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FTE I AM IN YOU. Look, it’s not copying, you’re copying!!! A professor I’ll never take a class with said we’re all forced to become novelists in the post-modern era. Or, he said that in the acceptance speech for an award for a book I haven’t read. Your editors are doing a little free-indirect moment here. I’m ripping my hair out. Emily, I’ll sue you for libel. She says she can feel the force of my intensity. The Design Eds have headphones in, they can’t hear me and Emily fighting. But we’re fighting, dude, we’re fighting. Emily thinks you italicize the “the” in titles of publications. Little does she know I’m going through her email drafts and adding umlauts to all her vowels. Nan Dickerson wants to kill me. He confrönted me in a dark alley. He made a shank out of a jagged Miller High Life can, folded and crumpled and förged into a BDW-sponsored weapon. Little does he know I have been systematically changing the Indy style guide when he’s not looking. Little does he know that I know where he lives, I know how to get there, and I know what he isn’t expecting. I know what he thinks I think he’s expecting and I think it pales in comparison to what I’m expecting to be able to achieve. Actually, guys, we’ve broken carbonated bread together at 11:57 p.m. and all is mended. We’re över it. We each have each other’s parent’s home addresses because of print subscriptions, and that is deterrent enough. Hi, folks from home! Hi Mom! Hi Dad! Hi Mom again! Shoutout grandparents! We’re good now. Don’t even worry about it.
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MISSION STATEMENT
The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.
While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.
The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/ or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.
Week in Old People
( TEXT NADIA MAZONSON
TALIA REISS
DESIGN LIZ SEPULVEDA
ILLUSTRATION MEKALA KUMAR )
c Lorna, septuagenarian trail “guide” extraordinaire, says the cure to Alzheimer’s is line dancing. We think the cure to existential crisis is hiking with the elderly.
Lately, we’ve been feeling pretty grim about the prospect of aging, since we happen to be living through a fucking apocalypse. We figured that seeking out an elderly presence might help, and the time is right: it’s March 15, which is technically St. Patrick’s Day in the sense that everyone else we know is drunk on a bus headed to Newport, where they will celebrate the revolutionary spirit of Ireland by getting their fakes confiscated at bars and stealing from Brandy Melville. This sounds like hell to us. We don’t even have fakes (lowkey hml if ur doing an order). We will observe St. Patrick’s Day the old-fashioned way: by taking a hike in Smithfield, Rhode Island with a gaggle of crunchy elders.
Part of growing up is learning to talk to strangers. We start with our Uber driver, Suzy Q, a Rhode Island baddie who grew up on a beef cattle farm and now has two jobs: Uber Driver and Mom. She hates driving. At the end of the ride, she tells us: “I would give anything to go back to middle school.” Ouch.
Suzy Q drops us in front of a barren field (Judson Farm, we think) and says, “Hope you’re okay without an inhaler!” By the time Lorna arrives on the scene, we’re perched coyly on the Faunce-like steps of the farmhouse. Who the fuck is Lorna, you ask? Lorna is our leader, with stretchy pants and a Fuck Ass Bob. “Your leader is not a fast walker,” she wrote on the sketchy online forum where we found this hike. At 73, she’s training to be a figure skating instructor and wants to “get back into skiing.” She has osteoporosis, like, everywhere.
“Come sign your life away! Are you ready to sign your life away?” she insists, pulling sheets of paper from her trunk. Um? “Here’s a pen to sign your life away!”
Sure, Lorna. One problem: what names do we sign? WHO ARE WE? Usually, we are Talia Beth Reiss and Nadia Gabriella Mazonson, but Suzy Q let some kid name her daughter, so we let her rename us as a gift. Now we are BayBay and NayNay. (We came to hike with old people to get a grip on reality and now we have lost our own names! Oh, sugar.)
One by one, a train of red cars emerges from the driveway, and out come our surrogate grandparents. They are:
Pam, 75. Has Miley Cyrus meme eyes. Is also a trained hike leader and can smell Lorna’s horseshit from a mile away.
Judith, 63. Probably your therapist if you, like BayBay, are a gay, anxious Brown student.
We introduce ourselves. Jon says he’s from Foxboro. “But China first!” Lorna tells him. Jon is not amused. Lorna insists that after the hike we join her for a “free” dinner at a Lutheran church (actually, the cost is a donation). Lorna does not attend this church, but she’s been loyal to their themed dinners ever since one introduced her to sauerkraut. “I would crawl to that dinner if I had to,” she says. Today the dinner is St. Patrick’s Day themed, and BayBay is THRILLED about the prospect of corned beef and cabbage (she fucks with the Irish heavy).
As we set off, Lorna demands that we pee on the trail if we have to pee. “Some people are shy, and that pisses me off—don’t hold your pee. That pisses me off,” she says. Pam catches BayBay writing this quote in a notebook like a Real Journalist and raises an eyebrow. We descend into the wilderness, but we don’t get very far: Lorna wants to tell us a story. Over the next several hours, Lorna stops us about every 30 feet to tell us a story. Here’s what we learn:
Lorna is a landlord (“I love my Nigerian tenants,” she keeps on emphasizing). She also used to house a “French war bride,” whatever that means. She usually drives really slow and it pisses her off when people drive 90 mph (“What happened to eco-driving?!”). When she feels depressed, she listens to the song “Stretchy Pants” by Carrie Underwood. A few years ago, she discovered she’s an introvert.
At some point, we tune Lorna out and hang with Judith. She tells us about her daughters (our age) and her pottery classes, and we commiserate about CPax’s ugly architectural choices. Pam is bringing up the rear, walking a virtual dog named Lexie and furtively checking AllTrails. We try to talk to Jon with little success. He’s not here to make friends.
We’re rounding hour four when we come to a swamp that we’ve certainly seen already. Lorna looks at the trail marker, then at her map. “I think I did it wrong…oh, sugar.” Jon tells BayBay that his social battery is running low. Pam widens her eyes at NayNay and asks for a handful of BayBay’s goldfish. She’s been on AllTrails the whole time; she saw this coming. Judith offers to whip out a compass. Jon goes nonverbal (he says he’s also discovering he’s an introvert).
Lorna decides she knows where she’s going and takes off. Jon follows. Seeing them up ahead, Judith calls out: “You’re good? You’re oriented to time and place?” Jon stares back.
We find the route and, tally ho!, we’re off. We come to a fork in the path. We’re so close. We can see our cars. Jon is so sick of this shit that he splits off. Already walking away, he calls back: “It’s longer, but I’m faster!” It’s true: as we mosey on, there’s a clearing in the trees and across a huge, dead field we see Jon fucking BOOKING IT. He’s so small like a fast little ant. Judith sees six trees connecting and says they’re like old friends. We want to be old friends with Judith. Well, we want to be young friends with old Judith.
It’s nearly dark when we finally make it to the cars. Lorna decides that Pam will drive us to the church (we are stranded without Suzy Q), and Pam is like, uhh? We try to hop in but her seats are down and every square inch of the car is filled with shit from her garage. We love her anyway, but we hop in with Judith instead. She takes us to the Lutheran church.
us sinners, indeed, because inside we find trays of corned beef, cabbage, and soda bread. NayNay grabs a chicken leg and eats it so gracefully it’s crazy. Lorna selects a spot for us at the cool girl table, which is headed by a “diabetes educator” named Janine, who looks like a carbon copy of Babette from Gilmore Girls. Everyone at the table has had cataract surgery, except one, who is afraid that if she gets it, she won’t be able to read anymore. “I like to read in bed. What if I fall asleep with my glasses on?” she says.
Janine reassures her: “Uh, you just take off your glasses.”
We also meet Peggy and Kathy, who have been friends since high school. Peggy tells us that she recently went on a cruise in the Dominican Republic, where she wrapped her arms around a pig, and it swam through the ocean with her like a dolphin. She has a necklace with her late dog’s nose print (“it’s more valuable than a diamond ring to me”) and a degree in botany. Peggy believes that small dogs are bossy because “they have small man complexes,” and until she had open heart surgery, she knew Latin. “But now,” she says, “it comes and goes.”
NayNay and BayBay don’t want cataracts, or osteoporosis, or open heart surgery. They don’t want to forget the languages they have toiled over. But Judith tells us that she’s loved aging. “You get so much calmer,” she says. “Wisdom is real. It’s only hard if you’re really beautiful. So you guys will be fine.”
Judith is wise, so we believe her. Like, look at all these church-going, figure-skating, pottery-making old people! We don’t know if they’re all as wise as Judith, but they do seem to care less if people see them picking cabbage out of their teeth. Hopefully, one day, we’ll all be so lucky.
As we get up to leave, Lorna shoves two takeout boxes full of corned beef and cabbage into our hands. Janine says, “Remembah this: it only gets bettah!”
Dear Judith (pseudonym),
If you’re reading this, we really really really don’t want you to think that we went on this hike just to mine it for Old People Content. Actually, we love old people (and you are not even old). And we love you, because you are good and kind and you love owls as much as we do. We want to go on another hike together. You have BayBay’s number. Text us please. Also, thanks for the ride home.
and TALIA REISS B’27 are rarely oriented to time and place.
Jon, ??. Jon lowkey DGAF. Hides in the car until it’s time to hike.
There’s a sign over the door that says: “God be merciful to me: a sinner” (Luke, ???;???). BayBay tucks in her Star of David. Everyone in the room is so white they’re practically glistening. God was merciful to
NADIA MAZONSON B’27
¡Nuestra Familia, No!
DEPORTATION DEFENSE ORGANIZING AT BROWN AND IN PROVIDENCE
c Nos buscan y nos llaman
Nos desean atrapar
Quieren transformarnos—en algo más allá Algo que nunca he sido y te prometo que nunca seré El ilegal que ellos siempre me han dicho que debo ser
What people don’t understand is that we were made ‘illegal.’ Through the actions and the words and the closing of doors. Through the system and its cruel, exclusionary policies that have been weaponized against immigrant communities. Growing up, I didn’t think of my family nor my community as ‘illegal.’ I saw hard working people who had been through so much, who woke up everyday with the miraculous strength to keep going. To take their kids to school and themselves to work, in pursuit of their dream—a promise of something more.
Even before Trump was elected, we all knew this would happen. But we did not know the extent to which families, including my own, would become targets, further accused and criminalized, even if they did nothing wrong.
Today, the threat of deportation is more prevalent than ever as the Trump administration revokes policies that protect immigrant communities and implements new ones that target them. On March 15, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a statute that has historically only been put into effect during wartime. It grants the government additional powers to regulate non-citizens by imprisoning, detaining and deporting them. Trump’s version specifically targets alleged members of el Tren de Aragua, which he designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Executive orders have been used by the Trump administration to justify the incarceration and deportation of Venezuelans to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center. Many were deported without due process on grounds of alleged gang affiliation, despite no evidence of committing any illegal activity.
This political climate has impacted students, staff, and faculty at Brown. Axel Martinez B’26, Dream Team co-founder, expressed that his family is afraid to go anywhere unnecessary. His parents are “going to work and coming home and nowhere else or…boarding up the windows and putting shades and everything,” he said. This is the fragility of an immigrant livelihood: paranoia arises from knowing that on a day like any other, everything you’ve built might crumble.
With the Trump administration’s unprecedented detention and deportation of pro-Palestine students and workers—beginning with the abduction of Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil on March 8— many members of the Brown community have found the institution’s response insufficient.
On March 13, the Undergraduate Council of Students held a meeting with University administration. This open forum was meant to foster dialogue between students and senior leaders about Brown’s response to recent federal actions, the safety of undocumented students on campus, and the targeting of pro-Palestine activists at peer institutions like Columbia.
However, for many, the meeting left a lingering ambiguity as to the administration’s commitment to protecting undocumented and non-citizen community members. “It just kind of hammered home that both students and also administration don’t know
what to do. There’s no…answers to it and it’s really frustrating…And I think that that really affects undocumented students here at Brown and it makes them feel very, very powerless,” said Martinez.
Despite this, the University continues to say that Brown is fully committed to supporting members of the Brown community “within the law.” While the University announced that the Department of Public Safety will “not inquire about or act on information related to immigration status,” or provide Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with sensitive information about affected community members without receiving valid subpoena, ICE still has jurisdiction on school grounds if they have a judicial warrant. According to a recent Today@Brown announcement from the University, “neither Brown nor any other organization has discretion or authority to stop [ICE].” The University’s unwillingness to leverage its financial and legal resources merely signals what is already known: the institution will not save us.
