The College Hill Independent — Vol 51 Issue 7

Masthead

DESIGN EDITORS

SELF PORTRAIT IN EMOJI

Jackie

20

BULLETIN

Lila Rosen & Jeffrey Pogue

INDY DISSES

Get out of ******. Put on some pants. Open your LAPTOP! You are so legible right now.

NM, it must be hard to be in your brain. You know what does wonders? Medication. But don’t worry. It’s not that bad on the outside. He has framed photos of the Dow-Jones on his wall. You don’t know who just had cornbread for a whole month. You don’t know LS’s cornbread arc, I do.

People think that we’re non-hierarchical, but nobody ever even said that. We’re putting you on a performance achievement plan.

Oh no i’m Divergent. Ok, time to be insurgent. Honey, I’m alliagant. YOU ARE A FASCIST!

In two issues you will be chopped unc washed-up has-beens. I’m going to put laxatives in your syringe of Chef Boyardee. If you say ‘always already’ one more time… Hiking is reactionary. It was, in fact, derivative. You are our super-ego. You’re so quotable.

MANAGING

Sabine Jimenez-Williams

Talia Reiss

Nadia Mazonson

WEEK IN

Maria Gomberg

Luca Suarez

ARTS

Riley Gramley

Audrey He

Martina Herman

EPHEMERA

Mekala Kumar

Elliot Stravato

FEATURES

Nahye Lee

Ayla Tosun

Isabel Tribe

LITERARY

Elaina Bayard

Lucas Friedman-Spring

Gabriella Miranda

METRO

Layla Ahmed

Mikayla Kennedy

METABOLICS

Evan Li

Kendall Ricks

Peter Zettl

SCIENCE + TECH

Nan Dickerson

Alex Sayette

Tarini Tipnis

SCHEMA

Tanvi Anand

Selim Kutlu

Sara Parulekar

WORLD

Paulina Gąsiorowska

Emilie Guan

Coby Mulliken

DEAR INDY

Angela Lian

BULLETIN BOARD

Jeffrey Pogue

Lila Rosen

MVP SKM

Mary-Elizabeth Boatey

Kay Kim

Seoyeon Kweon

DESIGNERS

Millie Cheng

Soohyun Iris Lee

Rose Holdbrook

Esoo Kim

Jennifer Kim

Selim Kutlu

Jennie Kwon

Hyunjo Lee

Chelsea Liu

Kayla Randolph

Anaïs Reiss

Caleb Wu

Anna Wang

STAFF WRITERS

Hisham Awartani

Sarya Baran Kılıç

Sebastian Botero

Jackie Dean

Cameron Calonzo

Emma Condon

Lily Ellman

Ben Flaumenhaft

Evan Gray-Williams

Marissa Guadarrama

Oropeza

Maxwell Hawkins

Mohamed Jaouadi

Emily Mansfield

Nathaniel Marko

Daniel Kyte-Zable

Eleanora Rowe

Andrea Li

Cindy Li

Maira Magwene Muñiz

Kalie Minor

Naomi Nesmith

Alya Nimis-Ibrahim

Emerson Rhodes

Georgia Turman

Ishya Washington

Jodie Yan

Ange Yeung

ALUMNI COORDINATOR

Peter Zettl

SOCIAL CHAIR

Ben Flaumenhaft

DEVELOPMENT

COORDINATOR

Tarini Tipnis

FINANCIAL COORDINATORS

Constance Wang

Simon Yang

MISSION STATEMENT

ILLUSTRATION EDITORS

Lily Yanagimoto

Benjamin Natan

ILLUSTRATORS

Rosemary Brantley

Mia Cheng

Natalia Engdahl

Avari Escobar

Koji Hellman

Mekala Kumar

Paul Li

Jiwon Lim

Yuna Ogiwara

Meri Sanders

Sofia Schreiber

Angelina So

Luna Tobar

Ella Xu

Sapientia Yoonseo Lee

Serena Yu

Yiming Zhang

Faith Zhao

COPY CHIEF

Avery Liu

Eric Ma

COPY EDITORS

Tatiana von Bothmer

Milan Capoor

Jordan Coutts

Raamina Chowdhury

Caiden Demundo

Kendra Eastep

Iza Piatkowski

Ella Vermut

WEB EDITOR

Eleanor Park

WEB DESIGNERS

Casey Gao

Sofia Guarisma

Erin Min

Dominic Park

SOCIAL MEDIA EDITORS

Ivy Montoya

Eurie Seo

SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM

Jolie Barnard

Avery Reinhold

Angela Lian

SENIOR EDITORS

Angela Lian

Jolie Barnard

Luca Suarez

Nan Dickerson

Paulina Gąsiorowska

Plum Luard

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.

*Our Beloved Staff

IRELAND’S

BODY

IRISH DANCE, ITS GIRLS, AND ITS POLITICS

( TEXT ELEANORA ROWE DESIGN SEOYEON KWEON ILLUSTRATION MEKALA KUMAR )

c One flinty evening in March of 2023, I knelt on the floor of 3 Kilts Tavern to wrench my foot from its shoe. The air smelled thickly of beer, salt, and Mardi Gras beads freshly torn from their plastic packaging. My dance teacher tapped the mic. “Four hundred years ago”—I frantically ripped the electrical tape sticking fiberglass to my heels—“British invaders in Ireland wrote the penal laws.”

The American author Ursula K. Le Guin once said that dancers, of all people, must have a precise vision of their appearance. As she writes, “what dancers look like is, after all, what they do.” Sweat rolling down my back in Three Kilts, breathing secondhand cigarette smoke through many-times–applied lipstick, I felt Le Guin was right: my body meant something more than the way it moved. To the Irish dancer, one’s appearance resonates far beyond a stage’s bounds or a tavern’s walls. It tells a story about colonialism and power, one that stretches across continents and the bodies of the girls who tell it.

More mainstream forms of dance, such as ballet and hip-hop, occupy an evergreen place in the American imagination; they are toured by troupes at length, documented on reality television, undertaken by scores of hopeful young girls, and often satisfy aesthetic appetites. On the other hand, Irish dance appears culturally specific and absurd. The form’s characteristically still upper body, straight legs, and

rapid taps give it an unnatural quality. It’s only seen by the public in particular instances—Riverdance and St. Patrick’s Day shows, a few viral clips on the internet. It’s a target of joint awe and humor; under an Instagram reel of champions stomping in unison, my favorite comment reads, “POV white people when there’s potato salad at the function.”

Irish dance has a creation myth that gives a simple explanation for the absurd practice. Every dancer can recite it like they’ve memorized their dance steps: under the penal laws, Irish culture was forbidden. No dancing in the streets. But the Irish were strong, and instead of giving up who they were, they gave up the movement of their arms and chests. A British soldier passing a window wouldn’t see the dancing feet of Irish citizens; he’d see obedience from the waist up.

The story is brilliant: it’s about anti-colonial resistance, nationalism, and all-Irish perseverance, passed on through girls’ clapping hands in dance studio lobbies. If only it were true.

Irish dancers have NOT in fact been keeping their arms tight to their sides for centuries, as the story implies. The practice emerged only around the 1920s. The true story of Irish dance instead began with the Gaelic League, a nationalist organization founded in 1893 committed to revitalizing the Irish culture and fighting for an Irish state. They detested all foreign influence on Ireland, and resisted the forced assimilation of the British crown.

In 1897, the League staged its first Oireachtas (AIR-uck-tuss), a festival to showcase Irish culture

interspersed with panels on the League’s political agenda. The Oireachtas included a performance of Irish dance: at the time, a post-church recreational activity resembling square dance, inspired by sailors who would pound nails into their feet and tap on ship decks. The dance brought in more people and revenue than anything else at the meeting. The League had stumbled upon cultural gold.

As it continued to host Irish dance shows, the Gaelic League brought itself revenue and attention. But dance also fueled the League’s ideology, which equally championed Irish culture and Irish statehood, holding that the two were inextricable. By including Irish dance at political events, the League proved that politics did not belong in the high white towers of the Crown they so detested; it belonged with the people, tapping on plywood after church.

Irish dance brought an influx of female dancers and teachers, who were largely left out of the Gaelic League’s decision rooms but essential to its mission. The League depended on women—the nation’s teachers and mothers—to sustain the Gaelic language and Irish culture at home. And women served a symbolic importance: they would literally and figuratively bear the next generation, one that the League hoped would live in a free Irish state. A woman signified fertility and nurturing care; her job was not only to provide instruction in Irish dance, but also to solidify the Irish people’s connection to community, home, and the land. Female participation in the League’s cultural programs was necessary for the wholesale

recruitment of Irish citizens and transformation of civil society across generations. To that end, women opened urban dance schools, developed their own choreographies, and enjoyed new agency within the League’s political project.

Meanwhile, young girls were actively sought out as Irish dancers. Girls—agile, delicate, beautiful—were a stark contrast to the famine and war-torn landscapes of mid-19th to early-20th century Ireland. They were the ideal carriers of a joyous and prideful cultural transformation. Dance proved that Ireland—the old, imagined Ireland, of Gaelic, of Catholicism, of Celtic knots—was something worth fighting for, even after the double tragedies of the potato famine and the British occupation, even during the short, bloody year of the Irish Civil War. Irish dance was beautiful; thus, Ireland was beautiful. Irish dance was important; thus, Ireland was important. Dance was spiritual ammunition for the Irish nationalist agenda, one which fit culture and politics in the same tightly laced shoe.

As Irish dance started to spread, the Gaelic League needed to centralize and control it. They formed the Irish Dancing Commission (An Coimisiún Le Rincí Gaelacha, or the CLRG), and populated it with its own members. To this day, the CLRG is Irish dance’s foremost governing body; it regulates everything from the teacher certification process to permitted beats per minute (I can recite them still, like a child at a chalkboard: reel, 118; treble jig, 73).

Despite their overwhelming majority in the dance world, women represented less than 10% of the CLRG’s first board. Men, often with little to no experience with dance, constituted the majority of judges at competitions.

One of the most important contributions of the CLRG was the rule that all dancers must perform with their arms held tightly to their sides. This was done to strip all foreign influence from the form, forbidding outrageous innovations by young and excitable choreographers. And the tight arms were a crucial element of the creation myth that the Gaelic League began to circulate, the one my dance teacher told at every pub and retirement home where my school performed for St. Patrick’s Day.

The staying power of the story about the Irish dancer’s arms shows the lasting political impact of the sport. Via migration and globalization, Irish dance has spread across the world, with competitions hosted everywhere from Mexico to Australia. But the most popular nation for the sport (outside of Ireland) is the United States. Every St. Patrick’s day across America, patrons pile into taverns and pubs to witness Irish dance and its stories. Irish anti-colonial politics, so effectively entwined with its culture, spread as rapidly as the tradition of wearing green on March 17. Americans can easily get behind the anti-colonial fight of the Irish (who are now considered a white population) due to its parallels to the fight for American independence. The proximity of Irish dance to its political messaging reveals something the Gaelic League knew: while the power to choreograph is great, the power to build stories around that choreography is even greater.

The look of the modern competitive Irish dancer, however, is far from its traditional roots. Look into any high school gym transformed into a feis (a competition) and you will see a decidedly 21st century phenomenon. The millions of Swarovski crystals! The sweet reek of sock glue! The girls, encased in thick makeup, peering through polyester lashes at the small bright screens that contain their scores! This, surely, is modernity at its finest…right?

