The College Hill Independent Vol. 32 Issue 3

the college hill independent Volume 32

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a Brown/RISD weekly

February 19, 2016

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Issue 03

the

NEWS 02 Week in Drudgery Lance Gloss & Liz Cory

Volume 32 No. 3

03 Pax Colombiana Maria Camila Bustos & Nicolas Montano METRO 05 Motherfuck Gentrification Jack Brook 07 POC @ PC Hannah Maier-Katkin 11 Cálmate, Cálmate Madeleine Matsui

From the editors: ditch broken words for light;

ARTS 15 Momcore Lisa Borst FEATURES 09 Tick, tick, tick Emma Jean Holley INTERVIEWS 14 Building Dwelling Floating Maya Sorabjee

or flesh.

ENH

METABOLICS 08 Wax and Wane Ryan Rosenberg LITERARY 17 Untitled Eli Neuman-Hammond EPHEMERA 13 cloudlife India Ennenga X 18 Complicated Beaks Gabriel Matesanz

Managing Editors Camera Ford Alec Mapes-Frances Francis Torres News Jane Argodale Piper French Julia Tompkins Metro Sophie Kasakove Jamie Packs Shane Potts Arts Lisa Borst Jonah Max Eli Neuman-Hammond Features Gabrielle Hick Patrick McMenamin Dominique Pariso Science Fatima Husain Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa Tech Kamille Johnson

P.O Box 1930 Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

Interviews Elias Bresnick Occult Lance Gloss Literary Marcus Mamourian Metabolics Sam Samore Ephemera Mark Benz Jake Brodsky India Ennenga X Layla Ehsan Sara Khan Pierie Korostoff List Rick Salamé Zak Ziebell Cover Jade Donaldson

Staff Writers Ben Berke Liz Cory Kelton Ellis Liby Hays Corey Hébert Hannah Maier-Katkin Madeleine Matsui Kimberley Meilun Ryan Rosenberg Staff Illustrators Teri Minogue Yuko Okabe Ivan Rios-Fetchko Web Charlie Windolf Senior Editors Sebastian Clark Rick Salamé Kim Sarnoff Maya Sorabjee MVP Hannah Maier-Katkin

Design & Illustration Celeste Matsui Alexa Terfloth Zak Ziebell

theindy.org

@theindy_tweets

WEEK IN DRUDGERY Intelligent Recline Are you sick and tired of pushing your own office chair back to the table? YEAH! Do you mourn the loss of precious energy spent literally just moving your chair a couple feet forward at the end of a meeting? UGH, TOTALLY! Well, you’re in luck…introducing: “Intelligent Parking Chair” by Nissan, that generally ‘okay’ Japanese car manufacturer with way too much time on its hands.

We’ve all thought about it: wouldn’t it be great if my office chair could move autonomously? This week, Nissan released a YouTube video of the Intelligent Chair, a bulkier model of the ubiquitous office staple that showcases the “Intelligent Parking Assist” technology newly available in their cars. The chairs, much like the cars, are guided by a system of four motiondetection cameras positioned in each corner of the room that create a composite bird’s eye view image. Humans simply have to input their desired configuration for the chairs, and the Wi-Fi-controlled system will order each one back to its place when someone claps their hands.

Nissan’s explanatory video sets the scene: “The meeting is finally over, they are so exhausted that they forget about restoring chairs to their original state.” We watch from the viewpoint of cameras above as one man claps his hands and the quasi-robots whir straight to the table to settle in a perfectly aligned formation. Spatial harmony has been restored in the conference room. They may have a point: most real adult office meetings are so grueling they wipe your ability to remember that the thing you were sitting on like 10 seconds ago should probably be put back where you found it.

Even so, one has to wonder: what’s the problem with chairs being left a little away from the table, anyway?

Shortly after the invention’s unveiling, Facebook was set ablaze with comments. Many bemoaned the product’s encouragement of laziness, while others wished Nissan would have pushed their tech further for a “self-making bed.”

Several others pointed out the inevitable problem the whole clapping thing would pose any time someone concluded a presentation or expressed their appreciation for a company accomplishment. One man wrote, “If I see someone sitting on one of these, I’ll clap on purpose.”

Although Nissan thinks “office automation will accelerate further to support busy office workers,” some people worry it could be the insidious beginning of humanity’s demise. One woman exhorted “Get out of your chair and just WALK. The lazier our society becomes the more we will wind up like the movie WALLE! [sic]” Another man echoed her fear more explicitly: “Self parking office chairs are going to take our jobs!”

For better or for worse, it turns out these ‘intelligent’ recliners will not be available for purchase any time soon.

They were merely Nissan’s way of saying “Hey guys, check out what cool technology our cars have!” It seems humanity will be just fine…for now. – LC

Feb 19, 2016

by Liz Cory and Lance Gloss illustration by Celeste Matsui

Toils Not Been considering the lilies? So has Joaquín García. And he’s had plenty of time to consider.

Mr. García was employed as a water treatment engineer at Agua de Cádiz, a Spanish municipal water board, from 1990 until his retirement in 2010. He collected his paychecks all the while. But it seems that he had some trouble making it to work in the mornings. Says García, he grew sick of being bullied around the watercooler for his socialist politics. So, one day in 2004—or, according to some allegations, it was 1996—García didn’t show up for work. One day of leave became three; one week became two months. Cadiz got a new pump station; García read Spinoza. New employees cycled in and out; García took a bike ride. Nobody noticed his absence until 2010, when it was time to give him an award for 20 years of dedicated service.

He could have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for the meddling Deputy Mayor, Jorge Blas Fernández. Mr. García was rudely interrupted from his leisure to suffer an extended court procedure which, last week, occasioned a fine of €27,000. Not bad, considering that this is only a year’s salary for an engineer at Agua Cadiz. Overall, it might be called a victory for persecuted socialists everywhere. And even with Joaquín García away from his desk, his department can proclaim that Cádiz “meets all State and Federal water quality standards for drinking water.”

Anyway, garden manuals advise an inch of rainfall per week for most lilies. Given the proper climate, you don’t need to water them at all. – LG

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MACHINE GUNS TO OLIVE BRANCHES Colombia Imagines Peace Once Again

by Maria Camila Bustos & Nicolas Montano illustration by Catherine Cawley

Last week, Colombia and the United States celebrated the fifteen year anniversary of Plan Colombia. This program, often heralded as the centerpiece of the War on Drugs, has provided the South American nation with billions in military aid over the past decade in order to combat narco-terrorist insurgencies that were threatening to overrun the country.

In a press conference at the White House, Presidents Obama and Juan Manuel Santos, his Colombian counterpart, announced to the world that a new era in Colombian history was fast approaching. Gone were the days of Pablo Escobar, of the very real possibility of becoming a failed state, and soon, of the 60 year-long civil war between guerrillas, paramilitaries and government forces. However, while these messages painted an optimistic picture, on the ground in Colombia such things are easier said than done.

For the last sixty years, Colombia has been home to the longest-running conflict in the Western Hemisphere. The civil war has wreaked havoc across rural and urban areas alike, contributing to a population of six million internally displaced people—the second highest rate in the world after Syria. In 2012, in an effort to de-escalate this conflict, the government began peace negotiations with the largest guerrilla group in the country: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (known by their Spanish acronym, FARC).

The government has established March 23 as the deadline for all components of the peace agreement to be signed in Havana; the FARC has stated that this process might take

longer, given delays in securing a transitional justice program.

This would allow the establishment of a Truth Commission, the full demobilization of combatants, and their eventual reintegration into society. On December 15, the government delegation signed a landmark agreement, providing reparations to victims.

This is one of the thorniest components in any post-conflict agreement: deciding who the victims are, and what they receive, is often a matter of contention. Over the past three years, both sides have agreed on issues regarding agricultural reform, political participation, and the eradication of illicit crops and drugs.

The origins of the conflict are complicated but can be traced to unequal land tenure, poverty, political violence, and extreme inequality. As with many other countries across the region, Colombia witnessed the emergence of Marxist guerrillas in the mid-20th century. At first ideologically motivated, these guerrillas challenged the unjust political and economic state of the country and received support from the public. But by the 1980s, their quest for power led them to unleash unparalleled levels of violence against the population: massacres, disappearances, and attacks against critical infrastructure for the provision of public services. At the same time, with the rise of drug cartels in the region, the FARC turned to drug trafficking—along with kidnapping and extortion—to finance their military activities. To make matters worse, a group of wealthy landowners took the situation into their own hands, forming paramilitary groups in order to protect themselves and their landfrom the increasing threat of guerrillas. The combination of these factors turned Colombia’s war into an increasingly complex and deadly three-way conflict, with civilians caught in the crossfire.

Ghosts from the Past While the forthcoming agreements, looking to end the low-intensity yet long-lasting war with the country’s largest insurgent group, could indeed open a new chapter in the nation’s history, the peace negotiations are not without precedent. Colombia has been plagued by violence since before the start of the current civil war. Animosity within the nation stems from rifts that appeared as soon as the country gained its independence from Spain in 1819, with persistent acts of violence on the part of all armed sectors throughout the following 200 years. If there is one constant fixture of Colombian daily life, it is perhaps the omnipresence of violence.

This is not the first time in Colombian history that the government seeks to end war through negotiations. In 1985, President Belisario Betancur held peace negotiations with the FARC. During his administration, a small number of guerrilla groups demobilized and formed their own political party, the Unión Patriótica. Though the government backed these efforts, members of the party were systematically murdered by paramilitaries and right-wing actors throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. A total of 5,000 militants died, including two presidential candidates, eight congressmen, 13 deputies, 70 councillors, and 11 mayors. Violence against ex-combatants discouraged other guerrilla factions from even considering peace as a real option, when reintegration into the country’s

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political life proved so dangerous.

In the early 1990s, President Virgilio Barco’s government signed peace agreements with a number of smaller guerrilla groups, including the Movimiento 19 de Abril (M19). The M19 had distinguished itself from other guerillas for its ideological struggle against poverty in the country, as well as for their brazen acts of urban terrorism (including laying siege to the Supreme Court building in 1985). Immediately after their demobilization, they created the Alianza Democrática M19 (AD-M19), a new political party that successfully won a number of seats in the Constituent Assembly of 1990. The M19 became a symbol of hope for many that a peaceful alternative to the armed conflict was possible. However, many of the new party’s leaders also faced political persecution and constant threats, which, when coupled with internal discord and an inability to organize, eventually caused the AD-M19 to collapse.

The Role of US Foreign Policy Today, the anniversary of Plan Colombia comes with an inevitable clash of opinions. Officially approved under the Clinton administration, the plan was supported by Democrats and Republicans alike. The program forged close ties between the two countries, which became apparent during the ‘pink tide’ of newly elected left-wing governments that swept through Latin America in the 2000s.

Colombia was one of very few countries in the region that did not elect any left-wing, anti-US politicians. Choosing not to jeopardize bilateral ties, Colombia elected centerright politicians and secured a massive amount of aid through Plan Colombia. This allowed the government to revamp its security and militarization efforts.