This ambiguity is a stark break from the University’s response to mass deportations during Trump’s first term. Founded in 2017, the Undocumented Students Initiative created a streamlined mechanism of communication between students and the University. It served to connect students with legal resources. The University even paid for an initial legal consultation for students to receive support with DACA application and renewal as well as personal and familial legal situations. After 2017, the initiative was absorbed by the U-Fli Center. The University did not respond to a request for comment on whether legal support will be available for undocumented students and students of mixed status families on campus.
Unlike in 2017, this time Brown has merely released a brief FAQ on the website of the Office of Global Engagement (OGE). This FAQ includes a brief set of questions and answers that direct students to the OGE and Office of the General Council if they are contacted by a federal agency and states that community interactions with ICE will be handled on a caseby-case basis.
To the immigrant community, the threat of deportation is not a new one. It is an ever present byproduct of their search for safety and access to a better quality of life for themselves and their children. Learning to live in the chaos is a hallmark of the immigrant experience.
In Rhode Island, community organizations have long supported immigrant families. Today, the Deportation Defense Coalition of Rhode Island—composed of the Olneyville Neighborhood Association (ONA), Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), and Alliance to Mobilize our Resistance (AMOR)—have become integral to deportation defense and protection. Community response mechanisms have been effective in sanctuary cities like Los Angeles. This work relies on community members and volunteers to keep each other safe. They hold organizing meetings and sessions to train each other on knowing your rights, and have created opportunities for community outreach to the same places ICE seeks to target.
( TEXT NAME REDACTED DESIGN ANAÏS REISS
ILLUSTRATION BENJAMIN NATAN )
In 2025, these organizations launched an Immigration Defense Hotline, building off a hotline founded by AMOR in 2017. The hotline is primarily used when community members have an interaction with ICE, and is also equipped with an attorney where community members can call and ask for individualized advice. This hotline is one of the main forms of deportation prevention. When called about an ICE sighting, the organization will dispatch volunteers to verify the sighting, record interactions, and protect community members. The hope is that under the pressure of witnesses and community solidarity, ICE will leave.
A second feature of the defense hotline is a verified chat to notify community members of ICE sightings. This chat seeks to reduce well-intentioned misinformation that may also further perpetuate the fear of deportation. In a time of mass hysteria around deportation and an influx of community warnings about ICE sightings, it is particularly important that channels are verified and secure. +++
Providence has explicitly stated that it will not “proactively collaborate” with ICE. This means that the city will not opt into 287(g), a program that allows ICE to deputize local law enforcement to make arrests on ICE’s behalf. Providence has passed a written policy that bars officers from honoring administrative detainers, which allow ICE to hold a person in custody for up to 48 hours without a judge’s approval. However, the situation is much more complicated. The extent to which other cities in Rhode Island seek to protect the community varies. Municipalities like Smithfield have indicated that they may be more willing to collaborate.
Some Providence officials, such as former mayor Jorge Elorza, have declared the city a “sanctuary.” Though local immigration policies have not significantly changed since Elorza’s tenure, mayor Brett Smiley has yet to claim the same label, stating, “There is no definition for ‘sanctuary cities.’” The term is usually defined by policies that limit cooperation with federal immigration officials, and it is often used by states and cities seeking to protect the safety of all community members. However, it has a limited legal foothold. Federal statutes like 8 U.S.C. § 1373 prohibit local governments from limiting communication about immigration status to the Department of Homeland Security. Many attempts to protect community members depend on the state asserting its autonomy.
Providence City Councillor Justin Roias is attempting to amend the Community-Police Relations Act. This amendment would strengthen protections for immigrants by prohibiting federal officers from local premises without an arrest warrant, probable cause, and the name of a specific person. Furthermore, it would ban federal immigration agents from accessing schools, places of worship, medical facilities, and courts. This amendment is still pending approval.
Steven Paré, the commissioner of Providence’s Department of Public Safety, said in an interview with WPRI that it is becoming clear that the federal government and the Department of Justice are leveraging federal funding to coerce local governments
into compliance with immigration-related enforcement. Despite these well-intentioned ordinances and jurisdictions, he says that “limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement may just put the safety of these communities at greater risk.”
This is concerning given the deceptive ways that ICE operates. The Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens and non-citizens alike, prohibits entry into a home or vehicle without proper judicial warrant or voluntary permission. Immigration officers often resort to concealing their identities, wearing normal clothing to achieve their goal. They can ask questions that drive a non-citizen to reveal their status. As described by the Immigrant Defense Project, ICE agents “may drive what looks like a delivery van, wear a fake uniform, or carry ladders, clipboards, and other props.”
ICE Academy Detention and Removal Operations Training Division, “Verbal Techniques/Communication for Consent” via Immigration Defense Project
In other instances, ICE has been known to use cellular communication, impersonating local police. They may call about a lost ID, ask to confirm an upcoming court date, or request updated contact information.
The last time mass mobilization for immigrant rights happened, rhetoric around immigration was markedly different. Legislators and community advocates had constructed a palatable narrative on the basis of deservingness. At the time, there was an idea that kids deserved DACA, for instance, because they had not chosen to come into the US; their parents had brought them. Thus, they deserved a genuine chance to succeed.
Now, while organizations such as PSL, ONA, and AMOR are trying to implement community infrastructure mechanisms to combat deportation, the harsh reality is that deportation is not always preventable—but we can be prepared. Through close interactions with attorneys and community-based organizations, I’ve compiled some information about rights and safety.
I. Know Your Rights
Carry the little red card, or white card. It should look a little like this.
Immigrant Legal Resource Center
In any given interaction with ICE, whether you are personally involved or a witness, you have the right to record. Recording interactions can help document the violation of constitutional rights that may support later immigration court cases for detainees.
You are required to tell them your name but not your country of origin. According to Roger Williams University law professor Deborah Gonzales, one of the main ways people get deported is by unknowingly providing ICE information about country of origin or immigration status. You have the constitutional right to remain silent and ask for legal representation.
II. Warrant Basics
Judicial vs. Administrative
A judicial warrant is ordered by a judge and provides the power to arrest, search, and seizure. This type of warrant requires compliance.
An administrative warrant is issued by agencies like the Department of Homeland Security. It provides the power to arrest and detain but not to search. In some circumstances, it may authorize a seizure. If you are presented with an administrative warrant, you have the right to deny entry into private spaces.
For Undocumented Community:
1. Carry Proper Documentation
If you have a green card or another kind of documentation, carry it with you at all times in case you get stopped by ICE. It may be safest to print a copy and leave the original at home. You want to be able to prove your lawful residence even if it is temporary or conditional.
2. Preparedness Workshops and Paperwork
Preparing for situations in which parents may be deported is important. In Rhode Island, organizations like Progreso Latino are now offering free preparedness workshops where community members can be supported in filling out various forms, including planning for temporary guardianship or temporary caretaker status in the event of parental deportation. Organizations like Progreso Latino acknowledge that it may be difficult to think about what happens to their kids in this worst case scenario, but preparedness is key. It is necessary to fill out this paperwork and leave a copy with an emergency caretaker. Progreso Latino assures that this agreement can be nullified. After all, this is merely a precautionary measure.
It has always been clear that the institutions will not save us. Community based organizations such as AMOR, ONA, and Progreso Latino have always been essential to ensuring the safety and well-being of immigrant communities. At this moment, the administration would like us to live in fear; let it run through our bodies, into our hearts and our souls; let it overwhelm and defeat us. Yet to live a life in fear is not to live at all. Although building community response systems and infrastructure may seem slow, there is no alternative. Our reality is community. For now, all we can do is continue to fight for one another, combat the hate with love and empathy—and prepare.
Resources
Here are some organizations that could provide immigration related resources in Rhode Island:
Dorcas International Institute of Rhode Island: Provide appointment based low-cost advice and representation. Trained to support cases of naturalization, family petitions, temporary protected status, asylum, deportation defense, legal services for victims of crime, etc.
Catholic Charities of Providence, Project Hope/ Proyecto Esperanza: All the above
Progreso Latino: Free consultations but include nominal fee, same services
Note: Despite the incredible work and services provided by many of these organizations have been affected by recent budget cuts.
NAME REDACTED has never and will never say the word illegal.
Boy, are you stupid?
THREE OLDER WOMEN ON MENSTRUATION
c I got my first period at a pool party (classic). I was ten. My mom, bless her, marched me up to the women’s bathroom, handed me a tampon, and said: “Girls don’t miss out on life because of our periods.”
People have been fashioning makeshift tampons for centuries, but the commercial tampon arrived in 1931 and didn’t become mainstream until the 1960s. Prior to that, most people used Kotex pads: thick napkins that had to be hooked to an elastic belt. The shift from thick, soggy pads allowed people more freedom during menstruation. For the first time, you could continue running, swimming, dancing, and living while you bled. In advertisements, feminine hygiene companies capitalized on this quality, promoting tampons as ideal for a sporty lifestyle. They depicted women wearing swimsuits and leotards, laughing in white water rafts, on ski slopes, tennis courts, and gymnastics beams. One ad from 1974 lays out a hypothetical winter afternoon in which “you were a confident bundle of energy…because Tampax tampons were protecting you.” It goes on to promise: “Tampax tampons take away worry, take away embarrassment, take away your last reason for not joining in.”
It has been true, in my experience, that internal menstrual products allow for more movement and activity. Once I’d shoved up my first tampon, I was able to jump right back in the pool and swim. Now I use a menstrual disc. Nothing is visible, and I can’t feel that it’s there. I can go twelve hours without needing to change or adjust anything. The disc is the first menstrual product patented by a woman, and it is evidence of tremendous progress in period care— truly, I’ve never felt freer. It’s a big deal that new products are allowing people to live more actively as they bleed. After all, people with periods spend a cumulative 6.5 years bleeding. Life is too short to waste that time in bed.
But the insistence on ‘toughing it out’ came, for me, with a hitch: I didn’t know to seek help when my period escalated. The following year, in sixth grade, I had a period where I bled for 53 consecutive days. Every few hours of every day, I would soak an ultra-sized tampon and a night-time pad, leaving dark stains on many classroom chairs. It was not just for fashion’s sake that my signature look that year was a red flannel wrapped around black leggings.
This went on for months. One day, I was standing to watch a class demonstration and abruptly dropped, body slack, into my teacher’s arms. I’d lost so much
blood that I blacked out. When I finally received care at the hospital and, later, from a pediatric gynecologist, the only treatment they could offer was hormonal birth control, which, at age 11, made me pimply and depressed. Nearly a decade later, treatment options remain scant, and I still have a hard time letting myself tap out when my period gets bad. You can sometimes find me silently crying in the back of a lecture hall, gagging over my open backpack when the pain is nauseating.
+++
Unfortunately, tampons did not eliminate the “last reason for not joining in,” as Tampax suggested. Despite progress in menstrual hygiene products, discomfort during menstruation persists—largely due to period stigma and misogyny. There is, in our culture, a firmly-entrenched belief that periods are gross, but bearable, and women are weak if they react, complain, or rest.
Because of what midwife Leah Hazard calls the “yuck factor,” scientists have scarcely researched periods. As a result, there is little understanding of how the menstrual cycle works on an individual level. Dr. Kate Clancy, a biological anthropologist, studied a large sample of menstruating women and, as she writes in her book Period, “never found…people whose hormone values look just like the textbooks.”
She continues: “The idea of normality has become so powerful, so entrenched, that much biological research involves averaging toward a mean phenomenon in such a way that it may not be describing anything that is actually real.” What little attention researchers give to periods fails to address the needs of individuals.
The result is that when variation in the menstrual cycle arises, doctors aren’t particularly good at recognizing and treating issues. Until recently, researchers tested menstrual products using unrepresentative saline solutions and synthetic vaginas, so we don’t have a clear understanding of how much blood each product actually absorbs. This can put menstruators at risk of toxic shock syndrome and limit doctors’ ability to identify heavy-bleeding conditions. For instance, it takes an average of ten years, seven physicians, and one invasive procedure to be diagnosed with endometriosis, which is known to be excruciating.
