for grant funding—might be one additional consideration among many in their efforts to expand thinking about who might be interested in their society.

But Bean remains hopeful. Through the Newell D.

Goff Center for Education and Public Programs, the Society has begun to cater their events to a much wider scope of people through more family-oriented programs.

There are now school walking tours in which guides take school groups through the streets of Providence to recount personal and collective narratives about the city in an interactive way, as well as to demonstrate the ways in which Providence has changed in the last 400 years.

It has also grown its All-Ability Inclusive Program at the Museum of Work and Culture in Woonsocket to include the John Brown House in Providence, and has implemented programming for those with visual and hearing impairment. In addition, they have worked toward better socio-economic accessibility through free access to the library for Rhode Island residents and students, as well as an online database available internationally that features digital surrogates of material not on display. The online catalog and complementary online search tools have allowed access for patrons to research the library’s holdings before they visit, so when they come to view original material, they can use their time more efficiently.

The Society, in collaboration with Providence College, has created EnCompass, a digital textbook for seventh to 12th grade students in public, private, charter, and homeschool classrooms with images of primary sources and artifacts. It covers topics within Rhode Island’s history, including the state’s legacy of immigration, industrialization, and women’s suffrage. The project marks progress in the RIHS’s mission to ensure future generations’ interest in history—in part, by focusing on the progress of the state itself. +++ Among the 12 founders of the RIHS in 1822, two were governors, two were chief justices of the Rhode Island Supreme Court, another was a United States senator, one was a chancellor, and four were trustees of Brown University. Prior to 1822, the need for the Society had been apparent; Rhode Island lawyers and politicians of the late 18th century like Theodore Foster, Stephen Hopkins, and Moses Brown—all white men—had been safekeeping old manuscripts in their own private collections. By handing over their manuscripts to the Society shortly after its birth, they laid the foundation for the present RIHS’s vast collection of colonial manuscripts.

Today, the Society’s board has a group of 17 men and women who come from increasingly different backgrounds: a retired heart surgeon, lawyers, accountants, jewelry business owners, and members of academia who work at URI and Brown University. While the RIHS still has not expanded its board beyond the upper to upper-middle class, less than half the board has previously worked with history in a professional or academic capacity, bonded moreso by their shared value of preserving the evidence of history.

Elizabeth Francis, executive director of the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, wrote about the value of history to Rhode Island in the Providence Journal, referencing the aim of religious freedom of its founder Roger Williams: “What no other states can claim is over 350 years of an authentic, rebellious and disruptive spirit that is embedded in our architecture and civic structures and represented in our independent thinkers, innovators, makers and civic leaders. It’s our history, our most renewable resource—after all, we make more every day.”

KANIKA GUPTA B’20 is creating RI history.

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017

SILK ON THE BRAIN

BY Paige Parsons ILLUSTRATION BY Ivan Rios-Fetchko DESIGN BY Robin Manley

On biotechnology, poetry, and worms

The domesticated silkworm, bombyx mori, has become more human than its wild counterparts: its silken cocoon inflated to be more lucrative for the textile industry, its fibers engineered for strength, and its feeding reliant on people continually delivering chopped mulberry leaves.

This coevolution with humans has unfolded over five millennia. Yet perhaps the most intimate moment in all human-silkworm relations is the present.

In the past decade, the biotechnology industry has sought its own gains from the silkworm. With the developments of silk skin grafts, corneal implants, replacement bones, and nanosensors, biomedical interventions are integrating silk into the human body. The interface between human and silkworm has always been tangible: small interactions of human hands feeding silkworms mulberry leaves, the point of contact between silk threads and human skin. Silk filaments form protective casing for the silkworm pupae in the stillness of its final molting, but for humans, silk becomes garments; utility differs, but for both organisms the material comes to envelope the body—allowing possibilities of transformation.

Touch alone withholds the narrative or temporal aspects of the material. However, beneath the smoothness of the silken textile is the rougher subtext of its production. It takes approximately 2,000 silkworms to produce an average, industrially produced silk dress. For the wearer, the material appears exclusively as surface.

The stitches of seams make human labor visible where it is forgotten, but the winding, reeling, and weaving of filament is imperceptible.

Now, as bioengineers create transparent films from liquefied silk, that surface further obscures the fibers woven by silkworms. At the Tufts University Silk Lab, bioengineer Fiorenzo Omenetto is leading a team of researchers creating optical biosensors that can be implanted on the surface of the brain to monitor various health conditions. Silk allows doctors to monitor bacterial infections, cancer, and other conditions. The material is remarkably biocompatible and accepted by the body in sensitive places. It is even capable of biodegrading within the body without causing harm.

Just as silk textile manufacturers have always done, the first step is to boil the cocoon, undoing the binding glycoprotein, sericin (though in the lab, the worm is cut out of the cocoon instead of boiled alive). Rather than reeling the fibers into thread, the bioengineers purify the silk further with a lithium bromide solution. The clear liquid is then sucked into a syringe and, depending on what biological properties the sensor needs to pick up, is deployed into a variety of protein combinations.

This process is relatively fast, simple, and inexpensive compared to the production of other materials used for medical implants.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The sensors communicate information optically through a soft-lithography process called nano-imprinting. The silk protein can be combined with another protein or enzyme in order to target a specific molecule— oxygen, for example—which can then be measured using an electron beam. The oxygen will interact with the nanoimprint in such a way that the sensor transmits information through the photodetection process. The nanoimprint can take on any shape. At first, the lab used the Tufts logo. Then a poet named Jen Bervin intervened in the process. Typically working at the intersection of text and textile, Bervin saw the use of the university symbol as a grave “content gap.” She claimed the logo left out the importance of the relationship between patient and the device entering their head. In her poetry, Bervin endeavors to close the gap, synthesizing the words to the silk’s 5,000 year history: “The poem addresses the patient from the point of view of the silkworm, and, suddenly, the animal from which this material derives becomes important again.”

With the imprint of the poem, the sensor itself enfolds deep historical time, beginning with the first silkworm cultivation in the Zheijiang Province of China as early as 5000 B.C. The beginnings of the relationship can be traced in myth to a chance encounter between an empress and a cocoon. Bervin’s silkworm narrates: “UNDER A MULBERRY TREE IN A TEACUP RESTING LIGHTLY IN THE HAND OF THE EMPRESS XILINGSHI A BRINE UNFURLS.” Silk expanded from a regional good to a global commodity, weaving together networks of places and people with diplomacy, goods, and ideas. Literary scholar Tamara Chin argues that the concept of the Silk Road, with its place in our historical narrative of globalization, makes human agency in planetary processes visible. She argues that mapping this network has always been an exercise in “humanity’s collective self-awareness of ‘forming one body with the planet itself’” rather than maximized commodity flow.

This gargantuan scaling-up elucidates the full view of the silkworm-human relationship. As Bervin tells it, a matrix-like formation surfaces across scales: the Silk Road trade routes wove East and West, the weft threads wind left to right as they interlace with the vertical warp threads, and the silkworm spins its cocoon by travelling back and forth in a figure-eight. This pattern continues to the molecular level, as one of the silk DNA structures, the beta sheet, forms a lattice-structure. Silk as connective tissue takes material and poetic form.

Bervin plays with this further by composing poetic lattices known as boustrophedons, an ancient Greek form that consists of a series of reversals, where each line

is read in the opposite direction. On the sensor itself, the poem will be imprinted in the pattern a silkworm winds its filament, which stands anachronistically in the face of the liquefied silk of the sensor’s base. The actual imprint will be too small for human eyes to read, yet its presence on the sensor allows poetry into an internal place.

