the VOLUME 40 ISSUE 9 24 APRIL 2020
LOST IN TRANSLATION
FIRE FROM ASHES
O, IT’S MANIFOLD!
Providence public schools, multilingual pedagogy, and the coronavirus crisis
A conversation with sound maker Nicolás Jaar
Corporeal poems and flash fiction
Indy
the
Cover
Twin XL Sylvia Atwood These days, words haven’t felt right for the taking. A tired world is a heavy weight for any tongue to carry, and lately, my lips have been stretched thin by silence. I keep trying to fit my words someplace between the beautiful and the taciturn, keep them aimed towards something needed and real. Yet they rarely end up where they’re headed, and I know it’s because I’m too afraid to set off in the first place. Tell me: how do you feel strong enough to find language for the moment we’re living in?
News 02
Week in State Feuds Leela Berman
13
The EFF and the Anticolonial Struggle Iryumugaba Biko
–––
Metro 03 09
A passage from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass,” a treatise on Indigenous wisdom and environmental duty. She is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. “But then the Words That Come Before All Else begin to flow, and you start to answer.”
A Socially-Distanced 2020 Census Kion You Lost in Translation Leela Berman
––– Maybe we can try it like this. 'BubbleShape.dat' every 2 Tell me: what is it you need?
Features 04
Get It in Writing Amelia Anthony
15
Gold, Alone Marie Lachance
Arts 05
Briding the Gulf Lucy Duda
Science+Tech 07
Ashes from Fire Alex Westfall
Literary 11 17
O, It’s Manifold Natalie Zummer
10 5 0 -5 -10 -15 -20 -25
The In-Between Spaces Miranda Ruiz
Mariposas y Marsha en los tiempos de Inseguridad Isabela Minaña Lovelace
MISSION STATEMENT
The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism. Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond. The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.
24 APRIL 2020
40 30 20
X 18
25 20 15
VOL 40 ISSUE 09
-40
10 -30
-20
0 -10
0
-10 10
-20 20
30
-30 -40 40
STAFF WEEK IN REVIEW Emily Rust | NEWS Anchita Dasgupta Peder Schaefer Tristan Harris | METRO Ricardo Gomez Miles Guggenheim Deb Marini | ARTS Zachary Barnes Eve O’Shea Isabelle Rea | FEATURES Audrey Buhain Mia Pattillo Nick Roblee-Strauss | SCIENCE + TECH Bilal Memon Izzi Olive Andy Rickert | LITERARY Catherine Habgood Star Su | EPHEMERA Liana Chaplainm Sindura Sriram | X Jacob Alabab-Moser Ethan Murakami | LIST Ella Comberg XingXing Shou Cate Turner | STAFF WRITERS Alana BaeR Leela Berman Mara Cavallaro Uwa Ede-Osifo Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña Evie Hidysmith Kaela Hines Muram Ibrahim Anabelle Johnston Jennifer Katz Emma Kofman Evan Lincoln Zach Ngin Jorge Palacios Nell Salzman Issra Said Kion You | COPY EDITORS Josephine Bleakley Muskaan Garg Sarah Goldman Marina Hunt Christine Huynh Seth Israel Thomas Patti Ella Spungen | DESIGN EDITORS Daniel Navratil Ella Rosenblatt | DESIGNERS Anna Brinkhuis Amos Jackson Kathryn Li Katherine Sang | ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Eliza Macneal ILLUSTRATORS Sylvia Atwood Leslie Benavides Gemma Brand-Wolf Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Ryn Kang Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Pia Mileaf-Patel Claire Schlaikjer Floria Tsui Veronica Tucker Katrina Wardhanna | BUSINESS Caín Yepez Abby Yuan | WEB Ashley Kim | SOCIAL MEDIA Muskaan Garg | SENIOR EDITORS Ben Bienstock Ella Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Tara Sharma Tiara Sharma Cate Turner Wen Zhuang | MANAGING EDITORS Matt Ishimaru Sara Van Horn Alex Westfall | MVP Leela Berman
@THEINDY_TWEETS
WWW.THEINDY.ORG
week in state feuds
States whose biggest beef with each othe r typically involves passing a pigskin have gone one step further during this global pandemic by limit ing interBY Leela Berman state travel. Restrictions first began cropping up in ILLUSTRATION Jessy Minker mid-March in states with prominent vacation econoDESIGN Daniel Navratil mies, like Hawaii and Florida, and culminati ng with our dear little Ocean State in late March. This is a far cry from the modus operandi, where state s bicker about who has the best pizza and roadtripp ers are viewed as voyagers, not villains, at hear t. In a nation that was sorely unprepared for this pandemic—with a dilapidated healthcare syste m and a president in denial of the virus’s severity— decis ions about how to address COV ID-19 came down to governors and individual citizens. Some assessed the situ- state boundaries have tightened with the spread of ation and decided to continue their vacations , while COVID-19, the vitriol some Americans like to reserve others fled from hotspots to try to stay safe. Rather for people they assume to come from foreign counthan blame failing infrastructure for the virus’s tries has been extended to out-of-staters. The news rapid spread, many directed their rage at certain caught on, with headlines including the provocative individuals. phrases “Rhode Island Police to Hunt Down New Rhode Island took one of the most pointed stanc es Yorkers Seeking Refuge” and “The Governor Who early on. On March 26, before most other state s had Dissed New Yorkers.” instituted required quarantines, Governor Gina Door-to-door searches for New Yorkers were Raimondo announced that those traveling from New aimed at reminding them and anyone tempted to York must self-quarantine for 14 days after arriving follow in their footsteps that not following orders in Rhode Island or risk a fine and potential arrest. would, in the words of Governor Raimondo, “come New Yorkers, many fleeing from New York City, were with penalties.” Perhaps she was alluding to the kind largely traveling to Rhode Island beach town s like of public shaming that keeps cropping up around New port. State police and the National Guar d were the world. Whether from police brutally enforcing enlisted to stake out the border, major highways , train quarantine policies or people turning on their neighstations, and airports. Cars with New York license bors with aspirations of vigilante justice, staying at plates were pulled over, drivers’ contact infor mation home is not only celebrated on Instagram stories collected, and copies of Raimondo’s executive order but surveilled the world over. In India, police have handed out. To ensure complete submissio n, the beaten those who disobey quarantine, or made them National Guard perused rental homes and summer do squats and push-ups. Hong Kong punished rulecottages, knocking on doors, searching for those breakers with heavy fines of thousands of dollars. The from the Empire State and demanding that they quargovernment of Nova Scotia encouraged local resiantine—gotta catch ’em all! dents to call the police if they suspected somebody In a New York Times inter view, one beac h of breaking quarantine. Individual people, fleeing town local described seeing a trooper car, lights from harm, become scapegoats in the new pandemic flashing, following a car with a New York license regime. plate. Others shared photos on Facebook of cars As for Rhode Island, during a CNN interview, with New York license plates in parking lots, perhaps Governor Cuomo threatened to sue the state, publicly out of resentment, fear, or a base desire to tattle . As calling the pointed law “absurdit y.” The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island said that police stops based on license plates violated fourth amendment rights. All very unfortunate for those hoping authoritarian measures would help stop the spread of the pandemic in Rhode Island. The Rhode Island solution to this state-on-state drama? Simple: a new authoritarian and exclusionary measure applied equitably to people from all states! Raimondo expanded the quarantine requirement to
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
any visitors or residents returning to Rhode Island. Seven states, including Rhode Island, now require all visitors to self-quarantine for two weeks. Another eight states, including heavyweight big states Texas and Florida, require quarantines for visitors from certain states—mainly, New York and New Jersey. Relative to Little Rhody, these states managed to get by with a little less media attention. Apparently, Rhode Island’s downfall could be located in the execution, with police forces actively searching out cars and homes. Perhaps the lesson is not to start battles with a state about 20 times your size? All these rules were passed via a handy gubernatorial executive order. Raimondo, explaining her decision to the New York Times, said she was less concerned about the public perception of this kind of measure than the image of overflowing hospitals. “I’m focused on outcomes, not optics,” she elaborated. While time will tell if these sorts of quarantines are effective measures for reducing the spread of COVID19, it is clear that these feuds make enemies at a time where we all desperately need (physically-distanced) friends. If the lack of good news is getting you down, know that some states still seem to be getting along. About a week ago, Washington, Oregon, and California donated PPE to New York state (this Indy staff writer humbly thinks that the West Coast is, indeed, the best coast). In recent weeks, a handful of states on both coasts have agreed to coordinate their openings from shutdowns. Perhaps both state feuds and state collaborations come from a similar place: trying to find some sort of solution with little support from the federal government. What’s important to remember is that we’re all in this together, no matter what your license plate might say.