Like in the first decades of the Gaelic League, Irish dance today is dependent upon its widest population and most essential resource: girls. This emphasis is starkly written into the rules. Per CLRG regulation, when a dancer is 10 years old or younger, makeup is strictly prohibited; on her 11th birthday, she

undergoes a spontaneous and complete puberty that transforms her into an adolescent, and she is expected to behave as such, donning thick foundation and false eyelashes. Subsequently, when a dancer turns 23, she experiences early menopause and is essentially rendered an elderly hag: the CLRG regulates that she wear tights of at lease 70% thickness, lest she risk being uncouth. At the core of these absurd, often arbitrary rules (why 11? why 23?) is an essential truth: if Irish dance nurtures the ideal nation, you need your dancer to be the ideal girl.

While men’s outfits in Irish dance are regulated to an extent (they must wear their ‘Sunday best’), girls are the target of the bulk of beauty standards. To fulfill them, they purchase an absurd number of goods—wigs, bedazzled socks, shoe buckles, headpieces, and dresses, to name a few—that sustain the economic engine of the sport. Female performers distort their bodies onstage. They don ‘bun wigs’ that sit like second heads atop their scalps, frame their bodies with structured dresses, glue white poodle socks to their calves, wrap their hard shoes with dozens of layers of black-and-white electrical tape, and tan their legs to shockingly dark levels to enhance ‘muscle definition.’

These rituals build dancers who appear healthy, beautiful, and—crucially—Irish. Their wigs imitate the tradition of dancing in still-curled hair after a Sunday service, an allusion to Irish Catholicism and propriety. Dresses feature patterns from the Book of Kells, a medieval Irish manuscript of the Gospels. The Irish girl is beautiful, but not sexual; strong, but lithe; traditional, but up-to-date with the latest trends. Modern technologies have cemented this process of distorting the dancer’s body through spray tans, longstay matte foundation, and synthetic wigs.

The sport’s standards and trends are magnified by its infuriatingly obscure judging system. Irish dance involves a litany of technical skill, but the sport lacks any rubric or standardized way of allotting points, a relic from the time when inexperienced men from the Gaelic League would judge competitions. Thus, culturally enforced beauty norms are perceived to impact scores, but to an unknowable extent. The CLRG offers no clarification on what constitutes beauty, beyond age-based regulations regarding makeup and tights, but teachers tell dancers that any deviation from tradition (too-light legs, wrongly taped feet) will tank their score. Thus, young girls in dance (and their families) pour vast amounts of time, energy, and money into conformity. Any infraction could cost a dream.

As an awkward preteen, I found the standards of Irish dance to be endlessly suffocating. I didn’t like the way I was growing into my dance dress, and I wanted to sink into the floor every time my mother applied my lipstick wrong. At 14, I rebelled by cutting my hair short like a boy’s. I refused to wear a wig at competitions for the next three years.

Dancing in short hair, I didn’t feel as liberated as I thought I would. Still, my body—like the body of every dancer—was subject to scrutiny. I felt the desire to overcompensate for my wiglessness, to optimize my body into a most beautiful machine. To be confronted daily with my appearance and to work it to my will—which, after all, is the task of the dancer— felt impossible.

Still, I kept coming back to class.

As someone who spent over a decade steeped in its world, I cannot help but love Irish dance. The form is heartbreakingly beautiful. Even in the depths of insecurity, I would come to the studio to watch my classmates; it’s hard to leave the room with dry eyes after witnessing some of the world’s top competitors dance a full slip jig. And while I felt constrained by the rules of competition, dancing in the studio was a form of release.

Despite its contradictions, Irish dance is a liberatory form. With its roots in sailors’ amusement and the Gaelic League’s decolonial campaign, the sport intends to make noise: a powerful assertion coming

from a culture that was silenced. This is especially striking when it’s performed by women and girls, of whom silence and docility is often expected. A girl onstage represents more than the beauty standards she performs; she is an independent agent choosing to dance, making a ruckus deemed uncharacteristic of her gender, wielding the dual power of elegant performance and physical strength that could break glass.

The dance analyst André Lepecki writes that we must see the dancer’s devotion “not as a masochistic submission, nor as an antipolitical surrender” to some distant choreographer or board of governors. Rather, the dancer is given a task: to take up the mantle of a tired, complicated, problematic form and give it new life. Governors can grumble and choreographers can yell, but at the end of the day, it is the dancer who dances. Dance is more than its history: it is the people who are building on it, here and now. This is especially seen in modern Irish dance movements, which aim to bring dancers of color and transgender dancers to the forefront. The Gaelic League forbade ‘foreign influence’ in the sport, which made it inaccessible to and prejudiced against ‘non-Irish’ bodies, but Black dancers such as Morgan Bullock are taking the form into their own hands, revitalizing the old sport with evolved technique. As the sport evolves, it is retaining its roots in Irish culture (such as the use of Irish-made shoes and eight-count trebles), while expanding its repertoire of possibilities (such as being performed to Megan Thee Stallion). To me, and to many other dancers, the sport’s fraught past and present inspire a call to action: to reimagine a form of expression freer than before. This is part of why I became a dance teacher myself. I wanted to change the paradigm of dance I grew up with. Rather than encouraging my dance students to be like ‘toothpicks’ (tall, straight, and thin) as my teachers told me, I use the metaphor of redwood trees. I tell them to be strong and brave in their tallness, to reach up to the sky.

This action is but one in a series of collective revisionings of Irish dance. To Lepecki, dance’s relationship to politics extends beyond its use as a nationalist tool. Like the political fight for freedom, dance “must be built with others, must be set into relation, and must be dared, collectively, into existence.” I think of places where I’ve seen dance dared into existence, as a reclaimed and liberatory form: in the choreography of studio owners, taking up the mantle from their mothers; in the young people who drill and stretch and kick, the kids who love to spin in the studio; in the girls who hug each other in that still-breathless weakening moment before the speaker announces which one of them has received first place; and the hours on the floor, and on the bench after, wincing from blisters.

Lepecki writes that the evolution of dance, like the evolution of politics, must come with the daily reminder that every movement toward liberation “will be always provisional and incomplete.” In this manner, I believe there is nothing closer to liberation than dancing: both take practice. I read Lepecki and think of how, for many afternoons during my adolescence, I’d haul a 4x6 piece of plywood from behind my parents’ dresser to dance on it. The tapping of my feet, treble-and-down. Like the work of a dancer, the project of freedom—inside and outside of dancing institutions—requires persistence and continual imagining. Irish dance teaches all of us to engage with liberation, hold it in our bodies, and practice it.

ELEANORA ROWE B’28 is selling her old wigs on eBay.

“I’m Not Gay, Greg.”

Fathers, Fanfics, and Facism

c Balding from chemotherapy, gaunt from cancer’s ravages, Frank Heffley, Greg Heffley’s father, patriarch of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, is dying.

For the fake fans that no longer keep up with the series: No, Wimpy Kid did not veer from a satirical documentation of a middle schooler’s hijinks into gritty realism. In fact, Jeff Kinney, the series’s author, probably does not know this plot exists. This story is subterfuge. It’s subversive. It’s spectral. It’s one of the most popular Wimpy Kid fanfics on the subreddit r/LodedDiper.

When the original Wimpy Kid was first released in 2007, it immediately became a literary phenomenon. Irreverent and cynical, it eschewed the tidy morals and likable leads of its literary ilk. Greg Heffley is near-sociopathic, and Kinney wants readers to know it. He ruthlessly manipulates his best friend, Rowley. He dates for popularity, crushing on Holly Hills only because she’s “the fourth-prettiest girl in the class.” His family isn’t much better. His dad shames him for not measuring up to the masculine ideal and almost sends him to a military academy. His older brother, Rodrick, bullies him. During a blizzard, his little brother, Manny, lets the rest of the family freeze as he hoards food and heat in his room. It is perhaps Wimpy Kid’s more morally ambivalent reading of school and family that led to its overwhelming popularity (like to brag, “300 million copies sold!”). Those of us who grew up reading it saw ourselves more in the quasi-monstrous Greg than in the idealized protagonists of other children’s stories. There is no happy ending in any of the books, only manipulation and misunderstanding that culminates into hilarious absurdity.

However, Wimpy Kid is still a children’s book. Greg’s problems are middle school bullies, the Cheese Touch, and at worst, mild school vandalism. Certainly not dying patriarchs. So what’s up with the fanfiction?

Named after Rodrick’s band, r/LodedDiper’s moniker is fitting: it’s filled with shit. Meant as a subreddit for fans to post their look-like-the-books fanfiction (LLBs), which mimic the series’s iconic art style and diaristic narrative, it has since been inundated with crackfics, fanfiction written with the express purpose of being absurd: there’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Chastity Camp,” “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: No Nut November,” “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Greg’s First Edge.” Among the swill however, there is a gem: “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: 25 Years Later.”

Written by u/jugdeggrogs, “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: 25 Years Later” narrates Greg’s life, well, 25 years later. Not quite forty, he’s too young to have a midlife crisis. Yet, desperately alone, working a job he doesn’t love, he’s fast approaching one. His family dynamics have shifted. Rodrick, once a household failure, is now happily married. The once-beloved Manny has been ostracized after moving to New York. Greg has been condemned to a middle-child’s fate, forgotten, wandering aimlessly through his life until he gets a call: His father’s cancer has gotten worse.

The series’s central conceit is that it’s a diary. Of course, we’re not meant to believe that it’s an actual middle schooler’s diary, and within the original series, the distinction between the author, Jeff Kinney, and the fictional “I” of Greg Heffley’s narration remains clearly demarcated. But within the realm of fanfiction, the diaristic structure more intensely blurs the line between biography and fiction. In a 2020 interview with The Hindu, Jeff Kinney said, “The people in my stories are just outlines with no skin tone—they tell a generic story of childhood.” Though such a claim is undercut by the existence of racially specific characters such as Chirag Gupta, and though the setting of his series is tied to American suburbia, he is right in the sense that the narrative structure of Wimpy Kid , just like the blank pages of a diary, presents a space for readers to write their life into. Characters become symbolic, abstractions animated by the fanfic authors’ most intimate anxieties and desires. Archetypes within Wimpy Kid fanfiction, then, may point to broader social worries, undercurrents in the collective unconscious.

In “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: 25 Years Later,” Frank Heffley’s sickness precipitates the slow nosedive of Greg’s stable, if unfulfilling, life. He writes in his diary, “I’m genuinely scared […] This is never what I thought my life would be like when I was a kid. Why couldn’t I have that life? Is there something wrong with me?”

One need only look to the series’s title for an answer: It’s Greg’s wimpiness, or, as Rodrick would say, it’s because he’s a “sissy.” The terms “sissy” and “wimpy” are hurled into the exact contexts into which the term “queer” is typically slung: when something smells fruity vis-à-vis a masculinity that doesn’t quite measure up to the ideals of virility, of success, of getting what you want. In the original books, Greg never gets the girl. He’s an enjoyer of the effete: his mother’s bathrobes, salon gossip, romance novels. His pursuit of girls reads less as actual desire, and more as a strategic identification of girls who are socially acceptable to desire (again, the only reason he has a crush on Holly Hills is because she’s the fourth cutest). His relationship with his best friend Rowley borders on homoerotic. In one instance, Greg’s mother walks in on Greg and Rowley, stripped to their underwear while drying off their clothes. Later, his mother tells him it’s normal for boys to explore.

Greg’s seemingly subtextual queerness in the original series manifests itself explicitly within the fanfiction milieu. Whether gay, bi, or vaguely queer, Greg, more often than not, desires men. Yet, he never inhabits a proper, liberatory queer identity as you would have it in Heartstopper. His homosexuality remains entrenched in his wimpiness. Maybe he doesn’t want women, but he never gets the man either. His desire is disappointed and disappointing. And in “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: 25 Years Later,” his queerness is the center of all his problems.

Seven years prior to the beginning of the fanfic, Rowley moves to Boston for a job at a comic syndicate. Devastated, Greg invites Rowley to the roof of their

( TEXT EVAN LI

DESIGN CHELSEA LIU ILLUSTRATION LUNA TOBAR )

old middle school on the night before he leaves.