Despite the expansive role bombyx mori inhabits in the human world as a species, the vitality of the animal is treated as disposable. The pupae undergoes five stages of molting, after which the cocoon is taken before the metamorphosed adult moth can emerge. Emergence permitted, the silkworm moth goes on to live another three weeks, in which it may lay hundreds of eggs; as Bervin writes, “THEY SAY I HAVE A SHORT LIFE BUT I HAVE AN EVEN SHORTER DEATH I HAVE SO MANY IT PAINS ME IMAGINE THIS FOR 5000 YEARS DEATH COMES OR IT COMES THREE WEEKS LATER ITS THE COMING BACK THATS HARD.” Attempts to produce silk without death open up new problems. The production of ahimsa, or “peace silk,” confronts the unruliness of reproduction, as moths can lay hundreds of eggs. When the number of hatchlings vastly exceeds the feeding capacities of the cultivators, hundreds of larvae are starved. Ironically, while the lifecycle of bombyx mori is incompatible with silk cultivation, its product is completely biocompatible with the human body.

The relationship between humans and silkworms is messy and interwoven; to untangle it in order to excavate the dynamics that leave one species with fatality and the other with profit would be too vast an undertaking.

Given our position, we can only grasp at the human scales and try to imagine the silkworm’s. The suffering of mass death is apparent, yet the broader experience of the organism remains opaque. Through imagination, we may try to enter their perceptual world, as Bervin does, and try to trace the relationship between species. While we can point to an incipient moment in mythological time or the archaeological record, the human desire to construct a narrative out of a chaotic world is difficult to satiate within the expansive space between species.

From Bervin’s silkworm: “THAT IS HOW PEOPLE LIKE TO TELL IT. YOU KNOW THE NIGERIAN PROVERB UNTIL THE LIONS HAVE THEIR OWN HISTORIANS HISTORY WILL ALWAYS BE TOLD BY THE HUNTERS IF YOU DON’T KNOW IT, WHY NOT.” And so the human and silkworm tangle has to continue on, not fully told.

PAIGE PARSONS B’18 prefers to wear her silk live.

SCIENCE

06

NO APOLOGIES Following Representative Moira Walsh's path to the Capitol

BY Caroline Sprague ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY Ashley Min

The Rhode Island General Assembly’s youngest Representative—26 year-old Moira Jayne Walsh— thinks her colleagues have it all wrong when they avoid canvassing unlikely voters during their campaigns. “I wasted my time,” she mimics in their imaginary voice before snapping into her own: “No. Talking to another human being is never a waste of your time.” There may be a caveat to that, however. “I don’t like dating,” she says. “I’m busy lighting the fires of revolution. I don’t have time to go to the movies.”

It’s a Sunday in May at the end of a week off from legislative duties, so Walsh is catching up. As much as she can, of course, given the frequent interruptions from her three year-old son Malcolm. She is seated in a pile of blankets and pillows on her bedroom floor, and a large stack of paperwork is her focus—mostly collections of data from lobbyists or written testimonies from hearings.

“Most of my colleagues just throw all of this stuff away,” she says. But Walsh reads it all.

Elected in November 2016 to represent the third district in the Rhode Island General Assembly, Walsh is perhaps best described as incendiary, a media darling with a few controversies already under her belt: since her election, she has lost a job, garnered publicity for her comments critical of drinking at the statehouse, and, in her own words, “[made] a lot of enemies.”

Her shift from working as a waitress at the Classic Café in Providence to the Capitol has been a significant transition. “I have a tendency to not want to like politicians,” she said, “I know I am one, but I still don’t identify.” Unlike most of her colleagues, Walsh is a single mother, has no college degree, and lives entirely off her part-time legislator’s salary of about $15,000 a year.

“Even the most progressive of my colleagues are still of a certain class,” she says. Walsh stands out. In some ways, quite literally: at the close of one April session, all the representatives rose, and Walsh’s red sneakers with white laces looked small and flat in the sea of beige and black high heels.

“I am here to serve you, my neighbors,” her website reads. Walsh speaks about her “neighbors” a lot. As Walsh grew up in the predominantly low-income Smith Hill neighborhood in Providence, she has gained a unique awareness of and intimacy to the issues represented by local legislation aimed to assist working-class residents.

Next year, she says, she wants to focus on the opioid crisis, and calls her own experience a qualification. “I, as somebody who has a relative who’s addicted to opioids, know that they’re just going about it the wrong way,” she says.

She wants to regulate opioid narcotics without criminalizing them, part of a larger effort to convince politicians to allocate resources to people unjustly perceived as less worthy. “I just want to make it a little less expensive to be poor.” +++

In 2015, Representative J. Aaron Regunberg sponsored legislation to raise the minimum untipped wage from its rate of $2.89 to $3.89. Walsh, who still speaks openly about the difficulties of working as a waitress, was brought to the cause by a co-worker trying to get her involved in the activist scene. The co-worker brought

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her to an industry night at a local bar, where Walsh was overwhelmed by support from fellow restaurant workers from the Restaurant Opportunity Center. They encouraged the 23 year-old single mother to fight for her rights, and soon Walsh joined their ranks. At their lobbying event for the bill at the State House, Walsh connected with Representative Regunberg, who encouraged her to testify.

She advocated for the higher wage on the Senate floor, returned weekly to testify, and became increasingly aware of the repetition, redundancy, and lack of responsiveness in the process. She grew tired. Her tipping point, she says, was a dismissive question from a legislator: Why don’t you just get another job, if you’re so unhappy with this one? She describes the way her eyes welled up with tears, and her question in response: where do I go from here? Met with indifference from both her boss and the politicians supposed to represent her, Walsh found her own response: “Okay. Well then I’m gonna come up here, and I’m gonna do it.”

In November 2016, Walsh took her no-nonsense attitude to the campaign trail. On election night, she and other progressive candidates in Rhode Island waited together for the results. She sat by the outlet in the wall with a dead phone, which she refused to look at even after it recharged. Her campaign manager, Laufton Ascencao-Longo, approached her and brought her away from the crowd to speak in private. Walsh was ready for the worst, but Ascencao-Longo told her she had already won, defeating incumbent Thomas Palangio by a 3.6 percent margin. +++ Walsh's father ran a furniture and appliance resale business called “The Earthen Vessel.” Her love of community comes through particularly when she speaks about him: “If people speak as nicely about me as they do about my father at the end of my career, I will consider myself a great success,” she says.

As a student at Rhode Island College, she studied Spanish, Arabic, and International Studies. She then transferred to the Community College of Rhode Island and changed her major to English. Around a year later, she was pregnant with Malcolm. She left school and never went back, and is hesitant to say she ever will, remarking that being a legislator is “hands-on” education. +++ Walsh’s outspoken demeanor has played a role in local controversies. In April, she made a comment on Matt Allen’s WPRO radio talk show about an excessive amount of alcohol consumption at the Rhode Island State House, saying that her fellow legislators had “file cabinets full of booze.” The comment—which she later said was an exaggeration—left fellow legislators angered and scandalized, and garnered significant media attention. Walsh remains unfazed, and despite public remonstration, is unapologetic in person. “I searched in my purse for fucks to give,” she says. “I don’t want to talk about budgets hammered. I can barely talk about a budget sober,” she says with a laugh. She wants her colleagues to know that

their drinking is “on the taxpayer’s dime [and] on the taxpayer’s time.” +++ Larry Berman, Communications Director for the House, called the incident “unfortunate.” Drinking at the State House, he explained in a phone conversation with the Independent, is done symbolically, or after session to “unwind.” He calls it “part of the political culture.”

Walsh also pointed out the informal and unofficial meetings that happen in bars and restaurants, which have a perhaps disconcerting hand in shaping political decisions.

“Is there some of that going on? Yes,” said Berman. But he doesn’t think that differs from any other professions.