—LB
WEEK IN REVIEW
02
A SOCIALLY DISTANCED 2020 CENSUS BY Kion You DESIGN Matt Ishimaru
HOW RHODE ISLAND IS ATTEMPTING TO COUNT EVERY SINGLE ONE OF ITS RESIDENTS The United States Census Bureau has historically declared April 1 as a national "Census Day," a time to unite the nation in the shared importance of completing the census. Complete Count Committees (CCCs), localized census advocacy groups composed of community leaders and government officials, would census data could be more or less remediated on a have hosted rallies and marches to promote the 2020 national and state level, it is the local, neighborhood census, launched earlier in March, and would have tract level that would be most vulnerable to statistical emphasized the 1.5 trillion dollars in federal funding variance. "We have a very large, predominantly Latino at stake. However, with stay-at-home orders in place population in various parts of the city," he said. "I think across most of America, CCCs have had to radically it's more likely that it will be undercounted on that rework their campaign strategies. In Providence, a scale." city at serious risk of being undercounted, Census Day Among Providence’s Latinx population, which shifted online. makes up 42 percent of the city’s residents, an addiSabina Matos, the president of the Providence City tional roadblock to full census participation is latent Council, kicked off the hundred person Zoom meeting fear around giving personal information to the governby emphasizing the most crucial point: Census data ment. Moreover, the proposed and since-removed determines how much federal money Rhode Island "Citizenship Question" on the census—a fear-mongets over the next decade. She presented the stakes as gering gesture by the Trump Administration—has "four billion dollars allocated to the state for healthcare, instilled even more wariness among immigrant housing, roads, environmental protections." Mayor communities. Dr. Logan also mentioned that due to Jorge Elorza spoke next, emphasizing the redistricting current pandemic conditions, a proper count may be impact of the census, saying, "We are on the brink of more of an issue among immigrant, working-class losing a congressional seat, unless everyone gets out communities. "Some people are going back to Mexico," there and gets counted." he said. "Some people are hiding. Some people are not Luis Estrada, a Rhode Island CCC leader, spoke normally where they are." about how census outreach, which has been ongoing James Diossa, the mayor of Central Falls in Providence for over a year, had been thwarted by and co-chair of Rhode Island's Complete Count COVID-19 at its most critical juncture. "Here's the Committee, told the Independent that despite being truth," Estrada explained. "We're stuck in a situation in a crippling pandemic, the census still needs to get where our traditional field operation...is no longer a done. "I think it's absolutely a priority," he said. "This valid operation for us." In past years, if households did will have a ten year impact." Accordingly, Diossa said not self-respond to the census—which in 2010 was over that Rhode Island's CCC has adjusted their outreach one third of households nationwide—one of 500,000 strategy from traditional, in-person field operations to enumerators hired by the Census Bureau would have methods such as mass robocalls, liaising with public knocked on their door to obtain information. Door schools, and blasting translated materials into the knocking usually starts in May, but this year census local media. Their outreach strategy is evolving in real field operations have come to a complete halt, with time, as government and community organizations June 1 as a tentative comeback date. On April 13, the across the state rush to test online methods for effecBureau asked Congress to extend the delivery of final tiveness and efficiency. Immigration Coalition is encouraging the use of census figures from the end of this year to April 30, Diossa is viewing Rhode Island's stay-at-home Instagram Live to film yourself filling out the census 2021, but the proposal is currently pending. orders as a potential positive for response rates, given and distribute it across online circles. The Asian Because 2020 is the first year the census has gone the fact that the census is now online. "This is a unique American Federation has advocated meeting different primarily online, rather than through mail, the Census opportunity," he said to the Independent. "People racial groups on their commonly used social media Bureau has provided real time response rates across should have time to fill out the census. There's really applications: WeChat, for the Chinese community the nation. The city of Providence has lagged behind no excuse." However, Diossa also recognized the diffi- and KaKaoTalk, for the Korean community. The both the state and nation, falling in line with a trend culty of getting the importance of the census across Latino Community Foundation has even launched among lower income, majority-minority urban areas. to his largely Latinx, immigrant population, many of a census-inspired lottery game called “Censotería.” As of April 22, the national self-response rate is at 51 whom are new to a decennial census system and are Personally, I have been flooded with Instagram adverpercent. Rhode Island as a whole is at 48.3 percent, but already experiencing instability as essential or unem- tisements from the Census Bureau, as well as YouTube Providence is over ten percentage points lower, at 37.2 ployed workers. "You have to be very direct," Diossa advertisements featuring cameos by local Providence percent. The consequences of a potential Providence said, and stated that the messaging that resonated personalities: Mayor Elorza, NBC 10’s Mario Hilario, and Rhode Island undercount are dire: According to most with his community took the form of something Bekka Berger from Hot 106, and the Big Nazo aliens. the Rhode Island CCC's Get Out the Count Plan, an like, "With your participation, you are allowing us On Twitter, dozens of Providence nonprofits blast incorrect count would affect the allocation of a third to participate in improving schools, healthcare, and census infographics everyday, emphasizing the federal of the state's annual budget. Moreover, Providence roads." funding that goes to their specific arenas of social work. County had already undergone a census test run, when As a whole, those most hurt by stay-at-home Ultimately, both Dr. Logan and Mayor Diossa it served as the Census Bureau's sole guinea pig in orders will be groups without fixed addresses, groups emphasized that at the moment, the census is clouded advance of 2020. Its results were dismal, with self-re- that must be physically visited to be counted: Native in uncertainty. If census data ends up skewed, the equisponse rates ending up at 52 percent. Some residents communities on rural reservations, people experi- table distribution of resources and democracy could may even believe that there is no need to fill out the encing homelessnes, those temporarily staying in be thrown off for the next ten years. In this vein, the 2020 census given their participation last year. others’ homes. As a result, just as much as the census 2020 census falls in line with just about every other is a statistical examination, it is inevitably a political private and public good and service put into jeopardy +++ one. And cities like Providence, with large low-in- over the past month. Towards the end of his interview, come, minority populations already reeling from the Dr. Logan threw this question of uncertainty back onto The entire city of Providence is classified by the Bureau economic consequences of COVID-19, will require the Independent. He asked, in regards to reporting on as a "Hard to Count" census tract, due to factors such more funding and outreach so that the Constitutional the census, "How do you make your work informaas language barriers, low literacy, and a lack of internet mandate for the census is given its due diligence. tive when you have ambiguity?" Perhaps we can look access. Accordingly, residents of color have been to the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force Leader consistently undercounted: In 2010, Rhode Island's +++ Dr. Anthony Fauci, who told Vanity Fair regarding the Black population was undercounted by 2.6 percent, its future of our country, "I will say what’s true, and whatLatinx population by 2.1 percent, and its Asian popu- More optimistically, as people adjust to social ever happens, happens." lation by 0.8 percent. Dr. John Logan, a professor of distancing, new grassroots strategies to perform sociology whose research depends on census data, told online census outreach have been circulating across KION YOU B’20 encourages every single person to get the College Hill Independent that although inaccurate the nation through social media. The New York counted, and to tell their friends to do the same.