Prolonged diagnosis stems from another manifestation of gendered stigma: the refusal of many doctors to take women’s pain seriously. A 2018
(
TEXT TALIA REISS DESIGN MARY-ELIZABETH BOATEY ILLUSTRATION
MELES )
literature review found that women in chronic pain are more likely to be dismissed as “hysterical” or “malingering,” while men in pain are characterized as “stoic.” As a result, for certain conditions, women are less likely to be treated with high-power painkillers and more likely to be misdiagnosed with mental illness when they present physical symptoms. This gaslighting is exponentially worse for Black women.
Even when menstrual pain is not pathological, having a period can be fucking brutal. Even when we use the newest, easiest hygiene products. Even when we take medication. For many menstruators, it is not feasible to simply pop in a tampon and go about our days. Sometimes, making the most of life on our peri ods means heading home and having a cup of tea.
But stigma makes taking time off difficult, too. Many men, including male bosses and professors, trivialize menstruation—perhaps because of the pervasive notion that women are physically weak and emotionally sensitive. In many professional and academic environments, to call out sick is embar rassing at best and career-damaging at worst. In a 2024 study by BioMed Central, only about half of the women with menstrual discomfort that would have warranted leaving actually requested time off. The others, fearing professional consequences, toughed it out.
Part of the problem is that we just don’t talk enough about menstruation—especially to men. I make it a point to describe to my boy friends, in graphic detail, the dizzying experience of seeing your own hand covered in mahogany blood. The cramps that rival passing a kidney stone (I know from experi ence). That weird shooting pain up the butthole. The sense of utter misery and self-loathing that feels inex plicable, despite the fact that it happens If I have to experience it, they have to hear about it, and they don’t get to squirm.
Because women’s stories are relentlessly dismissed, there is value in bringing them to the surface. Intergenerational communication is particu larly important, because it allows us to track progress and cultural shifts in attitude and behavior. I sat down with three older women who grew up in the U.S. to discuss their experiences with menstruation.
Ursula D’Auria
age 80, grew up in New York
I knew nothing. My mother didn’t share anything as far as a period or pregnancy, and when I first got my period, I thought I was bleeding to death. I thought something really bad was happening. Then, of course, she told me that it was normal, but she didn’t exactly go into detail.
I think I told you the story about [how] I was kissed by a guy, a French kiss, and I thought it made me pregnant. I went to Seaside Heights with my friend. We were in the ninth grade. Her parents had a houseboat out on the Jersey shore, and we went out in the evening, of course, and met some groovy guys and got in their car. This guy was making out with me, and I didn’t know anything. When he started getting his saliva in my mouth, I said, “Oh God, I’m pregnant.” So I went back to the houseboat, I was starting to cry, and my friend said, “What’s wrong with you?” And I said, “I think I’m pregnant,” and she said, “What are you talking
Jewel
Hudson age 83, grew up in Tennessee
My mother was not very forthcoming, and, you know, I’m 83, so that would have been in the 50s. She didn’t really talk to me a lot about [my period]. But in high school we had classes; I know that they talked to us about it and gave us examples of what the pad would look like and that kind of thing. And I read a lot, so I knew that it was coming.
I do remember on the weekend near Halloween, there was a party that a lot of the kids had gone to, and there was an accident, and both of them got killed. That was just a horrific thing to experience at school on Monday. And when I got home, I was discussing it with [my mother], and I realized that I had stained, you know... So that was the beginning of it.
I don’t think [tampons] even existed. It was about in the 60s when I started to use them, cause I graduated high school. If they [existed before], I didn’t know
story—we were in CVS, or whatever drug store existed when they were younger, and [my older daughter] Angie was buying some pads, because when she came along, there were these stick-on ones. She didn’t have to experience the belt that I was telling you about. I guess she’d [said] she needed some, and [my younger daughter] was across the store, had a box and was holding them, [shouting] “Angie, you needed some!” Angie was mortified.
[When I got older], people were talking about [periods]. I remember one of my friends at work wanted to try using a tampon for the first time, and of course I had used them at that time, so she was in the [bathroom] stall trying to ask me how to put it in. So that was kind of funny. But yeah, we talked about it more openly, because at that time, as an adult woman, especially when I got married, people were conscious of it because they did or did not want to get pregnant. I had a hysterectomy later in life, I think it was around 1996. I had developed very, very, very heavy periods, and it just got progressively worse over the years. It was [difficult to deal with] because it was nothing I could control, and [the bleeding] started being outside of my period, so that’s when it became a problem. You can become anemic if you have too much release of blood. I was wearing a tampon and a pad, especially at work, but there would be accidents. I remember one time at work, we were having a stand-up meeting, and I could feel the rush of it coming down. So I rushed to the bathroom, and I had to go to the drugstore and find some panties, and—it was a mess. That was a terrible time.
And so my doctors told me that I had fibroids—tumors—on my uterus. He told me that if I wanted a better quality of life, I needed to have a hysterectomy. I didn’t want to have the surgery—just didn’t want to take the time to do it; just [thought] things would get better. At first I wasn’t really talking about it and trying to live through it. [But then] I talked to a friend who had the surgery, and she said, “You’ll be so much better.” And when my doctor said, “You need to decide what quality of life you want,” that triggered me. I finally had the surgery, which cured the problem. I stopped having periods after that.
Britta Voss age ~80, grew up in New York
I was probably 13, and, as is seems to be really unusual now, I had no information or preparation in terms of what supplies I needed and whatnot from my mother. So I was kind of flubbing around in the dark. I did know this was something that was going to happen, that I would bleed monthly. But it all seemed kind of upsetting to me, because what I did know was mostly stuff that friends had told me, little bits. But it wasn’t like we really talked about it a lot.
I think what actually happened was, I was spending an overnight at a friend’s, and when I was getting dressed, I noticed some staining on my panties. When I got home, I did show this to my mother, so she gave me…the Kotex [pad], which was kind of bulky. It was pretty horrible.
You got the feeling that you really weren’t supposed to ask questions. At least I did because of my particular mother. I felt that I was supposed to take over this job myself, and I can remember going into the five-and-ten [to buy sanitary supplies] and feeling like I was doing something awful.
It was not easy. I remember one time when I was in high school, suddenly a girl rushed behind me and said, “Your skirt is stained, you have to go to the nurse.” I was so upset; I just felt like something horrible had happened, which, of course it [wasn’t], but that’s how I felt at the time. And I had to end up going home. But, you know, over time, I certainly did become easier with the whole thing.
And I never, never had a discussion with my mother at all. My mother was odd about anything to do with discussions of sexuality or bodily functions. Like stuff you needed to know, right? But she was not forthcoming in this way. And as a matter of fact, I have two sisters that are quite a bit younger than me, and when it came time for a period to be expected, my mother took me aside and told me that it was my job to tell my sister. Which really pissed me off. I was really mad about that. But I did as well as I could and tried to make it easier for her than I felt it had been for me. I’m still sort of mad at my mother about that. It’s funny, when I was older, [my mother] got a little jokey about such matters, but there was never an intimate discussion of any kind about periods, sex, getting married, any of those things.
There’s been huge improvement on the products one uses. I mean, it’s just like night and day. As time went on, I did start using tampons, and still pads. By this time they would stick on, and you didn’t have to worry about the stupid belt and all of that. I suppose, you know, you just felt a little freer. It was an easier way to deal with menstruation.
I didn’t have terrible cramps or have to lie in bed with a hot water bottle. I would maybe take an aspirin or something once in a while, but that part of it was not very problematic for me. One of my granddaughters has really awful cramps and practically needs to stay in bed for a day. Obviously their mothers were the ones that gave them the basic information, but I’ve talked about [periods with my granddaughters]. No one has any weirdness about it like my mother did. I mean, if someone doesn’t act weird about it all, it would maybe seem less weird. It might not be any more pleasant, but at least you wouldn’t feel almost that you were doing something wrong.
While we no longer need to strap ourselves into bulky sanitary belts, the problems of secrecy, shame, and poor treatment persist. The way forward, I think, is through this kind of storytelling. If these women had candidly discussed periods with their mothers, the beginning of menstruation may not have been so traumatic. If I, in middle school, had talked to more people about my period, I would have known that it wasn’t ‘normal’ or safe, and I would have sought help. It seems that for society to take menstruation seriously, those of us with periods must take it seriously first—by giving men the gory details, by advocating for accommodation when it is necessary, by demanding to be heard by our doctors, and by honestly preparing our kids for the day the dreaded stain appears in their underwear.
TALIA REISS B’27 is presenting at a sustainable period product workshop on April 21. Find out more on Instagram: @periodequityatbrown.
How Some ∞s Are More ∞ite Than Others
Addendum to ∞ article in V49 i8 “Named ∞s, Divine Symmetries”
a collection of objects surrounded by curly brackets. For instance, A = {1,2,3}, B = {elephant, tiger}, C = {blue, {1,2},☆}
c What does ∞ mean? Well, a lot of things, but in mathematics, it can be a property of the size of sets. An infinite set is one that contains an infinite number of objects, which may seem so trivial as to be silly. Yet exploring this subject further yields seemingly paradoxical results: sets contained in sets of the same size, sets that seem big but relatively aren’t (and vice versa), and even some ∞s that are bigger than others.
We generally measure the size of sets in mathematics by establishing a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of the set and the natural numbers ℕ = {0,1,2,3,4,…}. In simpler terms, imagine the elements of the set as cute little ducklings. We line them up all prim and proper and sequentially assign each one a ribbon with a natural number on it. If there is a finite number of ducks—say, five—then the size of the set will be five elements. If there is an ∞ite number of fowl and we are able to assign each one a ribbon without missing a duckling, then we say we have a countably ∞ite number of elements, or that the set is countable. This raises the question: What if there are more ducklings than ribbons? Is that even possible?
fig. 1. We do this by associating each even number with the natural number half its size
Before we answer this question, let us look at a few examples which show us just how weird ∞ can be. An infinite set can be the same size as a set containing it, such as the set of even numbers 2ℕ and natural numbers ℕ, or the set of integers ℤ (all positive and negative whole numbers) with ℕ
fig. 2. We do this by associating 0 with 0, each positive x with 2x, and each negative x with 2x-1
fig. 3. The proof for this is a bit messier but the reader is welcome to explore it more
We even get sets which seem a lot bigger than ℕ but are actually the same size as it, such as the rational numbers of the form p/q, where p and q are integers.
Let us now consider a different set: C = [0,1], or the set of all numbers between 0 and 1 inclusive. Numbers in this set are of the form 0.5, 0.667, 0.231982471928…, and so on. Instinctually, this set seems pretty small, probably smaller than ℕ. After all, this whole set fits between ℕ’s first two entries! But let us assume that C and ℕ are indeed the same size, which, returning to our earlier analogy, means that each duckling has a ribbon with a number on it. In fact, it turns out that for the purpose of comparing sizes, it doesn’t quite matter what the number on each ribbon is as long as we can give each baby duck a ribbon without missing one. Therefore, the numbers on the ribbons act more as an organizational tool for assigning the anatine sashes, and once each baby bird is sporting said ornament on their fluffy chests, they are free to run around and mess up the order, as ducklings are wont to do. The point of this digression, besides painting a cute picture of be-ribboned fledglings on the loose, is to establish that if we have shown that each element of C is assigned a corresponding natural number, the order doesn’t quite matter, and we can mix it up to produce an ordering as in fig. 4.
To reiterate, fig. 4 shows that, based on our assumption that C and ℕ are the same size, we can exhaustively assign each element of C a corresponding natural number. Now, let us consider fig. 5. Astute readers will have noticed that we have shaded red the number in the nth row and nth column—the first number of the first column, the second number of the second column, and so on. (Isn’t that a nice shade of red? It’s OK if you don’t think so; it is a default LaTeX color, after all.) Chromatic discussions aside, we can put these numbers to use in constructing an element of C which we will dub x’. To do this, we employ the following algorithm:
• For the nth digit of x’, we select the nth red number.
• If it is 9, we change it to 0.
• Otherwise, we add 1. Thus, we get x’ = 0.9049245…; returning to our duck metaphor, x’ is like a frankenduckling (or Frankenduckling’s monster, if you are wishing to be anal about literary history), each part of it being taken from a bird in the list, which we then slightly modify.