As for Walsh, Berman said “she’s doing a good job.”

“She’s certainly passionate about what she believes in,” he said. A pause. “We certainly like it when they’re passionate.”

The Rhode Island General Assembly is, however, perhaps not as passionate as Walsh would like. “It’s very unusual up there to find people who genuinely want to make things better,” she says. Some of her colleagues are also progressives, such as 73-year-old Edith Ajello, who Walsh says “is just a fucking hero.” But Walsh’s peers are still subject to criticism, such as Representative Aaron Regunberg, whose virtues she does not extol quite as fervently. “I love that man, but he’s like—he’s exactly what’s wrong with the Democratic Party. He knows how to solve racism, and he’ll solve it for you.”

Walsh explained her assessment of Regunberg through a critique of Resist Hate Rhode Island, the Providence activist group co-founded by Regunberg pledged to opposing the policy agenda of the Trump administration. “Have you ever been to a Resist Hate meeting?...there are no Black people there. Period. End of sentence. None…you’re gonna solve racism with no Black

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017

people present, that’s your plan?” asks Walsh. “Good luck with that.” The Independent could not corroborate whether there were no Black attendees to the event— nor that there were not Black organizers present across the organization’s many activist events—but Walsh is not alone in noticing that some Rhode Island activist groups are disproportionately white, which is especially striking in a community that has long been driven by the work and concerns of organizers of color. In an article in Rhode Island Monthly, Ellen Liberman wrote about Rhode Island activism in the wake of Trump’s election, especially in regards to first-time activists, who she identified as not “fully mesh[ing] with longstanding advocacy groups for people of color."

Walsh is strikingly aware of the gap between some legislators and their policies. “A lot of times good people make really bad bills,” she says.

Until this year, elderly and disabled individuals could ride the RIPTA bus system free of charge. A budget adjustment for this fiscal year increased the rate, charging them 50 cents for a ride. Walsh asserted that this was simply untenable, as the rise in transportation costs created the possibility of those elderly people without financial security going as far as foregoing food to be able to pay for transportation to doctor’s appointments. After her explanation that the policy would have real, immediate, negative effects, a colleague laughed: “There’s no need to be dramatic.” Since that conversation, budgetary policy has been passed to restore the free fare. This will take effect in January 2018. +++ Both in and out of the State House, Walsh’s objectives extend to the concerns of incarcerated people. A recently raised $300,000 will be going into a budget to develop

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

programs for preventing recidivism rates for previously incarcerated people, and on the house floor, a collection of bills in the “Justice Reinvestment Package” have been passed to help reform probation and criminal record laws that may keep people incarcerated for overextended terms.

Walsh is also spearheading a community gardening initiative. As a former Catholic, she is surprised to find herself working with Father Jakob Thibault, of the Chapel of the Holy Spirit on Douglas Avenue. With his help, Walsh and other organizers hope to turn a property close to both the church and a middle school into a greenhouse to combat the area’s food desert. The process is still in the fundraising stages.

Walsh’s future legislative projects are rooted in reaching across the proverbial aisle. She thinks it is important to pursue financial responsibility and more rights for minority voters in the House. Republicans agree. She is seeking collaboration, recognizing that her legislative power is greater that way. In the case of the free bus passes, several versions of the same legislation were proposed, and while Walsh’s bill was one of them, it was not the one chosen.

This is a pattern, she notes: a reproductive justice bill was recently passed from a different representative, with language directly lifted from Walsh’s own proposed bill.

“I could care less about credit, I just want to make sure it gets done,” she says.

In June, Walsh came full circle and sponsored a piece of legislation that proposed further increases on the minimum wage for tipped workers. It was held for further study. “Held for further study in the trashcan. You know.

The held-for-further-study trashcan,” she says. She

thinks this is a clear stance that House leadership is taking: “As you know, they don’t particularly like me up there, because I don’t shut up.” She’s happy, however, to play the antagonist, so long as her legislation is going through one way or another. “What they don’t understand is that it delights me.” She is no longer the waitress desperate to have her voice heard by an indifferent government. She is an equal, a colleague, and an unapologetic voice reminding the House to represent the people.

“I make them fucking crazy.”

CAROLINE SPRAGUE B’20 is looking for a cause of her own.

METRO

08

THE NAKED DEAD How the Haitian zombie was stripped of its meaning

BY Marielle Burt ILLUSTRATION BY Isabelle Rea DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

content warning: slavery, racial violence, sexual violence “Your grandmother has always operated by her own logic.” This is how my father describes his mother-inlaw’s belief in phenomena called ‘mystical’ in some circles and ‘bullshit’ in others. Angels, aliens, premonitions, possession, ghosts, God, and zombies—all of these are real to my grandmother, an immigrant from Haiti, now an almost 50-year resident of South Dakota.

One evening, when I was old enough to join the adult table for dinner yet young enough that sitting still for the hour-long meal was a challenge, my grandmother told me about the ghost that lurked in her childhood home.

She recounted the tale of this specter’s unfulfilled life that kept him from departing the island. Later that night, I asked my father what he thought of the story. With both eyebrows and one corner of his mouth lifted upwards, his third glass of wine in hand, he launched into a sardonic monologue: “Have you ever heard a story about anyone spotting a naked ghost? Think about it: there is no way a ghost could keep clothes on its body! Until somebody can explain to me why no one has ever seen a naked ghost, I’ll remain a skeptic. Show me some ghost butt cheeks, and then we’ll talk.”

Amused and convinced by my father’s playful rant and the thought of a translucent ghost tush, I began to take my grandmother’s stories with several grains of salt. +++ After traveling to Haiti to study voodoo rituals and Haitian spiritualism, esteemed African American novelist Zora Neale Hurston published Tell My Horse, an ethnographic account of the spiritual ceremonies she witnessed and the legends of supernatural events locals told her. Hurston relays the story of a young girl named Marie M., buried in 1909, who was spotted five years later loitering outside her home. Marie’s town became obsessed with this bizarre story and demanded an inspection of her coffin.

As the story goes, the skeleton found inside was much too large for a little girl’s, its limbs contorted awkwardly against the sides of the box. In an even more confounding twist, the clothes Marie had been buried in were neatly folded and placed beside this mysteriously over-grown skeleton. Reports of the initial sighting of Marie did not clarify whether she had any clothes on. However, similar stories of deceased Haitians who were spotted years after their pronounced deaths do specify that the supposedly-deceased rovers were completely naked, butt cheeks included. +++ In elementary school I was tasked with giving a presentation on Christopher Columbus. As I began relaying this to my grandmother on the phone, she cut me off. “But Marielle, you know Columbus raped your ancestors?”

Young enough to feel scandalized by her use of the word “rape,” I said “Okay, Grandma,” and quickly wrapped

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up the phone call. Was this another item for my strangeGrandma-story cache? I really wasn’t sure anymore. +++ On a hiking trip my father and I took in southern Virginia, he lectured me on the philosophical tradition of rationalism, a way of understanding the world through mathematical logic and deductive reasoning. The value of intellectual study over sensory experiences, he explained, set the groundwork for fundamental concepts of modern philosophy. I’m sure he went into great details about the specific influences of this philosophy, but at the time my focus was primarily on keeping my balance as I navigated the rocky path. +++ Christopher Columbus’s first landing in the “New World” was in modern-day Haiti. The site where he and his crew established their first settlement, La Navidad, was on the property my grandmother now owns (or at least very near it—the maps Columbus’s crew made of the island are imperfect). My grandmother has been attempting to sell this property the past few years. When I asked if she advertised the historical significance of the land to buyers she responded curtly, “This is not a history Haitians are proud of.”