03
METRO
24 APRIL 2020
GET IT IN WRITING
+++
Despite my tendency to attract chaos, nothing I’ve lived through is particularly memoir-worthy. Instead, writing down my life has been largely a private and therapeutic endeavor. I use it to process, reflect, and remember. Journaling is often high on lists BY Amelia Anthony of self-care practices. The journal is ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer a nonjudgmental confidant. In times of DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt crisis, I find myself writing in it more. This is, without a doubt, one of the first times where my everyday life has suddenly become extraordinary and decidedly historical. No one except us has cw: abuse, gaslighting lived during a time of national quarantine in contemporary America—which is If someone you are about to date for a I have forgotten a lot of what it was crazy! With the situations that govern us long time mentions that they have previ- actually like to date the person I dated right now—statistics, regulations, and ously read their ex’s diary, that may be freshman year of college. The day-to-day quarantines—changing on a daily basis, it the only red flag that you will ever need. details that I left out of my journals can be hard to keep up. Creating an accuare missing. rate documentation and asserting one’s During my healing process, I wished I own truth in the midst of all this can be +++ had kept more accurate notes about every- a way to get a handle on it all. Sometimes the absolute truth can be At home and stationary in quarantine, I thing that happened to me so that when cleaned out my bedroom desk, an accumu- therapists characterized the relation- just too much to pen down though, when lation of over a decade of childhood and ship as abusive I could have empirical the weight of one’s world is difficult adolescence. Organization has never been evidence to prove to myself that it was. to synthesize. When it feels this way, I found it so unbelievable that some- I assert that random collecting can be my strongest suit. I found stickers and uncapped markers and love letters from my thing like that could happen to me. just as worthwhile and rewarding. It also high school boyfriend and tiny bottles of Naturally, I wanted proof that I had been can be easier to write down your daily manipulated so severely. schedule in bullet points, rant about how alcohol I hid to throw away later. Part of healing after a relation- terrible the Tiger King and I episode was, I also found the stash of old journals that I have been writing as letters to my ship like this is forgetting. It is about or make a list of things to cook with erasing all the evidence: deleting texts, the strange assortment of food in your future self since age five. screenshots, photos. It is about letting fridge. This type of journaling is still Dear Journal, they begin in the early moments, especially the good ones, fade an accurate and relevant documentation away with time, both in detail and inten- of life right now. Be gentle with yourself periods. sity. Certain streets in Providence and and let the details of the everyday pain I lost my first tooth today :) Mommy was New York City used drip with so much memory and truth work their way in when they can. It is difficult to imagine what will washing my face for school and there it that it was physically uncomfortable to was! I cried. I got a star sticker on the walk them alone. It is about taking the be eventually said about this period. time to rewalk them and rewrite them. Even so, writing it all down a journal is chart (graph). This is really short! The other part of healing is remem- the first, unfiltered step towards being bering—remembering all the steps able to see some meaning or pattern. In Bye, throughout the relationship that fore- a world situation where it can feel hopeAmelia shadowed its demise and downfall. And the less to work towards such uncertain ends, writing about life now is a commitment to As I grew up, my daily diary became journal is great for this. When I break up with someone, I create our future selves. unrestrained and unlined. Instead of All of it feels so important and inscribing my life in summaries, I would a list of 50 reasons why I hate them. pick a random page, turn it sideways, and Ranging from things so petty they should historical—so err on the side of including write “poetry.” As the year went by, my never leave the page (picky eater, ugly everything. This type of record-keeping journal would become full and cramped, crier) to deal-breakers that leave me can ground us in the present. It is useful with poems and paragraphs and ephemera kicking myself (hates women), the list for writers and non-writers, forgetters and rememberers. With this in mind, I scrawled on or glued to each page. Reading serves as an explicit reminder. I am not sure what to do about the write more furiously and screenshot every my diary from sophomore year of high school is so visceral now, because I was Y situation, is a sentence I wrote in Zoom call I am on. It is easy to sleep writing with such truth and spontaneity my journal more than once that summer. or binge-watch away each day, but I try that it conveys exactly what it was like Endlessly equivocating, I explained away to promise my future self good material, the harm by writing down three sentences both for writing and for reflection, by to be 15 in the way that I was 15 then. justification for each sentence paying sharp attention now. These snippets form a collection of of what it means to be me at each moment in describing manipulation. Now, I literally could take a red pen and circle the flags. my life. AMELIA ANTHONY B’22 sleeps with her I wrote down everything I wanted to +++ journal next to her pillow. remember, ever. (This is a tendency I’ve never lost.) Lists of my best friends and songs I liked at the time. Everyone I This summer I was heading to work on the had ever kissed, in chronological order. J train in New York City and received a Compliments that I valued. Secrets I call from my best friend in Los Angeles. was keeping. Books and movies to read. I was alarmed—it was before 6am on the Jokes to tell and retell. Everything gets West Coast—so I answered immediately. Sobbing, she choked out a story about written down. I’m not actually a forgetful person. meeting up with her ex. The encounter In general, my memory serves me well. Yet quickly turned sour and toxic. Her ex something about humankind’s inability tried to manipulate her by lying about to remember everything unsettles me. what had happened moments later, accusing Growing up and experiencing more of life, my friend of harm she knew she definitely especially the good of it, fills me with didn’t do. My friend was terrified—worried an anxiety that I will forget even just about this thing she knew didn’t happen. I told her to do the thing I would one thing that has happened to me. So my journals fill up quickly— do in this situation: write down exactly rendering them maximalist in their inclu- what you just told me so that you know what is true. sion of detail and minutia. A diary, in this way, can be great This is partially a preventative measure. If you keep meticulous-enough protection against gaslighting. Keeping documentation of your actions, of your a written record of contracts and incitransgressions and their consequences, dents is always a good idea; get it in rarely will you make the same mistake writing is too often a lesson learned late. But recording what happened is twice. equally important for remembering what is true for yourself. +++
MAXIMALIST JOURNALING IN CRIS AND CALMNESS
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
FEATURES
04
BY Lucy Duda DESIGN Alex Westfall