“I love you.”

“I love you to [sic], man”

“No, I’m serious. I don’t know if I’m bi, or what, but I love you.”

“…”

Rowley leaves the next day.

Now, nearly a decade later, unraveling from his father’s imminent demise, Greg drives to Boston to seek Rowley out. He arrives at Rowley’s apartment. He knocks. Rowley opens the door. His eyes widen in fear, or perhaps something else.

“I’m not gay, Greg.”

He shuts the door.

When Greg gets back home, his dad is already dead. Instead of feeling grief, Greg is angry. He’s resentful that he’ll never be able to tell his father what he “really thought of him,” this “man who made me hide my sexuality for the last three decades.” “He’s the reason I’m miserable,” Greg laments. “Fuck you, Dad.”

Greg’s “fuck you” is, of course, directed at his actual father. And yet, given the broad expanse of his accusation—that his father has ruined his entire life— perhaps it’s also hurled at something much larger than Frank Heffley. Something much larger than any father could ever be: the Father.

For Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst and theo rist, the figure of the Father is not tied to any partic ular dad—or any person, for that matter. Rather, the Father is representative of a universal prohibitive function, moderating the desires we can act upon. While Sigmund Freud relegated the Father to the psychosexual realm—as in, the Father is the very real man who stands between the child and their mother—Lacan extends the figure to the social realm. The Father does not simply disappoint desire for the mother, but desire for anything in general. The Father comes to represent a set of seemingly ubiquitous norms that make social life possible only through the repression of one’s desire. You don’t get your mom, but you do get to be a respectable citizen!

So what type of Father is Frank? In nearly every famous fanfic I have encountered (“Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rich and Famous,” “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dysfunctional Perspective,” “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Frank’s Night Out”) the intimate violences of Frank—his homophobia, his misogyny, his physi cal abuse—recur. And yet in almost every single one, he is also dying, and bringing with him the Heffley family. He is not just a patriarch, but representative of a specific, heteronormative ordering of the family: the nuclear family. If the actual books poke fun at the dysfunction of the nuclear family, “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: 25 Years Later” performs an unflinching autopsy. Peeling back its greying flesh, readers are forced to inhale its anxious, dying gasps.

We are living through the family’s disintegration. As the state disinvests in social welfare in the pursuit of more capital, and demands the biological and social reproduction of children even as it makes family life increasingly untenable, the family splinters. Our affective attachment to the nuclear family as the locus of love and connection is set wayward. We are free. We are lost. We think: ‘What do we do now?’ “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: 25 Years Later” means to answer this question: What happens after the family? What comes in the Father’s wake?

In his anger, Greg misses the funeral. Still needing closure, he visits his father’s grave a few days later. He sees Manny, the disgraced son. The acrid scent of gasoline hangs in the air. Manny tosses a match. The father’s grave is set ablaze.

Seeing his father’s grave desecrated does not give Greg catharsis. Instead, as he writes later, “I feel sick […] It was only a matter of time before I became Manny, and after what I saw what [sic] he was capable of at the graveyard, I couldn’t let that happen.”

Manny’s act of violence performs the masculinity that Greg’s ‘wimpiness’ bars him from, and it mirrors the real-life strategies of the far-right. As Jordy Rosenberg explains in “The Daddy Dialectic,” today’s fascism “has a strange, parasitic relationship to the energies of the family’s decomposition.” Strange because the fascist movement drives the family’s dissolution, even as it purportedly takes up arms in its defense. One needs only to survey the hundreds of anti-trans and anti-queer bills passed by Republicans, alongside their cuts to social safety nets like Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), to understand. The Father’s death is the fuel for Manny’s fire; his grave, the object of its desecration.

Manny is never explicitly homophobic toward Greg. He does not need to be in order to be monstrous. Fascism’s desire to return to a fantastical patriarchal past unleashes a specific cisheterosexist violence. The family is just one realm. The nation is another. The body, a third.

While these terrains are topographically distinct, they are intertwined by a shared anxiety around alienation. Fascism attempts to excise it through projections of violence. It puffs out its chest, mimicking the Father’s power in a masculinized attempt to escape its fears. Perhaps Manny warmed himself with the flames, but in doing so, he brought hellfire on earth.

Perhaps we will never escape the Father; perhaps the nuclear family will be replaced by an even crueler order, but we are promised this: Things will be different, as they have been before. If, in line with the Father, fascism dreams of a return to a singular, static past, we must refuse this logic. We must fail, and in doing so, find new ways to live. That is the opening we find in Lacan’s theory. If the Father limits our desire, he is also the very condition from which desire springs. Desire, essentially, is to want something we do not—or perhaps, cannot—have. For desire to exist, there first must be prohibition.

According to Lacan, the moment we first learn to express our desire is precisely the moment when we can no longer satisfy it. As Rosenberg explains, “Once you’re old enough to say, I want my mother’s breast, I’m sorry to report, but you’re too old to drink from it.” In “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: 25 Years Later,” this split is not between our real, inexpressable desires and the failed desires we can articulate using language, but between what can be spoken and what must be confined to his diary. As Greg Heffley explains after his father’s death, “I guess this means I’ll have to write down what I thought of him instead of actually saying it” (emphasis mine). The impossibility of finally telling his father the truth drives Greg to text.

The very first page of Kinney’s Wimpy Kid series opens with Greg’s pronouncement: “First of all, let me get something straight: This is a JOURNAL, not a diary.” For him, a journal is a marker of success: It’s something he’ll give to reporters when he’s rich and famous so he doesn’t have to answer their “stupid questions all day long.” On the other hand, a diary is a failure, something that will get you called a “sissy.” A journal exists when you have too many people clamoring for your attention, so you have to ration your words. A diary exists when nobody cares to talk to you, so you write down your feelings instead of actually saying them. A journal is for winners. A diary is for wimps.

Yet it is the diary’s impotence which opens up new possibilities. In another fanfic, “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rich and Famous,” Rowley asks Greg,

while driving home from a hospital visit to see Greg’s father: “Why did you bring me with you?” Greg does not answer—cannot answer—but he responds in his journal: “What was I supposed to say? […] That I need him to support me? That he was the only person in my life that I haven’t screwed over? That my entire family hates me? That he’s my only friend? That I love him?” The text invokes the impossibility of actually telling Rowley his true feelings, and yet, ironically, by doing so, expresses just those feelings. In the fanfiction, Greg’s diary functions as a private, imaginary space in which his most intimate desires (not to win Rowley’s love, but to finally express his want for it) are not fulfilled, but rewritten. That is the promise of Greg’s diary. Not to make his queer desire real, but to let it, impossibly, under the violent purview of the Father, exist.

For me, that is what Wimpy Kid fanfiction offers. The canon embodies the nuclear family’s model of reproduction. Published by Amulet Books, written by Jeff Kinney, each new book inherits the legitimacy of the former. Found on Reddit or Tumblr, Wimpy Kid fanfiction has no such legitimacy. Rather than a single lineage, the fanfics exist in a messy web of relations. Different authors collaborate on single narratives. Artists improvise the original art style, even as they try to recreate it. These stories will never be real, but legitimacy is not what they desire. The stories reimagine, kink, and redream the canon, working the original material for its own needs. Here is Emily Heffley (“Diary of a Wimpy Egg”). Here is queer Rodrick (“Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick’s Secret”). Here is Greg and Rowley, together, finally, in old age (“Diary of a Wimpy Kid: 75 Years Later”).

Tuesday - August 31, 2021

Dear Diary,

I read “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: 25 Years Later” today. I really liked it. It’s supposed to be a half-joke, I know, but it also does make me feel better. Last week, a group of parents released a report decrying gender neutral bathrooms and ‘woke ideology’ in classes. It doesn’t scare me. I find it silly. But it still makes me feel a little lonelier. The fanfic made me feel better. I don’t really know why.

In four years, I will know. I’ll talk to my friend Phatee and he’ll tell me that he felt something similar when reading Marauders fanfiction. It’s a retelling of Harry Potter (also gay). He’ll tell me that even though he knows how it ends for Sirius and Remus in the original series (they die), it’s still nice to read. He says he sees himself in them. They have to deal with Voldemort. He has to deal with homophobia. Both want a slow angsty-burn romance though. Preferably with a bisexual jock.

I’ll know when I talk about it with my other friend. They’re usually more serious, so I don’t expect them to take to it. But I end up reading “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dysfunctional Perspective” with them for three hours. When I ask them why they got so sucked in, they’ll tell me that they see themselves in Greg, especially in his fear when his dad mistreats Rodrick. Especially when he parrots his parents’ insults to his brother.

Even as Greg remains frozen in middle school in Kinney’s series, Wimpy Kid fanfiction allows us to read and write our social and political anxieties into the original text. We create a palimpsest of our desires and fears. Fanfiction transgresses—not to destroy the original, but to make it anew.

For now, I am 15 and I still don’t know. I am living in a quiet, suburban home. I am in bed. Parents are planning destruction, but at this moment, I am inhabiting a world that is infinitely capacious and just as fragile, one that exists as text and imagination. Perhaps it will shatter against hard reality, but for now, I am feeling less lonely.

EVAN LI B’28 would like to thank Andrea for sending him Diary of a Wimpy Kid Tumblr posts.

The Real Black Eye in Our State

SURVEILLING AND POLICING RHODE ISLAND’S SEX WORKERS IN THE ERA OF (RE)CRIMINALIZATION

c On a Thursday afternoon in 2008, a Florida SWAT team took a battering ram to Bella Robinson’s apartment door, put her in handcuffs, and charged her with prostitution. Robinson didn’t understand why the men were waving guns at her, and she didn’t understand the violence of the intrusion.

Over the following months, Robinson attended court dates and hearings until the judge delivered a verdict: 90 days imprisonment. Unable to pay her utility bills while in prison, Robinson got out with a $3,720 fine. She didn’t have the money. The judge ordered her to come up with it or a warrant would be issued for her arrest. “They all knew the only way I could pay the fine was to turn more tricks,” Robinson told me in a clipped tone.

This was not Robinson’s first experience with incarceration. She only started sex work after a wrongful prostitution charge at 18—when a man in a red car sidled up to her on the street, offered her a ride, and, in response to her rejection, pulled out his police badge.

With a permanent criminal record that employers were not keen on, Robinson turned to the sex industry to put a roof over her head. She relied on advice from experienced sex workers, who told her how to pick up clients, what prices to charge, and where to book hotel rooms.

While engaging in sex work to pay off the $3,720, a client told Robinson that prostitution was decriminalized in Rhode Island. In early 2009, she packed a couple bags and moved to the one state where she could work without risk of incarceration. She worked out of a hotel in downtown Providence for eight months. Robinson said that she felt “free”; the police could serve as protection and not jail guards. This didn’t last long. In November 2009, Rhode Island recriminalized sex work.

Sex work on private property had been de facto decriminalized in Rhode Island since 1980, after Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE)—a national sex workers’ rights organization—sued John E. Roberts, the Chief of the Providence Police Department, and Dennis J. Roberts II, Rhode Island’s Attorney General, leading to a revision of the prostitution statute. In COYOTE v. Roberts, the organization alleged on behalf of long-term Providence-based sex workers that the Providence Police engaged in selective prosecution of prostitution law.

COYOTE v. Roberts used the Providence Police’s own records, which were considered primary statistical evidence by the courts, giving sex workers rare legitimacy during the court proceedings where their personal testimony is often disregarded. Police records from 1974–1977 show that women were arrested for indecent-acts charges at a rate 3.5 times higher than men. Less than 0.005% of these men were ultimately charged. During this same period, the Providence Police used 55 male undercover officers posing as clients but only four female undercover officers posing as sex workers. Since the majority of cops posed as heterosexual clients, they were predisposed to encounter and arrest female sex workers rather than the men soliciting them.