Over the past decade, the plan has seen its fair share of proponents and detractors. On one hand, supporters claim it allowed the Colombian army to debilitate the FARC, driving them into a stalemate in which negotiating with the government became an attractive option. Thanks to Plan Colombia, the FARC are no longer in a position to carry out the large-scale attacks they were known for in the 80s and 90s. According to Antonio Caballero—a journalist for the Colombian newspaper Semana—the FARC have become more realistic in their approach: they no longer fight for a revolution, but instead ask for a number of reforms. Those in favor of the plan also point to the strengthening of the Colombian state through the consolidation of power and territory as one of its main successes.

Opponents of Plan Colombia, including the Washington Office on Latin America, argue that it facilitated massive human rights violations on the part of government forces, prolonged the armed conflict, and failed to eradicate drug production. Among the human rights violations during this period, the oft-cited “false-positives” scandal stands out. Military units, incentivized by monetary rewards that came from Plan Colombia funds, were responsible for the murders of thousands of civilians, passing their corpses off as combat deaths in order to overreport their “success.” It is possible that roughly one third of the reported deaths were in fact “false-positives.” These crimes stained the legacy of former President Alvaro Uribe, a polarizing public figure who enacted a hardline approach to security, sometimes at the expense of human rights.

The post-conflict scenario that lies ahead will need substantial financial support to succeed. The UN has already agreed to deploy its peacekeeping forces and monitor a ceasefire. A number of developed countries have promised aid to support future reforms. However, this new plan will need to redefine success, peace, and security

Feb 12, 2016

in the country. Since 2000, over 70% of U.S. foreign aid to the country has gone to Colombia’s security forces.

With the changing times, it is imperative to allocate funds in support of transitional justice programs that ensure the successful reintegration of ex-combatants and the restitution of land to displaced victims.

It is essential that Colombians leverage this unique opportunity for peace. For the first time, the FARC finds itself significantly debilitated, forcing them to consider peace negotiations seriously. Paramilitary troops have also been in the process of demobilization through legislation enacted in 2006, allowing for a de-escalation of the armed conflict on all fronts. In the last decade, Colombia experienced economic growth and an increase in foreign direct investment, even as its regional neighbors were experiencing economic downturns due to the end of the recent commodities boom. The Santos administration has sought to improve the country’s international reputation, aiming to position the nation as an emerging force in the region instead of a pariah state. If the immense of funds that were previously spent on the military were instead channeled to the provision of basic services for the majority of the population (Colombia is infamous for the lack of state presence in some regions), the peace dividends that the nation would see could be transformative. The country has never had such a strong incentive to end conflict as it does now, and while transitioning from the wartime mentality that has been the norm for the past half-century will not be easy, it is well worth the effort.

A Nation Deciding its Future Violence is constantly normalized in the lives of Colombians: in the news, the dinner table, and even telenovelas.

It seems at times that being Colombian and living in a state of violence, even if experiencing it from afar, are inextricable. One in six Colombians—nearly 8 million people—have registered with the government as conflict victims over the course of the war.

Despite the normalization of violence, 60 percent of Colombians support the peace process, according to a Gallup poll conducted last November. Considering that the FARC are vilified by large swaths of the population (many of whom would prefer to see the FARC punished instead of re-integrated into society), this approval rating is not to be underestimated. President Santos has made it clear that once the agreements are signed in Cuba, they will be subject to a plebiscite—a democratic mechanism that allows voters to decide on an issue of national importance—in which Colombians will choose if they want to ratify the much contested peace deal. The plebiscite marks an important symbolic step for the people of Colombia, who after having been denied agency for more than a half century, now have the future of the country in their hands. After being victimized and controlled for sixty years, it will be the people themselves who get to decide their future.

The peace process will not satisfy all. The FARC are but one of several armed groups currently operating in the country—and larger structural problems of inequality, state neglect, and citizen security will remain long after the last weapons are laid down. However, the peace accord does what for so long was thought to be impossible: it gives Colombians an opportunity to imagine that a different country is possible and that peace is within sight.

MARIA CAMILA BUSTOS B’16 and NICOLAS MONTANO B’17 are sick of growing up in violence; they just want to eat their arepas in peace.

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“GENTRIFICATION IS BREAKING OUR HEARTS” The Affordable Housing Crisis in Providence

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Roline Burgison has been forced to leave from over ten different houses in South Providence despite never missing a day of rent. A combination of poorly constructed housing, problematic landlords, and most of all, a series of landlord foreclosures has kept her on the move, as was the case with the last house she lived in, on 4080 Public Street.

“My landlord came and got his rent and the next day I get a paper in the mail,” Burgison told me, referring to the house on Public Street. “It was the bank from Boston, telling me that my house was up for foreclosure.”

Burgison, a 53-year-old American woman and mother of four grown men, used to work as a security guard, but now lives on a fixed Social Security income after suffering a severe back injury from a car accident. The average income required to rent a single family apartment in Providence is over $40,000—yet Burgison receives less than $800 a month, which has made it difficult for her to find, in her words, a “reasonable” place in Providence’s South Side.

Despite living on the South Side for 30 years, she recently relocated to Cranston, as it was easier to find a home, though she continues to search for an affordable house in Providence. Since then, the frustrated Burgison has become involved with the Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), a Providencebased organization that seeks to empower low-income families in communities of color and give them a voice in social justice issues. Affordable housing is one of DARE’s primary concerns.

On the morning of February 11 Burgison shared her story as the first speaker in the DARE demonstration against the mayor’s new housing plan, Everyhome. Other protesters crowded behind her outside the mayor’s office on the second floor of the Providence City Hall, holding large cardboard cut-outs of broken hearts. The protest’s name—Gentrification is Breaking Our Hearts—revealed the fears of many middle class and low-income city residents about Everyhome, a heavily subsidized program designed to clear the city of approximately 650 abandoned and neglected houses. The program allows investors and local contractors to renovate and redevelop these houses, which the protestors feared would ultimately lead to the displacement of local residents from their neighborhoods. They felt that Everyhome could and should be used as a means to create affordable housing units.

“I am from Providence and I want to be back here in Providence,” said Burgison. “We love Providence, we don’t want to be pushed out of our homes.”

According to Raymond Neirinckx, coordinator for the State of Rhode Island Housing Resources Commission, the real problem with Everyhome is that it lacks a sense of “vision and purpose” for these properties, aside from simply putting them back on the market.

“The community should not suffer indignity of losing homes and then not get the opportunity to recover them,” Neirinckx told me. “This should be about a community recovery, not a market recovery.”

Although DARE had met with mayor Elorza in early December, the organization feels that its questions about the vision of the program still remain unanswered. The city has not responded to DARE’s most ambitious demand—that 50 percent of the houses to be recovered, or around 300, be set aside for very low-income families.

“Everyhome is specifically targeted to vacant and abandoned homes,” Evan England, the mayor’s press secretary, told me. “It does not require affordable housing, but that city supports that. It is incredibly important, but not necessarily wise to conflate those two priorities.”

Malchus Mills, an African-American with a graying beard and a cane, stepped up as the next speaker after Burgison. A 63-year-old disabled war veteran on a fixed income, Mills, too, has been forced out of the city he would like to call home, and lives in Pawtucket instead. What troubles Mills in particular is the lack of community involvement in the mayor’s housing plan—one of DARE’s main requests is the creation of a community advisory board. According to his press secretary, the mayor rejected this request on the grounds that the court system, which oversees the investors who redevelop the houses, has ultimate authority on that matter and would have to consent. In other words, it’s not his problem.

“How can you say you are helping the community when you’re not talking to us in any way?” Mills thundered. “In conjunction with Valentine’s Day, Mayor Elorza, our love affair with you is over,” He ripped a red heart in half and tossed it on the floor, to the resonant applause of the twenty-five protesters, a mix of students and older folks from across all demographics, many of whom wore red DARE t-shirts.

Concluded Joe Buchanan, 63, the vice president of DARE and the protest’s final speaker: “We’ll be back, five, six days in a row if we have to, Mayor Elorza, because it’s our city hall. We put you in here, we can take you out too.”

The Illusion of Everyhome On the surface, the Everyhome plan sounds great: fix up and resell vacant homes which drag down property values and become hotspots for drugs and urban decay. The logistics of the program, however, remain ominously vague and unclear, at least in the minds of Burgison, DARE, and other local activists. They want answers—Who exactly will be receiving these new houses? Will it be the city’s low-income residents or wealthy outsiders? And what steps will City Hall take to check what could potentially turn into an unregulated free market, with the redeveloped houses being turned over for maximum profit?

Gentrification as Colonization While no one on either side believes that abandoned houses should remain in their present state, members of DARE consider healthy urban development a matter of recognizing the voices of the poor in the redevelopment of their neighborhoods and a prime opportunity to construct much needed affordable housing units alongside market-priced ones. One solution Neirinckx suggests is to have the city work with the Providence Housing Authority to see if residents in public

METRO

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by Jack Brook illustration by Teri Minogue

housing can become homeowners of redeveloped properties, which would free up space in the crowded public housing for other families. But since Everyhome provides no incentives or policies for any such initiative—indeed, affordable housing is explicitly not one of its priorities—this opportunity will likely be lost.

Ironically, Mayor Elorza wrote his thesis at Roger Williams University School of Law, in 2007, on “Absentee Landlords, Rent Control and Healthy Gentrification: A Policy Proposal to Deconcentrate the Poor in Urban America.”

In it, Elorza writes that, “the focus of advocates for the poor should be on intervening at a particular point in the vicious cycle [of gentrification] that will convert it into a virtuous cycle that creates ‘cumulative upward movement’ in the living conditions of the poor.” Which, in a sense, is exactly what DARE is seeking to do—intervene in the process of redeveloping neighborhoods full of abandoned houses and ensure the residents of those neighborhoods have a voice and the chance to live in these redevelopments.

Elorza also writes that many policy interventions do not “address the root causes [of gentrification] as they fail to develop the poor’s capacity to determine their own fate at the local neighborhood level.” Rotondo and Mills emphasize that the advisory board DARE proposes would be a way for the interests of the city to align with those of the communities it is supposedly seeking to help.

“At the end of the day, gentrification is a colonization tactic,” says Christopher Rotondo, an organizer for DARE. “It’s a way to move people out of a space that you now desire. Neighborhoods change all the time and the way they change and why is based on political power.”

This same political power could be harnessed to ensure that much-needed change takes places. It appears that Elorza’s ideas are now being put to test—the only question is whether he and the city will act on them.

The Roots of the Crisis The bitterness and resentment manifest in the DARE protest are rooted in the rising crisis of the affordable housing deficiency in Rhode Island, nowhere more apparent than in Providence. While by law ten percent of Providence’s housing must be set aside as long-term affordable (i.e. for families earning 80 percent or less of the city’s median income), a 2015 housing report by Roger Williams University concluded that this benchmark was woefully insufficient. In 2014, about fifteen percent of houses in Providence were considered affordable housing, but even so, households earning $30,000 or less—about half of those renting—were not able to rent an average-priced 2-bedroom apartment in any Rhode Island city or town.