BRIDGING MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art’s contem- safe, intellectual distance. Lewitt complement the somber atmosphere without porary outpost in Queens, occupies an outwardly Katrib told me that because of the show’s subject competing for attention. Lewitt’s signature technique unassuming space in a converted school building. matter, “the art press has not understood the show at provides detailed, numerical instructions for drawing The museum’s entrance is a squat structure of grey all…it’s been the non-art press that has really gotten that can be followed without the artist present, usually concrete, an exercise in brutalism so understated that it.” Several reviews from the art world criticized the drawn directly onto the wall, and eventually erased I walked straight past it a few times before realizing I exhibit for being too blunt in its messaging, raising a or painted over. He uses the technical and creative had arrived. But the contents of its cavernous white- debate about whether art sacrifices aesthetic depth labor of the people remotely assembling his works to washed galleries on that grey day in February could when it pursues polemics. Other reviews have praised play with questions of authorship, standardization, hardly be described as unassuming. the show for giving attention to an under-examined and ephemerality in the way society values art. The Theater of Operations: Gulf Wars 1991-2011, an history. However, this recognition of the exhibit’s two artists face each other across the gallery in monoambitious and sprawling exhibition, occupied PS1’s political nature also invites critics to hold it to a higher chrome harmony, but the visual dialogue between entire building from November 2019 through March standard of ethical scrutiny. the works also generates a subtle tension between the 2020, closing right before the wave of institutional MoMA has been embroiled in controversy since personal and mechanized aspects of art and war: who shutdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic. This was it reopened after renovations in October of 2019. In gets the luxury of seeing minimalism, detached ratiomy final trip to a museum before quarantine, and the anticipation of the museum’s relaunch, grassroots nality, and calculated precision as aesthetic choices, experience has stuck with me, not just as a last blast in activists and artists began calling for MoMA board when for others they represent the imminent threat of the outside world (all the way to New York!), but as a member Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, to divest from dehumanizing violence? rich source of philosophical questions and moral quan- ICE contracts, private prisons, weapons manufacAs the exhibit went on, this affective and philodaries that I now have time—maybe too much time—to turing, and fossil fuels. When Theater of Operations sophical contrast in artists’ relationship to wartime mull over. opened at PS1 a month later, 37 artists featured in the culture became increasingly evident, just as the curaThe United States’ 1991 military engagement exhibition signed an open letter calling for MoMA’s tors had intended. American and European artists, who in the Gulf War officially lasted only 42 days. But its board of trustees to cut ties with its chairman, Leon experienced the war primarily from a distance, tended aftermath, including the war in Iraq from 2003 to 2011, Black. Black’s company owns Constellis Holdings, to lean into the brash, garish imagery of early-2000s has resonated through the decades, heralding a slew formerly known as Blackwater—a defense contractor popular culture and political commentary. In his essay of cultural changes that continue to haunt the world infamous for its war crimes in Iraq. In the ensuing “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” cultural theorist today: increased surveillance, drone warfare, and a months, several artists continued to protest by having Jean Baudrillard argued that the media’s oversatura24-hour news cycle that profits off mass hysteria. By their work removed from the show. They pointed tion with images and discussion of the war—especially presenting an array of works by well-known Western out the hypocrisy of MoMA mounting an antiwar its framing as a “war” in the first place, implying a level artists alongside the perspectives of Iraqi artists who exhibit without acknowledging its own relationship to of organized combat occurring far away from civilian have received less international renown, Theater American imperialism, demanding to know: how can lives—actually prevented people in the West from of Operations presented a startling juxtaposition of the museum claim to radically critique recent history understanding it as a real and immediate atrocity. In aesthetic and everyday experiences on either side of while remaining complicit in the present? line with Baudrillard’s thinking, the exhibit’s Western the continental divide. It charts the war’s divergent artists showcased their understanding of the wars as trajectories, from sanctions and the looming shadow +++ a site of capitalist corruption and technological alienof violence for artists in the Persian Gulf region to ation, but in doing so contributed to the very informaAmerican TV pundits endlessly debating oil and Walking into the labyrinthine exhibit, I could imme- tion overload their works sought to critique. terrorism alongside banal popular culture.The show diately see the curators’ wide-ranging approach and French photographer Jean-Luc Molène’s La Guerre was rife with contradictions, most visibly the aesthetic selections at work. There was a clear attention to - 17 janvier 1991 (which translates to War - January 17, contrasts staged intentionally by the curators. But sensory balance and catharsis: I first entered a dark- 1991), for example, shows a seemingly ordinary day on there was also the cognitive dissonance of learning ened room with a jarring, sensory-overload video a Parisian street, with the title and a few subtle splashes about the war from the comfort of a sterile white box, installation, followed by a gallery whose wide expanse of red the only hint of conflict. Similarly, American seemingly detached from the outside world, and an of smooth white wall was punctuated by small, richly artist Cory Arcangel’s “Bomb Iraq” is a simple desktop acute awareness of the museum’s own uncomfortable colored etchings of allegorical figures, and elsewhere computer game that prompts the player to launch relationship with its artists’ political statements. encountered a palate cleanser of pieces which dated missiles at a blank blob of a country, demonstrating I spoke with one of the curators, Ruba Katrib, who from the era but related only indirectly to the war. how the impersonality of drones makes it possible to told me that the curatorial team had several goals for One monumental work, Hanaa Malallah’s She/He carelessly end lives. These artists sought to confront the exhibition. They aimed to highlight the toll of US Has No Picture, occupied a gallery near the entrance, the war’s banality in everyday European and American intervention on the Persian Gulf region both during serving as a chronological and emotional anchor. life, but simultaneously created new artifacts of that and after the wars, the transformation of military Malallah used burnt and torn canvas scraps to create detachment. When they did confront the brutalities and media technologies, and the lived experience of a mural with portraits of people killed by American of war on the ground, American and European artists Iraqi and Kuwaiti citizens, outside the broad stereo- laser-guided missiles at a public shelter in Baghdad overwhelmingly portrayed the violence through the types familiar to American audiences: “terrorists, oil in 1991. Only 100 of the 408 victims had a photo, so trappings of military technology—armored soldiers, sheikhs, and women covered in black from head to the 308 others are represented instead by their names guns, and bombs. Even a work like Tony Cokes’ Evil.16: toe,” in the words of featured artist Nuha Al-Radi. In converted into a string of numbers, each letter replaced (Torture.Musik), which places the viewer in a room particular, the curators hoped to bring the work of Iraqi by its value in the Arabic system of numerology, inter- blasting American rock music at top volume alongand Kuwaiti artists to the forefront and place them in spersed with laser-cut brass plaques that reflect the side neon lights and projected text, describing and opposition to Western art-world darlings like Thomas viewer’s own face. simulating a method routinely used to torture Iraqi Hirschhorn and Martha Rosler, who have been showOn the opposite wall, black and white geometric detainees, wields its high-tech political commentary ered with praise for commenting on the war from a drawings by the American conceptual artist Sol like a blunt instrument.