Columbus claimed the island of Haiti for Spain, calling it “Hispaniola,” and thus marked the beginning of a long pattern of colonial violence on the island. The Spanish enslaved the first peoples, brutally working nearly the entire population to death in several decades.

To maintain an economy dependent on coerced labor, the Spanish turned to chattel slavery.

When the French took possession of the island in 1625, they renamed it Saint-Domingue and expanded the plantation economy, further crowding the island with ghosts. The colony became the site of some of the most devastating slave conditions in the Western hemisphere: over one million Africans died brutal deaths in the one hundred years of French colonial rule, while thousands more committed suicide, choosing self-inflicted death over an imposed state of living death. Chattel-slavery was, in the eyes of European colonists, a ‘rational’ system of economic transactions. Slaves were treated as possessions, their names and identities replaced by numbers branded onto their bodies. Slaves’ bodies did not belong to them, but to the plantation owners who determined how, when, and where they would work, eat, sleep, live, and die. +++ Narratives about sub-human threats to human existence are among Hollywood’s most lucrative devices. When critics are asked to point to the origin of the zombie craze in America pop-culture, many cite Victor Halperin’s 1932 film White Zombie, the first feature-length zombie movie.

White Zombie follows a voodoo priest who aims to possess

a white woman and coerce her to carry out his nefarious plots. Though the voodoo priest is played by a Caucasian actor in line with Hollywood’s practice of whitewashing its representations of people of color, the exotification and demonization of Haitian culture preserves the film's moral: the inherent innocence of whiteness.

Since White Zombie, American audiences have faced an onslaught of zombie horror in fiction, film, and TV. These Hollywood ‘zombie flicks’ might be better termed ‘survivor flicks.’ The zombies in these films usually serve not as characters, but as formulaic plot devices, tools that elevate the importance of the survivors’ lives. The threat of a zombie attack makes viewers invested in the continuation of the survivors’ narratives and the preservation of their bodies. Snarling, flesh-decayed zombies are shot routinely on screen. Killing these soulless creatures is constructed as a necessity, a practicality required for the survivors to endure. The clear divide between survivors and zombies establishes an unquestioned, moral hierarchy of bodies, a hierarchy that bleeds beyond the screen replicating the violence against bodies that Western stereotypes deem threatening. +++ Hollywood directors and critics fail to consider the origins of the zombie myth, as well as the particular context in which the myth was introduced to American audiences.

The first report of the zombie legend is traced back to Haiti during French colonial rule. The story held that slaves who tried to take their own life would be caught in a space between life and death, their liminal corpus doomed to wander the island, unable to reclaim control of their bodies even through suicide. Various incarnations of the zombie myth emerged throughout Haitian history, eventually coalescing around the notion that zombies are the creations of witch doctors, who possess corpses to do their bidding often as field laborers or thieves, undead bodies bound by the demands of their possessors.

Americans became acquainted with Haiti’s zombie lore during the US occupation of the island from 1915 to 1934. This occupation was a response to concerns of the expansion of German influence in the Western Hemisphere, but US politicians crafted a mission of imperial ‘benevolence’ to cloak this nationalist aim. They asserted that the marines were stationed on the island to stabilize a dangerous and backwards nation. The hollowness of this interest in Haitian stability is informed by the almost 60-year period not long before this occupation when the United States refused to acknowledge Haiti’s independence from France. As US leaders feared that the successful slave rebellion in Haiti might inspire insurrections in the states, they denied the existence of Haiti and its freed citizens until it became strategically useful.

The US ‘stability’ efforts on the island included systematic efforts to destroy local voodoo traditions, as many of the poor Haitian citizens involved in voodoo practices were openly resistant to American intervention. Marines destroyed voodoo temples, sacred drums, and intimidated known voodoo priests and priestesses

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017

through threats of imprisonment. It was through this cultural destruction that the marines learned about Haitian spiritualism. They brought these stories back to the US, where they were then co-opted and cannibalized

by American pop culture. +++ Just after the US occupation of Haiti ended, around the same time as White Zombie was released, Zora Neale Hurston published Tell My Horse. American critics who could not digest Hurston’s earnest discussion of supernatural events within a Western system of reasoning mocked the book, writing off Hurston as either gullible or a sensationalist.

Critics were troubled by Hurston’s claim to have encountered and photographed an “authentic zombie.”

The photograph shows a woman in ragged clothing with an expression of confusion on her face. In describing the experience of interacting with this woman, Hurston writes: “The sight was dreadful. That blank face with the dead eyes. The eyelids were white all around the eyes as if they had been burned with acid…there was nothing you could say to her or get from her except by looking at her.”

Critics argued that this zombie was merely a victim of ‘social’ death, speculating that she had lost her familial ties and was suffering from a psychological condition.

While it is impossible to prove what caused this woman to lose her speech and control over her body, dismissing her suffering to discredit Hurston’s book—one of few ethnographic works about Voodoo culture at the time— amounts to a dismissal of an entire cultural belief system.

Critics of Tell My Horse did not consider the possibility that Hurston had intentionally evaded a neat rationality in search of something broader. In the few instances where she broaches on a scientific explanation of a supernatural event, she follows with an anecdote that undermines this logic. By way of illustration, Hurston

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suggests that zombies may not be a product of mysticism, but rather of a drug which destroys the parts of the brain that control speech and willpower; immediately following this explanation, however, Hurston recounts a popular legend about two child zombies who purportedly predicted the marriage of four sisters in a Haitian village.

Within a year of this prediction, the four women were all married. As the premonitions of these child zombies cannot be explained by the brain-damaging zombie drug, Hurston dislodges the tidiness of her own explanation.

By offering multiple, non-compatible narratives, Hurston challenges her readers to expand how we hold ideas and how many we hold at once. She presents a view of reality as multiplicitous, unbound by the singularity of logic.

Hurston’s goal in Tell My Horse is not to explain or prove the powers of voodoo mysticism, but to destabilize logic that justifies the Western rejection of these beliefs. Yet the rejection of her work by American critics, a rejection in line with the US military’s efforts to terminate voodoo traditions, demonstrates how Western systems of power aim to squash unstable accounts of reality. +++ My father’s ghost-clothes dilemma, which still defines his skepticism towards the supernatural, deserves deeper scrutiny: it is a little too neat, too clever by half.

It presumes ghosts have nakedness to cover up. But if a ghost is a spirit, wouldn’t it leave both its body, and by extension, its nudity behind? In letting go of steadfast, ghost-clothes logic, it becomes much more difficult to categorize away messy information, make dismissive sense of half-truths, and ignore strange-grandma tales and the untold stories lying beneath them.

Ghosts and zombies are two sides of the same supernatural coin: a ghost is a soul without a body, while a zombie is a body without a soul. In classifying ghosts and zombies as ‘unreal,’ Western logic assures that the

severing of soul and body is impossible. The same logic that denies the possibility of ghosts and zombies too often trivializes the violence of slavery, which reduced African men, women, and children to possessable bodies––bodies caught in a space between life and death—whose souls were unrecognized by the masters of the prevailing economic order. Whether or not zombies and ghosts are real in a literal sense, the violence they represent is all too real, a violence too brutal, too unthinkable, too incomprehensible to capture through singular, historical frameworks. These supernatural metaphors allow for the erased history of the possession of bodies and dispossession of souls to be glimpsed in the interstices between fact and fiction, the real and the unreal, the living and the dead. +++ I visited my grandmother this summer a few months after my grandfather died. She lost the love of her life, a man who meant the world to her and to my whole family.

During this visit, she told me that while cooking one day, she heard a loud, pure whistle, a whistle she was sure belonged to my grandfather. Her eyes filled with tears and awe as she explained that this whistle was my grandfather’s spirit communicating with her, telling her he was at peace and will always love her. This story, like so many of my grandmother’s tales, captures a fragments of reality only visible in the liminal space between that which we call ‘real’ and that which we label ‘supernatural.’