Even worse, in the last fifteen years, Rhode Island has had the second smallest increase in housing units among all states, and rental vacancies are at a 20-year low. It’s harder than ever for middle and lower class families to find housing, let alone something affordable. And for those who do, the cost of living in a house proves to be a drain on resources—according to the Roger Williams report, 57 percent of Providence renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs. This is well above the national average of 49 percent reported by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Because Providence is already experiencing an affordable-housing crisis, Rotondo believes that Everyhome could exacerbate the situation by serving as a vehicle for gentrification. After an investor is allowed to redevelop a property, the entire dynamic of a neighborhood can change, sending a ripple effect throughout the local community, usually in the form of much higher rents. It is true that in many ways this change can be positive—a cumulative decrease in poverty (ideally by helping increase the well being of the poor, as opposed to simply forcing them out) and an increase in businesses and urban benefits like parks. Moreover, there have been a variety of controversial studies, including one recently released by the California government, which have revealed that development does not necessarily force the majority of residents out of the neighborhood and can correlate with reduced rent prices in the long-term.

But Rotondo says that while redevelopment has many potential benefits,

Feb 19, 2016

what concerns him most is the lack of agency granted to the poor in these neighborhoods. It’s all well and good to seek to eradicate poverty through redevelopment, he adds, but the voices of those who will be affected, for better or worse, should be heard in the process of reshaping the neighborhood.

The Powers That Be There are four abandoned houses in a stretch of two blocks on Greeley Street in South Providence. Two on Tell Street by Federal Hill, another on Mangolia, and more on Ellery—all addresses on a list which the city has provided DARE of Olneyville and South Providence houses slated for redevelopment. These geographically consolidated properties are exactly the sort that, when redeveloped, have the potential to fundamentally alter the landscape of their neighborhoods.

“A lot of these properties are not going to be profitable,” Rotondo told me.

“Part of the idea that’s been floating around is to bulk sell units to national investors.”

The properties would then likely become high-priced single-family homes, as opposed to affordably priced multi-family structures, he adds. There are millions of dollars in various funds in the Everyhome “toolbox”, and all are open to investors regardless of whether the goal of their projects is to produce affordable housing or not. Without proper incentives, why would any profit-minded investor create affordable housing? The subsidies could have been set aside solely to encourage affordable housing, a policy the city failed to mandate.

Abandoned houses are currently redeveloped through a receivership program, in which a court-appointed attorney is paid to raise money to hire contractors and fix up properties before selling. The attorney gets to keep the profits of the sale, along with being paid for his work by the government. The problem, Rotondo says, is that there is no entity outside City Hall that can help oversee the actions of the receivers.

“Who better knows what’s going on in a community than the people who are there everyday?” Mills says. “These are the people who should be involved in the decision.”

It is clear that there is a deep mistrust between many low-income Providence residents and their city government, in no small part due to a profound lack of transparency. Minorities and low-income residents don’t have many reasons to believe that investors and developers have their best interests in mind—for instance, in 2014, Santander Bank was sued by the city of Providence for redlining.

When residents feel they are not able to participate in public policy initiatives or hold the political leadership accountable to their promises, civic relationships inevitably corrode, creating a dangerous division between those with power and those without.

Creating a Witness for the Community Joe Buchanan, 63, rested on the steps of City Hall after the protest. His beige collared shirt poked out from underneath a black one which read, in sparkling blue and red letters, “President of the Streets.” A South Providence resident his whole life, Buchanan has been an advocate for social justice since he was 12-years-old.

“We will fight any fight we need to fight, we’ll take any action we need to take to get done what needs to be done,” Buchanan says, reflecting on the day’s protest and emphasizing each word with a thump of his cane. “He [the Mayor] thinks that all we [DARE] do is rabblerouse, but what we really do is create a witness for our community. We’re not going away, because community doesn’t go away.”

But it very well could, if Everyhome turns out to be create a cycle of harmful gentrification, one in which low-income residents lack agency in the redevelopment of their own neighborhoods.

JACK BROOK B’19 thinks local residents should determine their own fate.

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PROVIDENCE COLLEGE PROTESTS A Local Struggle Against Systemic Racism

by Hannah Maier-Katkin

At 8:30am on Tuesday, February 16, a group of student activists, predominantly students of color, gathered in room 218 of Harkins Hall—the office of the President, Reverend Brian J. Shanley. The students organized this sit-in following an event in November at which between 75 and 100 Providence College students called on their President— referred to within the confines of the private, Roman Catholic college as Father Shanley—to address issues of racism on their campus. At the event, students presented a 10-page list of demands to President Shanley and the administration titled “In Response to Racism and Anti-Blackness at Providence College: Demands for Redress.” These include “an Inclusive Curriculum, Vice President for Inclusion and Diversity, Title VI Coordinator, the establishment of a Center for the Study of the Black Diaspora, and the establishment of a new Multicultural Center in Moore Hall.” The list of demands also called for action by January 11, 2016. On Tuesday, more than a month after this deadline, students staged a peaceful protest in the President Shanley’s office with the intention of sitting in until he signed their demands.

Steve Ahlquist, reporter for RI Future, wrote that this demonstration followed “three semesters of unproductive dialogue filled with political rhetoric and complacency from the President and his administration.” President Shanley has made little effort to meet one-on-one with student organizers to address their complaints. The student organizers identified themselves as The Board of Representatives, according to a post from Marco McWilliams, a racial justice activist in Providence and the director of the Black Studies Program at Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE). He told the Independent he was asked to help with the demonstration by student organizers who he had met when he visited their class last semester. McWilliams reported the developing story live throughout the day on Facebook and Twitter using #PCBreakingTheSilence. The Board of Representatives has not explained the meaning of their name, though McWilliams believes it offers a sense of legitimacy that “challenges traditional power structures,” he told the Independent. +++ One student spoke to the Independent outside of room 218, identifying himself only as a member of the Board of Representatives. In the hallway outside of the President’s office, he explained, “honestly I feel a lot of ostracism...there’s a lot of separation ‘cause there’s a disconnect between the people of color and the white students.” He cited examples of racism on campus including a protest last Friday, February 13, at which “a parent put his hand on a student who was protesting”, another white student reportedly mocked protesters and a white parent returned protesting cheers of “black students matter” with an emphatic “all students matter.” A video of these instances were posted to YouTube by members of the Board of Representatives. Earlier this month, five women of color at Providence College said that they were denied entrance to an off-campus party at which, according to ABC News, “people yelled racial slurs and threw bottles at them.” They reported the incident, and held a rally where other students of color shared similar stories. They called on the administration to take action, but their entreaty fell on deaf ears.

But the sit-in organized by the Board goes beyond individual incidents of racism on campus, and positions them within a greater trend of systemic racism. McWilliams told the Independent “there are some institutional challenges that the school had around the diversification of its curriculum... around culturally relevant material, attendance of students of color...silence from the administration.” This is not the first time that Providence College has been noticed for its lack of ethnic diversity. In 2007, Providence Business News reported that the Princeton Review ranked Providence College as having the most ethnically homogenous student population in the country. The school was also ranked eighth for “little race/class interaction.” Lack of diversity extends beyond the student body. College Factual reported that 88.3% of Providence College faculty is white and only 3.4% of the faculty are

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Black. Their headline for the student life page makes the implications of these figures clear: “One Ethnicity Will Fit Right in at This School. The Rest of Us? Probably Not.” The Board of Representatives isn’t as focused on responding to specific incidents or racist acts on campus. They’re taking on the institution.

A little after 3:00pm, a white man—presumably one of the students involved or at least a supporter—angled a camera on a tripod in the corner of the room and asked those participating in the sit-in to move closer together for the photo, telling them to “look strong.” ABC News reported that afternoon that almost 50 students participated in the event.

Three of the students, willing to put their physical health on the line, committed themselves to a hunger strike to pressure the administration to meet their demands.

Associate Vice President Steven J. Maurano told the Independent that, “Father Shanley simply can’t [sign off on the demands] given [their] broad nature.” Maurano explained that President Shanley was “willing to bring those demands to the faculty to begin that dialogue, but that’s not something that happens overnight...the students, for their part, seem to be impatient.” +++ Protests erupted at universities around the United States last November after students of color at the University of Missouri spoke out to address incidences of racism at their school, leading to the resignation of the university system’s president and the chancellor of Mizzou’s campus. Soon after, students at Yale held a demonstration to hold their own administration accountable for institutional racism after a professor sent an email—weighing in on a campus-wide discussion about culturally insensitive Halloween costumes—in which she wrote: “is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little obnoxious… a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?… Increasingly it seems [American universities] have become places of censure and prohibition.” At Ithaca College, students protested after Black Lives Matter posters were vandalized. The Ithaca Journal also cited an incident dating back to the Spring of 2015 in which a noose was found hanging on campus, invoking imagery of lynch mobs. Similar headlines also appeared at the local level.

Brown University’s main student newspaper, the Brown Daily Herald, issued an apology after consecutively publishing two racist columns, one of which argued that Native Americans should thank Christopher Columbus for the technology and livestock he brought to North America.

The overwhelming thread running through these cases is that universities across the country are not doing enough to support the needs of students of color, whose voices are marginalized at predominantly white institutions. At Providence College, students of color comprise only 16% of the class of 2019. This figure diverges drastically from the ethnic composition of Rhode Island’s capital. The latest US Census, compiled in 2010, puts the number of white people in Providence at 49% while “Black or African American” residents comprise 16% of the population and the “Hispanic or Latino” population was recorded at over 38%. +++ The students protesting in the President’s office at Providence College set the deadline for President Shanley to accept their Demands of Redress at 4:30pm on Tuesday. This was the same deadline that the administration set for the students to end their demonstration. The Associate Vice President Steven Maurano told students that while the police would not “strong-arm” them, they would be expected to leave the building. “We are waiting to see if Providence College security will begin making arrests. The students continue to maintain that they will not leave until the president of the college signs their list of demands,” McWilliams wrote on Facebook.

4:30pm came and went, but those students remained in the office. President Shanley had still not signed their demands.

Pictures and videos posted on Facebook and Twitter

throughout the day revealed images of students scattered throughout the room, some with textbooks on their laps, others sleeping on the ground, working on laptops, or quietly talking with one another. When I was in the room that afternoon between 3:00 and 4:00pm, it was calm and, to an outsider, it even felt relaxed despite the gravity of the demonstration. McWilliam told the Independent that it was a “very comfortable...serious, mature, developed campaign… [the student organizers] knew exactly what they were doing.”

The room was filled with students, and movement in any direction risked tripping over a student or their backpack.