05
ARTS
24 APR 2020
THE
GULF
MOMA PS1 AND THE ART OF WAR
These detached, sardonic pieces created an label at all. I was fortunate enough to attend a tour by dispassionate distance created by technological, teleuncomfortable dissonance when placed alongside one of the curators, during which I learned, among vised warfare. The striking effect of a tiny notebook poignant, vulnerable works produced by those living many other things, that etchings of a dove that I had unspooled into a tapestry of time and experience, the through the wars on the ground. Prominent in Iraqi taken for granted as a generic peace symbol were in fact stark side-by-side juxtapositions of works from oppoartists’ work, but almost entirely absent from that a bold antiwar protest for which the artist faced severe site sides of the world, and the inescapable physicality of Western artists, was the long period of sanctions consequences. Most of the people at the museum of the war as portrayed by Iraqi artists could only be imposed on Iraq by the United Nations. The presence that day seemed to be, like me, part of an academic captured by seeing the pieces in a physical, in-person of American troops on the ground in Iraq had clearly tour group, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether setting. But I also couldn’t escape the feeling that violent (if unequal) implications for both countries, an unaccompanied visitor would come away with the something was missing from the exhibition. Given whereas the sanctions had no effect on Westerners’ same contextual understanding. Although visitors can the museum’s limited hours, there weren’t many visiaccess to daily necessities or creative resources. The venture over to the bookstore to peruse the exhibit’s tors that day, and as we all drifted slowly around the celebrated Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s massive companion essay collection, the valuable context it cavernous building in a reverential silence, it felt more full-room installation Hotel Democracy, a towering contains is largely absent from the gallery walls. like a mausoleum than a space for ongoing critique structure comprising two stories of miniature hotel Artwork with labels, artwork without labels, and creation, resting on the laurels of having made a rooms, contemplates democracy’s contradictions from lengthy essays separated from the art—as someone statement. Each time I passed by a blank space with a cerebral distance with the aid of images culled from who works in a museum, I realize all this talk risks the simple label “this work has been removed at the mass media—along with the luxuries of time, space, devolving into fussy industry navel-gazing. But there request of the artist,” I thought about the explanations funding, and the ability to purchase 44 television was one more thing that stood out to me in this exhi- they could have displayed—the artists’ urgent, ongoing sets. The piece radiated an imposing but impersonal bition: the periodic appearance of no art and no expla- response to the very injustices portrayed throughout gravitas. During the sanctions period in Iraq, however, nation. That is to say, a blank patch of wall or a dead TV the exhibit—and how much more dynamic this would even pencils could be hard to come by. A new creative screen with a tiny placard indicating only that “this make the exhibit feel. medium proliferated known as dafatir, which are work has been removed at the request of the artist.” Theater of Operations closed as scheduled—the first small notebooks crammed with drawings, paintings, While PS1 has been a sister institution of MoMA since weekend of March—but many other exhibits around and collage. Dafatir are portable, easy to conceal, and 2000, the staff I spoke to ardently stressed that the two the world have not been so lucky. What was already a diaristic, presenting deeply moving personal accounts museums have separate boards and governance struc- soul-searching moment for museums, which have long and explosive imagery with limited space and mate- tures—implying that PS1 has no control over (and is not approached public engagement with the mindset of rials. Some dafatir used accordion-like pages to create controlled by) the toxic philanthropy of Fink and Black. “if you build it, they will come,” has been made all the a single continuous image and narrative up to five However, PS1’s response to protestors reveals the limits more urgent by the pandemic. Questions about repreyards long. After viewing works like Hotel Democracy, of the museum’s autonomy. Iraqi-American artist sentation, financial ethics, the museum’s responsiwhich had already been displayed and received exten- Michael Rakowitz’s requests that the museum pause bility to its local community, and the uncertain future sive publicity prior to this exhibit, it was gratifying to his video were repeatedly ignored; when he visited in of live arts in a digital age are now impossible to avoid. see the dafatir accorded due respect and breathing January to pause it himself and display a statement But the world’s response to the loss of its in-person room, fully unfurled and claiming whole galleries to explaining his decision, the museum quietly removed experiences, and the enthusiasm with which the public tell their stories. his sign and restarted the video. Similarly, when artist has greeted museums’ quarantine outreach projects, Ali Yass announced his plan to tear up his drawings, provides a clue to a way forward. Museums are at their +++ the museum removed them from the exhibition before best when they engage openly and productively with he got the chance, stating simply that “there are no pressing contemporary issues, not simply by holding What is the goal of an exhibit like this? Many of the circumstances under which MoMA PS1 would accept objects up for display. After all, why should the public works were visually striking, and the political stance the destruction of artworks.” trust a museum that argues for its own survival on the was relatively clear, but for whom and for what did The museum’s censorship of Iraqi artists protesting basis of art’s political power but won’t even answer to this exhibit happen? Was it an academic exercise? An the very issues the exhibit claims to confront is partic- its own artists? If museums want to carve out a role in activist one? If it aimed to speak truth to power, how ularly disappointing. These incidents also raise further the 21st century as a worthy home for art, community, did it make sure someone was listening? How was it questions about power dynamics in museum spaces, and public discourse, they need to demonstrate their trying (and succeeding/failing) to reach its commu- since PS1 is a non-collecting institution (meaning value as a space where creative choices can have real, nity in Queens and beyond? I don’t have satisfactory they exhibit artists’ works but do not purchase them), physical and political consequences. answers to these questions yet, and I don’t necessarily supposedly offering artists ownership of their own expect the museum to, either. The experiential and creations and a platform for their political voice. LUCY DUDA B’20 is ghostwriting Baudrillard’s postsocial value of museums can’t always be distilled down Ironically, the exhibition’s run has been an uninten- humous sequel, “The Pandemic Did Not Take Place.” to rational, practical, or utilitarian answers. But I’ll tional demonstration of imperialism in action—how continue to ask these questions until I begin to get a difficult it can be for a historically powerful institution response that at least approaches satisfactory—which, to cede the hegemony it is accustomed to holding, even for now, I can’t quite say about MoMA. in service of its own stated moral principles. A few things stood out alongside the art pieces while I wandered around the exhibition. One was +++ the relative sparseness of labels throughout the show. While the current thinking around gallery text is that Later, scrolling through a PDF of the exhibit catalog, “less is more”—that most visitors are more engaged by I was struck by how unsatisfying the tiny pixelated a brief open-ended description than a lengthy anal- images were in contrast to the real thing—espeysis—I was surprised to find that many pieces had no cially for an exhibit predicated on breaking down the
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
ARTS
06
FIRE FROM ASHES
A CONVERSATION WITH SOUND MAKER NICOLÁS JAAR