Now comes our coup de grâce: Since by our assumption every element of C has a corresponding natural number, what is the natural number associated with x’ ? It cannot be 1, since x’ differs from the number associated with 1 in the first digit. Nor can it be 2, since the second digit of x’ is 0, whereas the second digit of the number associated with 2 is 9. We seem to have gotten ourselves in a sticky situation. To see why, let us see what happens when we compare x’ with the element of C associated with the natural number n, which we will call x n . Recall that in our construction of x’, we defined its nth digit as being one greater than the nth digit of x n, or otherwise 0 if this digit is 9. Therefore by definition x’ differs from x n in at least one place and they cannot be equal. Approaching this from a different direction, let us suppose x’ is on our list. Thus, one of its digits will be red, as in fig. 5. However, we define x’ in the first place by changing these said red numbers, so this would mean x’ is different from itself—a logical contradiction. “In avian terms, comparing the x’ duckling to the fourth one, we see that the beaks are the same except the x’-beak is slightly larger. Similarly, the x’ duckling may have similar plumage to the 21837102nd duckling, except the feathers are a different color.
“This means that x′ is not in fact associated with any natural number, since it differs from every element of C on this list in at least one digit: We have on our hands an unribboned duck.”
What we have just shown is that C contains more elements than ℕ; its size is an ∞ larger than that of the natural numbers. In the parlance of mathematics, it is uncountable. This result is due to Georg Cantor, a famous 19th-century German mathematician, and is called his diagonalization argument. What is significant about it here to me is not what it says about ∞ , but rather how it says it. In his seminal work, The Guide for the Perplexed, the medieval Sephardic rabbi Maimonides proposes a negative theology in approaching the divine: establishing what God is not in order to better understand his nature. For instance, instead of asserting existence, one rather focuses on showing non-existence to be impossible. It was a solution to the paradox of how we are meant to establish certitudes about concepts that are vaster than the limits of our comprehension—∞ly more so, in fact. Much in the same way, Cantor’s diagonalization argument— and the tools of pure mathematics in general—allow us to chip away at problems we could not explore head-on otherwise. We may never fully understand ∞ , but perhaps we can touch the contours of its nature.
HISHAM AWARTANI B’25 is stuck in Borges’ library of Babel.
Fig 1.
Fig 3.
Fig 2.
( TEXT HISHAM AWARTANI DESIGN ESOO KIM )
Fig 4.
Fig 5.
PALESTINE ORGANIZERS )
c On March 17, two months after RISD’s refusal to divest from the near 18 months of genocide in Gaza, we, RISD Students for Justice in Palestine, organized the exhibition To Every Orange Tree with Carr Haus Cafe. Centering student artworks about political resistance and Palestinian life, the show is a continuation of our call to the campus community to support Palestinian liberation.
On March 21, four days after opening, a Twitter account used to doxx and manufacture zionist propaganda uploaded photos of the exhibition, labelling them as “anti-semitic.” On the same day, RISD Administration, without consulting any of the contributing artists or curators, forcefully shut down the Carr Haus building citing unspecified “safety concerns.” On March 25, RISD Center for Student Involvement emailed us demanding we take down the exhibit and relocate it to the third floor of Fathi Ghaben Place (20 Washington Place). The proposed new location is a small isolated office only accessible by RISD ID from 9AM to 4PM.
This blatant suppression of student work without involving students’ input is directly in conflict with the global and decolonial perspective that the RISD curriculum preaches. Censorship in higher education is more than a threat to free speech—it reveals the institution’s complicity in settler colonial campaigns to completely erase Palestinian life.
We have been educated in RISD’s mission: “transmit knowledge, and make lasting contributions to a global society.” Art has the capacity to speak aloud injustice silenced. Artists and designers witness, imagine, and build. As global infrastructures deliberately fuel mass destruction, it is imperative for those who call themselves artists and designers to resist and change those systems. Until it can recognize its role in perpetuating global injustice, RISD cannot call itself an educational institution. RISD must divest now from companies enabling the genocide and the military occupation of Palestine.
On April 2, as this piece is being written, students continue to pressure RISD administration to reinstall the exhibition at Carr Haus. While the physical artworks remain in storage, we hope publishing images in the Indy can make them publicly accessible and gather people to collective action against systems of violent oppression.
Follow @risdsjp on Instagram for updates.
In line with the precautionary measures taken in the gallery space, all of the artists have been anonymized.
x 8”
This is a photograph of my greatgrandfather’s notebook from 1933, Shuqba, Palestine. Through this work, I use photography as a means of archiving—offering a glimpse into life in Palestine before the Nakba, when Palestinians lived, worked, cultivated their land, and created art. The selected page reveals a repeated drawing and calligraphic design that my great-grandfather meticulously rendered over three months. By preserving and presenting these details, the work reflects on memory, heritage, and the quiet persistence of creativity across generations.
Palestine, 1933
Photography, inkjet print, 10.5”
Zionism is Colonialism Ink on paper, 9” x12”
My work reveals how the values of Judaism do not align with Zionism, and how the US and Israel are committing a genocide that is fueled by our increasingly oligarchical government. We, as artists and students are united in bringing attention to the genocide in Palestine through art and collective action.
No Rest Until RISD Divests
Silk Screen on Newsprint, 18” x 24” I made this poster in support of the student occupation of Fathi Ghaben Place. With the help of several community members, we silkscreen printed 100 copies of this poster at the Binch Press/Queer.Archive.Work studio. The poster was distributed at protests and displayed around the RISD campus.
Untitled (Free Palestine) Risograph print on paper 11” x 17”
( TEXT RISD STUDENTS FOR JUSTICE IN
Can’t You See Us?
noncitizen
The prints were made through etching on copper plates and printing with intaglio ink. The prints depict the tents on the Main Green, the Palestinian Flag on a tent with the banner The Liberated Zone, three RSJP members dropping the banner renaming Prov Wash Fathi Ghaben Place, students building the barricade out of chairs and tables on the second floor of the building, and the words DIVEST NOW! over keffiyeh designs.
Silk Screen print on paper, 8.3” x 11.7” Harsha Walia is a theorist who talks about the impor tance of imagination in our work for liberation against the nation-state. The artwork focuses on a quote taken from her book, overlaid with an image I took myself of blackberries, which are categorized as an “invasive” species—seemingly harmless language forms a subtext of national borders and land being taken over by alien species. A representation of the people—an emoticon taken from official national statistics graphs—and the kite which recalls Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer’s I Must Die appear in interference red which makes the viewer connect with the piece haptically as a witness.
Acrylic on Canvas 12” x 108”
In the Shadow of the Pharmakon
MEDICAL MUMMIA, NECROPOLITICS AND A METASTATIC GOD
Mummia
c By the 16th century, mummia was commonly available in apothecaries across Europe. For physicians at the time, it was a vital drug in their toolkit—capable of curing everything from leprosy to epilepsy. Despite its popularity, there was little consensus on what mummia actually was. Richard Sugg, a historian of Renaissance literature, outlines the major interpretations of mummia:
“One is mineral pitch; the second the matter derived from embalmed Egyptian corpses; the third, the relatively recent bodies of travelers, drowned by sandstorms in the Arabian deserts; and the fourth, flesh taken from fresh corpses (usually those of executed felons, and ideally within about three days) and then treated and dried by Paracelsian practitioners.”
Karl H. Dannenfeldt, in a comprehensive article on the history of mummia, describes how aberrations, mistranslations, and faulty scholarship caused this slippage of meaning. Examining herbals, handbooks, and physicians’ writings, Dannenfeldt identifies key moments where a “complicated and confusing process of transference and substitution originally involving the use of bituminous products in medicine,” gradually obscured the provenance of “real mummia.”
In the 10th century text Kunnāsh al-Manṣūrī, the Arab physician Rhazes was the first to use the term “mummia,” from “mum,” wax, to describe already-popular bituminous (crude oil-based) drugs. In the 12th century, Gerard of Cremona translated Rhazes’ text into Latin, and introduced new meanings not found in the original. He likened cadavers to bitumen: “the substance found in the land where bodies are buried with aloes by which the liquid of the dead, mixed with the aloes, is transformed and it is similar to marine pitch.” As Dannenfeldt mentions, Gerard of Cremona appends his observation (the visual similarity between mummia found in the body and mummia as pitch) into the translation. The result is that “liquid of the dead” is eventually treated as a valid substitution for bitumen.
The early modern period was characterized by a widespread European reconstruction of ancient Greek thought (preserved in the writings of many Arab scholars), initial waves of European colonization, and an increase in Europeans traveling across the Levant. These developments triggered a vigorous trade (both illicit and legal) of bodies from Egyptian tombs preserved as mummia, along with new scholarship on its healing properties. This scholarship augmented the ancient Greek heritage of physicians’ medical practice by retranslating Arabic texts through a Hellenic lens. Most of the original Arabic texts were lost during this revival; only the translations, predominantly in Latin, Italian, and German, remain. During the 16th century, Paracelsus, a Neoplatonic scholar and physician theorized on mummia’s healing properties. In his accounts, he argued that legitimate mummia was cadaver-based, since it could channel an “inner spirit” related to the human soul. The influence of his theory was pervasive—although mummia fell under heavy scrutiny in the 17th century, a movement of Paraclesian physicians continued to prescribe it. As late as the 19th century, it could still be purchased from apothecaries, both as bitumen and cadavers. The result of these translations were vastly contradictory accounts of mummia’s efficacy (poisonous/
cure-all), the “correct” geographic source (Orient/ Occident), and, of course, the “real” vs. “counterfeit” versions (human cadavers/pure bitumen). Mummia’s history was supplied with aporias, reversals, and contradictory meanings.
During a period shaped by colonial conquest, medical cannibalism was rife in Europe. European medical cannibalism dramatized a perversion—the hypocrisy of the European West—that fixated on a fantasy of cannibalistic practices in the far New Worlds and Orient as the indictment of the violent, brute other, but was perfectly content to consume mummia in European company. But the subversiveness runs deeper: all mummia scholarship, extraction, and trade was an act of textuality and translation. Striking into the heart of the Western episteme, mummia, in its textual alterity, undermined the authority of the European subject: mummia deferred the divine away from the Western episteme and into the subterranean space of the racial other. Though Dannenfeldt’s historical analysis is primarily cataloging mummia medicine across time, his attention (implicitly and secondarily) also becomes sensitive to the insurgent power of mummia’s textuality. And if mummia is text, every act of apprehending it begins in translation, a subversive force necessarily unfaithful to its object, always disclosing that which exceeds its authors.
My reading of mummia betrays the immanence of the climate crisis. Because crude oil is the progeny of mummia, recognizing mummia’s errancy uncovers the shared history of colonized subjects and the non-human objects of European extraction. The stakes are high. Now, we are attendants waiting in the Anthropocene, the supermassive timescale marked by humanity’s impact on the environment, with annihilation on the other side of our waiting. With a temporal attentiveness to the very-now moment of danger that history calls towards, I try to reconstruct (through deconstruction) the full importance of mummia as a racialized, errant, and ungovernable object against the sovereignty of the Western subject.
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Against non-contradiction
Mummia: all-at-once, life and death, Occident and Orient, remedy and illness, other and self, eternal soul and errant text. How do we reckon with the seemingly irreconcilable descriptions of mummia? How can it be both life-giving and deadly, remedy and illness? Derridean deconstruction demonstrates the destabilizing and insurgent force that text exerts on the spoken word. Mummia similarly emphasizes its own textuality. When mummia is written about and prescribed, how it gains meaning is not a “perfectly self-present” truth, but instead a meaning that is fractalized over time, dispersed across herbals and travelogues, and multiplied by differences in translation. The result of this fractalization, following Derrida, is an unrelenting critique of Western metaphysics’ phonocentrism, sovereignty, and paternalistic influence. The textuality of mummia demonstrates that its history rejects a logic of noncontradiction. It is death and life, remedy and illness. Mummia invites its own deconstruction by reminding us, constantly, of the fundamental undecidability of difference.