Someone walked in carrying pizza. The administrative assistant at the desk outside of President Shanley’s office searched for something to help one of the protestors clean their hands. Outside of room 218, the halls were silent, empty. +++ Father Shanley signed the demands around 10:00pm on Tuesday, 13 hours after the start of the sit-in. At 1:00am on Wednesday, The Board of Representatives released a statement about their plans moving forward: “We are proud of what we accomplished. We will see how honest [Father Shanley] is in his commitment in 20 days and whether or not we believe his plans are substantive enough.” McWilliams told the Independent that the students are “turning their attention toward follow-through” and “holding the administration accountable.” They have a “series of checkpoints...particular goals and deadlines and dates...going into March.” President Shanley’s signing marked a successful end to Tuesday’s sitin, but it remains to be seen what plan of action he puts forth and what kind of institutional changes students in the Providence College community will experience. But according to McWilliams, the students have made it clear that they’re not resting on their laurels. One student told him: “we’re gonna watch him like a hawk.” +++ Students who spoke with the Independent in PC's Slavin Center student union building, while overwhelmingly supportive, seemed to have little knowledge of both the sit-in on Tuesday or the events preceding it. One student mentioned they had “been getting a lot of emails lately,” and had heard protesting outside of his window but “didn’t really know what it was about.” Another student said she thought it was “great that they’re standing up for something they believe in and I know there’s a lot going on in society right now.”

But the consensus was that the issue of the student-led sit-in was not a large topic of discussion, which is often the case at predominantly white institutions.

The struggle to end institutional racism on college campuses and create diverse environments that better serve students of color and reflect the actual demographics of the United States also involves making other students aware that these problems exist. The shady workings of systemic racism are easily ignored by people whose lives aren’t personally affected by them or who simply aren’t looking for it. The rhetoric of asking students to engage in dialogue seems void when these students have to shout to be heard.

HANNAH MAIER-KATKIN B’18 is listening.

The College Hill Independent

FIGURATIVE ANALYSIS Waxwork and the Laboring Body

by Ryan Rosenberg illustration by Peggy Shi

When a wax figure of Nicki Minaj was unveiled in Las Vegas this past August, fellow rapper Azealia Banks tweeted in defense of Minaj and the figure’s hyper-sexualized pose: “All ppl are gonna do is go up to that statue and take pictures shoving their crotch in her face and putting their crotch on her butt.”

And that’s exactly what happened.

Madame Tussauds brands their figures as interactive.

You can walk up to them, touch them, hug them, take selfies with them. In a Vanity Fair article from last year about a Hollywood wax museum, Devon Maloney wrote that after taking down their “Please Don’t Touch” signs in the 90s, wax museums “have become a tactile, interactive celebrity experience that counteracts our digital lives, in which @-replying Harry Styles a million times has the tendency to estrange one from the real world.” Wax figures possess the power to connect celebrity devotees with their icons in some sort of tactile reality. Tussauds general manager Dalia Goldgor said in an interview with Vanity Fair that the company is thriving: “We’ve been around for over 200 years, and [considering that most] people are not going to ever be able to get this close to celebrities, we’re going to be around that much longer.”

Tussauds parent company, Merlin Entertainments, bought Madame Tussauds in 2007 for $1.9 billion, about half a billion dollars more than its previous owners paid two years prior. According to a 2013 earnings report, the company saw a 12% increase in attendance and a 14% increase in revenue from 2012 to 2013. Even if it’s not the desire to tweet at a member of a boy-band that drives a person to visit a wax museum, a sector of spectators is lured by the inherent campiness and creepiness of the wax bodies. However, the figure of Minaj on all fours is an extreme example of a wax figure that has been imposed by race and gender tropes, whose body is hyper-sexualized and objectified. Minaj’s body becomes a spectacle. The figure evokes Saartjie Baartman, a 19th-century South African woman who was subject to severe racism and sexism, as her body was paraded around Europe in human zoo exhibits. After Baartman’s death a French doctor dissected her body and for over 150 years her brain, skeleton, and genitalia were displayed in the Museum of Man in Paris. The Minaj wax figure has no control. Not only is she held captive, but spectators are allowed to touch her.

Madame Tussauds goes to great lengths to cater to their celebrity subjects. Tussauds sculptors will travel anywhere in the world to meet up with a celebrity at their convenience.

The Dalai Lama’s sitting for his sculpture happened in an airport. A team of Tussauds employees examine the star’s public relations image and aim to reflect this in the replica. “We discuss pose, expression and the image of the figure with the sitter,” their website states. Once the team has arranged their sitter, they take meticulous measurements and photographs from all angles.

How the figure is built is a matter of structural soundness: the materials must support the “pose.” A skeleton is made out of steel and aluminum rods, then bulked up with rolled up newspaper that is held in place with chicken wire.

The Tussauds website states that “aluminum is used for the arms because it is strong and can be moved aside while the body is worked on.” Slabs of clay are then applied to the armature, to create a mold into which wax is poured. An online video shows a herd of technicians hunched over a Lady Gaga head, painstakingly inserting each individual strand of hair, as if chiseling a marble monument.

Today, body-enhancing rhetoric provokes us to reach an ideal state of body and then once reached, maintaining it, never changing. We are encouraged to reach a perfection of

Feb 19, 2016

bodily form and then hold it captive, although we constantly displace that goal. While the enshrinement of the celebrity body by way of wax figure is a flattering PR stunt, it’s also a reminder that to change shape and grow old is to deviate from a static perfection. +++ Tussauds figures, mummified shortly after the time the sculptors take measurements and photos, are forced to stay still.

Yet, real-life Oprah’s weight goes up and down, and real-life Minaj might need to take a break. In contrast with Tussauds figures, Duane Hanson’s sculpture of a delivery man, sitting on top of a metal cart of boxes, clipboard aside, soda in hand, staring blankly at the floor, depicts a man taking a break.

Hanson’s photorealist sculptures reek of authenticity. Hanson

by the rest of us. But we are made to confront the fact that such women, who are usually invisible and ignored, are not just faceless domestics.” Hanson gives people like Queenie a permanent place in our recognition as bodies whose purpose is to clean up the messes thoughtlessly made by other bodies.

In a strange way, the Tussauds sculptors are like Queenie, catering to other, more famous bodies. Hanson may have liked to make a figure of a Tussauds sculptor in the workshop, hunched over a pair of acrylic eyes belonging to wax figure version of Diana Ross.

The poignancy of Queenie is that she can never flee. Hanson’s figures aren’t even able to escape through decay. Another figure, “Man Riding Lawnmower,” is durable enough to survive outside. Although art restorers grappled with how to clean Hanson’s aging male “Janitor,” they were able to lightly vacuum off dust. While doing so, they discovered that his clothes were stuck to his body and could never be removed.

They were also able to replace his broken watch. The only watch that they could find that resembled the original was operable and automatic, meaning it didn’t run on batteries, but needed to be wound. Temporality is warped for Hanson’s figures—they have checked out of real time. +++

worships change and fluctuation of bodies by blatantly acknowledging that his people are stuck, unable to change or move—and that is their great tragedy. Hanson said of his work, “I show the empty-headedness, the fatigue, the aging, the frustration. These people can’t keep up with the competition. They’re left out, psychologically handicapped.” Hanson is concerned with real societal problems that are decaying real people. His frozen figures mirror this relationship.

Duane Hanson started making his figures in 1967, creating body molds from live models, often just people he spotted on the streets. They are modernist embodiments of alienation and loneliness: security guards, homeless people, workers on scaffolding painting someone else’s house. Their stares are solemn, and if they are in pairs or packs they never interact. One pair’s eyes are drawn to a game of Connect Four, while a group of construction workers all face different directions. Hanson, who passed away in 1996, was fixated on the body’s pose. His figures are sometimes strangely crouched, or mid-step, or shifting their weight to one leg. Their positioning is the anti-pose, and one almost expects them to snap out of their momentary pause. An article from a 1999 USA Today states that “perhaps the ultimate paradox of Hanson’s realism is that his lifelike figures seem incapable of escaping their situations.” One of his figures, “Queenie II,” depicts a heavy-set, uniformed female janitor pushing, or rather, resting upon a plastic trash can, blankly staring out. The Saatchi Gallery’s website describes Queenie as being “understood on one level as the personification of all those resigned-looking women who drag their bodies around in pursuit of the mess created

In a day and age where we sculpt the form of our bodies by exercising and by means of beauty techniques—such as a non-surgical fat reduction treatment called “CoolSculpting” and Hi-Def Liposculpture that creates six-packs—Hanson’s reverence for the flawed, or the non-belabored human form, is enlivening. Bruce Katsiff, the director of the James A. Michener Art Museum in Pennsylvania, writes that since the days of Ancient Greece, sculptors have been fixated on presenting a human form that possesses an idealized physique, while in comparison “our own meager bodies, with their blemishes, sagging flesh, and countless other imperfections, seem frail and disfigured[.] Duane Hanson’s sculptures violate this tradition.”

Hanson’s figures have subtle finger hairs, hangnails, bruises, and varicose veins. Growth has occurred, nails have been bitten, veins ache with a pulse, and yet, the Janitor can’t move to make time start on his watch. The Janitor has stopped because he can no longer move. Hanson tells him that that’s OK, there’s no pressure to move, you’ve given enough. No one tells the Minaj wax figure that it’s OK to break her pose, and that if she wants to, maybe she should jab the museum visitor who is groping her hips against his with her stiletto in order to escape from captivity and re-gain her humanity. The Janitor is in an interim state and his catastrophe is that the demands of surrounding bodies have tired him so. He looks like he might move. In fact, we expect him to move, and yet finally, it has all caught up with him.

RYAN ROSENBERG B’17 is starting to wane.

METABOLICS

08

BEAR WITH ME

Salvation, Sobriety, and Salmon in the Alaskan Bush

Tick, tick, tick went the wristwatch found by Willy Fulton.

This is not a story about Willy Fulton, or the wristwatch, either. Part of it is about the owner of the wristwatch, a recovering drug addict from Long Island who had long ago dropped out of college to attain the familiar, and familiarly unattainable, Hollywood dream. And part of the story is about how he failed to make that dream a reality, and instead arrived at stardom in the more roundabout way: sprinting naked along the Alaskan riversides to ward off the floatplanes, which Willy Fulton often flew.

More than anything else, though, this is a love story.

It was mid-autumn of 2003. The ice hadn’t yet reached Hallo Bay, nestled across from Kodiak Island on Alaska’s southeastern coast. But it wouldn’t be long. The mass exodus of migrating things was tapering off to a last-minute few, no more blankets of wings rustling over the whole sky.

Whatever stayed behind would slide into the long sleep that mimics dying, like the little brown bat in its little snug spaces, and the arctic ground squirrel burrowed three feet deep, and the bears.

It was hard to believe that months earlier, the backdrop to this scene was a green so loud as to silence all else, and so big that that’s what people called it: the Big Green. A solid if uncreative choice, as well as a unique honor—it is just one savannah on the Wales-sized expanse of Katmai National Park, where it is impressive to be named at all; many of the mountains have been given no such distinction. Why go through the trouble, and for whom?

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The wristwatch, still running, eventually made its way into the hands of a woman named Jewel. “Oh, wow,” she said. She fastened the gift around her wrist and admired its refractions of light. Tick, tick, tick. It shone clean as a bone.