how to clean up the mess.” “Cenizas” is the Spanish word for “ashes,” an image Jaar: I’ve actually been making music the same way apt for tracks that merge destruction with regeneration for 16 years. The only big difference recently is that I through their whispering, monastic harmonies, drip- have worked with some people to create objects that I ping, glitched percussion, and Coltrane-infused piano sample and make sounds with. I can’t call them instruechoes. This same sentiment arises in the record’s ments because it’s a matter of making the objects in lyrics: On the opener “Vanish,” the repeated phrase order to sample them—not to ‘play’ them. But maybe “Say you’re coming back” evokes with incessance a that’s what’s changed; now I need a kind of alien kind of circular time, one that rejects linear progress. physicality to what I make music with. I’m getting less This refusal is revisited on the record’s final song, “Faith and less comfortable referencing the past or distinct Made of Silk,” where Jaar sings “Look around, not musical traditions. (But of course it's very hard not to!) ahead / a peak is just the way / towards a descent” over and over again atop a sprinting drumbeat. It’s through Westfall: There is a sense of movement, place-making, these tracks that Jaar confirms the following inquiry as and dislocation in the multilingual lyrics, sonic nods fuel for his work: Can electronic music imagine a new that reach far across the world, and direct references political world? to political histories. What role do landscapes or geogI noticed that to accompany his live-streamed raphy play in your work, and what kind of geography sounds, Jaar broadcasted his computer screen in do you hope your music imagines or constructs? real-time. While users in the chat function championed the techno scenes of their respective hometowns, a Jaar: Whenever I used to try to accurately answer the cursor toggled sound levels on Ableton Live, scanned question ‘where are you from?’ I would get stuck. I’m YouTube for footage of quicksand, and sifted through not American but I was born in [New York]. I’m not desktop folders. At the close of the two-hour set, Jaar Chilean but both of my parents are and I lived there pulled up a clip from a 1985 lecture at the United during my childhood. I’m not Palestinian but the Jaar Nations by philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. I remember family is. I think things got simpler when I realized that the prosody of this moment: Krishnamurti’s urge that it didn’t have to ‘make sense’—that ‘sense’ itself was “Peace requires a great deal of insight, a great deal of maybe the issue to begin with. inquiry without condemnation,” rhythmically colliding In my last [live-streamed] set, I played ‘religious’ with the sound of young kids playing and Jaar’s own music from different parts of the world, and also a unreleased, flickering synths. It was then that I under- YouTube clip from [Jiddu] Krishnamurti, who questions stood the virtual space Jaar had created—one in which the idea of anything sacred “originating in thought or sonic fragments from across the globe and throughout any organization.” He speaks of “truth as a pathless time converged in one place. Maybe this was elec- land” which is maybe the best way I can answer your tronic music’s power: its capacity to breathe new question in regards to 'geography.' I’m very moved by life into something with a history, to collapse several the idea of a ‘pathless land’ when I think of our particutemporalities and places into one, to broadcast it back larly intense moment of global chaos. We need to learn to a public scattered across the globe. There was a how to learn without a path. certain collectivity—as if the sounds we were hearing belonged to nobody in particular and all of us at once. Westfall: You released the album Sirens just over a A glimmer of possibility. month before Donald Trump was elected, and Cenizas Nico was generous enough to speak with me came out in the midst of a worldwide public health from his home in Europe about sonic negative space, crisis. I wonder if you think the role of the artist feels learning without a path, and art’s place in unsettling significant in times like this, where there’s maybe both the hierarchies of today. a collective sense of chaos and possibility. I am curious if you see music—yours or in general—carrying the +++ function or potential, a responsibility even, that goes beyond the scope of the music itself—and if so, what Alex Westfall: I’d love to know more about your time that might look like to you. at Brown and in Providence. How did your studies and creative practice shape one another? Jaar: I think there are multiple roles an artist or musiA twinkling piano riff grows louder as it folds into itself. cian can have in a time of crisis. But...when has it not Soon after, the sound of a human sniffle, the slow creak Nicolás Jaar: I was actually speaking with a friend been a time of crisis? of a door, a body shuffling about, then settling. The from Brown today and I told him that I really regretted Of course, right now is an unparalleled time, but high-pitched keys dissolve into the ambient crackle dropping out of this class called ‘Thing Theory’ that we for example, the disproportionate deaths of African of a microphone: “Thanks for being here, everyone.” shopped together. He stayed in it and it really shaped Americans and Latinos in the US due to COVID-19 Every noise is so exact that I forget we’re not in the his thinking in a beautiful way. Meanwhile, I’m just is the outcome of an ongoing crisis in the health and same room, that I’m among 7,000 others on a website getting around to reading some of the books from that infrastructure of this country whose foundation is typically reserved for streaming video games, listening class now! A part of me wishes I had gone deeper into based on racist hierarchies set in place long ago and to a live broadcast by Chilean-American musician, my studies, actually. It’s hard to realize how special it dutifully maintained over time. The causal chains that Nicolás Jaar. all is when you’re there. Little, insignificant things play led us to this moment are just as part of the current Raised between Santiago and New York City, much bigger roles than they should, but I guess that’s crisis as the 'current crisis' itself. The inhumanity that Jaar graduated from Brown University in 2012 with just youth…! has supported the country for hundreds of years gets a degree in Comparative Literature. He released his louder in moments like this, but it is just as present first full-length record as a junior, touring the global Westfall: The periods of silence in many of your tracks in times of 'normality' (a normality we could just call club circuit on school breaks and assembling songs feel meditative, spiritual. What do these moments of 'neoliberal crisis'). between exams. Jaar is a prolific creator, and his work stillness signify for you, and how do you approach As far as 'art' is concerned…I have difficulty resists labels and categories: He has scored a Palm incorporating this kind of “negative space” when separating art from life: if I was to do so, then there D’Or-winning film; he’s co-produced MAGDALENE, creating something? would be clear boundaries between what I make and the acclaimed album by vanguard-pop artist FKA who I am. For better or for worse, these boundaries twigs. Jaar is curating a residency for sound artists Jaar: I never listen to my own music, but the other do not exist. In 2014-15, when I was making Sirens, I in a converted food storage shack in the West Bank, day, spurned by my sixth week in quarantine and frus- was very preoccupied with the rise of fascists moveand under his alias Against All Logic (A.A.L.), conjures trated by how Spotify aggregates everything in order ments throughout the globe. After hearing the horrors tracks that signal the familiar warmth of a dancefloor— of popularity and creates playlists with titles like “This of the Chilean dictatorship firsthand during my youth, the 4/4 beats that instruct bodies to move synchro- is X…” I decided to make a kind of ‘selected discog- I was (very naïvely) shocked that these forces could nously as dawn breaks outside. raphy’ playlist of the past 11 years and for the first time gain such grounds in our present times. And so, the When Jaar releases music under his birth name, I re-listened to some songs from five, seven or even entire record ended up displaying this shock and these however, his tracks drift freely in the space between 11 years ago. It was a very, very strange experience. preoccupations. I couldn't help it, it was present in all electronica, sound collage, and ambient noise. So many of the songs have this moment where every- I read and all I consumed. This is why there are songs Stillness emerges from unconventionally slow beats- thing breaks, fragments, and goes into a vacuum, and about Trump (“The Governor”), Palestine (“Three Sides per-minute: While a house or techno track will often then it all comes back again but in a different form. It’s of Nazareth”), the Pinochet dictatorship and its legacy clock out at an average of 128 bpm, many of Jaar’s comical how many of the songs do this; I didn’t know (“No”), racism against Muslims in the US (“Killing Time”), songs linger in the cool range of 80 to 100. He insur- this. It’s all the same song, over and over again! But and my pessimism about the future (“History Lesson”). gently uses samples to probe the political: One song maybe this structure is my dream or hope for myself or A year after that record came out, the dystopian from his 2011 record Space Is Only Noise re-ap- for us, to be able to experience complete disintegra- world of Sirens seemed frankly quite 'tame' compared propriates the oft-misogynistic language of 2000s tion and to build something new from a place of calm- to the reality of 2017. This new dystopia—with roots in Latin-American pop, and another from 2016’s Sirens ness and stillness. very old systems—gave way to something else for me, stretches the fluttering chords of ’70s Paraguayan folk on a more intimate level. I felt that if I had grown up in a harpist Sergio Cuevas. Jaar’s latest album, released Westfall: Have discoveries in technology affected your society that could end up in such a state, there would March 27, is titled Cenizas. When I asked him to distill production process? I’m curious if working digitally be aspects of its negative energies that also linger the project into a sentence, he characterized it as “a offers you something that working in analog can’t—and inside of me. This dissolution of 'inside' and 'outside' is place full of ashes of an old fire, and we still don’t know how you might consider both forms in conversation. really what informs Cenizas.