( TEXT TARINI TIPNIS
DESIGN SEOYEON KWEON ILLUSTRATION LY FASTNER )
Pharmakon
In Plato’s Pharmacy, Derrida deconstructs the term pharmakon in Platonic works to expose Western metaphysics’ phonocentrism, and to reveal the destabilizing potentiality of the written word as it occupies multiple meanings. The pharmakon is a drug: translating to both remedy and poison, despite the Platonic use of the term as either/or. Derrida makes two notable claims about the Platonic pharmakon: (1) text is a pharmakon, and (2) the pharmakon emphasizes its own textuality.
Derrida argues the first point through a passage in the Phaedrus. Socrates introduces the story of Theuth and Thaemus. Theuth is the god of writing who has come to offer the King of Egypt, Thaemus, the gift of the written word. Writing is presented as a pharmakon: “O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory and wisdom; I have discovered a potion (pharmakon) for memory and wisdom.” Thaemus, as King and as speaking subject, has the power to authorize writing, to bring it to life.
According to Derrida, the pharmakon bears marks of textuality—its meaning is fundamentally indeterminate and insurgent to the authority of speech. Thaemus denounces writing, explaining that it is illusionary—it will “introduce forgetfulness into the soul,” as those who learn it will no longer “remember from the inside, completely on their own.” Writing, always on the outside, always a translation, produces unreliable difference. Plato repudiates the pharmakon as the host organism of an always-parasitic writing. And yet, in the same breath, the prognosis is reversed: Theuth comes clear-sighted to Thaemus with something that he recognizes will benefit the Egyptian subjects—writing is undoubtedly remedial. But despite the pharmakon’s double meaning, the Platonic speaking subject will always insist that it is restorative or harmful—remedy or poison. Thaemus announces the moral valence of the pharmakon, strictly poisonous, and disciplines the errancy of text.
Mummia is a pharmakon in the same vein, not only because it is a drug, but because it insists on its own textuality. It constantly refers outside of itself— outside of “pure” bitumen, toward the balsams of the body, toward deaths and cadavers—thereby producing an associative network of ideas co-constituted by the signifier “mummia.” The word has been played on, and this playing is not arbitrary; it is representative of commitments from the wielders of the terms, each one a translator. But a Platonic legacy is retained in the medical history of mummia (indeed, at the heart of all Western metaphysics), and it can be observed in the speaking subject’s discontent. Like Thaemus, Dannenfeldt cannot coexist with the ambiguity of mummia: it must always be tamed, tempered, and placed within boundaries at every attempt of its escape.
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Metastasization
Following the Greek tradition, Plato sees health and disease as equal parts of the body: normal development includes disease. Even as a curative drug, the pharmakon impedes the correct passage of natural life. It is enemy to both the sick and healthy, so it is
strates that the pharmakon is “curative” in a limited capacity, because it can only displace and aggravate (metastasize) the site of disease: “Just as health is auto-nomous and auto-matic, “normal” disease demonstrates its autarky by confronting the pharmaceutical aggression with metastatic reactions.”
In Platonic thought, natural life (both good health and disease) comes from within the soul. Disrupting the “natural life” of a subject, then, is transgressive: not only is the functioning of one’s kidney or mind interrupted, but all that belongs to the soul is interrupted too. In the Alcibiades, the soul houses the divine, the good, and wisdom: “So this part of the soul [its best part] is most like a god and anyone looking to this, having known all that is divine, both god and wisdom, would also come to know himself.” Though Socrates does not claim that the best part of the soul is identical to God, he maintains that the soul uniquely experiences the divine. The pharmakon, metastasizing the natural life of the soul, metastasizes the soul’s relation to God too.
Derrida notices that the metastasizing pharmakon is a political entity. The written word is not insurgent on merely epistemic terms, but because it is a security threat to a polity of speaking subjects. Derrida evokes imagery that we find today in reports of dangerous immigrants, in justifications for occupation, in the conduct of raid operations: the pharmakon comes from “outside,” it is “undermining,” it is “duplicitous.” It is crucial, then, to emphasize that the speaking subject is a European subject (considering that Derrida critiques Western phonocentrism), and that the pharmakon is prototypical of the Black and Brown people whose racial alterity characterizes the insurgent “outside” in imperial history. Mummia is illustrative in this way—it is a historically typical pharmakon, and its insurgent textuality is related to its disruption of the specifically Western episteme. It is the European subject’s “natural life” interrupted, a Judeo-Christian God metastasized. Recognizing that the pharmakon’s alterity is racially constructed, shifts a discussion of the pharmakon to imperiality. The true object of the European subject’s ethical and epistemic affections, the face of God, is found in the expression of the enemy—the racial other. This crime does not go unpunished: imperial violence is built on an anxiety that access to the divine is always residing in others. +++
Consuming Alterity
Inextricable from the history of mummia is the role of race, the making of Empire, and the vast networks of capital that shaped the Anthropocene. It is no exaggeration that the beginning of the European colonial empire marked the establishment of a new world order. But to reorder the world, and to make
must die in its place—European powers legitimized imperial expansion through the trade and consumption of death. The critical binding between imperialism, resource extraction and death points us toward a new narrative about climate upheaval that reassesses traditional citations for the origin of the climate crisis. Early triangular-trade technologies like steam ships, artillery gunboats, and medical Quinine organized the deaths of Africans towards mass ecological extraction in the colonies —transformations in the climate were already at work here. The logic of fossil states did not erupt spontaneously when coal was first burned. Nor did it erupt in the late-19th century when industrialization became an established force in the making of modernity. The history of mummia points to the possibility that the climate crisis predates the combustion of carbon—it begins in the incipient days of the colonial Empire. It begins when European physicians establish the necropolitical trade and consumption of mummia.
Racial others, atomized across the colonized world, are apprehended in terms of citizenship, polities, and enmity. Mummia-pharmakon follows this logic. But, as Derrida demonstrates, the pharmakon-writing is irreducible to topographic binaries— inside/outside—making it ungovernable. Derrida identifies writing against the spoken word in terms of citizenship, and contrasts the two in their capacity to be governed. On the one hand, the spoken word is a governable, surveilled citizen. It “does not wander, stays at home, is closely watched: within autochthony, within the city, within the law.” On the other hand, writing is without citizenship, “described as errancy as such… In nothing does writing reside.” Writingpharmakon does not merely live “outside” the structure of the polity, but in a completely unreadable territory—nowhere—making it resistant to interpellation, outstandingly ungovernable. And yet, because alterity is itself always a stroke of interrogation—a persistent threat—the pharmakon nonetheless demands recognition. And this is what the sovereign does: it recognizes the pharmakon, but brutally. It consumes mummia, it digests it.
In Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe identifies two main ways that imperial sovereignty is sustained: “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations.” The typology identified is extractive and disciplinary. This is true in the case of mummia. To orally consume is an exercise of the sovereign’s predation—a characteristically imperial double-act of extractive and disciplinary violence. This is a devastating offensive—it expropriates the other’s resilience as biopower. The sovereign is faced with a dilemma: it cannot turn away from, nor can it accept the other. In turn, the polymorphic other transcends the impermeable categories placed upon it by the sovereign: as pharmakon-text, it always resists. Recalling that natural life is metastasized by racial alterity, consuming
the other allows the sovereign to form a relation to God. Consuming is to host the other insofar as it is recognized solely for its instrumental power.
So long as enmity’s resistance can be expropriated as an infinite resource of colonial extraction, imperial powers can profit off this balancing act of hospitality and discipline. Coloniality produces a new ecosystem, where the divine can be grown with cotton plantations. It can reflect in the daytime sweat of slave populations, and it can be taken as the drug-mummia. To reconcile with an absent, metastasized God, who lives with the other in nowhere, the European subject seeks to engage in an extractive violence that it believes will unite the distant alterity of God with its own subjectivity. The European subject seeks to incorporate that which exceeds it— and commits profound horrors towards the pharma-racial others in this consumption.
In the exemplary case of Prester John, European powers deployed violent mythologies to consume alterity. Prester John was a mythical priest-king, imagined to govern a lost Christian nation hidden in the profane world. In possession of incredible wealth, his Kingdom was imagined to geographically border the Kingdom of God. Between the 12th and 17th centuries, Prester John was speculated to live across the New Worlds: East India, Christian Ethiopia, and the Americas. His importance as a potential political ally was stressed by European rulers—they hoped he would join a pan-Christian front and fund wars against the growing Islamicate. Because Prester John’s terrestrial kingdom bordered the Kingdom of God, the alterity of racial others and the divine was functionally synonymous. During the Age of Discovery, Prester John was always placed past cartographic borders, inviting religious expeditions to seek him out. John exemplified the colonial strategies of extractive-disciplinary consumption. Because he was respected in Europe, his real, living subjects (sometimes Ethiopian, sometimes Indian) were afforded the same hospitality and acclaim—the alterity of others was recognized. And yet, John was a technology of predation: every territory labelled Prester John’s became a resource for imperial profit. And because there was no “real” Prester John, he was a strictly European myth, expansion was malleable to changing standards and geographies of otherness. Deployed like a trojan horse into the home of the pharmakon, John was the envoy of imperiality.
In a slightly different variant of imperial consumption, the widespread use of medical mummia was implicated in debates about the significance of the eucharist. Despite the embodied, ecstatic-embodied act of Catholic transubstantiation now contested by Protestant thought and contextualized by the bloody conflict of the Holy Wars, mummia was taken by both Catholics and Protestants across Europe. Racial alterity becomes the expression of a subsumed medieval-Catholic tradition: the soul of the racial other was digested by Catholic and Protestant Europeans, and the particularly ecstatic act of divine healing, related to the ingestion of the body of Christ, now occurred through its proxy, the racial other.
Consumption, then, is domination via incorporation. It is hospitality through hostility. The literal digestion of mummia cadavers is a real recognition of the other, though it certainly isn’t rooted in care. Consumption is the lingua franca of imperiality, and its inversions refract in the colossal formation of the global south, and even in the making of liberal democracy—which needs to consume its enemies, the terrorist, the non-persons at the border—to assert itself. The fossil states now are built on the pharmakon ancestors of petrochemicals: bitumen and mummia. They are always in solidarity and coexistence with racialized bodies. But even now, in the time of annihilation, in the long shadow of European conquest, the pharmakon resists. The deaths of others, the suggestion of skulls, the ghosts of bodies both human and nonhuman, possesses vitality beyond belief. Though scarred by incisions, bent by exile, their potent errancy is always—now and forever— present. Errancy without bounds, the resistive force that resuscitates the living and dead, this is the liberational alchemy of the pharmakon
TARINI TIPNIS B’26 is finding skeletons in the medicine cabinet.
Now You’re Speaking My Language
ESPERANTO, REVOLUTION, AND LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALISM
c What started as a joke has become a love affair. The father of two and former pastor spends hours a day in his New Jersey home poring over dictionaries, tweeting fellow devotees, and reading manifestos, all in a stateless language with maybe two thousand first language speakers. Andrew Glos is one of the numerous, though certainly not innumerable, linguistic supranational citizens, otherwise known as Esperanto speakers.
Holding up an Esperanto version of Manifesto de la Komunista Partio (The Communist Manifesto) and his personal translations of H.P. Lovecraft’s short stories (disclaimer vigorously made during the interview: Andrew Glos does not endorse Lovecraft’s politics), Glos told me about the inception of his affair in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown. After learning the grammar in two days, he soon began to tweet with fellow Esperantists from Indonesia to France. This was the linguistic answer to Glos’ search for the values of “solidarity and unity,” echoed by his leftwing politics and Quaker faith.
An auxiliary language—one used between those who do not share a common first—with about 900 root words, Esperanto is derived primarily from Romance and Germanic language families, with an occasional Slavic and Greek word annexed into the vocabulary. In short, Italian with a Polish accent. What swept Glos off his feet was not this Schengen zone of a language, but the universalist idealism that was its genesis. This utopic objective continues to be the common link between its dispersed community of speakers. Egalitarianism is directly propagated by entities such as the World Esperanto Association, a non-hierarchical member organization which works “not only to promote Esperanto” but to “call to attention the necessity of equality among languages.”