“That’s astonishing, Grandma.” I replied, “I believe you.”

MARIELLE BURT B’19 is an anti-corporate ghost queer.

FEATURES

10

DIGITAL INHERITANCE

Identity and imagery in the blue light of nostalgia

BY Theia Flynn and Annabelle Chace ILLUSTRATION BY Maddie Brewer DESIGN BY Sophia Meng

ON THE VISUAL IMPACT OF THE E-CARD “Having a great time, wish you were wired!”

“Traveling the Net? Miss your buddies back at the domain? Send ’em a postcard!”

Wired Magazine, 1995 Under the above article’s subhead “Postcards From the (Cutting) Edge,” one is directed to the MIT Media Lab’s online “Electric Postcard” service. The website mentioned by Wired entices visitors with “more than 35 different designs, including well-known artists such as Kandinsky, Van Gogh, da Vinci, Gauguin, and the Alice in Wonderland print.” They await you in a static, pixelated lull.

A year earlier, in 1994, MIT computer science researcher and author Judith S. Donath published Inhabiting the Virtual City, a thesis on digital communication online. In it, she described the future of human interaction via the Internet and reported the unexpected success of the “Electric Postcard.” Somehow, this odd transmutation of the traditionally double-faced, physical postcard onto a flat RGB matrix had gotten to the heart of many early web users. With their pre-formatted, customizable messages and images to match, electric postcards presented users with a range of possibilities in digital communication that had not yet been seen. It was also free, and the tech inspired the recruitment of artists and programmers. This was a first step towards contemporary instant messaging.

The electronic postcard—e-card for short—was a design experiment that developed throughout the second half of the ’90s and into the new millennium. It grew alongside the World Wide Web itself, born in 1990.

Communication underwent a metamorphosis as it tapped into the interconnectivity of the internet. It became unrelated to a real-life geolocation. There is a certain splendor in the e-card’s self-referential awareness of the World Wide Web’s virtuality. In representing virtual home and holiday spaces that evade the need for knowing real addresses or owning stamps, e-cards nonetheless offered the traditionally handwritten ‘Wish You Were Here’s so intrinsic to ‘real’ postcards—only typeset in Times.

Gone were the ink blotches and scribbled screw-ups. The unprecedented speed of online message delivery accelerated communication, making headway in the realm of the casual Internet conversation in ‘hey’s and hypertext.

Conversations were generated by the pixelated e-card images themselves. Somehow, one could now actually travel to the place from which the card had been sent by following an embedded link. The rudimentary code and design decisions made during the development of e-cards were the some of earliest manifestations of the digital, instant, and illustrated messages we are accustomed to in 2017—in many ways, the e-card is the ancestor of both Snapchat and Instagram.

Current online platforms have recently seen a resurgence of the old-net memorabilia, full of glitter and flashy visual information. While much of it is simply an evocation of early web design, e-card graphics often show up, along with net art. Both are instances of embedded, pixelated files and code used to generate new forms of image creation and dissemination. As Donath explains, “The picture on the card takes the place of the message. It lets the sender express a bit of his or her taste (for humor or for the macabre or, most popularly, for Impressionist

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prints), like sending a little gift.” Sharing e-cards was far more time-consuming than exchanging simple textbased emails, due to the size of the (low-res) images.

However, this was a novel and strangely ephemeral way of exchanging works of art and forms of expression with depths greater than what was possible through isolated text.

Nowadays, this sort of excitement has turned into a source of pure nostalgia. Likewise, it is at the origin of a number of works by new media artists and designers, notably contributors to the Brutalist Website project.

Web Brutalists borrow from the early web, reflect upon it, and occasionally, give it an ironic spin. This ‘recycled’ way of shaping contemporary digital landscape comes out in the form of intemporal chimeras; using current CSS to emulate early visual or functional limitation of the early web. While this may be just another self-contained internet fad, the phenomenon describes the response of a generation of tech-savvy creatives to the acceleration of technology and its subsequently minimized, efficiency-driven aesthetics. An ever-growing cache of forgotten materials burgeons as we blast forwards into the future.

No longer victim to the physical effects of deterioration, virtual matter is preserved in a capsule.

If the late ’90s saw communication translate the postcard into the digital realm, an example of future communication may just be the adaptation of the e-card into the next new platform. From the golden age of the postcard in the 1900s to the 2000s, it will have taken a century, for us to accomplish this. In 100 years, we could be looking at the e-card, forefather of online chat, being adapted into a post-e-card.

—TF

ON PERSONAL GROWTH IN VIRTUAL LIFE Go on to the website Neopets.com today, and you will find a rich and dead world. You can visit Stonehenge. You can visit Machu Picchu. You can also visit the crumbling virtual world of ‘Neopia,’ a piece of internet ephemera standing as a new form of cultural debris. Launched in 1999 by idle British university students Adam Powell and Donna Williams, the website grew exponentially until it was purchased in 2005 by media conglomerate Viacom for $160 million. By this time, it had been alleged that the website accrued up to five billion page views per month with an active user base of 60 million people.

80 percent of these people were under 18 years of age.

As the years went on, however, Neopets’ existing user base aged and a rotating staff lineup struggled to attract a new generation of tweens. The already busted virtual economy, trapped in hyperinflation, continued to spiral

out of control as veterans of the site or adults with too much time on their hands accumulated points and kept the price of rare or coveted items at levels a new or casual player could not hope to reach without significant toil. To maintain profitability, real-money purchases were introduced, centered mostly around the customization of pets, while most of the staff was laid off and replaced by freelance work. This has resulted in the website’s slow grind to a halt. Today, Neopets.com is an example of abandonware, a term for code left unmaintained and preserved on the internet. For example, when features such as the ‘Key Quest’ multiplayer game break, they stay broken and on display. Quite a few people continue to inhabit the website’s dusty corpse, suggesting that the appeal of Neopets lies in a more personal type of game.

The main website created a comfortable playground for children’s internal lives. While other popular virtual worlds at the time such as Club Penguin or the more adult Second Life were predicated on user interaction, the lore of Neopets never seemed to feature the real world people in its user base. The world map of locations within simulated tourism was an open and inviting environment with the potential for anonymous adventure. It was a world that demanded participation: flash games, virtual storefronts, audiences with important NPCs with amusing flavortext.

Attendance of regular site-wide events such as the yearly Altador Cup and lore-heavy story/puzzle combos such as the Curse of Maraqua created a simulation of community artificial enough to border on solipsism. All of this was shrouded in comfortable anonymity—almost all of these activities could be completed without discussion or interaction with others. A heavily censored forum and guild system allowed for social interaction in a restricted way, allowing more for roleplaying than discussion of real life topics. Neopets was a world as nonthreatening as a private fantasy. This fantasy, though, was fully illustrated, animated in a bright cartoonish style and had colorful anthropomorphised animals in it.

An open and safe environment invites creative play, and public Neopets activity is mostly creative in nature: contests ranging from visual art to html, a full user-submitted fictitious newspaper complete with a comics section. It is telling that the ‘contests and spotlights’ page remains somewhat active today—for a lot of users this is an excellent outlet to gain gratification from their creative endeavors. It was a structure in which to pour childlike enthusiasm and hyperfocus. This combination of encouragement, organization, and anonymous confidence incubated young artists.