There are the stories that begin at beginnings because they might as well, and there are the stories that begin at their chronological endings because we don’t know how else to tell them. Even David Letterman saw it coming a mile away. On his show, the crowd went wild.

If this story didn’t have to begin at the end, those who retold it could weave in suspense like a string pulled taut. They could pluck it like a chord.

Everyone loves a great underdog story. Would the owner of the wristwatch prove the experts and the Lettermans and the roaring crowds wrong?

Would he succeed in communicating to the world his vision of empathy for creatures great and formidable and small?

No. He wouldn’t. Because in the end, Timothy Treadwell was eaten by a bear. His girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, was, too. Some say Timothy was a crackpot, and that all the proof you need for this lies in his camcorder, which got switched on during the attack. The lens cap concealed everything there was to see, but the audio captured everything there was to hear, clear as bells. The camcorder—and the 100 hours’ worth of footage from the past five years, all reeling toward what everybody could now agree had always been the inevitable end—was one of the only things left.

That, and Timothy’s right arm. On it, a wristwatch.

Tick, tick, tick.

The College Hill Independent

by Emma Jean Holley illustration by Lynnette Munoz +++ In his 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog crafted what might be the most provocative (and, it follows, bestknown) retelling of the Timothy Treadwell story. Much of the work was already done for him by Timothy himself, whose amateur video footage shared his remote little pocket of the Alaska Peninsula with the world.

From this rich primary source, Herzog stitches together a narrative as only he can—that is, through an intractably grim and psychologizing lens—but it’s not as though Timothy himself was blind to the human soul’s capacity for darkness. At one point, his addiction to heroin had progressed to the point where, in his own words, “I was either gonna die from it or break from it.” He tried programs, and promises, and quitting cold turkey. Nothing took. He’d drink and drink. He was shooting up pretty regularly, too. He overdosed once, almost died. Another time, on acid, he jumped headfirst from three floors up, miraculously saved by the soft mud underneath, which preserved a mold of his face when he pulled it out.

Some time after his overdose, a friend convinced him to travel to Alaska, where he saw a wild bear for the first time. With the encounter came a revelation. He uses this word, “revelation,” about the contract he wordlessly drew for his soul: “I promised the bears that if I would look over them, would they please help me be a better person? They became so inspirational…that I did. I gave up the drinking. It was a miracle.”

This is why he would never kill a bear, never hate a bear, and never, ever cause one any discomfort or pain—even just with bear spray, even at the expense of his own life. How could he? He owed them this life; they had given it back to him, and they could take it again if they pleased.

And so there is another way of telling the story. +++ For life on the Alaskan riverbeds, everything goes back to the sockeye salmon. And every sockeye salmon lives to go back home.

The salmon’s story begins, like Timothy Treadwell’s, with death—in this case, the death of its parents, who promptly die as soon as they are parents at all. This exchange of life for death is called “spawning,” and it occurs between summer’s end and winter’s beginning. (Up in bear country, there is not much in-between.) To be spawned is to develop invisibly, in the gravelly underbellies of certain rivers where the water under the ice flows freely. As a hatchling, the sockeye wriggles its way into the quiet solitude of lakes, then the open sea, where it waits for the call to come, carried on falling water and salted waves. The call can only be answered by yielding to a tug more powerful than physical laws—that of sexual instinct on a massive scale. Each summer, up to a million sockeye migrate out of Alaska’s Bristol Bay, up and inland, back to whichever little freshwater stopover aerated them through that first winter. Mating takes place. Afterwards, the female sockeye salmon spawns her eggs, called roe, then dies of exhaustion.

Sometimes, salmon heave upstream in such thick droves that when they leap out of the water, as they periodically do, it looks like raindrops in reverse. The bears don’t even have to hunt; they just open their great jaws over the river and wait. These are the years they grow torpid and happy.

They get fat.

Then there are the shortages, brought on by overfishing, ecosystem disturbances, or long droughts that dry up the riverbeds and leave the salmon gasping and rotting under the summer sun. These are the times when the bears get tense and mean, their tastes less finicky by the day, their shoulder blades beakier. When things get so bad they have no qualms about turning to cannibalism. This occurrence distressed Timothy Treadwell to no end. During one of these droughts, he went off on one of his on-camera tantrums.

“We need more rain!” he cries over and over. “Downey is hungry, Tabitha’s hungry, Melissa is eating her babies! I’m like a fucking nut. We’ve got to have some rain! I’m not a religious guy, no, but I’m telling you, I’m just pissed, because—” he pauses, near tears, struggling to articulate why the situation feels like such a betrayal.

“It just doesn’t seem right” is the phrase he ends up using. He repeats it, for good measure. “It just doesn’t seem right.”

Much of this violence came at the claws of the Big Red Machine, who lorded over the Grizzly Maze like a despot drunk with power. Even Timothy, who normally saw this kind of bear as a special challenge, a chance to hone his ursine networking skills, had the prudence to back off. “I would love to be his friend,” he mourned, having retreated to the far corner of the Maze, “but he’s not that type of bear. [He’s] from the old days, the old days of when bears came here and the sight, the smell of a person meant poacher, meant death.”

But Machine ran the Maze on borrowed time. Late one summer, when the salmon started running dry, a new bear came snarling into the thicket. Timothy called this new bear Demon. Demon wasn’t big—or at least, not nearly as big as the Machine—but he was trouble. He attacked with relentless ferocity, and he never lost a fight. When the inevitable standoff came between Demon and the Machine, the Machine was more surprised than anyone at how easily he was toppled from the lofty parapet

Feb 19, 2016

he’d occupied with such impunity. Demon didn’t let up until he drove the Machine into exile.

There are some bears, as there are people, who are complicated to love.

With Downey, who’d known Timothy since the spring she was born, it was simple. She was seven that summer—a sweet, fat, affectionate little lady who found great fun in flopping. She’d flop in and out of the river, ungainly as you please. She would actively seek Timothy out, plodding all hang-dogged over the knolls until she spotted his bright blonde head. Once she found him, she’d flop down beside him and loll about, potbellied and unafraid, content to bask in his blown kisses and his coos. “Like she was my own sister,” said Timothy, to us. To Downey: “You are the most beautiful thing.” To us again: “I will care for her. I will live for her. I will die for her.”

Overcome, he cries a little. +++ That last summer, near the end of August, everyone was getting hungry and the hierarchy was in shambles. The tension between the bears grew taut and feverish, all of them stalking each other, hairs bristled, teeth bared. In his journal, Timothy wrote: “I felt a great deal of paranoia, and rightfully so…

The chemistry between the bears was explosive.” Fights erupted. Downey, frightened, would scamper off to find Timothy, visibly soothed by his presence. But he and Amie were slated to leave at the end of September, when the weather and the hunger got harsh. They hoped she would be okay.

In the end, it was Downey that did them in—or, at least, their soft spot for her. On their last day in Katmai, they looked for her but could not find her. They fretted. What if she went to pay them a visit, and wondered where they’d gone? What if she’d gotten hungry and reckless, and ventured down to catch a few stray fish where Demon paced low-down grooves along the riverbank, bloody foam speckled on his chin?

Timothy and Amie were in the airport, all set to board the plane back to Malibu, when they decided they couldn’t do it. Not yet. The weather was calling for buckets of rain, and rain meant a fat, swollen river that would usher in one last salmon run of the season. Why not go back, they reasoned.

Just to make sure everyone’s okay. Just to say goodbye. According to several accounts, it was her idea as much as his. So they called up their friend Willy Fulton, who flew them back, full of doubts. He would have hung up the phone on anyone else who’d asked him to enable such an idiotic undertaking, but he’d flown Timothy for all these years and it had always been okay before, hadn’t it?

When Timothy and Amie splashed back to shore, it was a kind of homecoming; they were relieved to spot Downey right away, flopping about in the river and overjoyed to see her friends. They spent a lovely, golden crop of days there before it was time to leave again, for real this time.

They were in the tent, packing, when a bear started bumping up against the tarpaulin. He wouldn’t scram. Timothy unzipped the tent and stepped out, intending to shoo him away.

It’s hard to know if, in that moment, Timothy recognized who he was facing; marginalization had changed the Machine, and not kindly. His formerly massive body had transformed into one that was shrunken and skeletal, sharp of rib and slack of jaw. His fur was mangy. How the mighty had fallen—the Big Red Machine, once the undisputed king of the Grizzly Maze, was starving to death.

But that night, he feasted.

When Willy Fulton flew the park rangers into the Maze, the salmon run was long dry. He marveled at what had remained unscathed.

Tick, tick, tick.

EMMA JEAN HOLLEY B’16 is not Werner Herzog.

FEATURES

10

MINDFUL BODIES

by Madeleine Matsui Illustration by Iris Lei

Bringing Mindfulness to PVD Schools

Find your mindful body. Find an anchor for your breath. Close your eyes. These are the instructions that Shannon Smith, a mindfulness instructor at the Providencebased non-profit ResilientKids, uttered to a classroom full of five-year-olds at William D’Abate Elementary School in Olneyville. I accompanied her to a mindfulness training class on a gray Thursday afternoon. Smith worked as an elementary school teacher for seventeen years, but switched to part-time mindfulness instruction two years ago. She teaches this group of kindergarteners at William D’Abate twice a week, for 20 minutes each. Smith is warm, amiable and optimistic. She exudes a confident serenity and genuine passion for her work. In total, she works at five schools and 15 classrooms with kids between kindergarten and fifth grade. “It’s pretty powerful when you see kids connecting to [mindfulness lessons],” said Smith.

Mindfulness is not new. Despite all the hype around mindfulness in recent years, it has roots in Buddhist religion and philosophy, in which mindfulness is considered an important stepping-stone on the path to enlightenment. Mindfulness can be defined as any of the following: attention, focus, presence, or awareness. Mindfulness can also be defined by what it is not: distractedness, disengagement, inattention. In an age of heightened distraction, more people are turning to mindfulness training—often practiced in conjunction with meditation—to regain focus and exercise being fully in the moment. +++ Vanessa Weiner is the founder of ResilientKids, which aims to use mindfulness curricula and training to enhance the social, emotional, and academic growth of young people. Weiner first discovered mindfulness while training for the Olympics as a young girl. As a mother, she started practicing meditation with her own children, subsequently realizing the huge demand and potential for mindfulness training more broadly. “I needed these tools for my own kids who weren’t really getting this in their school. I was inspired to offer some classes on an after-school basis so that my kids could participate,” said Weiner, “but ultimately there was a tremendous need. With so many kids signing up, it showed me that it wasn’t just my kids who needed these tools.” The “need” Weiner refers to can be supported by the fact that, according to the Rhode Island Department of Education, more than one-third of all public schools in Rhode Island’s core cities that serve the highest proportion of low-income children have been identified for intervention due to poor academic performance. Moreover, the Rhode Island Department of Health reported that in 2009, high school students who received a D or F grade faced greatly increased health risks such as suicide, drugs, alcohol, obesity and depression. Studies have shown mindfulness meditation as leading to significant improvements in anxiety, academic performance and enhanced social skills. Beginning in 2009, Weiner was the first person in Rhode Island to formally integrate a curriculum-based approach to social and emotional learning through

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mindfulness practice within the school day. ResilientKids was founded in 2011 and hasn’t stopped growing since. To date, ResilientKids has worked with over 5,000 school-aged children in Rhode Island.