The presiding judge determined that “it was not unreasonable to assert that the Department’s use of a predominantly male undercover force revealed a design to ferret out the women who violated [the prostitution statute] while ignoring the equally guilty men.” The case resulted in the revision of Rhode Island’s prostitution statute, reclassifying prostitution from a felony to a misdemeanor. After this, COYOTE became dormant in Rhode Island. However, in amending the statute, the General Assembly accidentally omitted the definition of indoor prostitution altogether, so only street sex work and solicitation have remained illegal.

Elena Shih, a human trafficking and sex work researcher at Brown University, explained that “the strange Rhode Island legislative loophole” that legalized indoor sex work remained unnoticed by the judicial system until Operation Rubdown, a series of Providence Police raids on massage parlors in 2003. The operation culminated in no convictions, as the defense successfully argued that indoor sex work was not illegal under Rhode Island law. Word spread, and for the next six years, the Ocean State drew clients and sex workers from around the country. This included Robinson, who said she was “finally safe enough to report when bad clients tried to hurt [her].”

This continued until 2009, when Governor Carcieri signed a bill that closed the loophole. While doing so, he condemned the influx of sex workers and clients, saying, “I think it’s been a black eye, frankly, in our state that we’ve allowed this.”

The shifting legislation around prostitution in Rhode Island serves as a 30-year case study on the impacts of decriminalizing sex work and demonstrates the absurdity of moral policing. From 1980–2009, reported rape offenses dropped by 31% and gonorrhea cases decreased by 39%, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Decriminalization improved public health, both for sex workers and the greater Rhode Island public,

( TEXT JACKIE DEAN DESIGN CALEB WU ILLUSTRATION SERENA YU )

and yet it was reversed. Carcieri’s claim of “restoring decency” ignored this evidence, prioritizing a facade of morality over safety.

After recriminalization in 2009, Robinson saw the incarceration of sex workers steadily increase and reformed COYOTE Rhode Island in response. She said recriminalization “only felt real when the arrests began.”

While all forms of sex work were recriminalized after 2009, disparities in the policing of indoor and outdoor sex work, which is divided along racial and economic lines, remained. Street-based sex workers experience high rates of homelessness or are otherwise socio-economically unable to work indoors, engaging in ‘sex for survival.’ Street exposure and visibility leave those workers at greater risk of harassment by potential clients and the police, while the ensuing cycle of arrests, fines, and criminal records exacerbates the economic pressures that initially drove them to sex work.

The loitering laws of the 1970s, which targeted street-based sex workers, provide the foundation on which street-based sex work is policed today. The laws led to the mass arrests of predominantly non-white queer sex workers and those profiled as such—a practice for which the term ‘walking while trans’ was coined. The criminalization of loitering and sex work interacted to criminalize poverty and trans people of color in public, including the sex workers who helped Robinson when she got into the profession; they were often stopped by police for ‘walking while trans’ on Florida streets.

In the 1980s, metropolitan police departments prioritized sexual policing in public spaces as a policy of urban renewal, when concerns over white flight and plummeting urban property values took hold. This further increased the policing of non-white and queer bodies, as these sex workers were largely excluded from indoor sex work at parlors and escort agencies.

Alice Little, a sex worker in Nevada’s legalized brothel system and an online advocate of financial literacy for sex workers, said that “what really affects safety is where you can do your work and how much you can charge.” She added, “As a 4’8" redhead, I don’t have a problem with pricing. It’s different for sex workers of color.”

According to Shih, the policing of sex work is “inherently racial, no matter the form.” Prostitution raids in Rhode Island primarily target massage parlors, where employees are mostly non-citizen Asian women.

Three months after recriminalization took effect, in February 2010, the Providence Police conducted their first series of raids on two city migrant massage parlors. They arrested three women for prostitution and one for permitting prostitution—a newly defined crime under the 2009 revision, which holds landlords and business owners liable for knowingly allowing someone to engage in commercial sexual activity. An anonymous blog post titled “Raids Started…” reports that the police did not provide translators to the women arrested. The post’s author

questioned how the police were “helping these ‘victims’ if [they] are not even talking to them?”

The second raid, in November 2010, was coordinated by Rhode Island State Police, the Providence Police, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations. An ICE press release described how “utilizing undercover troopers as female prostitutes and male panderers/security guards, the Rhode Island State Police continued the operation of the prostitution house and received numerous male customers.” The six-month investigation led to the arrests of 14 people, including both male solicitors and female sex workers.

These raids are outlined in “Prostitution and Prostitution-Related Charges in Rhode Island 2000–Present”, the most comprehensive report thus far on the state’s 20th-century sexual policing practices.

COYOTE Rhode Island, led by Robinson, published the report, which found that “since the recriminalization of indoor prostitution (2009), there has been a sharp increase in arrests of Asian spa workers.”

“Migrant massage work became a site of such violent surveillance and policing,” Shih said. She noted how continued policing over the past decade has “wreaked havoc on migrant and sex worker communities.” During a series of Pawtucket massage parlor raids in 2019, Pawtucket Police arrested 13 female workers, who were “all summarily being jailed, and then released with no place to work,” Shih said. Those who did not have citizenship were deported. Four of the women were charged with prostitution, three for facilitating prostitution, and all 13 for working as unlicensed massage therapists.

“White sex workers working indoors [in Rhode Island] don’t experience this kind of SWAT policing or mass arrests,” Robinson said. Although it is difficult to find data as sex work is criminalized, internet monitoring and police records indicate that white sex workers are more likely and able to work independently and online. COYOTE’s report details this disparity: “Asian spa workers accounted for 13 of Rhode Island’s 16 total prostitution-related arrests in 2021.”

Shih emphasized that massage parlor raids have financially benefited Rhode Island law enforcement. “The most shocking thing from [the 2019 Pawtucket raids] was that $650,000 of one spa’s assets were redistributed between the Pawtucket Police Department and the District Attorney’s office,” Shih said. The Pawtucket Police Department recorded over $1,000,000 in total assets seized from the three spas.

The targeting of migrant sex workers is a new moment in Rhode Island’s history of sexual policing malpractice, while arrests remain as gendered as the predecriminalization era. The tradition of using predominantly male undercover officers has continued. According to the ACLU, between 2016 and 2019, 94% of people arrested on prostitution-related charges in the state were women.

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Sex workers are disproportionately impacted by aggressive sting operations that rely on invasive surveillance technologies. “Police test tactics and

surveillance on sex workers first. Name another misdemeanor where that happens,” Robinson said.

In the past 20 years, there have been seven clearly documented cases of law enforcement pilot programs on sex workers and nine early applications of law enforcement tactics nationwide, according to FBI law enforcement bulletins and academic evaluations of pilot programs. These programs tested novel digital surveillance technologies such as facial recognition, drone footage, hidden webcams, web-scraping, IP-tracking, geolocating, and digital screening. Rhode Island state and local police use many of these methods in sex work policing, such as in Operation Backpage, which led to the arrests of 22 people—one of the biggest prostitution busts in the state. Several of these tactics have since become common policing practices for a variety of crimes, namely other blackmarket industries such as narcotics. However, U.S. law enforcement has not publicly acknowledge any systematic use of sex workers as a control group on which to pioneer operations.

Rhode Island police use these technologies in tandem with sting operations. Providence Police arrest records detail the frequent use of sting operations, but do so with opaque language that fraudulently positions officers as passive bystanders. I found a common pattern amongst these depictions, which described how a plainclothes officer would “drive by” a sex worker, “stop and roll down the window,” and gain an incriminating quote. The officer’s own language was almost never quoted or described in police reports, and the word solicitation was certainly never written. In one report, when a sex worker “offered to do ‘anything’ for the sum of $20.00,” the officers only ambiguously “negotiated further” before establishing she would perform “oral sex for the price of $20.00.” This lack of transparency is characteristic, COYOTE reported: “Unlike drug or weapons stings, prostitution stings in Rhode Island are rarely recorded, logged, or audited […] in many cases there is no evidence that another officer or supervisor was present or monitoring the operation.” Providence Police did not respond to a request for comment.

A 2023 study by COYOTE, Shih, and ACLU Rhode Island, which examined the impacts of the preceding 12 years of recriminalization, found that unmonitored sting operations resulted in extreme abuses of police power. The ACLU testified on “reports [that] describe physical or sexual contact between the undercover officer and the person arrested before identification or arrest occurred.”

From 2000 to 2022, 55 of the 1,716 prostitution arrest records in Rhode Island included allegations that police officers engaged in sexual contact with sex workers before arresting them. The 2021 study cites a Rhode Island–based social worker who testified “we have heard multiple people—primarily female identifying clients—describe being raped, having sexual favors demanded of them, and being otherwise coerced both in lieu of and prior to arrest.” COYOTE argues that the lack of supervision during sting operations allows “officers to use sexual contact as part of the ‘proof’ of solicitation without external accountability.” In most of these cases, sex workers gave consent to officers for sexual contact only after

the officers claimed that they were not police and that they would pay for services.

Because sex workers are a criminalized and largely low-income population, there is an extreme power imbalance between them and the police. The social worker explained that as a result, the victims of police assault “did not report the police violence because they will face retribution or they will not be believed.”

Robinson has advocated for two Rhode Island bills that would explicitly make sexual contact by law enforcement during investigations criminalized. SB0372, introduced in 2023, focused on expanding the definition of coercion to include coercive sex by police officers. The second, SB265, introduced last March, proposed a new offense of sexual penetration in custodial contexts by a peace officer, which Robinson defined as including “correctional officers, park rangers, fire marshals, anyone with the authority to put you in a cage or threaten you.” Neither bill made it out of committee.

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Many sex workers call themselves canaries in the coal mine. Instead of warning of toxic gas presence, they warn about new and extreme forms of state violence. Olivia Snow—a writer, dominatrix, and professor— writes that this metaphor ultimately fails, because “unlike miners taking heed of the canary’s abrupt silence, the general population treats sex workers with indifference at best.” Sex worker communities in Rhode Island have been subjected to mass digital surveillance, aggressive morality policing, and ICE raids since recriminalization 15 years ago, before these methods were widely used in tandem against Rhode Island’s general population.

Sex workers are the first to experience new modes of control but are never the last. Policing methods pioneered in prostitution enforcement have become mainstays in law enforcement, and online surveillance methods tested on sex workers are now being turned on all digital platform users. Despite outcry from sex workers and advocacy groups, including COYOTE, the public pays little attention to sexual policing.

Sex worker advocacy in Rhode Island has always been rooted in the recognition that sex workers are not an isolated community. Sex workers are “worried about money, worried about the police, just like most people,” Robinson said. COYOTE continues to advocate for legal protections for sex workers and ultimately redecriminalization. This past March, they lobbied for Bill S0810, which sought “to restore the legal framework that existed prior to 2009 with respect to consensual adult commercial sexual activity.” It was held for further study. When asked about the bill’s failure, Robinson momentarily paused, and then responded: “We are here to stay.”

JACKIE DEAN B’28 wants you to listen to the canaries.