Esperanto was invented in 1887 by Polish Jew L. L. Zamenhof. Zamenhof grew up in Białystok, an ethno-linguistically hostile environment under the Russian Empire, where tensions were prevalent amongst speakers of Polish, Russian, Belarusian, and German. He constructed Esperanto as an egalitarian second language with the express purpose of eliminating these language-based identity politics. With its ideological framework expressed via his interno ideo (“intrinsic idea”) to “remove the walls between ethnicities and accustom people to seeing their neighbors as brothers and sisters,” Zamenhof always intended it to be more than a practical auxiliary language. This anti-nationalist intent remains core to the now largely digitized community. For Esperanto’s diasporic community, discussing politics on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit is more common than “how was your day?” or “what do you do for a living?”, Glos emphasized.
socialists, its neoliberal roots became obscured by a revolutionary offshoot which utilized the language as an infrastructure for military communications.
During World War II, several Esperantists joined the French resistance, serving as intelligence operatives. They used Esperanto to relay Nazi arrest plans, largely of Jewish families in occupied regions, potentially saving the lives of hundreds.
POWs and Esperantists in concentration
( TEXT JACKIE DEAN DESIGN SELIM KUTLU ILLUSTRATION MINGJIA LI )
camps continued using the language as a means of covert communication after their capture.
Politika potenco kreskas el la pafilo
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun
While retaining Zamenhof’s ideological stances of internationalism and egalitarianism, Esperantism soon broke from its early reputation as “the language of peace.” Attracting anarchists, communists, and
Simultaneously, Esperanto could be heard on the banks of the Yangtze River during Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and subsequent Pacific War. Chinese nationalists incorporated Esperanto into the New Culture Movement. Criticizing ‘traditional’ philosophies such as Confucianism and championing new values, Xīn Qīngnián (New Youth) hoped the language could encourage international recognition and protection of sovereignty. However, the League of Nations’ nonintervention thwarted this dream.
The loosely organised communists in the area employed Esperanto for concrete revolutionary purposes, seeking foreign financial aid and political
legitimation through connections with Western speakers. However, they also modalized Esperanto as a means of raising class consciousness. Adhering to speech-action theory, Chinese Esperantists believed that Esperanto would not only convey information across language barriers but also serve as a revolutionary act. Through using Esperanto, the speaker would be offering global class solidarity to their interlocutors. In other words, one is not just speaking Esperanto but internationalism. Some contingents of Chinese communists believed that the complexities of Chinese writing obfuscated class consciousness to the agrarian proletariat. The most radical of these were Chinese-language abolitionists, who proposed an Esperanto-only language policy.
Chinese anarchists also embraced speaking Esperanto as a revolutionary act, a culture-based one, and used it to make resistance literature more accessible to international audiences. The interplay of Esperanto, literature, and revolution took place in parallel with the Romanization movement of written Chinese, which was spearheaded by a coalition of latin alphabet language speakers, Chinese speakers, and Esperantists, an alliance that Zamenhof could only have dreamed of. This was epitomized by the Klara Circle, a revolutionary feminist Esperanto organization named after the Marxist-feminist theorist Clara Zetkin as well as L. L. Zamenhof’s wife Klara, whose dowry paid for the publication of the first Esperanto dictionary. The circle attempted to mobilize Chinese women by spreading Marxist Esperanto writings. The group also applied Esperanto’s economic ideology, calling for boycotts of imperial Japan. Under the leadership of Hasegawa Teru, otherwise known as Verda Majo (“Green
May”), the Klara circle organised extensively with comrades throughout East Asia. Esperanto’s departure from pacifism into an embrace of violent revolution took place in the country where it derives much of its grammar. The Spanish Civil War saw the use of Esperanto in the form of fighter recruitment, military strategizing, and publications. The Esperantist anti-fascist Committee of Catalonia worked with the Popular Front to create propaganda material in Esperanto, including pamphlets and press releases to garner public support in Esperanto. Multiple other political parties published newsletters in Esperanto, including the POUM (the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) and the PSUC (the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia). Exemplifying the leftist alliance’s dualism, Esperanto was a war cry for anti-fascism and self-determination. Anarcho-syndicalist labor unions also used Esperanto as a means of mobilization in the publications “Popola Fronto” and
? Kion vi faras por eviti tion
“Informa Bulteno,” disassociating Esperanto further from its original conception as a language of peace. Around 100 Esperantists came to Spain as foreign volunteer fighters, joining the International Brigades and vanguarding the effort to use Esperanto as an official common language in the Brigades.
But as the Popular Front lost ground and blood in the simmering summer of 1938, the International Brigades were reorganised around non-auxiliary language comprehension and nationality, a re-bordering antithetical to Esperanto’s internationalist and universalist mission. The communication difficulties that accompanied a truly international brigade cost them time and coordinated strategy, inefficiencies that plagued the Popular Front as a body. They would go on to lose to Franco’s Nationalists, a fitting moniker considering the swing of the ideological pendulum.
The case for Esperanto
Postmortem criticism of the impracticality of the Popular Front mirrors criticism of Esperanto. These days, Esperanto is met with either mockery or vitriol, utilized as a punchline in a Mick Jagger Saturday Night Live skit and inspiring anger on an ask-a-linguist message board as one linguist “will not try to conceal…contempt for the basket cases who teach their unfortunate children Esperanto.” The reactions to Esperantism’s aspiration to be the global language, misinterpreted by some as a vision of a unilingual utopia, are both emotional and rational. Critics view Esperanto as the enemy of multilingualism and, by extension, multiculturalism. They correctly recognise the gravity of a linguistic monopoly, one which could suppress minority languages—particularly indigenous languages in modern settler colonies that retain oral cultural knowledge—and lead to their marginalization in a quest for equality. On a technical level, these critiques are rooted in the reverence for the organic quality of ‘natural’—non-auxiliary— languages. These concerns are rooted in the interconnection between language and culture, a relation that in our world includes the nation as an arbiter of cultural bounds.
The interrelation between statehood and languagehood in the age of the nation-state is formally codified. Contemporary languages are often named after their country of origin and politically backed through constitutional designation. This relationship is not unilateral, as languages are constitutive of national identity, an identifier of the ingroup. In many nations created throughout the colonial and interwar periods of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, extreme language variance contributed to fragmented national identity, as in Białystok. Zamenhof hoped to pursue inter- and intra-nation harmony through language universalism. However, his conception of solidarity overlooks a key feature bred out of linguistic commonality: it is not just the communicative function of language that creates this solidarity, but also the interplay of the identity crafted by and with a shared language that allows for a sense of co-citizenry. The solidarity of the broader Arabic-speaking world with Palestine is not just a coalition based on dialects but on shared experiences of struggle, history, religion, and culture.
Esperanto is a language without a state. Instead, it exists on the digital plane. The modern view of culture as nationally constituted leaves Esperanto without an army to protect it. As a constructed language it faces further criticism, condemned as devoid of cultural depth for its punctuated equilibrium. But a dichotomy between natural and artificial
cannot be easily maintained in a language, particularly within the modern nation state. Language policies have invented and standardized much of the phonology, phonetics, and syntax of modern Chinese, Hebrew, Norwegian Nynorsk, Irish, and a great many other contemporary languages.
The Esperanto community does not lack a culture. In what is described by American linguist Arika Okrent as “Esperantoland,” its conference customs and messageboard politics compromise a distinct culture. Culture, if simply measured by the volume of art and media produced, is abundant in Esperantoland, which contains over 25,000 books— although only 130 originally written in the language— as well as hundreds of regularly distributed magazines. Cultural icons include reggae singer Jonny M, who will soon release his fourth studio album in Esperanto, and Kajto, a sea shanty Esperanto folk group from the Dutch province of Friesland. These contributions to the language’s culture are truly a fusion, coming from across the globe with no domestic base. Locality is eradicated. Esperanto is not cultureless but borderless, a position in opposition to the nation state’s geographic containment of culture to reify a cohesive national identity.
However, the claim of artificiality might be implicitly directed to the constitutive character of language, which itself constructs individual identity. It is how we complain, love, express pain and express joy. Speaking is thought to be one of the most direct forms of self-expression, and thus to have an inherently organic quality. The ‘mother tongue’ is an idiom which unveils this intimacy between a speaker and their first language, the one taught through familial relations. Surprisingly, Esperanto does in fact have first language speakers; around 2000 denaskuloj have been raised in Esperanto families. A group of first language speakers allows for an organic and dynamic quality the language is condemned as lacking, as the language becomes creolized. Dialects then emerge, appearing to run counter to Zamenhof’s interna ideo, but are still mutually intelligible as they cross-contaminate. This collective is dispersed and global, located mainly in the United States, Brazil, and Western and Eastern Europe, and convenes at youth conferences annually. Language is used as an identity-building tool independent of its counterpart in the notion of national identity, the nation. Esperanto’s internationalism and communalism realizes the interna ideo, or at least the potential of a universal language.
Tout-monde
“There must be ways to organise the world with language. As hopeless as everything might appear, the simple arrangement of words can tame chaos,” writer Pwaangulongii Dauod insists in his eulogy for his late friend Binyavanga Wainaina, the wry and formidable Kenyan author who placed solidarity at the center of his work and life as a pan-Africanist. These words echo those of Esperantists and others who see the necessity of a meaningful linguistic backdrop for shared intention and joint action—in other words, solidarity. But any discussion of intentional homogeneity always brings along concerns of epistemological violence; who has language power and who doesn’t.
The Interna Ideo mirrors Édouard Glissant’s “Tout-monde” (All-World) theory, with both recognizing the interconnectedness of language and culture across countries and, as a result, the value of linguistic hybridity. However, the form this hybridity should take is a schism between Zamenhof and the Martinican theorist and poet. Informed by his
mother tongue of Antillean Creole, an amalgamation of French and various indigenous South American and West African languages, Glissant declared “the right to opacity.” This right primarily aims to preserve linguistic and cultural diversity through hybridity, a principle one would at first assume Glissant and Zamenhof share.
However, Esperanto’s practical transparency denies “the right to opacity,” instead reinforcing the Western notion that clarity is essential for meaningful social interactions, brushing over the unknowable aspects of the human experience. Glissant even argues that the pursuit of transparency is impossible, as no two people are ever ‘speaking the same language’ given the inherent opacities of the self and in relation to the other. Not only is Esperanto’s universalism impossible to realize, this right claims, it poses the danger of erasing linguistic differences and imposing a dominant worldview.
Esperanto borrows its grammatical structure, vocabulary, and alphabet from exclusively Western languages, particularly the Indo-European language family. This is abject Eurocentrism. By making the language primarily accessible for speakers of Western languages, Esperanto failed to uphold one of its fundamental values from the outset. This amalgamation of the already hegemonic languages into a single Western superlanguage to take over the world seems like something from a Marvel movie. Esperanto, instead of creating a sense of global harmony, could serve to reinforce the linguistic and cultural domination of the West.
Zamenhof disregarded the so-called Global South, and in doing so did not provide an alternative that would include them as an equal political and linguistic agent in solidarity relations and thus recognize the value of these cultures. Solidarity would not necessarily be given to those who require it most, but instead to those which are linguistically, and thus politically, convenient: those in the West. Homogeneity could also serve to erase smaller indigenous languages and with them knowledge of cultural customs. Language grief resulting from language loss has a tangible effect on communities, a literal silencing. Universalizing language policies have historically been weaponized, attempting to erase indigenous identity through language assimilation policies.
This is a prominent critique within the field of interlinguistics and among auxlangers (those who speak auxiliary languages) who push for greater parental language diversity within Esperantism. It must also be again noted that Esperanto was not designed to be the only language, but to serve as a global second language, supplementing rather than supplanting pre-existing languages.
When the first Esperanto dictionary was published, it was written under the pseudonym Doktor Esperanto. Translated, “the one who hopes.” It is an unabashedly idealist language, and its idealism is reflected in its revolutionary history and current communities. However, Zamenhof did not mean Tout-monde but Tout-Europe. Despite this fatal shortcoming in application, I think we can take Esperanto’s naïveté and appreciate it as a contribution to linguistic solidarity relations and revolutionary practices. After all, solidarity is a collective of ones who hope.
JACKIE DEAN B’28 is on day 10 of her Esperanto Duolingo streak.
Late-Winter
AN ODE TO MARY OLIVER
( TEXT EVAN GRAY-WILLIAMS DESIGN SELIM KUTLU ILLUSTRATION
LILY YANAGIMOTO )
3.