More and more schools are applying to get ResilientKids into their classrooms. At first, ResilientKids sought out schools, but now, schools seek them out. ResilientKids is also expanding into neighboring Massachusetts. With nine employees—eight part-time instructors and the founder—the biggest issue to expansion is the logistics of making sure the organization’s limited staff can devote adequate time to students and classrooms. The programs are structured to be weekly and year-long, since the most successful programs have been those with regular, long-term contact between the instructor and students. To support their school-based operations further, ResilientKids is now in the process of a rebranding initiative to offer private workshops and training for paying adults. ResilientKids is branching out into community and workplace, seeking to grow their presence and cultivate more funding for school-based initiatives. Because Rhode Island public schools have insufficient funds to finance classes with ResilientKids, 90-95% of funding for classes comes from private donations, fundraises and grants. Schools themselves make a small monetary contribution depending on their ability to pay. Currently, there is a graduated imbursement system in place whereby more affluent schools pay a higher price for mindfulness training, and low-income schools pay significantly less. +++ Smith and I entered a classroom filled with twenty giddy kindergarteners for whom this was their first experience in school. Most of the five year olds were ESL students from Spanish-speaking homes. On the walls of the classroom hung posters featuring photographs from the famous Civil Rights march from Selma to Montgomery and a portrait of Ma-to-toh-pe, a chief from the Native American Mandan tribe. The whiteboard read: “Bienvenido a la calle de la lectura! Como vivimos trabajamos y jugamos juntos?” And in English: We live together, we play together.” Underneath were new vocabulary words: armar, fragiles, grua, inventor, redondo, taller. Upon entering the room, the kids, seated on a square blue carpet cried: “Miss Shannon! Miss Shannon!” In a stern voice, their teacher Miss Suarez commanded the children to stay calm and quiet: “Cálmate, cálmate.”

Each session is structured to include breathing and movement exercises, followed by a lesson incorporating mindfulness and social and emotional learning. Social and emotional learning is the process by which people acquire skills to manage their emotions, express empathy, cultivate positive relationships, and create and pursue positive goals. After some brief stretching and deep breathing exercises, Miss Shannon instructed the kids to sit in a big circle on the carpet. She took out a small, gold bell.

The College Hill Independent

The exercise was to pass around the bell without making any noise. One by one, the kids stood up slowly, walking carefully with the bell in their hands. Behind the simple task was a more complex lesson: to expose the kids to relationship skills and building community, and the impact an individual can have on the group. Amazingly, the kids were for the most part fully engaged and remained focused on the task at hand. I was incredulous that among this group of five year olds, there was no fidgeting, fighting or talking.

The evidence for the efficacy of mindfulness is not just visible in the classroom but is also backed up by scientific studies showing changes in the brain and better health. This month, Carnegie Mellon University published new research in Biological Psychiatry showing brain changes that result from mindfulness meditation training.

The study followed 35 job-seeking, stressed adults who either underwent an intensive three-day mindfulness meditation retreat program or a relaxation retreat program without the mindfulness component. Brain scans from the study showed that participants who underwent mindfulness meditation training experienced improvements in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for attention and executive control. Those who participated in the relaxation retreat program did not show similar improvements. The potential of mindfulness meditation training to help adults manage stress is evidenced in changes in the participants’ brain functional connectivity and lower inflammation levels related to stress.

The results substantiate ResilientKids’ core mission, methods, and success.

“Mindfulness can really empower students to self-regulate, stay focused, to find their own daily source of happiness and gratitude, and to maintain deeper connections with others around them. To empower kids with those tools is different from them passively taking part in some other therapies that are out there,” said Weiner. By teaching children of all ages to better manage anxiety and reduce toxic stress, develop concentration, self-awareness and compassion, ResilientKids prepares children for stresses inside and outside the classroom and enhances their overall learning experience. Despite growing enthusiasm for mindfulness, some psychiatrists have warned that it can have disturbing side-effects. Experts on mindfulness say that in rare cases, certain people can react badly to mindfulness. When potentially vulnerable individuals—such as those suffering from mental illness, depression and anxiety— are not in a stable place to undergo mindfulness training, some can emerge with increased self-criticism and feelings of failure. Ed Halliwell, a mindfulness instructor in London, said: “You can sometimes get the impression from the enthusiasm that is being shown about it helping with depression and anxiety that mindfulness is a magic pill you can apply without effort…It is not like that at all. You are working with the heart of your experiences, learning to turn towards them, and that is difficult and can be uncomfortable.” There is also the issue of under-qualified and poorly trained teachers posing as experts on mindfulness. Oxford University’s mindfulness center clinical leader Marie Johansson advises that instructors receive at least one year of training in order to be able to safely work with practitioners. Psychiatrists caution that mindfulness instructors must understand the fundamental aspects of mental issues and to know when to refer people to be seen by specialists. +++ At the outset, ResilientKids worked primarily with children in public and charter schools in low-income areas in the greater Providence area. Some of the challenges these children face include violence, poverty, housing, with some living in high crime neighborhoods. Since then, ResilientKids has expanded their operations to include a wide variety of schools. These children face a different set of stresses: academic performance, testing pressure or high expectations from parents. “Each generation faces its unique challenges. Kids these days are experiencing something well beyond I did growing up—social media and technology in particular are a whole area of social pressure kids everywhere are experiencing,” said Mark Allard, another ResilientKids board member. Despite the children’s range in backgrounds and everyday stressors, mindfulness training can contribute to mitigating the effects of all these stresses. Allard himself participated in a mindfulness program designed to expose adults to various forms of mindfulness and meditation, run by Brown University Professor Willoughby Britton in the summer of 2015. Now a regular practitioner of mindfulness and meditation, Allard touts its incredible healing effects for a myriad of maladies.

Mindfulness can be an extremely powerful tool even for those who unwittingly practice it but don’t know it by its name. Jim Scanlan, a ResilientKids board member, unknowingly practiced mindfulness throughout his childhood. A Rhode Island native, Scanlan is a sex-abuse survivor. He was portrayed recently in the movie Spotlight—a film that portrays the Boston Globe Spotlight Team’s Pulitzer-Prize winning investigation of the Catholic Church’s systematic concealment of sexual abuse by its clergy in 2002—as “Kevin from Providence.” Despite his alias in the film, the sexual abuse he suffered while at Boston College High School in the late 1970s is completely true to life. “Because of what I went through and knowing what kids can go through in difficult times—that’s why I fell in love with [ResilientKids] and why I support it so much. I happen to be one of the fortunate ones, for whatever reason. I didn’t have formal training in mindfulness but I knew the power of it and I knew what I did in terms of separating things,” Scanlan said. By “separating things,” Scanlan means compartmentalizing: for three years while in high school, he was able to successfully put aside the “one slice of real evil” in his life. “I stayed at my high school, I stayed on my team with [the perpetrator] as a coach because I didn’t want him taking other parts of my life—the things I loved. And I was able to separate, to have a positive look on things even though I spent the next three years with him around me. At the end of the day I didn’t realize I was practicing my own form of mindfulness,” said Scanlan. Today, Scanlan helps ResilientKids fundraise and spread awareness about its activities.

At the end of the twenty minute long session led by Miss Shannon, a remarkable calm had fallen in the classroom. It was a brief and rare respite from the usually energized and occasionally frenzied behavior typical of children their age. Miss Shannon asked: “What’s that place that we can go to inside?” One student answered in a soft but assured voice: “Our secret spot, our quiet place.”

MADELINE MATSUI B’17 is mindful of mindfulness.

Feb 19, 2016

METRO

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HUMBLE ABODES

In Conversation with Charles Simonds

by Maya Sorabjee In his 1976 fictive ethnographyThree Peoples, New York-based sculptor Charles Simonds imagined the building practices of three civilizations governed by different relationships to time. The first built their homes in a straight line, never to return to their own pasts. The second built in a single circle, condemned to constant retrospection. The third built an everascending spiral, aspiring “towards an ecstatic death.”

For 45 years, Simonds has been working with the notion of place. His oeuvre is varied in method and medium, from in situ to freestanding sculptures, conceptual narratives to filmed performance. His experiments attempt to situate the body in the physical landscape, to discover the landscape within the body, to dream up alternative, often fantastical, ways of living and interacting with the world. The artist tends to prefer a direct engagement with the (often urban) environment, seeking a connection to earth that is lost in the sterile walls of the art gallery. Simonds fiddles with proportion: his 1976 memorial design for urban planner Stanley Tankel took two unfinished high-rises in Queens and proposed to wrap the giant cement skeletons in wisteria. On a less monumental scale, his Dwellings is a career-spanning series of miniscule architectures embedded into crevices and walls in cities around the world.

Simonds constructs these sculpted ruins for his imaginary Little People by meticulously layering tiny clay bricks into abodes specific to each invisible civilization.

Simonds’ work oscillates between site-specificity and pure abstraction; he too, lives between the universe of his own fictions and the terrains that inspired them. Following a recent lecture at Brown, the College Hill Independent spoke with the sculptor about some of his projects. In our conversation, his replies disclosed an enchanting self-awareness, an ease afforded by the rare ability to assemble the worlds of the mind and dwell among them.

The College Hill Independent: Your work with Dwellings stems from mythology and fiction, and the dwellings themselves are very personal, but the first thing that strikes me are the ideas they embody—of migration, settlement, ruins—and I can’t help but think about all the political issues that surround settlements today, especially with the refugee crisis and the destruction of so many archaeological sites in Syria and Iraq. So I was wondering whether the things that are happening today make you re-read your past work?

Charles Simonds: My past works or my works’ pasts? It’s a lot about displacement and lost pasts. So yes, it does; I’m pretty boring in the sense that I’m constantly thinking about my work and what it was and is.

The Indy: That’s not boring!

CS: I mean I’m boring to myself! (laughs) In other words, the more I go on, the more I try to think about what I have done and what I’m doing. I’ve had maybe three different moments with disenfranchised groups—the Lower East Side, Turkish people in Berlin in Kreuzberg, Tunisians and North Africans in Paris and Belgium. And whatever it is—and I don’t think it’s by choice—I just chose to work in neighborhoods that had a lot of broken walls. Certainly I’ve found that my connection to those groups and their responses to what I do has

defined a lot of the things that I think about. For instance— proverbially—a North African seeing one of the Dwellings in Paris would say “Oh, that looks like Morocco,” and a Turkish person would say “Well, that looks like Anatolia,” and an American thinks it’s American Indian and they all throw it into their pasts in some wishful and poignant way. I think that’s part of what it’s about, there’s a kind of forgotten past, or hoped-for past, needing to be recaptured; which speaks towards disenfranchisement and speaks towards dislocation and speaks towards transience, all these different things.