“Serbian Synthesizers are Led by God”

EXPLORING THE DISSONANCE OF TURBO-FOLK

( TEXT HISHAM AWARTANI

DESIGN JO LEE ILLUSTRATION FAITH ZHAO )

c If I were to pinpoint the moment my infatuation with the Balkans took root, it would be when my unsupervised middle school YouTube algorithm–surfing brought me to the music video for “Bosanska Artiljerija” (Bosnian Artillery). This song comes from the time of the Bosnian War (1992–1995), when Bosniak, Serb, and Croatian militias waged bloody battle to delineate ethnic control of the future Bosnian republic. A chapter in the wider violent Balkan wars, this conflict tore apart the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The “Bosanska Artiljerija” music video features a montage of the titular artillery firing munitions at Serb positions, while Bosniaks sporting green headbands march in file. At one point, a mounted man toting a fluttering fleurs-de-lis flag of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina gallops at full speed across a field. Snare drums and an electric guitar undergird the track, with rousing accordion synthesizers complementing the vocals and shining through on a couple of solos. The lyrics extol the virtues of the heroic defenders of the Bosnian nation, jokingly referring to them as bekrijama (bacchanals), and list various Bosnian locales which these bekrije are fighting to protect or regain.

Needless to say, I was enthralled (if you want to know what I mean, watch the video). My further burrowing into this internet rabbit hole introduced me to similar songs by the other belligerents in this conflict (Serbs, Croats, and Kosovars), each with their own rallying cries, images of national pride, instrumental arrangements, varying levels of musical quality, and the occasional insult aimed at their opponents. I had stumbled upon a genre known as turbo-folk (hereafter TF). At its core, TF marries the folk-revival music dubbed by Yugoslav academics novokomponovana narodna muzika (from the Serbo-Croatian, “newly-composed folk music,” henceforth NCFM) of the 1970s and ’80s with a more modern electronic production. Its melodies are replete with accordions, synthesizers (if not synthesized accordions), fast rhythms, microtonal vocal modulations in a heavy vibrato, a combination of traditional and modern instruments (such as electric

guitars and pianos), very often young female lead singers, and various borrowings from Eurodance, rock, ska, and Yugopop.

The name turbo-folk was first popularized in 1988 by the eclectic Montenegrin experimental rock/jazz fusion/electronic singer Rambo Amadeus. He was not a fan of TF. Amadeus diagnosed his contemporaneous genre of low-brow electronically-oriented folk music as “a cacophony of all tastes and smells bound into one sound draft that has the task of satisfying the widest tastes, the lowest passions.” He sought to parody TF in his 1988 album O Tugo Jesenja. Its eighth track “Pilot babo,” for example, almost comically executes the excessive vibrato so characteristic of TF. From its inception, the genre was perceived by the urban elite public as lowly, gaudy, and kitsch.

TF lyrics center around quotidian aspects of life, such as gambling, drinking, and tribulations of the heart, but also, evidently, more nationalistic topics, such as defense of one’s homeland and the cowardice of one’s opponents. Members of the Yugoslav intelligentsia viewed it as a symptom of the moral and cultural degradation of Yugoslav society that accelerated during the ’80s, as worsening economic conditions led to a mass migration of rural populations to urban centers, where the rustic newcomers were viewed as uncouth. TF’s adoption into the fold of nationalist expression and its later implication in the Bosnian genocide of the ’90s did not help. Some have even accused TF of being invented by war criminal and former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević (which it was not). Propositions to ban TF by municipal politicians in Croatia and Slovenia remain a common populist tactic for expressing anti-Serbian sentiment. But is that all there is to TF?

Music for a New Socialist Republic

Following the establishment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1945, the patriarch of the postwar Yugoslav project Josip Broz Tito undertook an extensive modernizing program. It aimed to in-

dustrialize the war-torn federation and establish a new, unified Yugoslav identity based on forward-facing socialist ideals. As part of this push, folk music began to receive standardized arrangements from state composers and feature at festivals in the form of zabavne (festival, literally ‘entertaining’) music. Additionally, more ‘western’ (for instance, heptatonic) types of folk music were favored in these festivals over others, hence the predominance of French-inspired Croatian chanson, Bosnian sevdalinke and izvorne, and Slovenian polka. Though officials were initially wary of transgressive music such as jazz (which they feared would reflect American capitalist ideals), new musical influences continued to seep in from abroad. Genres such as Yu-Mex emerged, with rancheras and mariachi songs sung in Serbo-Croatian (whose album covers often featured the artist donning a sombrero in an approximation of stereotypical Mexican garb). The Yu-Mex fad was short-lived, and the ’70s and ’80s saw the emergence of a robust rock scene comprising bands such as September (sampled on Kendrick Lamar’s “Duckworth”), Leb i Sol, Bijelo Dugme, Riblja Čorba, Gjurmët, Ekatarina Velika, Haustor, Idoli, and Azra, just to scratch the surface. These groups also dabbled in new wave, post punk, ska, and jazz rock. Although the bands were often critical of the government and embodied the counterculture of the disillusioned urban youth, they were mostly left alone.

In the same time period, another genre of music emerged: one that outsold rock bands and drew the ire of Yugoslav officials. This was the aforementioned NCFM, which comprised, in essence, modern arrangements of ‘folk-sounding’ songs based loosely on the traditional music of Serbia and Bosnia. Several communiqués from party members and radio executives disparaged NCFM as a corruption of societal values, and they refrained from providing it with vital state support and funding. The reason for these officials’ displeasure was twofold: first, as opposed to the variants of folk music sanctioned by the state, NCFM retained ‘oriental’ features framed as ‘non-Slavic.’ In

one case, a member of the Serbian parliament played an NCFM tune alongside a popular Iranian song to prove their similitude. A political opponent even supported the display with a complementary belly dance. Meanwhile, Borba (the official newspaper of the Communist Party) labeled the microtonal vibrato that characterizes NCFM as “Anatolian howling” or, alternatively, “frighteningly howling vocals from a quasi–Turkish-Arab ‘tradition’” (Edward Said would like a word with these detractors). Second, the urban intelligentsia perceived NCFM as vacuous and distasteful. Many songs had neither the lyricism of more bona fide folk songs, nor their rootedness in tradition. Grammatical correctness was sacrificed for rhyme, and the feeling of folksy gaudiness was prioritized over adherence to traditional aesthetics or the strictures of the newly-organized state folk. Nonetheless, no widespread action was ever taken to censor NCFM, and sales dropped off naturally after 1983. During the ’80s, electronic elements were progressively adopted into NCFM, the combination of which was ultimately appellated by Rambo Amadeus as “turbo-folk,” a mark of his perceived musical degradation of folk music. The term would stick and come to describe the sonic cornerstone of the following decades.

Soundtrack to a War

The dissolution of Yugoslavia, which started in 1991,

inexorably changed the musical landscape of the Balkans. Many rock bands, which relied on touring revenue and were composed of members from across the republics, could no longer survive. Some bands ruptured along the lines of the newly-founded states; the Sarajevo-based Zabranjeno Pušenje (No Smoking) split when Nele Karajlić, one of the founding members, fled to Belgrade and founded The No Smoking Orchestra. The collapse of the rock scene led to a musical lacuna which the dormant TF could quickly fill. TF singers usually performed as solo acts, so the larger ones withstood the tempest of the dissolution, all the while local, small-scale TF artists proliferated. Additionally, the lumpen and parochial character of TF found fertile and fecund ground in the increasing nationalism spreading throughout each of the Yugoslav republics (each representing one of the major ethnicities of the federation) even prior to the outbreak of the war. This was accompanied by political backsliding and a rejection of progressive, trans-sectarian Yugoslav identity in favor of a more ethnocentric exclusionary politics. The return to more ‘traditional’ music with folksy characteristics appealed to those who advocated for the rediscovery of their heritage as the foundation for newly formed nation-states. The lucrative and relatively underground TF industry also proved a golden goose for the Serbian mafia, who permeated the clubbing scene which TF grew to dominate. Many mafijaši took TF singers—who were overwhelmingly women—as trophy wives. At the same time, organized crime was (figuratively) in bed with ultra-nationalist politicians, many of whom started out in the criminal underworld themselves. Thus, much of the funding for some TF singers would stem from these unsavory sources.

Although most TF remained mundane in subject and nationalistic only by association, some TF singers leaned into more explicitly militaristic themes. TF is mostly linked with Serbia (and to a lesser extent Bosnia), but this explicitly nationalistic strand of music was utilized by all participants in the war, even those fighting against Serb forces. Let us consider the example of Croat war music, whose classification within TF is contestable. Much of this discography bears little resemblance to the TF genre, comprising more standard marching songs such as “Hrvatine” (“Great Croats”) by Đuka Čaić or hard rock such as “Srce Sam Dao za Nju” (“I Gave my Heart for Her”)

by Divlje u Srcu. Nonetheless, the most famous Croat war band is indubitably Thompson (who holds the world record for most tickets sold for a single concert). Although “Bojna Čavoglave” (Čavoglave Battalion), his most well-known track, contains some folk elements, it is dominated by an impressively repetitive guitar instrumental and the rasping vocals of the lead singer Marko Perković, who always seems to be straining to belt. Notably, the song begins with “Za dom, spremni” (“For the homeland, ready”), the chant of the Ustaša (the fascist Croatian party which ruled during WWII and committed genocide against Serbs, Jews, and Roma). These fascist elements, along with explicitly genocidal language, occur frequently in lyrics of the Croat war repertoire. In “Oluja” (“Storm”), one of the few Croat war songs purely TF in form, Iljo Arlović proclaims: “osta čista Lika i Banija / bit će čista Hrvatska zemlja” (“Lika and Banija were clean / the whole Croatian land will be clean”), referring to the areas in Croatia from which the Serbs had fled. Nonetheless, it is the TF of the Serb military that most strongly exemplifies the connection between the genre and nationalist rhetoric, action, and celebration of genocide. The most restrained of its singers—although this bar is not high—is Roki Vulović, who sings in a standard TF fashion over homomorphic accordion/guitar/synths, which always somehow break out in a solo two-thirds of the way in. He sings about fallen commanders (“Pjesma o Mauzeru,” or “Song about Mauzer”), how the brave heroes protect Serb lands (“Narod je htio,” or “The people wanted”), and the loss caused by war (“Kućni prag,” or “Home threshold”). In “Panteri - Mauzer,” one of his best known and more euphonious songs, he praises Garda Panteri, an elite unit in the Army of Republika Srpska. Generally, however, his music refrains from mentioning his enemy except to issue vague threats, as in “Crni Bombarder” (“Black Bomber”), in which he says: “Stavićeš i sebi omcu oko vrata” (“You will put a noose around your neck”).

This is less than can be said about almost any of the other Serb military TF singers, who have a strong penchant for insulting Bosniaks, as seen in “Jadna Bosno Suverena” (“Poor sovereign Bosnia”) by Miro Semberac, where he sings “Doslo vrijeme da se Srbi svete / Sve dzamije u oblake lete” (“Time has come for Serbian revenge / All the mosques will be blown away”). Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović is sometimes a specific target of ire, as in “Ne volim te Alija” (“I don’t like you Alija”) by Baja Mali Knindza. Some of this vitriol has grown into anthems for hatred, particularly “Karadžiću, vodi Srbe svoje” (“Karadžić, lead your Serbs”) by Zeljko Grmusa. This song glorifies the actions of Radovan Karadžić—the president of the unrecognized Republika Srpska (which seceded from Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992), convicted of genocide against Bosniak and Croat civilians. The track was referenced and played by the Christchurch mosque shooter in 2019, whose actions resulted in 51 deaths. Perhaps the most abhorrent example of this malice is Koridor’s “Oj Alija Aljo” (“Oh Alija, Aljo”), which features such lines as “Nema više turskih pita, od posavskog zlatnog žita” (“No more Turkish [Muslim] pies made from Posavina’s golden grain”) and “Oj Alija, Aljo, šta će tebi hrana? / Kol’ko bolan misliš imat Ramazana?” (“Hey Alija, Aljo, what do you need food for? / How many Ramadans do you think you have”). These lyrics refer to the practice of starving Bosniak POWs, and the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks from the Posavina region. On top of such genocide-mongering, even some of the seemingly innocent aspects of TF have sinister underpinnings: Ceca, a defining voice of TF, would frequent the frontlines to provide moral support for Serb soldiers through her performances. It was there she met Željko “Arkan” Ražnatović, the leader of one of the most notorious Serb paramilitary groups—the two were soon wed in a ceremony awash with Serbian flags, unmistakably fake crowns, and

men in traditional garb firing an assortment of weapons into the air. VHS tapes of the event were sold to the general public. The specter of nationalism is hard to shake when it comes to TF from Serbia.