SCIENCE+TECH 24 APRIL 2020 07
BY Saanya Jain ILLUSTRATION Illustrator DESIGN Designer
ILLUSTRATION Alex Westfall DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt PHOTO Courtesy of Nico Jaar
To answer your question more directly, I think first read it at Brown in 2010”: we, first as humans (and then as artists, or cooks, or engineers, or scientists or whatever we 'do'), have an “One name for another, a part for the whole, the ALEX WESTFALL B’20 is learning how to learn without “infinite responsibility” to question, criticize and topple historic violence of Apartheid can always be treated as a path. the cruel hierarchies that make up our contemporary a metonymy. In its past as well as in its present. By life. The barriers to freedom are monuments violently diverse paths, one can always decipher through its erected both inside ourselves and outside in the singularity so many other kinds of violence going on in world, and I think the tearing down of one can affect the world. At once part, cause, effect, example, what the other. I think art and music can make cracks in the is happening there translates what takes place here, barriers, but not without help. We need entanglements always here, wherever one is and wherever one looks, between activism, art, technology, and science if we closest to home. Infinite responsibility, therefore, no are to make decisive changes. We need polyphony. rest allowed for any form of good conscience.” —“Dedication to Chris Hani,” Jacques Derrida, Specters NOTE: Jaar borrows the term “infinite responsibility” Of Marx from a text that has “stayed with [him] ever since [he]
SCIENCE+TECH THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT 08
LOST IN TRANSLATION
BY Leela Berman ILLUSTRATION Yukti Agarwal DESIGN Daniel Navratil
ENTERING: The language of achievement and deficit
PROVIDENCE PUBLIC SCHOOLS, MULTULINGUAL PEDAGOGY, AND THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS
Two comprehensive reports researching the conditions in the Providence Public School District (PPSD) came out in 2019. In June, researchers at John Hopkins University released a report that outlined how the school district inadequately supports students, which led to the state takeover of the Providence public schools and a flurry of action and events at Brown University to consider the role the University might play in supporting the public school system. A year earlier, in 2018, the Providence Public Schools were notified by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that the district was in violation of the Equal Education Opportunities Act by failing to effectively identify and support English language students. In response, the then-School Commissioner requested that the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) investigate the situation for English learners in the PPSD and provide suggestions for realizing the standards outlined in a settlement with the DOJ. The CSCS produced a report focused specifically on the quality of education, support for, and identification of English learners in PPS, and noted that supporting English learners was a persistent and long-term need in the PPSD. Much like the John Hopkins Report, which harkened back to a 1993 report entitled “Providence Blueprint for Education” (PROBE), the CSCS report followed up on a 2012 study completed by the Council. The 2012 report warned that the school district was underprepared to support English Language Learners (ELLs). Not much had changed by 2019. It is easy to get lost in the language of these reports, which focus especially on “instructional, staffing, and fiscal issues” to meet DOJ compliance. Shifting between legalese and statistics, they construct a narrative of achievement— one focused on “measured” success as defined by meeting a series of criteria as measured by the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) ACCESS for case Lau v. Nichols determined that schools denied a ELLs exam. “meaningful opportunity” to students who could not The CGCS report, and English language learners speak English, violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in general, are absent from many articles about the and in turn, that schools must provide these students recent school takeover. This is true despite the fact that with supplemental learning. The Equal Educational about one-third of students in the PPSD are English Opportunities Act of 1974 prohibited discrimination learners—as opposed to about one-tenth of students and required that schools take action to support equal nationwide—reflecting a long-standing erasure of participation. In the span of a decade, it was made clear English learners within media and government atten- at the national level that the language barrier rendered tion on schools. education unequal: students who did not know English Despite the importance of understanding how were being taught in English. The ‘simple’ solution was the city is caring for its ELL students, the CGCS to support students in learning English. report’s sole focus on improving exam-based English How is this task carried out within the confines of achievement ignores the fact that multilingualism a school district? Everything on the PPSD website is itself—fluency and comfort in multiple languages and listed in both Spanish and English. There is no button cultures—can be an asset and a victory. The current to translate—all information is already bilingual. The focus on language learning is one that seeks equity, but district refers to an array of students as Multilingual English-learning students are still invisible in larger Learners, who are reached by a variety of programs. political and educational conversations. Pushing past There are four English as a Second Language (ESL) the framework of achievement raises the questions: programs for varying levels of English ability and two what would a critical model of language pedagogy bilingual programs, which allow students whose native look like? Is English language learning assimilation? language is Spanish to learn in Spanish and English proficiency of students, it is also the assessment used to Amidst a global pandemic and widespread reliance simultaneously. Not all of these models are available at measure the effectiveness of the programs. According on remote learning, what does language learning look every school, forcing some families to make complex to the CGCS report, many English learners are still at like? choices about whether to travel an excessive distance the ‘developing’ level after seven years in the program. English Learning has been institutionalized in to find a school that meets their needs. Furthermore, The equality dreamed up in the ‘60s has yet to be fully Providence and beyond, and that very institution is in these models are not complete: there has been some realized—and just last year, a group of Rhode Island flux and requires adaptation—during the pandemic debate in recent years, for example, about whether republicans tried to make separate “language acadeand after. PPSD should create a separate bilingual program for mies” for ESL students in an ordinance that was undePortuguese speakers. These programs attempt to reach niably segregationist. EMERGING: The language of English a vast multilingual community with a wide variety of The silencing of ESL students and the erasure of Language Learning different languages and needs. their programs perpetuate a racialized and linguisThe day-to-day of these programs might look tically-ordered hierarchy of education, one that The institution of English learning first emerged as a different at each school, but one thing is the same continues to this day. At the end of one data set, the legal one. The 1967 Bilingual Education Act was the across Rhode Island: the examination used to iden- CGCS report states: “23 schools—more than half of all first federal act to recognize the specialized needs tify English learners and score the “level” of English schools in PPSD—had enough ELs enrolled to warrant of students who were not fluent in English and was learning the students have achieved. The exam is substantial instructional, staffing, and financial atteninextricably connected to the Civil Rights move- called ACCESS for ELLs, and places people into five tion.” However, the report concludes that despite the ment and the push for educational rights. The fights levels of a sociocultural context: entering, emerging, huge presence of students learning English in the against school segregation and linguistic discrimi- developing, expanding, bridging, or reaching. PPSD, “For all intents and purposes, about one-third of nation went hand-in-hand. The 1974 Supreme Court Because this exam assesses the language the district’s enrollment is invisible.”