Certainly, I think this project in Munich that I’ve recently proposed, of taking three or five neighborhoods and having them self-identify, is similar to my project in the German department store [part of the Kunst als soziale Strategie exhibition at the Bonner Kunstverein, 1978]. And all these groups then would have the chance to interact with each other, because Munich has many different groups of people. I happened to arrive the same day as the first refugees, and I’m sure that’s why they chose my proposal. But in a certain way, that’s taught me a lot about something about my work, that it has a kind of poignancy; I think there’s a kind of tristesse, of something lost.

The Indy: Given what you consider to be the limitations of the art world, your choice to work within the built fabric of cities allows you to renounce authorship, and I think that gives the work its mythical quality. But it raises the question of who gets to own the works—is it the people who come and watch you or try to take the dwellings? Is it the city itself that owns these things?

CS: Yes, it’s so valuable, to be a non-player, to be a harbinger.

And I think people’s memories own them, I think that’s where it resides. I think it resides in a collective memory.

The Indy: Your 1972 Floating Cities [a project comprising small painted basswood models depicting elements of a built environment (factories, houses, windmills) that can be arranged into an adaptable metropolis-at-sea], is very different from Dwellings in that it is more critical and hypothetical.

CS: Basically, they share some conceptual levels. Actually, I can tell you exactly—a lot of my work has to do with mixed metaphors of plants and growth. The floating cities are actually the hinge for them; they’re analyses of simple organisms and specialization, so as organisms start to evolve and develop specialization in themselves, it’s a corollary. So it’s more a reflection of growth and life forms as an architectural hinge.

The Indy: And it seems like the way they could be reorganized, it speaks to the audience again and allows them to apply their own meanings to the city. But you made the modules that were to be rearranged, so how did you decide on which elements of the city to include?

CS: It’s meant as a caricature of modern architecture. Each one is a send-up of a modern building or a Mies building— they’re all completely tongue-in-cheek—nobody knows that, but they’re all little jokes! That’s the only way I could keep myself amused. So it has garden apartments, suburbia, farms.

Feb 19, 2016

I make endless configurations and then I photograph them, endless little kinds of cities.

The Indy: Did you make Floating Cities in reaction to something?

CS: It comes from having worked a lot in a neighborhood on the Lower East Side, with community work, and we were always fighting the city to get control of certain buildings, block development, have some leverage, and so on. And so we would have these battles all the time and finally I thought, it would be so much…the idea came from feeling, kind of, how do I escape this? Floating Cities was like having property without location, so you could just go wherever you wanted to go.

Actually, the idea is kind of analogous to the specialization of cells. So for instance, factories were like digestive systems and stuff like that.

I had thought of the idea and then nothing was happening—I didn’t have a barge or anything. But then I saw in the newspaper there was a guy in Germany who was building—you know, shipbuilding is episodic, like real estate—and so there was a big slump in shipbuilding, and so instead of building ships, he was building floating factories in Japan that he would float to Brazil, paper processing plants, and install them and they would do their business and so on. Because it was cheaper to build in a high technology place. And so I thought, well, these are going to be floating cities and they’re going to go all around the world and steal all the business.

The Indy: So was it ever intended to go beyond this scale?

CS: Well it’s an idea, it’s a poetic thing, but you know now they have seasteading—there’s a whole movement where they’re trying to do this. But at that time I didn’t think of it as a—like my imaginary world, it’s a kind of a tool to look at how things are. I think they’re all like warped mirrors towards what is. It’s a lens.

The Indy: Much of your work relates the body to earth to dwelling to land, and I was wondering if, over the course of your career, you’ve seen the connection between the body and the built environment become more tenuous.

CS: I’ve never thought about it, but some issues of scale have changed. I live across from two buildings that were built in my neighborhood on my block in the past ten years that are nearly as tall as the Empire State Building, and they’re just apartment buildings—so like, castles in the sky from Mr. Murdoch and so on—and there’s something about the scale and the remove. I always think of them as medieval castles and the workers come from Queens to service the lords at the tops of the buildings. So that’s the metaphor for me—it’s as if things are going backwards. And you know, I worked for so long in a very intimate neighborhood where everybody knew everybody. The Lower East Side at that time, people knew who was who and who was bad and who was good and who was doing drugs, and you know, even though I know everybody on my block, so to speak, since I’ve lived there around 35 years, it’s very different. So the village thing, it’s not in New York.

INTERVIEWS

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Note s o n

M OM BOO KS

Elena Ferrante’s Visual Aesthetics When I was in high school, I worked in a small bookstore in Virginia. I mostly helped out, shelving books and making displays in the storefront windows. The common in-store metric of a book’s worth as a display object—most of my coworkers were men—was whether or not it was a “mom book.” This taxonomy had very little to do with the content of a novel, and almost everything to do with how it would look as a display: a mom book might have a frilly serifed typeface spelling out its title; a saccharine photograph of something like a swing set or a naked woman’s back; the (most often female) author’s name written in relatively small text, at least compared to the blocky shouts of JONATHAN FRANZEN or ZADIE SMITH printed across the jackets of better-selling, more serious literary fiction; and—the ultimate marker of a mom book—an “Oprah’s Book Club” sticker plastered over the front.

Mom books aren’t just for moms. Book club books, chick lit, beach reads: we have a lot of gendered language to dismiss emotional fiction about domestic experiences, from the best Isabel Allende and Marilynne Robinson novels to the factory-fiction of Danielle Steel and the like. At a point when the majority of contemporary fiction readers are women, there is still critical (if not commercial) pressure to keep literary fiction packaged such that it appears separate from the soap-opera territory of typical “women’s fiction”: works that grapple with the day-to-day experiences of (usually white, heterosexual, cisgender) women. +++ When she was in high school, Elena, the narrator and protagonist of Elena Ferrante’s celebrated Neapolitan novels, worked in a small bookstore in Naples. The bookstore functions as a kind of narrative springboard: Elena’s place of employment between her last years of high school and her first year at university, the bookstore is a bridge between Elena’s childhood in a poor mercantile neighborhood and her life beyond Naples as a woman of letters.

Even before Elena’s bookstore job, the book-as-object is central to the diegesis of the Neapolitan novels, as well as to their critical reception. The four novels (which were written under a pen name—Ferrante’s identity remains unknown) trace an intense, decades-long friendship between Elena and her friend Lila, beginning with their early childhoods as schoolgirls in Naples. Their friendship is marked by intense spurts of rivalry, jealousy, and competition for power within their intimate two-person hierarchy. Early on in the first novel, My Brilliant Friend, this rivalry is established when Lila writes a small book, entitled The Blue Fairy. It has a careful pastel drawing on its cover and stands in for Lila’s seemingly inherent brilliance in school, her easy abilities against which Elena is constantly comparing herself.

The book, authored by a fourth-grade Lila, becomes a lifelong obsession for Elena, even as she surpasses Lila academically—going on to middle and high school after Lila drops out at the end of elementary school—and eventually as she leaves Naples for university in Pisa. In the second Neapolitan book, The Story of a New Name, Lila enters an unhappy marriage and stays in Naples while Elena writes a novel, which becomes a minor bestseller among Italy’s literary elite. Still, she writes, having found the old hand-bound copy of The Blue Fairy: “How I had loved the cover colored with pastels, the beautifully drawn letters of the title: at the time I had considered it a real book and had been envious of it…. I began to read The Blue Fairy from the beginning, racing over the pale ink, the handwriting so similar to mine of that time. But already at the first page I began to feel sick to my stomach and soon I was covered in sweat. Only at the end, however, did I admit what I had understood after a few lines. Lila’s childish pages were the secret heart of my book.” This is the overarching relationship between Lila and Elena, which gets at something native to many intense friendships between women: through their competition, the two women define each other, setting the terms of each other’s various successes and unhappinesses. +++ The final Neapolitan novel, titled The Story of the Lost Child, came out this past September, wrapping up the two friends’ story of mutual influence. The book’s release provoked an enormous escalation of attention among U.S. audiences; in a phenomenon coined “Ferrante fever,” the buildup to the final book’s release was something between that of a new Knausgaard and a new Harry Potter, culminating in midnight release parties at many bookstores. Amidst a wave of virtually unchecked acclaim for the novels, criticisms of the books’ covers operated as a singular interruption of near-universal praise. Described as “awful,” “comically ditzy,” and “reminiscent of vintage tampon ads,” the books’ covers make them almost embarrassing to read in public: all four books are bound in pastel-toned images of painfully kitschy scenes—a wedding, a beachside embrace, a woman holding a baby. The cover of the The Story of the Lost Child depicts two young girls on a beach, each

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wearing fairy wings. The type is serifed and precious, and, unsurprisingly, Ferrante’s name is written in daintily small print. The Neapolitan novels appear, in short, to be the ultimate mom books, proclaiming their girlish frivolity from bookstore shelves even before a browsing customer might know that they tell the story of a decades-long female friendship.

But here’s the thing about the books: they are just about as Serious and Literary as any Serious Literary Fiction published in the last decade has been. Elena and Lila’s friendship, spanning from the 1940s until the present, is set against a detailed portrait of Italy’s changing intellectual left, which plays an increasingly prominent role as the books move forward in time. Elena, at university, reads the Greeks, reads Trotsky, reads Hegel. She is exposed to communist Italian youth movements, narrates as her colleagues flock to Paris in May 1968 and hand out literature on workers’ rights in front of the sausage factory where Lila has found employment, and eventually discovers academic feminism. The brilliance of the Neapolitan novels comes not just from Ferrante’s emotionally dexterous understanding of interpersonal dynamics, but from their tenuous balance between emotional and academic spheres, between Elena’s position as a friend and as a person of letters, between the two women’s interior lives and the intellectual landscape of Autonomist Marxism, tumultuous class and labor relations, and emergent feminism that surrounds them. +++ I spoke to Dayna Tortorici, an editor at n+1 (and former editor at the College Hill Independent) who wrote an essay about Ferrante for n+1’s Spring 2015 issue, about the Neapolitan novels and their marketing. “They make more sense in an Italian commercial context,” she told me over the phone. “But a good point of comparison is that almost all American literary fiction is packaged similarly. There’s a lot of hand-painted script with no graphic imagery at all. Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest novel looks that way, The Art of Fielding looks that way, The Marriage Plot looks that way. Maybe the trend is turning, but you’d see it and you’re like, ‘Oh, this is the branding of literary fiction.’ And Ferrante could have had ‘classy’ book covers and had her books be about women intellectuals dealing with their gender identities and the stereotype of frivolous women, but she, or maybe Sandra Ozzola [the founder and art director at Europa Editions, Ferrante’s publishing house], pushes the reader to do something extra by committing to carry around this tome in public that has two children in fairy wings on the beach on its cover.”