In contrast to these vitriolic odes to genocide emergent from Serb and, to a lesser extent, Croat TF, the corresponding Bosniak output seems rather

Zabranjeno Pušenje

The dissolution of Yugoslavia, which started in 1991, inexorably changed the musical landscape of the Balkans. Many rock bands, which relied on touring revenue and were composed of members from across the republics, could no longer survive. Some bands ruptured along the lines of the newly-founded states; the Sarajevo-based (No Smoking) split when Nele Karajlic, one of the founding members, fled to Belgrade and founded The No Smoking Orchestra. The collapse of the rock scene led to a musical lacuna which the dormant TF could quickly fill.

tame. Although it contains some songs stylistically characteristic of TF, its repertoire distinguishes itself by a preponderance of electric guitars. The resulting sound is streaked with elements of the earlier rock scene, while still maintaining distinctive TF elements, such as the iconic vibrato. The best known Bosniak TF song is the “Bosanska Artiljerija,” the aforementioned wellspring of my interest in the genre. Its rhetoric is patriotic in nature and calls upon the Bosniak nation to “Let the enemy know that we won’t give up easily” (“Dušmani nek znaju da se lako ne damo”), but the hostility is not comparable to that found in the Serb or Croat lyrics. Other notable numbers include “Armija Smo Tvoja Bosno” (“We are the army of yours, Bosnia”) by Haris Ganić, which opens with a poetic chorus of “Dok zemlja gori / Vraća se sjaj / Iz ovo pakla stvoriću raj” (“While the earth burns / a shine is created / I will make heaven out of this hell”), and “Grbavica” by Mladen Vojičić Tifa. The latter track references the neighborhood of Sarajevo where the football team FK Sarajevo is based (see my piece in Issue 1 of Volume 50, “Boban’s Drop Kick,” for a discussion of the ethnopolitics in Yugoslav football). Specific Bosniak military units also produce their own music, with the 204th Teslić Mountain Brigade (made up of refugees from the town of Teslić) being the standout example. Their album Teslić - Vratiću se ja (“Teslić - I will be back”) is set mostly to niveous music videos

with dapper hibernal all-white uniforms to boot, and covers topics ranging from eulogies to their fallen commander Đoga, to honoring their mothers, to a celebration of the brigade itself. Their generic spectrum ranges from classic rock to prototypical TF.

Seeing as Bosniaks are Muslim, Islamophobia played a major role in the Bosnian genocide. As a result, many songs were awash with religious imagery, such as “Mi smo vojska Allahova” (“We are soldiers of Allah”) by Ilahije i Kaside, “Mi smo muslimani” (“I am Muslim”) by the 241st Sprečansko Muslim Brigade, and “Mudžahedin” (“Mujahideen”) by Mahir Bureković. In contrast, the music of the Kosovars—the other predominantly Muslim group in the region—is almost absent of such religious themes. Instead, the imagery of songs such as “Marshi I UÇK” (“March of the Kosovo Liberation Army”) and “Jam Kosova e Shqiptarise” (“I am Kosovo and Albania”) by Arif Vladi draws far more heavily on the double-headed eagle of Albania than any Islamic iconography. It is from Kosovo that we get the funniest track from the ’90s: “Thank You USA” by Armend Miftari Mendi. Sung in charmingly awkward English lyrics, the track acknowledges the U.S.’s contribution to Kosovo’s independence, with lines such as “Thank you U.S.A [sic.] / you are my bestfriend [sic.] / you are the peace keeper / you are the legend” and “Thank you U.S.A [sic.] / stoping [sic.] genocide / helping small Kosova / stoping [sic.] the wrong fight.”

Whose TF?

This bellicose strand is what would come to dominate the foreign perception of TF, in spite of the fact that it was only a minority of the total musical output. Wartime TF thus turns out to be an inaccurate sample for this music as a whole, characterized by an enormous heterogeneity in production, style, and ethnic association, and a general association with the conflict. TF is not inherently militaristic or nationalistic—a view which results from a myopic focus on wartime TF, to the detriment of the rest of the genre (although this is something I am guilty of in this very article). While many TF singers appeal to conservative impulses, others are outspoken in their progressive views; big-name artists such as Severina, Jelena Karleuša, and Seka Aleksić have all expressed their support for LGBTQ+ rights at a time when homophobia is on the rise in the Balkans.

The juxtaposition in TF of kitschy extravaganza with more international and sophisticated ’80s rock

elements constitutes a form of Yugonostalgia (see Adora Limani’s piece on this phenomenon in Issue 1 of Volume 51, “Do You Have A Yugoslavia-Shaped Hole In Your Heart?”), a longing for the times and circumstances from which these rock groups sprang. However, the association with nationalist elements was not unique to TF. In the 1992 song “E, Moj Druže Beogradski” (“Oh, my friend from Belgrade”), the Zagreb-based rock band Film reminisces on the close connection between Croatia and Serbia, and the absurdity of fighting one’s former compatriots. The result is a touchingly bittersweet anti-war melody where the Croatian is brought to tears by having to shoot his friend from Belgrade. In response, Bora Đorđević, lead singer of the recently-defunct Belgrade-based Riblja Čorba, released “E, Moj Druže Zagrebački” (“Oh, my friend from Zagreb”), whose upbeat melodies contrast starkly to its threat of robbing the friend from Zagreb and bringing him to tears. Đorđević also released a song comparing Tito to Al Capone for the former’s perceived suppression of the Serbian people, and continued to ally himself with nationalistic elements throughout his life, showing that reactionary thought had also percolated into the rock scene.

Although we have been discussing a broad swath of wartime music which we have designated as TF, showing any of these songs to a well-adjusted Balkanac will more likely than not result in a curious, confused stare. Such a normal Balkanac may have been exposed to such songs by the internet, or by family members of a more nationalistic disposition, but the bellicose strain of TF is certainly not what first pops into their minds when they think of the genre. A more accurate depiction of TF’s public perception in the Balkans can be seen in Part 2 of Vice’s Around the Balkans in 20+ Days, in which the American journalist Thomas Morton accompanies the TF singer Goga Sekulić through a day in her life. This includes a studio recording session, meeting her friends, and attending a TF-fuelled rager lasting till 4 a.m., all the while imbibing large quantities of alcohol. Morton appears disparaging of Sekulić’s profession at times (even though she is nothing but nice to him), but the tumultuous music playing at a neck-breaking BPM in a nightclub illuminated by blinding lasers and teeming with a drunken throng of shady men and women with various degrees of cosmetic enhancements captures the image many people in the Balkans have of TF: trashy, image-obsessed, mindlessly consumeristic, slightly oriental, crassly promiscuous,

vacuous, and with an unhealthy relationship to alcohol. Granted, TF's association with nationalism—and especially the mafia—are well-known to the public, and in Croatia it tends to be viewed as a Serbianizing phenomenon. However, the militaristic strands of TF discussed here are rarely listened to.

This foreign perception may have to do with the Balkans’ oriental mystique, wherein the violence that erupted there during the fall of Yugoslavia is viewed as uniquely barbaric and ‘un-European.’ Western countries may wage their own wars, but at least they never brag about burning down places of worship like the savage Balkanaci. In his 1945 novel Bosnian Chronicle, a veritable tour de force in its portrayal of the orientalizing of Bosnia, the Yugoslav author Ivo Andrić writes of a French consul who describes Bosnian music as “more akin to the howling of dogs than to human song.” The Frenchman reasons that “none of it has any connection either with music or singing, as this is understood by other peoples, but happens simply to be one of the ways in which they express their hidden passions and evil lusts, which otherwise, for all their wantonness, in the nature of things, they would not be able to articulate,” to which the Austrian consul affirms that this music is “a dirgelike atavistic cry from the bottom of a primeval soul”—not too far off from Rambo Amadeus’ definition of TF.

The moment the music video of “Bosanska Artijlerija” shows a montage of the cities mentioned in its lyrics, I still feel the same rush of patriotic fervor for a nation I have no connection with. But I have also come to appreciate the modern TF, with all its kitsch, which actually makes up most of the genre. Thus, when Seka Aleksić in her song “Crno i zlatno” sings “Pomešaj ove noći crnu i zlatnu / Po mojoj koži slikaj kao po platnu / Diraj me usnama po telu i vratu / Pa onda stavi me u ram” (“Tonight mix black and gold / Paint on my body like a canvas / Touch your lips on my body and neck / And then put me in a frame”), I find myself involuntarily nodding my head to the beat, because despite the gaudy lyricism, the song is (if you permit me this colloquialism) a banger. In this turbo-folk dissonance, I am no longer enthralled; I’m entertained.

HISHAM AWARTANI B’25+1 is yearnfully scrolling @bosniarealestates on Instagram.

TOWN & COUNTRY

Dreams of Utopia

All of the boys will be gay

We will agree about who should live and who should die

Death will be another city we go on vacation to

Death will be Cancún

We will all agree about things except art which will be harmless

Religions will disintegrate their ideas will cohabitate in a large temple with wooden columns and red steps

San Francisco will be warm in the summers

They will have never built the bridge

There will be no bridges

There will be no roads

There will be no news channel

There will be no dreams

There will be no country except country music

And there will be a lot of country music

Layover in Girl City

I have three hours so I leave the airport take the subway to Girl Central girls everywhere all kinds

I buy a hot dog on the street with cash no one uses cash here everyone can tell I’m a tourist there are lots of tourists here transplants too people are friendly in this city which is a giant grid and easy to navigate in theory but I’m lost I head south towards a monument I wish

I could move here then remember the taxes are so high

I lived here for a while when I was a kid and didn’t have to pay taxes I take a picture take the subway back to the airport GRL airport get a t-shirt for my daughter at the gift shop it’s yellow and as my plane takes off

I notice the moons growing one morning while working in the yard

I am surprised I thought I planted tomatoes but I water and weed them anyway

I am spending a lot of time alone these days maybe I have always been alone

I look at the skyline it looks

monogamous

I have a truck and there’s a road but I never take it

I have a telephone so I could call someone but I never do cod in a pan on the back of a dog who radiates deep molten heat

And I pick the moons they are ripe and the birds are trying to eat them

There are five:

The first I crush into powder put the powder in with the cod

The second I wash and feed to the dog

The third I juice and use the skins to dye fabric for clothes

B’26 is making moon wine.

( TEXT GEORGIA TURMAN DESIGN JENNIFER EUNGYO KIM ILLUSTRATION ANGELINA SO )

GEORGIA TURMAN

Ghosts in the Machine

AND OTHER SITES OF POSSESSION

( TEXT NAHYE LEE

DESIGN SELIM KUTLU ILLUSTRATION AVARI ESCOBAR )

c The head snaps back. There is something behind the eyes and in the body, the body that lifts off the floor and begins to convulse. Things fly across the room. The mouth opens and it speaks, horrific and distorted like static pouring from the tongue. White pupils stare into nothing—insides scooped out and replaced by another being, a spirit, a ghost, a demon, a father, a God, a voice.

We’ve all watched this scene before. It happens all the time. We recognize possession on screen: the moment when something unfamiliar enters the body and transforms it into something grotesque. Possessions involve a spirit that takes and a body that is taken, the body whose plunder frequently becomes the narrative device that drives horror movies. To be possessed means to be displaced. If the self once inhabited and animated the body, it is now without a home—the host loses agency and identity, reduced to its physical presence in the world and the occult being governing it.