This niche internet culture is rich, yet often invisible, as participation in it is necessarily solitary. Omitting full-on fanwork found on the internet itself, it is hard to determine any possible long term impact on art or this generation’s collective psychology. However, some artists such as Bunny Rogers, who explicitly plumbs imagery from Neopets in her installation work, light a possible path. In her installation “Michael” (2015), she appropriates official and fanmade images of Neopets and engraves them onto slabs of slate, seemingly to memorialize times of grief in her adolescence. She is able to use this imagery as a language to communicate her past and feelings in a way both humorous and poignant, proving that the deserted virtual worlds littering the internet are relevant still—they live as sites of nostalgia, and as wells of valuable material with which to contextualize the lives of those growing up at the beginning of the digital age.

—AC

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017

BEHIND THE BAG BAN A look at reusing and recycling in RI environmental policy

BY Ted Catlin ILLUSTRATION BY Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN BY Tiffany Bushka

This past spring, two communities in Rhode Island, Newport and Middletown, banned single-use plastic bags. Both bans were passed unanimously by local city councils, both will go into effect on November 1, 2017, and both were met with almost no resistance from residents. Marine health is an incredibly important issue for both of these seaside communities, and across the Ocean State. However, as similar bills have failed on the statelevel, smaller legislatures are now stepping up and taking on the responsibility of environmental stewardship. In spite of their intentions, the consequences of these bag bans for Rhode Island ecosystems are not straightforward.

The Clean Ocean Access (COA), a non-profit based out of Aquidneck Island, has organized hundreds of beach cleanups around the area, gathering thousands of pounds of ocean debris since 2006. COA was also behind the legislation in both Newport and Middletown, led by co-founder and executive director Dave McLaughlin.

“It’s an island-wide attempt to remove bags from retail,” he told the Independent. By removing bags from retailers, COA hopes to reduce the amount of plastic bags and other materials that end up in the ocean and Narragansett Bay. The movement to institute the ban began on Change.org in the fall of 2016 with a petition initiated by the COA calling on the city of Newport and the towns of Middletown and Portsmouth, both located on Aquidneck Island, to change their policies. In response to the petition, which ultimately gained over 1,000 signatures, the Middletown and Portsmouth city councils initiated public hearings and legislation to address single-use plastic bags. McLaughlin spoke at the hearings in both Newport and Middletown this past spring.

His data-driven plea, emphasizing that the COA has removed more than 94,000 pounds of debris over the last 10 years, played a large part in illuminating just how serious a problem this is for the local ecosystem.

After the hearings, Newport’s city council passed the legislation with almost no opposition. Councilman John Florez, who introduced the resolution for the bag ban, told the Indy, “We have a tourist driven economy, and having clean waters is a critical part to our ocean economy.” Local retailers rely heavily on tourism, fishing, and sailing for their business, so a law that could help preserve the ocean ecosystem would be in their favor, despite the burden of transitioning away from single-use bags.

Single-use plastic bags have a wide-range of environmental impacts associated with their production and consumption. Plastic bags are made from long chains of hydrocarbons which are made from petroleum and other crude oils and natural gases. Some estimates claim that over 12 million barrels of oil are used to produce the 100 billion plastic bags used in the US each year.

13

SCIENCE

The images that we most commonly see of plastics in the ocean are those of sea turtles and birds entangled in six-pack rings, but those pictures only tell part of the story. Plastics that end up in the ocean frequently damage ecosystems or release toxins and oils into the water as they break down. Depending on the type of plastic, the temperature of the water, and the amount of direct UV exposure, debris can take anywhere between one year and 100 years to break down, without ever fully degrading; they split repeatedly into microplastics, releasing toxins and chemicals as they degrade. Once these microplastics and the chemicals they release are ingested by sea creatures, they not only damage the individual animal’s health, but also enter the food chain, affecting subsequent trophic levels for years to come. Given the widespread recognition that plastics are toxic when released into the environment, when the citizens of Newport and Middletown were presented with legislation for a bag ban, they leapt at the opportunity to be better environmental stewards. However, the bag ban might not be the only way, or the best way, for those citizens to support the environment in the way they hope to. +++ In an investigative report conducted in 2011, Le Journal de Montreal delved into the impacts of single-use versus reusable bags. Despite reducing the number of single-use plastic bags in circulation, the newspaper found that reusable bags were not as eco-friendly as was commonly thought. Reusable bags are often made from cloth and durable plastics, both of which are not recyclable. Even though an individual may use a reusable bag for around five years, that bag will end up in a landfill for decades after its use. The report also found that among the storebrand reusable bags tested, four tested positive for toxic levels of lead. Once a reusable bag containing lead arrives in a landfill, the lead will be released over time and contaminate the soil. Unfortunately, single-use plastic bags jam the machines at standard recycling facilities.

Given special facilities, however, they are efficiently recyclable.

In cities where plastic bag recycling programs exist, plastic bags are chipped into pellets, and are then processed into new bags, or more often, into products like the plastic lumber used in artificial wooden decks. These recycling programs can drastically reduce the amount of source materials needed to produce plastic products of all sorts, including bags. According to the Environmental Protection Agency's website, recycling ten plastic bags can save enough energy to power a laptop for 3.4 hours.

However, recycling programs only work if the plastic bags are actually recycled.

While Rhode Island has a plastic bag recycling

program—ReStore—it is not used by enough citizens to provide a wide-spread solution to plastic bags. There are bin locations at many larger grocery and big-box stores, and at the Material Recycling Facilities in Barrington, Westerly, and Woonsocket. But without the simplicity of curbside removal, ReStore does not see widespread use. Another problem is the obscure publicity for the program online. The Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation (RIRRC) website has exceedingly limited information, only telling visitors that plastic bags and films are “recycled through a special program called ReStore.

You can find ReStore containers in large RI grocery, pharmacy, and big-box stores.” However, there seems to be no database of where these bins are located around the state, on how much plastic is recycled through ReStore, or any explanation of how the plastics are recycled.

The RIRRC was created by the Rhode Island state legislature in 1974, also known as the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation Act. The corporation was created to manage the state’s municipal waste, and has been behind several key recycling initiates, including the first law making statewide recycling mandatory, RI Recycling Act 1986. It is telling that in the RIRRC's description of its history since 1974—which includes several other statewide recycling initiatives like the Recycle Together RI program, and local initiatives like the Maximum Recycling program, which was only prototyped in Foster and Scituate—ReStore is nowhere to be found. RIRRC, seemingly, has not invested much time or energy in publicizing ReStore. +++ “Only five to 10 percent of plastic bags are actually recycled,” McLaughlin explained to the Indy over the phone.

The rest end up as litter or in landfills, bringing us back to the environmental impacts that plastic bags can have in the ocean. “Ocean health is a time-sensitive issue— it’s out of control,” McLaughlin added. While perhaps providing a better long-term solution for the issue of plastic bags, due to the lack of public awareness around existing bag recycling programs in Rhode Island, they do not capture enough single-use bag waste to render the bag ban unnecessary. McLaughlin admits that having reusable bags enter landfills is not a long-term solution for the bag issue. However, coastal states cannot afford to wait for longer-term solutions to become realities.

McLaughlin isn’t sold on the idea that recycling programs are the best solution either.

From 2013 to 2016, the COA removed over 57,000 pounds of debris from the beaches and waters surrounding Rhode Island. Among the pollutants removed that year were 11,766 plastic bags. Yet plastic bags were only a small part of the problem. There were 42,561 cigarette

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017

butts and filters, 11,409 plastic bottles, and 18,730 food containers. Recycling programs might promote the idea that things can be used once and recycled without any consequences, a mindset that can transfer over to other non-recyclable debris. “Prohibiting plastic bags from being passed out at retailers is a good first step to get people looking at their footprints, then looking at all other single-use materials,” McLaughlin explained over the phone. Those single-use materials are a big part of what McLaughlin sees as a cultural mindset of disposability that is damaging the marine environment of Narragansett Bay. “Fifty years from now, we might have great recycling,” McLaughlin conceded. Bag bans will severely cut the number of plastic bags in circulation, thus limiting the amount of ocean debris, and while it will lead to more reusable bags ending up in landfills simply by more reusable bags being used, the cultural shift it could create might outweigh those consequences. Councilman Florez hopes to capitalize on this cultural momentum and take action on other environmental legislation. “Straws end up in our waters too. There’s also potential to talk about the release of balloons into our atmosphere,” he told the Indy. “Newport is the preeminent seaside community in the Ocean State. We have a responsibility to be stewards for the environment.”