Indeed, in an interview published in August, Sandra Ozzola told Slate that the covers were designed to look tacky—that their saccharine-ness is meant to intentionally play with the books’ fascination with the gender and class assumptions Elena and Lila are subjected to. “I intentionally searched for a photo that was ‘kitsch,’” Ozzola said. “This design choice continued in the subsequent books, because vulgarity is an important aspect of the books, of all that Elena wants to distance herself from.” This in-joke may have come across to attentive readers, but Ozzola admitted that the covers haven’t really translated well: “We also had the feeling that many people didn’t understand the game we were playing, that of, let’s say, dressing an extremely refined story with a touch of vulgarity.”

Ozzola’s realization mirrors a moment within the books. In Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third novel, Elena sees the German, French, and Spanish translations of her book. “They were ugly books,” she writes. “On the cover were women in black dresses, men with drooping mustaches and a cloth cap on their head, laundry hung out to dry. I leafed through them, I showed them to Pietro, I placed them on a bookshelf among other novels.

Mute paper, useless paper.” The intellectual power of her book has been betrayed by its packaging. +++ In “Those Like Us,” her book review for n+1, Tortorici points out the particular historical and ideological context from which Ferrante’s books arose. As opposed to the flattening and egalitarian rhetoric of sisterhood and camaraderie that characterized American feminism in the 1970s and ‘80s, Italian “difference feminists” of the same era—based largely in the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, a political group for women—sought to acknowledge the differences in power between women, whether those differences were based in race, class, or sexuality, thus anticipating an acknowledgement of intersectionality that mainstream American feminism would not recognize until several years later. “The regime of sameness also failed to comprehend differences in strength and personality, taste and desire,” Tortorici writes. “Missing from sisterhood, the Italians argued, were mothers and daughters, and they questioned whether the insistence on sisterhood — to them most manifest in the political fight for ‘equality’ inherited from the youth movement — was a reaction to ‘the obliteration of the mother in our society.’” The idea being that, under patriarchal conditions, the relationship between mother and daughter has no form.

The College Hill Independent

by Lisa Borst illustration by Gabriel Matesanz

The evasive mother-daughter relationship, then, became a paradigm onto which social hierarchies among women were mapped—a paradigm that acknowledged differences in power between women, and then attempted to use those differences to help all women move forward. The daughter depends fully on her mother until, sinking into old age, the mother’s role is reversed and her grown child helps her out.

“All of Ferrante’s novels have mothers and daughters in them, and the relationship between friends also has a sort of mother-daughter component,” Tortorici told me. “And the Italian feminists worked the fact that people have different relationships to power into their understanding of how to fight for more just social practices, so it’s all about women helping other women move forward. And it’s very pronounced in My Brilliant Friend: the two friends are constantly pushing each other to succeed, to finish school, to leave the neighborhood, to do whatever.”

Throughout their decades-long friendship, Elena and Lila “alternate between playing the symbolic mother and the symbolic daughter.” Lila pushes Elena to succeed academically much more than Elena’s own mother ever does. On a beach vacation one summer, Elena teaches Lila to swim and urges her not to cheat on her husband. Lila, having temporarily married into wealth, buys Elena’s school books so that Elena can keep studying. Elena cares for Lila and her young son when Lila becomes overworked at her factory job. The texts are rich with psychoanalyze-able scenes of babies and mothers, autonomy and dependence. And yet the two friends’ roles as mother and daughter are never static, shifting as they alternately surpass and fall behind each other. The Neapolitan novels are, in the truest sense of the phrase, mom books. +++ In a recent and oft-cited essay for Tin House titled “On Pandering,” Claire Vaye Watkins, author of the short story collection Battleborn and the 2015 novel Gold Fame Citrus, wrote about her success as a female author whose fiction has mostly grappled with typically ‘male’ subject matter. (Her books are saturated with boozy stories set in the American West.)

Growing up, she wrote, “I watched Melville, I watched Salinger, watched Ford, Flaubert, Díaz, Dickens…I read women (some, but not enough) but I didn’t watch them. I didn’t give them megaphones in my mind. The writers with megaphones in my mind were not Mary Austin, or Louise Erdrich, or Joan Didion, or Joy Williams, or Toni Morrison, though

Feb 19, 2016

all have been as important to me as any of the male writers I mentioned, or more. Still, I watched the boys, watched to learn. I wanted to write something Cormac McCarthy would like, something Thomas Pynchon would come out of hiding to endorse, something David Foster Wallace would blurb from beyond the grave.”

Compare Watkins’ statement with a quote from Ferrante about her influences, published in an interview with the Paris Review, and you begin to wonder if Ferrante’s secret identity might actually be Claire Vaye Watkins—or, barring that, why female novelists are so often compelled to seek male literary role models. “As a girl—twelve, thirteen years old—I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me,” Ferrante told the interviewer. “That phase ended after a couple of years. At fifteen I began to write stories about brave girls who were in serious trouble. But the idea remained—indeed, it grew stronger—that the greatest narrators were men and that one had to learn to narrate like them...So even when I wrote stories about girls, I wanted to give the heroine a wealth of experiences, a freedom, a determination that I tried to imitate from the great novels written by men. I didn’t want to write like Madame de La Fayette or Jane Austen or the Brontës—at the time I knew very little about contemporary literature— but like Defoe or Fielding or Flaubert or Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky or even Hugo.”

There’s a moment in The Story of the Lost Child when, on a book tour across Italy, Elena describes a lecture she gives about the feminist tract she has recently written. “I talked about how, to assert myself, I had always sought to be male in intelligence—I started off every evening saying I felt that I had been invented by men, colonized by their imagination.” I sought to be male in intelligence: Elena’s statement stems from the same conditions that have convinced contemporary fiction readers of all genders that Jonathan Franzen’s books look more serious than Allende’s or Robinson’s or Barbara Kingsolver’s or Ferrante’s.

Perhaps the over-the-top girlishness, the very intentional mom-book aesthetic, of the Neapolitan novels’ covers is an attempt to deliberately work against that kind of internalized literary misogyny—the same kind that Watkins and Ferrante herself describe. Elena thinks that she has been invented by men, but Ferrante’s book covers argue otherwise: that the ultimate ‘inventor’ is only ever the mother. To male readers and writers, Tortorici told me over the phone, “I think Ferrante is saying, ‘Yeah, within the mom book is something really important to you, because without it you would be dead, you would not exist.’”

LISA BORST B’17.5 is Elena Ferrante.

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by Eli Neuman-Hammond

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LITERARY

The College Hill Independent

2.19 Seizing the Means of Reproduction Conference Pembroke Hall, 172 Meeting St // 9.45am–6.15pm // free A one-day academic conference exploring reproductive labor and social reproduction from within Marxist feminist and related traditions. Features a number of panels on subjects ranging from labor organizing among domestic workers, to austerity politics, to prison abolition. If you go to one academic event this week, make it this one.

Way Out (EP release), Black Beach, Savage Blind God, Laika’s Orbit Aurora // 9pm // $5 Way Out are a post-punk / goth trio with a good new EP to show you. An Indy editor said that missing this show because of a trip to Cape Cod is the thing she most regrets.

Gertrude Atherton, Dent, 95–97, the Money Bags Wave Cloud // 10pm // probably $5–10 Gertrude Atherton is an all-women punk band whose first release was a concept EP based on a short story by the author for whom the band is named (Gertrude Atherton). I’ve seen them a couple times and have gotten into their sound. I’d probably describe it as ‘heavy.’ Check them out! Email cultureisaweapon1@gmail.com for address.

2.20 Heurisko: a play about found things 95 Empire St // 1.30pm // $5–10 (suggested) A new play by Ronald Kevin Lewis. I think his own description of the event is really good, so I’m just going to quote it: “Heurisko: a play about found things, is a dance-theatre piece about Alabama, cotton, and American slavery. The work seeks to resurrect the ghosts of personal ancestral figures, while providing historical context to the skeletal remains of memory and documentation.”

Journey to the Stars Museum of Natural History and Planetarium // 2–2.30pm // $3 A planetarium show. Travel through the cosmos from the comfort of Providence, Rhode Island. Kid friendly, but children under 4 are not permitted in the planetarium.

Okokon, Administrator, Jon Rossi, Herbs Chambers <3 CR // 9pm // $5 Noise-y and out-there stuff from a bunch of cool folks. Message event organizers for address.

2.24 Rhode Island Fact of the Week: the interior is mountainous, sparsely inhabited, and covered with forests of pine.

PsychoTropics, Stumpf, We Can All Be Sorry, Teddy Farkas AS220 // 9pm // $6 Psych-rock, pop-rock, out-there lo-fi. Go-see, music-show.

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2.21 Downtown Smash II Aurora // 6pm // $3–6 Casual videogame tournament with events for Smash Bros for Wii-U, Melee, and Project M. I don’t really know what that stuff means so I am hoping that what I wrote makes sense to people who are interested in this event.

No shade, <3

2.22 Juan Wauters (of The Beets) w/ Tall Juan (also of The Beets) and Pixels Aurora// 9pm // free Juan Wauters is a Queens-based folk-rock musician who writes music in both English and Spanish. His music is really fun.

And you can see him for free, what a treat!

2.23 Drawing Room: Back to the Basics Intensive RISD Museum // 12–1pm daily thru feb 28 // free with museum admission “Challenge yourself to draw every day for one week. Artist educators Margaret Owen and Nick Carter guide participants in learning techniques inspired by works in the collection.”

Erotic Fictions: Films by Chick Strand & Hito Steyerl Cable Car Cinema // 8pm // $5 Screening of two films dealing with “the mediated erotic image and its reception,” according to an Indy editor. Films explore female sensuality, bondage, and aesthetics.

Artist Development: Money Matters and Legal Lessons RISD Museum // 2–4.30pm // $5–$15 “In this development workshop, Steven McDonald, general counsel at RISD, offers useful and practical advice for artists about copyright and contract law. Certified public accountant Richard Streitfeld provides general guidelines for financial management and addresses questions. Gain a strong understanding of the legal and financial issues that pertain to individual creative practices.”

Vudu Sister, Palace People, Alec K. Redfearn Aurora // 8pm // $7 Vudu Sister are grungy and a little folksy. Palace People is a brand-new project. Alec K. Redfearn is pop-y and features the accordion.

3.01 Abdu Ali, Malportado Kids, Elon with DJ Elyjens, with DJ WackLikeThat Aurora // 9.30pm // $5 Genre labels can’t capture Baltimore-based Abdu Ali. A wonderful, swirling, chaotic mass of electro beats, rapping, singing, melody, and dissonance. There’s really nothing else quite like it. Malportado Kids are a fantastic, angry Providence dance duo that screams, chants, and sings in front of rad projections. They share two members with punk band Downtown Boys. Make sure you go to this show, and go early to see all the acts.

3.03 Sans Everything AS220 // 7pm daily thru March 6 // $15 A group of botanists on board a spaceship sometime in the deep future have to perform a play by a forgotten author named William Shakespeare.

Imagines “a world without stories.”

The play that they have to perform, in case you were wondering, is “As You Like It.”