But the idea of possession presupposes a body that can be separated from the mind. We—the possessed—are not identical to our bodies but in them, their (usually constant) inhabitants. Our selves, then, are detachable from “the assemblage of parts, organs, and tissues that constitutes the whole material organism,” as the Oxford English Dictionary defines the body.

The notion that the mind and body are distinct was most famously theorized in the 17th century by René Descartes, who saw “the body as a machine made by the hands of God.” Scientists echoed Descartes’s vision throughout the 18th century and beyond. In 1747, the French physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie wrote, “The human body is a watch […] a machine which winds its own springs.” The American biologist Herbert William Conn suggested in 1899 that “the living organism is […] a series of machines one within the other.” In 1966, John B. Watson, a psychologist and founder of the scientific theory of behaviorism, compared the body-as-machine to a car: “Take four wheels with tires, axles, differentials, gas engine, body; put them together and we have an automobile of a sort.”

The phrase “ghost in the machine,” coined by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle to critique Descartes’s mind-body dualism, captured this idea of a thinking self haunting a mechanical frame. But the absurdity of the image—an invisible will piloting an empty vessel— was perhaps what made the metaphor so enduring: Once the self was imagined as a ghost and the body as a machine, it became possible to picture other ‘ghosts’ taking over. The body could be possessed, disciplined, or owned because it was already separable from the will that animated it.

This mechanistic view of the body coincided with the Second Industrial Revolution, amid the normalization of mass production. The Philosopher Robert Chapman writes that “it was capitalism that allowed the body itself to go from being understood as a dynamic organism to being a working or broken machine.” People were reduced to living automatons, their normality or abnormality understood in terms of their bodies’ functionality—which was judged strictly by their productivity. David Nicholls, a

biochemist, adds that the myth of body-as-machine became significant when it began to be applied “not only to the function of various bodies, but to the machinery of production that had become necessary to fuel the growth of an economy.” The same logic used to explain bodily function spurred, in the industrial age, a notion of the body that worked efficiently and predictably—just like a machine.

In “An Atlantic Genealogy of ‘Spirit Possession,’” The historian Paul Christopher Johnson asserts that this idea of the automaton, a “machine-body without will,” enabled the conceptualization of spirit possession. If the human body was understood as a self-winding machine, its movements could be determined by mechanical laws rather than human agency. The body could be a simple tool—one animated, inhabited, or controlled by external forces, whether those of industry or empire. He thus outlines spirit possession as a “conceptual apparatus of the West” which allowed it to define “the degree to which human beings can be seen as property […] and legitimately maintained in servitude.” Spirit possession marked a primitivity characterized by physical frenzy and illogical spectacles beyond the scope of reason. It created and justified the idea of “irrational machine-bodies”—people incapable of independent thought, whose bodies could be ‘put to work.’

The term “possession” itself was often used to describe African religious practices. E.B. Tylor, an anthropologist, wrote that “to the minds of the lower races it seems that all nature is possessed, pervaded, crowded, with spiritual beings,” framing their beliefs as indicative of inherent inferiority. Spirit possession indicated the lack of a rational self, allowing the West to transform Africa into “the model anti-modern site for possession” and its people into property, possessed first by spirits and then by colonizers. Spirit possession was a term and practice that the West co-opted for their own ends, morphing it into evidence of enslaved people’s inferiority and thus justifying their subjugation as the possessed—“those who are like things.” Africans were ‘possessed’ in both senses, their bodies inhabited by alien forces and held as property by others.

Yet spirit possession also allowed the possessed to resist the state of being made property. More specifically, the spirits’ occupation of the body would allow the host to resist the idea of a single, coherent self, a self that could, for instance, sign contracts or be legally bound to the hierarchy of slave and master. Johnson writes that this “problem of contract” arose because “the authenticity, identity, and agreement as to mediating authority are all rendered opaque” by the spirits’ presence. Therefore, he concludes, “spirit possession indexed not servility or enslavement, but rather liberation [...] Being occupied within would lift the cage pressing down from without” (emphasis my own).

+++

Dictée by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha—a collection of poetry, images, calligraphy, and blank spaces—is concerned with the body and the state of its inhabitation. Being written in Korean, French, and English,

Cha makes the text partially inaccessible; she leaves much untranslated, and her translations are often intentionally inaccurate. Like Johnson, she sees occupation as both violent and generative. When Cha depicts the occupation of the diseuse—a female performer of monologue—she references the colonial projects of Japan and the United States: the occupation of Korea by the Empire of Japan from 1910 to 1945, and the occupation of Korea after World War II by the Soviet Union and the United States from 1945 to 1948. In Dictée, spirit possession justifies colonialism, just as Johnson argues it was used to justify the enterprise of slavery.

The first section of the book begins with dictation, as the diseuse attempts to speak a foreign language. This attempt is at best arduous and at worst agonizing: “She would then gather both lips and protrude them in a pout.” The protrusion of her lips is unnatural and intrusive: To speak is a conscious and uncomfortable effort. “Inside,” Cha writes, “is the pain of speech the pain to say […] It festers inside. The wound, liquid, dust.” The oppressive presence of dictation in the diseuse is an occupation. What possesses her body is not a spirit but rather a linguistic demand, an owner that urges her to forfeit the familiar contours of her native tongue and force her mouth into the shape of the Latin alphabet. Cha’s depiction of the process of dictation is perhaps semi-autobiographical: She learned both colonial tongues, English and French, as an immigrant to the United States—and for her, dictation must have been just as embodied and vicious. Korean is expelled from her body like the self might have been in the face of a vengeful ghost; a linguistic identity displaced and forgotten as the vessel is occupied by a tongue that seeks to conquer other bodies still. It is difficult, I remember, to start rolling r’s.

What responses are possible to the violence inflicted by refusal? Professor Lisa Lowe argues that the body is “the literal and figural site from which different and often fragmented speech is uttered in resistance to the imposed competency in the colonizer’s language.” Cha describes the diseuse’s effort to dictate with a prolonged, disgusting physicality, and when she does speak, she spits out “bared noise, groan, bits torn from words.” She “resorts to mimicking gestures with the mouth,” and chooses not to be fluent. What does it mean to force herself to dictate the words thrown at her in a foreign language, to repeat the sentences a schoolmaster might say? It is to become less than who she was—to be subsumed into a whole, where everyone must say and learn the same thing, to give up some part of herself to become fluent and acceptable. Instead, she insists on remaining inarticulate. The agony of dictation is not a choice, but the decision to remain in that moment before assimilation is. That she experiences dictation as torture, and that she ultimately fails to speak decipherably, suggests that her body is a site of resistance against the imposition of colonial languages. To reject dictation, to reject becoming the same, means also to reject the expectation that the migrant shoulders—to translate her way into legibility and integration.

The possession that Cha describes is one that “admits others to make full. Make swarm. All barren

cavities to make swollen,” and in doing so “expel all excesses until in all cavities she is flesh.” The diseuse is reduced once more to her body, where her self is expelled to make room for the languages and the others that speak through her. The ejection of her self allows her to reject becoming representative of a whole identity, because she is simply many.

The professor of English Shelley Sunn Wong refers to this resistance as “Dictée’s project of radical non-identity,” against the “trope of wholeness” present in Asian American (and ethnic) literature of “uncomplicated and desirable progress […] from a condition of brokenness, estrangement, and struggle […] to one of reconstituted wholeness and ultimate inclusion in the narrative drama of American history.”

For the “Korean American immigrant woman writer” that Cha was, the demand to be representative of any part of her identity is an erasure that is overcome by allowing the body to be occupied by others. As Wong writes, “the insistence on attentiveness to multiple and often contradictory inscriptions of self rather than singular assertions of identity”—in other words, the cohabitation of the body by other beings—is a rejection of annexation into the ‘immigrant narrative.’ This narrative, too, was a kind of colonization based on the imperative to move from a “disunified self” to “coherent identity and, ultimately, identification with the larger society.”

Cha further identifies agency in the act of dicta tion through emphasizing that the diseuse admits allowing others to enter her. The inhabitation of her body is not always destructive, as is suggested by the violence of dictation. Cha interprets the occupation of the diseuse as resistant to an all-consuming narrative structure. In that rejection of acculturation, however, there is also the possibility of generation, of using that rejection to create something. If the diseuse does not let it in, it cannot enter. Through this resistance, she is able to reclaim the act of speaking. Akin to Johnson’s notion of spirit possession as liberation, the diseuse is freed from the structure that bids her to become an appropriated subject. At the end, the diseuse is an agent in her own speech: “The delivery. She takes it. Slow […] The pause. Uttering. Hers now.” Language does not take the body; the body takes language. Cha’s portrayal of occupation, then, coheres with the dual understanding of spirit possession as imposing acculturation on the colonized subject while simultaneously motivating and fuelling resistance. I no longer struggle with the r’s. When I speak I do it slowly, to make sure everyone knows I know the language.

had said and done when God spoke through her. She writes “the Lord made his Rivers flow […] and extraordinarily mounted my Spirits into a praying and singing frame, and so they remained till morning-light.” In other words, God was the possessor, and she was the possessed.

Trapnel maintains that her words were never her own, repeating that “for in all that was said by me, I was nothing, the Lord put all in my mouth, and told me what I should say.” She vigorously denies the possibility that her words could have been anything but prophecy or gospel, giving herself an authority that she could not have otherwise had as a woman writer in early modern England. Indeed, the attachment of her words to God through possession gave her a freedom that not many of her peers enjoyed; The professor of English Susannah B. Mintz notes that she would “travel through the countryside alone,” an activity virtually prohibited for unmarried women, and that her “utterances contained explicitly subversive political commentary.”

write freely. She is not so actively resistant as Cha, whose configuration of possession directly opposed the mapping of a colonial narrative and identity onto the “Korean American immigrant woman writer.” Instead, Trapnel fully embraces the idea of being a double agent, one who was a devoted and obedient woman but also an author who delivered coherent and rational criticism. As Mintz puts it, quoting Sidonie Smith, she “would mitigate the apparent threat of her voice by ‘perform[ing] traditional femininity,’ along with more subversive declarations of power and independence.” The ejection of her self is what allowed her to at last speak.

+++

I am thinking, as I write this article, that in order to efface ourselves so completely from our work and the words we speak, we must also understand who we are, the self that we are born with, which inhabits the body before it is pushed out by the other ghosts in our machine. We have a self—of course we do! Our minds do not exist only to animate soulless automatons; they transcend the reduction of our bodies into cogs in industrial clockwork. In reading Trapnel, I find myself less fascinated by the words she spoke during possession than her account of the experience, the ‘I’ that returns over and over again as she narrates how God entered her body. According to Mintz, Trapnel is, too, “obviously fascinated by herself, and in the meticulous specificity of her narrative, she repeatedly directs our attention not toward God but toward Anna Trapnel.” By examining this process of possession and the ways it influenced her, Trapnel elucidates her own voice. She is there, speaking.

Two months after Cha’s funeral, in 1982, the year Dictée was first published, her mother read it for the first time “and had to stop a number of times because she felt that Cha was speaking directly to her.”

On the very first page, there is a black-and-white scan of an inscription in the Korean alphabet, hangul It is the only hangul in the book. It reads, “Mother, I miss you. I am hungry. I want to go home.”

But before everything, there was a prophetess. Anna Trapnel, born 1622 in Poplar, a district to the east of London, often experienced visions during which she allowed a divine voice, God, to speak through her. She is recorded to have fallen multiple times into extended trances and delivered verses that would be transcribed and published.

Language does not take the body; the body takes language.