1.
2.
What does it mean, that the world is beautiful —
What does it mean?
In the morning times, they prayed
And also, they prayed.
We coax ice from the machine
And from the gray-bound sky
And out of the air that hangs so thickly over downtown
And beyond the buildings — the low, old mountains
Grinding themselves down to gravel.
When you come to find me,
I’ll be grinding myself down to watery words
Syllables will pebble off me, of me
And hit the floor with a sweet, solid sound.
When you have loved through February, you can love through anything.
When you have watched the land grow hard and cold —
When you have dripped with freezing water —
When you have wilted four months without sun —
When you have watched the window’s fifteen-second loop —
Bitter rain battering the ground
More bitter snow to follow
Students walking single
Double
Triple under umbrellas —
When people around you close up tight like buds in a spring reversing
When spring is reversing and each day is four degrees colder
When black-and-white sex scenes twitch on the computer screen
When your too-sweet tea spits steam
When it is thirty-seven degrees and everything is water
Whose nature is to want to be somewhere else
When you sleep too long and lose the day
When the sex scenes are words
And text
And poems and references to poems
When you hack up your lungs
When you miss friends two thousand miles or two feet away
When you can’t find the right words —
If there even are right words —
When the rain moves down the pavement in clear plateaus
When the only color is others’ eyes
When you bite your fingernails to the quick and past the quick
When music sickens you
When others’ eyes sicken you
When the Ratty food sickens you
When poetry sickens you
When the bare flinty trees sicken you
When your mother sickens you
When your need sickens you
And your doubt sickens you
And you love —
Then you can love through anything.
Welcome to the end of the poem
Welcome to the poem’s slow release
Welcome to the dregs and to the softened tea leaves of the poem
That have done their duty of saturation
And can now lie lightly at the bottom of the cup, to be read
The chickadee lives only two or three years
Enough time to sit on a black branch on a drenched day
Enough time to watch the earth hurtle around the sun
And remember it hurtling around the sun
And remember remembering
I don’t know how long I will live
Already, I have burned through as many days
As the chickadee’s full clutch of babies ever could
I hope when my life’s final quarter comes, I’ll know, somehow
I hope the years will pass sweetly
I hope I will rise as grass, and slowly —
As the long-leaved, beautiful grass
I will see February rainwater beading off trees and chickadees
And remember it
And remember remembering
And always repeating
What does it mean?
Eight Clouds
OR, WHY DOES AVANT-GARDE FILM TURN INTO WATCHING THE SKY?
( TEXT DANIEL ZHENG
DESIGN SOOHYUN IRIS LEE ILLUSTRATION SITONG LIU )
c My editors asked me to write a piece on the new cloud installation in Sayles Hall, Unsui (Light) by Sanford Biggers. In fact, I had been thinking about clouds a lot, especially the clouds in a notorious (relatively speaking) film that everyone on Twitter is always talking about—James Benning’s TEN SKIES (2004). It would be an interesting connection, I thought, to talk about the motif of the cloud, what artists find in clouds as a lasting interest. I sent in a pitch.
The issue, though, was that I hadn’t yet gone into Sayles to see the installation. Perhaps more problematically, I hadn’t seen the movie in full either. And suddenly, the piece was due tomorrow. In a last minute gambit, I decided the thing to do would be to sit in Sayles at two in the morning, watching a movie where clouds drift by on my laptop screen, bathed in the slightly strangely dim and cold light emerging from the group of eight cartoon clouds dangling over my head.
of a six-and-a-half hour Ken Jacobs film, comments that the film is “incredibly entertaining, funny, and accessible—perhaps more so than any avant-garde film I’ve ever seen.” But again, this is immediately strange, or hard to believe. Six-and-a-half hours—accessible?
Biggers writes of his ceiling scape: “One of the impulses behind the installation was to create something that people can experience without any background information.” Hence his interest in the symbol of the cloud, that seemingly universal meteorological figure that everyone, no matter where in the world they are, has seen and can understand. Similarly, Benning writes of his film: “Very early in life you lay on your back and watch the clouds in the sky.” Most everyone has a memory of sitting down in a park, gazing up at the sky, seeing shapes emerge, a duck, a dinosaur. What’s universal about the clouds is that they are always and everywhere on top of us. As the statement goes, we all share the same sky. +++
The rub is, of course, that most people don’t think it’s a productive use of time to sit around and watch clouds drift by on a screen (they’re probably right). And TEN SKIES does not just feature clouds floating, but in fact is exclusively “about” clouds on screen. The film is extremely simple—as the title suggests, it contains ten static uncut shots of ten skies, each ten minutes long. Aside from that, there is a mostly quiet soundtrack, and a very brief opening title and ending credit. So just about, just skies—which is to say, just clouds and their backdrops. Some skies are sunny, some are overcast. But they all feature clouds drifting slowly, so so slowly, across the screen.
The film is a near unbearable watch, excruciatingly slow and agonizingly boring. It verges on a deathly stillness, with some clouds moving so slowly that they resemble photographs more closely than cinema. It goes without saying that what TEN SKIES lacks is, really, everything that movies are usually about— narrative, spectacle, entertainment. The most interesting thing that happens in TEN SKIES is, if you’re lucky, that a bird or a plane flies across the frame. This seems nothing universal, and really nothing accessible. It feels, instead, like something closer to suffering.
And yet, TEN SKIES is one of the most “famous” experimental films from this century. In a poll on the best avant-garde films from 2000-2009 by the magazine Film Comment, it ranked 7th. Among an admittedly niche community of film viewers, it is the touchstone of a properly “formalist” and “structural” film par excellence.
What’s particularly curious to me about TEN SKIES is not anything in the film itself, but its self-selecting audience. After all, the people (myself included) watching TEN SKIES are not the same people as those wandering into Sayles for class and happening upon Biggers’ installation. One must first hear about Benning’s (mostly obscure) film, and then
decide that spending 100 minutes watching shots of the sky is a worthwhile experience. The primary relationship to Benning’s film is not that anyone can see it “without any background information.” Indeed, it’s the opposite—only a very specific group of people watch this film, and for very specific reasons.
On Letterboxd, many people have many things to say about the film. One user, for example, calls it “One of the most viscerally terrifying films I’ve ever seen.” Another notes: “genesis/climax/post-apocalypse: the three preliminary stages of active development and deterioration, the cycle of life as presented by the cirque du nuage.” Terrifying? Cirque du Nuage? Where did these sorts of comments come from? Isn’t the film just about looking at clouds?
The point is, watching the film is never just looking at the sky. Rather, bored under the 2AM Sayles clouds, I was looking at clouds knowing full well that they were shot by a “renowned” filmmaker; I was looking at clouds thinking about the fact that there are ten of them, each ten minutes long, a formal organization that surely means something. In this sense, the “return” to the sky is not really about the accessibility or universality of clouds. It seems rather like an infinite extension of the experimental film viewer’s interest in slowness or difficulty into the terrain of that most universal and generic thing—the sky. Look at how avant-garde we are, we have conquered the omnipresent sky—or, perhaps, boredom itself. And hence the tendency to map so many different complicated words onto the simple fact of watching a cloud drift.
Biggers, we might note, despite claiming a certain universal accessibility for his piece, doesn’t arrive at the clouds immaculately. Instead, he developed the installation alongside his reading of the Japanese word unsui and his time studying Zen Buddhism; through a relationship with the history of Sayles Hall; through cloud references in LA graffiti. Does he not efface this by claiming blithely that the clouds can be experienced without background information? Or, the reverse: why is this context included alongside the piece, if the work itself doesn’t need background information in its universal or accessible stance?
These clouds, then, are hardly universal. The use of the cloud or sky as a symbol seems rather like a misdirection of the gaze toward universality, all the while co-opting it for an “inaccessible” discourse. It is the appropriation of a figure of absolute accessibility from the perspective of a niche ivory tower of experimental film spectatorship.
Yet. And still. None of this inaccessibility, after all, is in the film, or in the installation itself. Because yes, it’s true—everyone has sat and watched clouds go by, even if the clouds at hand are indexed to discourses that extend and appropriate them. Biggers, again, is not wrong when he appeals to universality without background information. It’s just that the fact that he’s not wrong seems wrong.
Indeed, no previous specialized knowledge of film or critical theory is a prerequisite to watching TEN SKIES. There is no hidden code or key to parsing the film, no jargon that one has to learn in order to figure out what’s going on. There’s nothing happening but the slow movement of clouds. The very most we can say about TEN SKIES’ seemingly clear-cut inaccessibility is that it is boring.
The film scholar Michele Pierson has an article titled “The Accessibility of the Avant-Garde,” where she notes a strange trend in which people like to talk about experimental films as “accessible.” Genevieve Yue (another academic), for instance, after a screening
I think what TEN SKIES presents us with, rather, is a contradiction that is tricky to escape. Perhaps a tentative double negative—these clouds are not not accessible. Or, that they might be accessible, in spite of the fact that so much about them (i.e. boredom) tells us that they are not. There is nothing more accessible than looking at clouds. But this accessibility is also difficult to disentangle from the many other layers—of formalism, slowness, and structure—that are grafted onto the film.
All of this leaves me with a lasting sense of ambivalence. As if both the discourse of universality and the discourse of inaccessibility are misguided, as if one wants to find a way to get out of the problem altogether. Contrary to this—maybe the real draw of clouds is that they force us to confront both figures at the same time.
Before the late 18th century, the sky was prevailingly seen not as a symbol of universality, but rather the opposite—clouds were a mark of absolute and constantly escaping difference. Historian of science Lorraine Daston calls this “the vertiginous variability of clouds,” or the fact of “everything changing into everything else, all at once.” The clouds were ephemeral, never static; they morphed and shifted endlessly before one could ever capture them.
In her book on TEN SKIES, cinema scholar Erika Balsom tells us that corralling this difference, these “unruly phenomena,” was the task pursued by Luke Howard, the 18th century meteorologist who coined the taxonomy we still use to talk about clouds today— cirrus, cumulus, and so on. Howard’s goal was to precisely, Balsom says, create “a taxonomy that would enable all to see the same sky.” The supposed universality of clouds, therefore, was also invented, it had to be invented.
And yet this invention was always somehow tentative—it still held the possibility of its falling apart. Balsom writes, “Even though these men met with a considerable measure of success, there is something quixotic about the project of reconciling the chameleonic character of clouds with the rigidity of names—and they were well aware of it.”
I’m curious if the gesture of making art about clouds follows the same sort of tack, and also maintains the same “quixotic” idealism. Which is to say, that the tension here between universality and obtuseness rehearses once more Howard’s project of “fixing” the movement of clouds, of rationalizing impossibly a movement of absolute difference. That the draw of making art about clouds is the possibility or promise of fixing as universal this disparate phenomenon. The film, after all, is reproducible—we can watch it over and over again, the clouds will stay the same. And yet through our encounter with their sheer duration, they remain always impossible to freeze in place.
In the panel accompanying Biggers’ installation, the curator suggests Unsui reminds us that “the clouds will always change.” If this seems to call back to the time before Howard when the cloud was a figure of constant variability—it is also immediately ironic, insofar as what Biggers does is precisely produce an abstraction of clouds that by necessity remain always the same. But maybe this impossible fixing of intractable difference, a process that refuses to efface either end, is precisely the point, and is why these works spawn this intolerable discourse on both sides. Clouds are not simply either universal or inaccessible, then—they are both unbearably universal and inextricably impossible to access. I think that’s something to keep in mind if you ever find yourself watching a film about clouds drifting for 100 minutes, and if you want to figure out why that might yet be worthwhile.
DANIEL ZHENG B’25 thinks there might be better movies out there.
Three Impressive Pool Trickshots Every Pool Player Should Know
( TEXT SCHEMA HQ
DESIGN SCHEMA HQ )
Looking for a way to add spice to your GCB Wednesday, Wild Colonial Thursday, or Seaweed’s Saturday? Need to impress your friends? Just want that couple across the bar to really like your vibe? You’ve come to the right place. We secured an exclusive interview with five-time World Snooker Trick Shot Champion Chalky Biliardsson, better known as Providence’s Pool Pirate, to learn the technique behind some of her signature shots. She currently holds a residency at Nick-ANee’s Bar (75 South St.) and will be displaying her talents every Saturday until the end of April.