TED CATLIN B’20 wants Rhode Island residents to recycle their plastic bags with ReStore.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SCIENCE

14

METASTASIS On radiation, migration, and remembrance

BY Jessica Jiang ILLUSTRATION BY Dorothy Windham DESIGN BY Sophia Meng

content warning: cancer, state violence My mother has a list of rules.

Never drink soy milk (the estrogen might interfere with my growth, and I would be doomed to shortness forever).

Never use those earbuds that go deep inside your ear canals (studies are only just beginning to show it, but they'll ruin my hearing down the line).

Never use a tampon (toxic shock syndrome could cost me my leg or my life; I could go to sleep any night with a tampon in and wake up 10 minutes from death).

Never stand next to the microwave when it's on (I can't see or feel it, but microwave radiation is leaking out of those vents).

Never keep your cell phone by your bed at night (cell phone radiation charging next to my head all night, every night is surely a recipe for cancer—and that is a risk we really cannot take). +++ In the fall of 2005, my grandfather discovered cancer in his lungs. His three-hour call to our house was the longest international phone call I can remember bearing witness to, back when you had to pay dearly by the minute to hear a loved one’s voice, scratchy though the sticky receiver you would clutch to your cheek. An ocean away, my grandfather sought out his own solutions, buying a device from an alternative medicine vendor that he held to his chest for hours at a time. It was vibrant and electronic, and supposed to break up the tumor with prolonged use.

Instead, seven months later he was comatose, and one month after that, he was dead.

When my mother talks to me about cell phones, she uses the same tone of voice she reserves for my grandfather’s death. Sinking, ashamed, and resentful, she asks me: how can you think that holding electronics like that right up against your head can be good for you? Keeping your phone plugged in so close to your brain as you sleep?

Finally, she tells me: I saw it happen with my own eyes, saw my own father's life drain away as he insisted on clutching radiation to his chest every night.

I know nothing about the progression of my grandfather’s lung cancer for over 10 years, though judging by the links my mother insists on sending me, it is certainly something she relives in the everyday. Major cell phone radiation studies reignites cancer questions. Alternative remedies threaten global health hazards. Instead, the story is something I have to piece together over the years—from her quiet and guilty shame, from our fights every time I get sick, from the way she argues with my little brother when he asks when he’ll get his own phone.

Five years after my grandfather’s death, when my other grandfather finds tumors in his brain—though he has taken cold showers for his health all his life, though he is known in his neighborhood for his morning runs—my mother says: it’s just like my dad again. Your dad’s father always stood right by the microwave in his tiny kitchen in China, and now look at the way he loses his balance.

15

OCCULT

Look at how he can't even remember your name.

A faith in alternative medicine, a lifetime spent loitering waiting for the food to heat up: if you believe what my mother tells me, then these are our nasty family secrets, and they were my grandparents’ lethal mistakes.

The only consolation is that they are mistakes with solutions—solutions that are straightforward and wishfully simple. +++ My mother tells me that she’s never been superstitious.

She is at the tail end of a generation born on the eve of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. By the time my parents came into the world, Buddha figures across the nation were already being defaced, books and scrolls being burned in every town in the name of modernization.

The purging of the old beliefs began in 1966 and went on for another decade; if China’s ‘backwards’ culture was the final tie to its feudal past, then for the revolution to succeed, everything had to go.

So what luck could red bring you, when your neighbors were being sent away to labor camps by Red Guards decked out in the same color? What did it matter if your windows faced an auspicious direction? Feng shui wouldn’t protect your friends when the troops showed up at Tiananmen Square—and practicing it openly could kill you even quicker, get you disappeared for clinging to bourgeois superstition. Would an amulet have helped? A fortune told or incense burned? Every temple my family has ever taken me to has been a literal museum.

When modernity without spirituality is the world you grow up in, when practicing the old religions would kill you before they could save you, then science is the one thing you learn to hold on to. Though intellectuals found themselves thrown out with superstition, the scientific establishment was among the first to emerge from the ashes once the Cultural Revolution was over. Like thousands of others in her generation, my mother did science so well—crunching numbers, writing code, passing every exam—that it got her a student visa, a ticket out of China, a future across the ocean, and a glittering American dream. So if science appears to proffer an explanation for my grandfather’s death, and reveals a solution to make sure nothing like it happens again—what more could she ever ask for?

(Misleading) studies show, and (tabloid) headlines reveal, and so my mother believes and believes and believes. From cataracts to cancer, the REAL dangers of microwave ovens. Risk of brain cancer can triple after 25 years of cellphone use.“Game-changing” study links cellphone radiation to cancer. Her emails light up my phone screen in the middle of class, in my bed late at night, in the mornings when I wake to shut off my alarm.

I sometimes contemplate asking her: Do you really think that radiation from household electronics was worse for my grandfathers’ bodies than the stress and malnutrition of growing up during a decade of war with Japan? Or the horror of watching thousands die of starvation in their respective home provinces over the course of three years? Or the mysterious disappearances and the

public executions that followed in the decades to come?

Or maybe the cancer just happened, as it does in bodies all over the world and from all walks of life.

But war and famine, poverty and repression are not optional for those caught in their midsts. The idea that such trauma might be sticky—might be a monster that sinks into your skin or your brain or your lungs and won't wash out—is terrifying. Accepting that would be tantamount to believing that we carry with each generation traces of the one that came before; every dream and desire, but also every wound and every heartbreak. We would be composites of injuries both ancient and new.

Scar tissue too tangled to trace, so that the only thing we would know was that there can be no life without some kind of healing, however crooked.

Still, I think there is nothing my mother has ever yearned for more than a fresh start. +++ Though she shies from microwaves and cell phones, my mother spends her days in front of a computer, as both my parents have done since they immigrated in the ’90s. She writes to me in an email: “I left my home country in my twenties. I don't have permanent attachment to anywhere. I don't believe in nationalism. I'm a world citizen.”

If she ever feels any longing for the country that she left behind, she certainly disguises it well enough, in blunt English and a tone so obstinate I can feel its sting over email. Perhaps she wants these words to sit heavy in my inbox, as they radiate up at me from the screen of my phone, so that I will believe their undeniable truth. Yet I also suspect she has genuinely unlearned her yearning for any homeland, if the idea of the good life in China was lost sometime before her birth, before the civil war and the Japanese occupation and the endless internal migrations. Like sweet dreams and second languages, the good memories of life on the mainland evaporate all too easily without the practice of remembering. And my family has never been particularly talented at storytelling.

But the bad memories live on: in technological fixations, in mysterious neck pains, in outbursts of anger, in the ability to see betrayal anywhere and everywhere.

“I learnt from Chinese history in the past 80 years,” she writes. “No cause is worth fighting for except your own. People is forgetful and can quickly turn their backs on you.”

Maybe she meant to say “that’s how much I care about you,” but it came out all wrong. Maybe: “Something out there could hurt you, but I am doing the best I can.” It is a warped way of saying that. But I believe her. +++ Here’s what I learn from what my mother tells me: Keep the world at arm's length sometimes.

There are forces you cannot see at work, and though you may not know it now, they are taking the people we love from us, again and again.