Although Trapnel never explicitly uses the word “possession” or any equivalent term, what happens to her body during the trances is similar to what constitutes a possessive event—a non-corporeal agent becoming involved with a human host. According to Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea, she would lose consciousness and control, failing to recall what she

her apparent prophetic ability, which allowed her to transcend the conventions and stereotypes imposed on her by her gender. “Any woman writer in the early seventeenth century,” Mintz recalls, “confronted widespread cultural resistance to what was considered tantamount to insubordination.” It is not difficult to imagine the backlash against women writers, who dared construct a self through literature at a time where they did not even have the right to vote—and would not have it for another three or so centuries. Trapnel’s reticence makes sense—through the invocation of God as the one who occupied and controlled her body by speaking through her, she was able to sidestep the fraught, stigmatized territory of becoming a woman who wrote. In a culture “dismissive of women’s speech and suspicious of any act that signaled independence,” Trapnel’s status as a prophet allowed her to intentionally deprive herself of her agency, which would, paradoxically, amplify her voice. She was, to briefly return to Johnson, possessed in both senses of the word. Trapnel’s prophetic trances positioned her as both the vessel and the property of God: her body physically occupied by the Lord, her voice proof that she belonged to Him as His innocent and faithful messenger. She had given Him her body, and spoke His words. What more could the patriarch ask for?

Trapnel uses the concept of possession to unsettle the identity and norm imposed onto her, carving out a space for herself wherein she could speak and

NAHYE LEE B’28 is rethinking her use of the ghost emoji.

I spy the word TRACE I spy the word FRAGMENT I spy the word PIECE, take a careful look.

R’27 thinks silver serifed first.

I spy the word FOUND, can you spot it?

I spy the word RELIC I spy the word SCRAP

c I SPY: Letfover Letters Trink, Experimental Typeface Found material, 2025.

Jndie Goes On A Date

c It’s getting chilly. All I want to do is snuggle up with a big, big, steaming hot mug of something yet undetermined. Or maybe with… someone. Indie is not immune to whatever infection this season brings (what some may call a ‘love’ ‘bug’). And today, the fever is reaching new heights. You heard it here first: Indie is finally leaving the walls of Conmag, stepping out into the world, and going on a Date. And, dearest readers, I’m taking you with me.

EVY:

EVY: Thanks for coming on a date, on this bed. And for agreeing to keep your shoes on.

INDIE:

INDIE: Do you normally do your first dates like this?

EVY: Yeah. My mom didn’t let me date in high school.

INDIE: EVY:

INDIE: Red. Shoes should never be worn beyond a five-foot radius from the doorway. No offense.

EVY: So.

INDIE:

INDIE: So.

EVY: Can I take off your shoes now?

INDIE:

INDIE: Only if you can step into them.

EVY: I’m a size 9, so.

EVY: EVY:

INDIE:

INDIE: Before we go any further, I need to know if you’re someone I can trust. I’m not just looking for someone really, really hot. I’m also looking for someone wise and dependable, someone who can give advice that’s almost as good as mine. My readers have questions, and I want to know how you’d answer them.

INDIE: Mirena asks: “I keep bringing up my IUD in conversation with people I don't know very well because it's the only thing on my mind these days. What are some better conversation topics so I don't scare away my acquaintances with, for lack of a better phrase, pussy talk?”

EVY: To be honest, oversharing is the only thing keeping orange juice that perfect combination of pulpy and tangy. So I’d say, keep the pussy talk. If you still want to add some variety, you could reverse that and talk about DUI prevention.

INDIE: Okay…

EVY: EVY:

INDIE:

EVY: This is my ninth time having a date here. On my twin XL.

INDIE: Oh.

INDIE:

EVY: So what do you do for a living?

EVY:

INDIE:

INDIE: I answer questions.

EVY:

EVY: That’s so funny. I ask them.

INDIE:

INDIE: Ask away.

EVY:

EVY: Talk me through your outfit. What should you wear on a first date?

INDIE:

INDIE: One of three options. Something a little bit slutty but not so much that it reads as something a little bit slutty. Or, back issues of Dear Indy (1990–present) fashioned into a dressing gown of sorts, so they know what I’m about before I even have to say anything. Or, a hazmat suit. You never know what might be coming for you.

EVY:

EVY: Hm. I’m glad you’re not wearing the latter, because I’m big on physical touch as a love language. Are you?

INDIE:

INDIE: Huge. But I would never admit it.

EVY:

EVY: If you could take one of my fingers and store them in a jar, which one would you take?

INDIE:

INDIE: Left middle. It’s the longest.

EVY: INDIE:

EVY: Do you think people fall in love because of timing, or in spite of it?

INDIE: Both, sort of. But mostly in spite of it. If it were to happen solely because of timing— because of sheer proximity or convenience— it wouldn’t really be love, would it?

EVY:

EVY: Have you ever fallen in love during a group project?

INDIE:

INDIE: God I wish. Group projects tend to breed hatred more than love, in my fortunately limited experience. But not at the Indy, if you think of the Indy as one big neverending group project, or as several section-specific group projects. The Indy provides the exact appropriate conditions for the seeds of love/ lust/some ambiguous third thing to flourish. This column is usually a one-woman show, though, so. Still no.

EVY:

EVY: If you could cut your hair and then grow your hair would you do a cartwheel?

INDIE: No. A back handspring.

INDIE:

EVY:

EVY: Do you think Conmag has good lighting for heartbreak?

INDIE:

INDIE: I always feel a little bit like I’m in an extended battle with Conmag lighting and I’m not winning. So no. Or yes? Regardless, there is no heartbreak in Conmag. Only incredible genius and free-flowing artistry and lukewarm beverages.

EVY:

EVY: Red flag or green flag: people who sit on beds with shoes on?

EVY: You’re right. Okay. Wow, no one has ever asked me to prove my worth. But, I think I’m ready.

INDIE: EVY: EVY:

INDIE: RFK Jr. asks: “Why is everyone breaking up? Is it something in the water?”

EVY: The water’s fine. I think people develop an allergy to commitment when they start thinking about airplanes.

INDIE: White Rabbit asks: “Will I arrive to class on time?”

EVY: By the looks of it, no. If you put your Crocs on sports mode, you might have a chance.

EVY: EVY: EVY:

INDIE: Jack of None asks: “Should I quit everything and focus on three things deeply or continue on and have a superficial understanding of a lot of things? I’m overwhelmed with the number of things to learn and the fact that, as a senior, my time at Brown is going to end very quickly.”

EVY: Your learning about the world is never over. It will be different, sure, but unending. The end goal in life is to look like a pi symbol. Breadth and two depth sticks. So maybe start working on those sticks. Also, factual information may not be the best medium to experience the world.

INDIE: Keightlynn Covington asks: “What is the best way to end a crisp, autumn day?”

EVY: INDIE:

EVY: Thirty minutes of rotting on your phone. Well, I guess this isn’t the best way. But ohh, how I love my phone.

INDIE: Sticky Bitchuation asks: “My friend's girlfriend from elsewhere visits most weekends. She's very annoying, which is irrelevant. I keep calling her a bitch in a good way, like "bitch, you're crazy" or "bitch, come here" or "bitch, you look great in those jeans." My friend tells me I need to stop calling her girlfriend a bitch. Is that, like, valid?”

EVY: Your friend is valid. I mean, do you call your friend a bitch? Or just their girlfriend? Maybe that degradatory talk is reserved for between the two of them. You shouldn’t intrude in their special interests unless otherwise expressed.

INDIE: EVY: INDIE:

INDIE: SAD Girl Summer asks: “Why do I feel the worst when the weather is the best?”

EVY:

EVY: Hm. It’s like how your birthday ends in tears because you wake up expecting sunshine and rainbows. Or how Halloweekend is always less fun than expected because you spent 5 hours shopping on Am*zon to find the perfect fairy wings just for the Providence Police to shut down the party in 24 minutes. Maybe if you start expecting sadness every time the sun comes out, you can gaslight yourself into being happy. Just a thought.

INDIE: EVY:

INDIE: Gobble Gobble Toil and Trobble asks: “How do I deal with uncomfortable family situations at Thanksgiving?”

EVY: Whenever I’m uncomfortable, I itch the part of my heel that gets irritated by my shoes. It's nice. You should try that.

INDIE: Scareda Bareilles asks: “I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on this education, but I think it's my calling to be a waitress. My parents are mad that I want a job that doesn't require a college education, but I could be seriously great at waitressing and probably make more money than I can with a bachelors in the humanities. Should I spend another $100k on grad school, or is this a sunk cost fallacy?”

EVY:

EVY: Let the cost sink and get that degree, or spend it on a holiday during your paid leave as a waitress. Sing “Hakuna Matata” and try sun bleaching your pillow cover with leaves.

INDIE: Huh.

EVY: You got any more for me? Or did I pass your test?

INDIE: Huge S. With distinction.

EVY: Good.

INDIE: INDIE:

INDIE: So.

EVY: Our second date. Where would you take me?

INDIE: The back page. Have you ever been?

EVY: EVY: INDIE: INDIE: INDIE: EVY: INDIE:

( TEXT ANGELA LIAN & EVY HWANGBO DESIGN KAYLA RANDOLPH )

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Mutual Aid

c From @amornetwork on Instagram "A community member currently in ICE detention needs post-deportation financial support, as he is due to be deported to Barcelona next week. He is from the Dominican Republic and has no family or support network in Spain. We are hoping to raise $4000 to cover rent and food for two months. Please donate with a ♥️ in the comment section"

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c Lighthouse Community Development Corporation 11 Hawthorne St Second and fourth Saturday of each month 9 a.m.–noon Serves all RI residents Languages spoken: English, French, Spanish Take the following buses: 20, 22 c Salvation Army Providence Corps’ Food Pantry 386 Broad St Wednesdays 9–11:30 a.m. Serves Cranston, Johnston, Providence residents Languages spoken: English, Spanish Take the following buses: R, 20, 22 c Scalabrini Lay Movement Inc. 300 Laurel Hill Ave Wednesdays 4–6 p.m. Serves 02903, 02907, 02909, 02920 residents Languages spoken: French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish Take the following buses: 17, 18 c Women’s Refugee Care 570 Broad St Saturdays 10 a.m.–2 p.m. for fish and produce only Serves 02907 residents and all refugees from the African Great Lakes region Languages spoken: French, Lingala, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Swahili Take the following bus: R

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c Birth Workers Drop-in Acupuncture Clinic November 24, 4:30–7:30 p.m. Agroterra Midwifery, 502 Bullocks Point Ave Free c Christmas On the Hill Celebration November 29, 2–6 p.m. Depasquale Plz and Atwells Ave Free c From @danbrogan44 on Instagram: see information about the following food banks: c Better Lives RI Food Cupboard 12 Abbott Park Pl Mondays 3–6 p.m., Tuesdays and Wednesdays 9 a.m.–1 p.m. Serves Providence residents Languages spoken: English, Spanish Can visit 2x a month Take the following buses: R, 6, 17, 22, 9x, 10x, 12x, 59x, 61x, 65x, 95x

c Volunteer Day at the Steel Yard November 14, 4–7 p.m. 27 Sims Ave Free c Discussion and Reading — Big Feelings, Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl by Dan DiPiero w/ Robin James November 14, 6 p.m. Symposium Books, 240 Westminster St Free c Discussion and Reading — Road to Nowhere, How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore by Emily Lieb November 15, 4 p.m. Symposium Books, 240 Westminster St Free c ‘Eternal,’ a Group Art Show w/ readings by Jayde Marie Van Atta, Justice Ameer, and Celestino Pottinger November 15, 7:30–9:30 p.m. 335 Wickenden St c Justice Circle for Women of Color and Nonbinary POC in RI November 17, 6–9 p.m. Southside Cultural Center, 393 Broad St Free Register at bit.ly/NovemberJC2025