With enough practice, some artistry, and grace, people will start lining up to buy you a drink!
Editor’s notE: Biliardsson’s notorious ball-stacking technique is banned in 193 countries, including Vatican City. DO NOT ATTEMPT after drinking a Narragansett, Genesee, Natty Light, or any other bottom-tier beer.
Passé Shot: This trick requires a
ball must hit the yellow
With the proper application of force and the right sidespin, any nearby children trying their first IPA will be thrilled by the welcoming smiley face that has materialized on the pool table.
Tower of Cue-ball: This infamous shot effectively requires you to use the cue as a simple lever.
Once
au revoir
BONJOUR, INDIE!
learning how to say
We’re
Indie has always liked the French, and when a friend of hers sent a letter from the City of Lights she couldn’t help but sparkle with excitement. We’re hard working people, and hard thinking, and kind, and learning a whole lot. Indie doesn’t have all the answers, and neither does AL, but they sure do know where to start.
ANGELA LIAN / DESIGN APRIL SUJEONG LIM )
AND
( TEXT KALIE MINOR
CARTE POSTALE
CARTE POSTALE
Once upon a time, I had it all planned out—a jewel-toned couch, two cats, a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in a Chinatown apartment. But I’ve realized: things don’t have to go according to plan. I can live anywhere I want. I can be whoever I want. I can Shake Up My Life! And I’ll do it again!! I don’t know what’s ahead, and even though I’ve historically hated not knowing (hence a lifelong fear of getting shot in the back on the street, or [literally] stabbed in the back, or any of That Which I Can’t See), I’m kind of okay with it this time. More than okay. The tea leaves are telling me everything and nothing at all; the lines on my palm are going somewhere new. I went to Mass for the first time, and it felt like a forest. Change is in season. Good things are coming. Back soon, AL
Dear Indie, Change is the sharpest of pains. I feel like I’m constantly growing into myself. I like comfort; I like staying. I, too, prefer to let things fade, to let them happen to me. So far that hasn’t worked out so well. Change is something I have to be forced into—and once it’s done, I don’t like looking back. But I’m getting better at it, I think: putting one foot in front of the other, leaving the smoky hair salon after waiting for an hour and a half because I can actually just go cut my bob in the sink with craft scissors, which isn’t ideal, but it works, and if it really comes down to it, my bathroom is so small that I can actually just blast the hairy countertop with my showerhead and then everything is fine. I’ve discovered a wide-open future. It smells like cedar and it’s oh so yummy!
POSTCARD
Howdy AL, Sorry, that was inauthentic. I knew as soon as it came out. Sometimes I can’t help myself. Like Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s famed sculpture. You know, I think about that piece a lot. I wouldn’t classify myself as an art person, but I do get a wave of (maybe unwarranted) righteousness when I think about how that installation got derided over the internet. Much like the pomegranate, much like the Sad Girl™, all I could hear was people saying the quiet part out loud, and I really would’ve liked to keep the quiet part unsaid. There is no vacuum for things to exist in, only a big sneeze that dusts everything in the vicinity with context and time and desire and will and umami. I don’t want to be angry at the sneeze anymore, which, in a lesson for the ages, does not mean I must be passive. Only existentially content. If not for where I am, then for the knowledge that I have the agency to get to where I’m going. The Indy* misses you. We iconize our honored MEs on the stairway to Heaven, golden halos about your heads. But you will go forth into your forest, and rest in a mossy grove when the sun is high, and turn around, then back, then all the way right again. As all oysters imply, the world is yours. Just keep us in your LinkedIn, and keep on writing, God knows we need you ;)
Dear Indie, My butt hurts. We have Main Green here, but instead of grass, you sit on cobblestone. And all of the seating in classrooms is very wooden and hard, which is probably the tradeoff for going to school in a gorgeous historic building. I spend three-hour lectures in literal pews that my long beautiful legs are far too long and beautiful for. My hip joints are at risk of something bad. It’s not easy.Although my tenure as ME is long over, I still can’t stop sticking my nose in the Indy’s business like an overbearing has-been basketball dad or a college student who still keeps visiting their high school for some reason. (Hence this exchange.) The truth is, I miss Providence. My friends, Main Green during false spring, Jahunger, the Underground’s couch thing, The Fuck Green Airport. I miss the weird carpeting in Providence Place and the slightly evil walk to Federal Hill. I miss the half-functioning Indy lighter I had to give up at the airport because of “flight” “safety.” Sometimes I even miss Crit a little bit. Don’t get me wrong though. Paris might be the greatest city in the world. The vintage leather is plentiful and the movie tickets are five euros. I go to museums before class. I joined a choir. Last week, I got to see the Notre Dame and a spectacular view of the Seine at sunset en route from my cinema class to a flash tattoo event at a lesbian bar. Every day I wake up and think Paris I am in you, like an affirmation. My gripes are limited to the consistent, violent redness of the air quality map; the unbelievably hard water; and my butt hurting. I love it here; I see orchids everywhere. It’s not that I wish I were in Providence instead. I just have a hard time leaving places. I’ll have to leave this one, too—soon. I keep telling myself it’s okay because I’m coming back to Brown, but after just one year, I’ll be leaving for the last time. Indie, how do you say goodbye?
Bisous, AL
POSTCARD
And regrettably, I’ve come to love having a hairy countertop. I cannot be bothered to really get in there, not when the time keeps escaping me, not when there are dishes to be done and books to be read and feelings to be felt. So I’ve been waiting for the hair to blow itself away. I’ve waited for the feeling to fade on its own. I know that’s not the best advice—I’m a little distracted and uncomfortable because my butt is so so damp from sitting on the not-so-warm green—but I’m trying. Deciding to say goodbye can feel too final for someone full of so much beginning, but everyone forgets that goodbye frees up room for the big hello. I’m sure your bob, like mine, has been growing out. If you keep looking at your hairy grout and finding tendrils where they ought not be, it’s easy to forget that any time has passed at all. You can forget that change must come again. From across the pond (and some), Indie
Dear AL, I want to say that I know exactly what it means to say goodbye. I’m someone who prides herself on knowing it all, you know? But I don’t know, at least not in any tangible way. From kindergarten through the eighth grade I was a Best Friend Girl. Each year, fate would deliver me a diva from whom I could not be separated. Then, each year, said best friend would move away. As the awkward, too-honest, cartwheeling kid I was, I didn’t know where to put that loss. I think I still harbor a kind of cosmic resentment for those series of unfortunate events. The thing about cosmic resentment, though, is that it’s not something that goes away with a stomp of the foot, flick of the ponytail, and an aggressive turn on the swings. It’s like making the mistake of cutting your bob in the sink with craft scissors. What you thought would be a single moment of panic, then vengeful satisfaction, just ends up being little pieces of your hair stuck to clammy skin and in the grout and you cannot get them out and now you have to make peace with your hairy countertop.
Never too busy for a friend, Indie
&
Here’s What You Missed This spotlight was written at 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 1. At the center of political instability in Turkey is Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu. On March 18, Istanbul University annulled his degree, effectively banning him from running for president. The next day, he was arrested alongside more than 100 others on charges of corruption. İmamoğlu is one of the most powerful figures of the opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, and crucially, a large threat to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party, who have been in power for 22 years. Since İmamoğlu’s arrest, millions of people have taken to the streets to defend their democracy. While the arrest—which is being perceived as a blatant attempt to eliminate a political rival—was the final straw which triggered the protests, they reflect deeper grievances with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, and his government. Issues like freedom of expression, media censorship, and authoritarianism have long fueled public discontent, having worsened significantly over the latter half of Erdoğan’s 22 year rule. Protesters broke through police barricades, flooding the streets, and bringing life to a standstill in major cities like Istanbul and the capital, Ankara. Even rural cities, such as Sivas and Isparta, which have historically been supportive of the government, held demonstrations. The latest protest in Istanbul alone drew 2.2 million people, marking it as the largest protest in Turkey in a decade. The government has relentlessly tried to suppress protests through mass arrests, tear gas, and anti-riot water cannons, and has been accused of torture and rape during arrest. Despite the state’s violence, for many young people who feel as if Erdoğan’s regime has stripped them of their youth and freedom, there is no other option. People from all walks of life, from far-right nationalists to Kurdish leftist groups, have taken to the streets. Even the most apolitical individuals have joined the protests, united by the disillusionment and dissatisfaction towards the current regime. That being said, the disorganized and decentralized nature of the protests has led to hostility from right-wing protestors against marginalized protestors, particularly queer and Kurdish individuals, threatening the unity of the masses. Thousands of people have been arrested, including 301 young university students who are now imprisoned. Restrictions on entering Istanbul have been enforced and surveillance and investigations of citizens have drastically increased. Still, the spirit of younger generations remains unbroken. Despite growing up under a regime of political suppression and depoliticization, students and youth are striving to organize in their own ways and find their voices, whether that be dressing up as Pikachu and whirling dervishes, mocking the police, or organizing mass boycotts. Turkey’s history of mass demonstrations and their aftermaths forewarn an unsuccessful conclusion to these protests. Regardless, the only hope for our people is to take to the streets—not only for our people today, but so future generations will see total liberation. Things may have changed by the time you’re reading it in print. The author of this piece has chosen to remain anonymous out of safety concerns.
Events @ Brown & Arts
Events @ Brown Potatoes of August April 10–April 19 Leeds Theatre, 83 Waterman Street A theatricalist fugue wherein four retirees encounter a highly educated sack of sentient potatoes, and find their outworn belief systems forcibly confronted by the challenges of a highly integrated, enlightened metaphysics. Pay what you can on April 10; $7–15 on April 11–19. Legacy of Lies. El Salvador 1981–1984. Photographs by Robert Nickelsberg February 19–May 30 2nd Floor, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street A photography exhibition offering a critical historical record of the United States’ involvement in the Salvadoran Civil War.
Compound Violence Against Women in War Zones: Case Studies of Syria and Sudan Tuesdays, March 4–May 6 Virtual A free ten-week seminar investigating the impact of war and authoritarian rule on Syrian and Sudanese women, with a focus on the worsening gender-based violence, repression, and systematic discrimination that they face. The course examines the challenges faced by women activists and advocates for strategies that enhance their role in governance.
AMOR Community Fund for ICE Detainees
Donate to the AMOR Community Fund for ICE Detainees. All funds go to fulfilling requests for commissary support for those detained by ICE at the Wyatt Detention Facility. According to AMOR, “detained community members have reported inhumane conditions including lack of sanitation, overcharges for phone calls, racism, lack of access to food, lack of access to legal counsel and medical neglect.”
Other ways to help: Rhode Islanders can call and write to their state legislators to show their support for Senate Bill S-0295 and House Bill HB-5724. Make calls and send emails to the Wyatt Detention Facility administration to report these inhumane conditions and demand accountability:
James J. Lombardi, III, Chairman of the Central Falls Detention Facility Corporation (401) 454-5900
Arts
Through the Glass Theatre presents: Dead Man’s Cell Phone by Sarah Ruhl Saturday, April 5 8–11 PM AS220 Black Box 95 Empire Street, Providence, RI WSO –Symphony at CITY HALL Sunday, April 6 3–4:30 PM City of Warwick City Hall 3275 Post Rd, Warwick, RI The WSO returns to Warwick City Hall for a FREE live music event featuring the 60+ member orchestra. https://www.artsnowri.com/event/wso-symphony-at-city-hall/
Annalisa Boucher, Contact for the Central Falls Detention Facility Corporation (401) 721-0313 aboucher@wyattdetention.com
Free Manoutham! Reunite a Lao Refugee Father with His Family Manoutham is a loving father, grandfather, son, and brother who is currently being detained by ICE in Rhode Island. Despite having lived in Rhode Island for 35 years, Manoutham was taken from his home and family by ICE. Proceeds from the fundraiser below will go towards the legal fees needed to bring him back home and reunite him with his wife and kids.
The Alliance Presents: Disorderly Conduct Thursday, April 10 7–11 PM AS220 Black Box 95 Empire Street, Providence, RI All proceeds go to supporting Trans Lifeline
Here’s What You Missed
Sudoku