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017

You must do everything you can to survive, no matter how much it hurts.

Here’s what I learn in spite of what my mother tells me: Sometimes you lose and you lose.

It is okay to not have all the answers.

Still there must be a way to trust in the world, to seek out pleasure in its company even without knowing the consequences, and you must look for it no matter how much it hurts.

+++ My own birthday nears, and with it, the birthday of my late grandfather—a time of year when my mother grows more silent and more tense. Every fall, I am reminded that I must read this family history with all the context clues I have managed to scrounge together. The story does not make sense without my mother's fixations, without the Wikipedia articles and the history books, without the impulsive disclosures my brother and I have collected through the years. With each year, I learn to tell this story a little bit better.

At my favorite Asian grocery, a thick bundle of cheap incense costs two dollars. No one ever told me it was healthy to breathe in so much incense smoke, but I don’t like to write about either of my grandfathers without a stick burning. Finally, I close my mother’s email to me. I plug my phone in by my pillow and set my alarm for morning. These are my rituals, so different from my mother’s. I never forget the things she insists on, I only find different ways to commemorate them.

JESSICA JIANG B’20 still doesn’t know how to

take a compliment.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

OCCULT

16

DEPARTURE

BY Griffin Smith ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

You step away from the sound of your kitchen your kitchen’s smoothed wood bent and dried and formed around a frame of copper and water gathering fixings into its mouth. over the guardrail and the marsh the brown beluga marsh fringed with the hollow blush of styrofoam, sloughing and chafing in the water’s ears.

Where balconies of reeds hold birds with single features brushed bright red.

A body of water bodying awkwardly out, flatly hulking like the thin scarred face of a tambourine. out to the gas station with the ripped tissue sound of pumping fuel coating the pavement.

The maroon blues of oil and the blue maroons of broken leather.

The cars with their starched lion bodies inviting rust in rough wet bouquets. through the cursive hoops of neon flowered hoops, long jittered sounds of chapped pink and powder blue clotted with moths and shadow. past the diner bright and drunk in chrome and cocoa air.

The great American invention, as thick and leather as jazz.

Grafted to the highway like a molten feather, not quite able to touch the bugling shell of a ladybug tucked into your palm. and out onto the highway with a radio and a lantern strapped to your back.

The shoulder hums with run-down things.

A bottle shucked of its glass, an unthreaded wheel, a flattened bell.

You sit with them for a while.

Nothing moves in the splintered grunt of thunder.

17

LITERARY

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017

THE FRIDAY 9 ∫ 22 EMO NIGHT

243 South Water Street 1 PM — This summer I tried to have an oyster feast with all my friends but then I threw up :( Just because your List editor is too delicate for bivalves doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go!

FESTIVAL

OCEAN STATE OYSTER

3 Bell Street, Providence 11 AM — Let the mysterious folks behind the RI Patient Advocacy Coalition give you the 4-1-1 on all things medical-pot-related in Rhode Island. The organizers say there will be prizes (lava lamp), music (“chill vibes” Spotify playlist), speakers (that the music comes out of), fun (buying a lot of weed), bargains (ibid).

MEDICAL CANNABIS FESTIVAL

RHODE ISLAND ANNUAL

19th century stereopticon shows at Aurora throughout the evening, where you can, for some reason, look at Victorian life through 3D glasses.

LIST!

Fete Music Hall 7 PM — Sounds like the last emo night was a hit so this one will happen across both Fete and the adjoining Shelter Arcade Bar. Regarding emo music, your List editor stands by the old adage about if you don’t have something nice to say, etc.

GEORGE CLINTON & PARLIAMENT FUNKADELIC

The Strand Formerly Lupo’s, IDK why they changed it 8pm — Free your mind and your ass will follow! Unfortunately this is not free at all, but 30 whole dollars.

SATURDAY 9 ∫ 23 DOORS OPEN RI FESTIVAL

10 AM – 6 PM Citywide Providence!!!

— This seems rad! Free access to tons of buildings around PVD, from the attic of City Hall to Atlantic Mills.

There’ll also be a series of

LIST!

Boston Convention & Exhibition Center 5 PM — Hoooooly shit. This is better than when Miranda July interviewed Rihanna. And you get to watch!!

THE

come to Providence. One time one of our senior editors met Patti Smith when she (the editor) was like ten and when she asked the lauded musician, poet, and memoirist for life advice, Patti Smith told her to take care of her teeth!

Wild!

THURSDAY 9 ∫ 28

The sun enters your sign on Friday, the 22nd, but basically every other damn planet is still in rigid Virgo, so while you try to deal with the pressure to get things done and the simultaneous need to kiss everyone’s ass, try not to eject yourself six feet above your body.

Instead of oscillating between fantastical prospects and cold, sweaty real prospects, The Indy recommends you sit yourself down in Prospect Park by yourself and figure out what the hell is happening in your mind/body matrix.

Horoscope: Libra

Cable Car Cinema and Café 8 PM \m/

THE END

BLACK SABBATH: THE END OF

MICHELLE OBAMA

ROXANE GAY INTERVIEWS

MUSHROOM ID FOR

BEGINNERS

Providence Public Library 7 PM — Truffles are the most expensive fungi in the world.

A four pound truffle once sold for $2500 dollars.

Imagine a pearl necklace.

Now imagine that necklace but the pearls replaced with marble-sized truffles. Make this List writer’s dream come true and join me at this lecture on identifying mushrooms. We might forage splendor.

ALLYSHIP AND ACTIVISM

NON-TOXIC MASCULINITY: PATTI SMITH

WEDNESDAY 9 ∫ 27

Aurora Providence 8 PM — This sounds really fun tbh.

We are sad about Aurora closing and urge everyone to go there as much as possible while it’s still around :(

BINGO, HOSTED BY THE LADY J

Loie Fuller’s 10 PM $5 — Great, probably pretty noisy tunes in your favorite bougie art nouveau French restaurant.

VISIBILITIES // SCØTT REBER

TUESDAY 9 ∫ 26

is the co-founder, along with Allen damn Ginsberg, of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa.

LIST!

MONDAY 9 ∫ 25

THE SUNDAY 9 ∫ 24

JOBS WITH JUSTICE ANTI-

ANNE WALDMAN

Meet at India Point Park 1 PM — Advertised to “the folks who work on weekends!” Join the Sierra Club for a gorgeous ride all the way to Bristol.

The List recommends: a quick stop at the Dairy Bee for a vanilla-coffee softserve.

EAST BAY BIKE PATH

SIERRA CLUB ADVENTURE:

Jobs with Justice 6 PM — This is the second community meeting to address white supremacy following the events in Charlottesville in August.

Childcare will be provided, as will light refreshments.

RACIST ACTION COMMITTEE

FREE COLLEGE WEEKEND

Central Rock Climbing Gym Warwick, RI All Saturday & Sunday!

— You’re probably like, ehh, whatever, I have a commitment that weekend, I’ll go later. But here’s the thing: rock climbing is expensive af! And our rock climbing editor Will says that Central Rock is a very nice gym.

THE BLACK MARKET

HEX Museum of Dark Arts Woonsocket, RI 11 AM — Oddities, occult supplies, leather goods, antiques, skulls, and more for sale. I’m not sure what the Museum of Dark Arts is all about or whether I can safely advise readers to go there, but it’d be chill to own a skull.

Martinos Auditorium Brown University 5:30 PM — Anne Waldman is the author of more than 40 books of experimental poetry, and

RISD Museum 7 PM — This event is sold out, but I just wanted to put it on here to remind you that sometimes really big names

Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health ( Pawtucket) 7 PM — This sounds great. I will be passive-aggressively telling some boys I know about this event.