09
METRO
24 APR 2020
DEVELOPING: improvement
The
language
of
they can only be cut out.”
learning are a necessity for institutional and political equity.
She details how when she was in school, she would be yelled at by teachers for not speaking “American,” BRIDGING: The language of coronavirus I worked in a bilingual classroom as part of a Brown despite coming from a family that has lived in the support University tutoring program earlier this year, working Americas for far longer than the United States border once a week with a handful of third graders on math. has been defined. Language is political. For many Equity has become a prominent conversation during On the first day, I did not know I had been assigned years before and after the first court cases and legisla- the global pandemic, and the PPSD is no exception. The to a bilingual classroom and expressed concern to tion about language and education, English fluency for district immediately transitioned to remote learning, the teacher about whether I could effectively tutor, students who spoke other languages was the political with substantial thought put into supporting emergent given that I am not completely fluent in Spanish. She and pedagogical goal for educators, legislators, and bilinguals. Soljane Martinez, Educational Coordinator reminded me that math itself is a language, that it was even some families. For many, this meant that English at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, wrote just important that the students learned the math. This learning, be it in an ELL program or in the everyday, to the Independent: “As you can imagine, a district teacher’s comment is important: multilingual students was a border regime which could lead to linguistic that large, having to shift EVERYTHING online in are not just learning English, they are also learning loss and, in Anzaldúa’s eyes, cultural destruction. In a matter of days is no easy feat—and they have done a wide array of subjects and adapting to the social some ways, this story of linguistic loss is personal—my an AMAZING job.” The Annenberg Institute is contexts of their school environment. The students I mother came to the United States from Mysuru, India supporting the district with “translation of resources was working with loved that they knew more Spanish when she was five years old. Over the years, she lost and materials in a variety of languages that the district than I did, which served as a reminder: they were the ability to speak kannada, which she spoke fluently simply does not have the people power to provide,” and developing the skills to go to school in two languages. then. Although she by no means considers this cultural hoping to use the many languages spoken by students, In the post-state-takeover world, teachers have destruction, it is clear that linguistic assimilation was staff, and faculty to collaborate. Martinez emphasized been an immediate focus, because they can support the goal. that “there are very specific languages needed...If we students even in a system that still needs longer-term One theoretical shift in considering and naming could get even one person from each language to come fixing. A new program announced by RIDE will try students who are learning English suggests a pathway forward and volunteer to help, we'd be ensuring that to address the need for ESL teachers. This program forward for linguistic equity, as opposed to expecting EVERY family of PPSD was receiving timely commuprovides reimbursement for Providence teachers assimilation to English. Ofelia García, a leading nication and resources in their native language.” This to receive ESL certification, and four colleges— scholar in the field of multilingual education, believes highlights one of the complexities of supporting a Rhode Island College, the Rhode Island School for that bilingual students can be viewed as a resource multilingual population—even if many of the multiProgressive Education, Roger Williams University, rather than a deficit, and that viewing learning English lingual students and their families speak Spanish, not and the University of Rhode Island—committed as a deficit means English language learners are all of them do, and all students must be supported. A to providing seats for Providence teachers in their ignored and under-resourced. In her seminal work, district hotline allows for three-way translation. programs. While Brown has a Masters of Arts in she suggests a new name: “Calling...children ‘emerThe Multilingual Learning Team for the district gent bilinguals’ makes reference to a positive charac- could not be reached for comment, but the website teristic—not one of being limited or being learners… for distance learning indicates that English learning the term emergent bilinguals refers to the children’s will be supported in part via software like Imagine potential in developing their bilingualism; it does not Español, Imagine Learning, and Rosetta Stone. The suggest a limitation or a problem in comparison to distance learning website is comprehensive and those who speak English.” Growing up in a multilin- details a series of plans for a minimum of 330 minutes gual family, navigating between multiple languages of instructional learning each day, including “English and cultures, and the practice of processing multiple language development for multilingual students.” languages are skills of cultural import. While “emer- “Multilingual learner supports” is one of the four main gent bilingual” is not used within the Council of Great categories on the distance learning website, and many City Schools report, one might see the “multilingual of the supports are focused on providing resources students” umbrella on the PPSD website as gravitating and information about the crisis and school updates toward the emergent bilingual theory, as are the bilin- in as many languages as possible. Just like how there gual development classes that some schools offer. is a gap between the theory and practice of equitable Furthermore, emergent bilinguals can develop a language learning, there will likely be gaps—and sense of critical consciousness, if education considers improvisations—in this proposed method and how to deeply how language and culture are politicized. The best support multilingual students during this time. It United States, which so often exploits immigrants will rest on the many involved parties—teachers, famiwhose families have lived here much longer than lies, school administration, and translators—to bridge the US settler-colonial project has existed, has no this divide. official national language. One only needs to look up “speaking Spanish in public” and scroll through REACHING: The language of possibility a stream of videos of people harassing others for speaking in Spanish to see, however, that this proc- This article grapples with a series of questions that lamation does not translate into lived experience. do not fit into the conventional model of achieveLanguage becomes a form of racialized control, a way ment-focused understanding. In the reports, in legisof establishing economic and social borders within the lative histories, and in movements toward educational nation’s constructed physical borders. equity both past and present, it becomes clear that Back in the third grade classroom, a map of the from theory to practice, practice to examination, law United States hung prominently on the wall. Students to situation, and expectations to reality, much gets lost congregated in the room at the end of the day, gath- in translation. ering their backpacks and then looking up, seeing As with many other issues of educational equity, the map. They began pointing to the places—off the despite the “on paper” ideals of multilingual educamap—where their families were from. One noticed tion, emergent bilinguals continue to be dismissed and that Puerto Rico wasn’t on the map. It is not only ignored. At the same time, many efforts—such as the emergent bilinguals who are made invisible, but also effectiveness of a dedicated teacher, a philosophical their sociocultural backgrounds, as they often must re-framing of language learners as “emergent bilinnavigate multiple cultures, places, and communities. guals,” or ensuring all families receive coronavirus These absences are felt profoundly. Perhaps schools information in a language they are comfortable with— Portuguese Bilingual Education or ESL Education are afraid of reckoning with these absences, of opening continue to push forward. In Providence, however, and Cross-Cultural Studies, it does not provide actual the language with which they teach and learn to some- structural and financial upheaval is required to certification for educating at either the elementary or thing more than just achievement. These absences completely support these efforts. secondary level. are one more “gap” perpetuated in a school system It is difficult to predict what will happen post-coroWhile teachers can be a key resource in combating founded on segregation and inequity. navirus, when schools reopen and RIDE begins to the structural administrative, funding, and staffing Conversations about emergent bilinguals so often move forward with fulfilling the DOJ settlement from issues that lead to the ostracizing of multilingual focus on their achievement or their deficits, their invis- 2018, in which RIDE agreed to effectively identity and students, they cannot be the sole means of supporting ibility or their unknowability. Often, conversations in support English-learning students. What is clear is that English Language Learners. the media ignore the complicated process of learning emergent bilinguals are an essential part of conceptuEnglish, and how that can be culturally loaded. alizing a changed PPSD and thinking past the language EXPANDING: The language of critical In the CGCS report, one refrain was that “prin- of achievement. Now, their success, like that of many pedagogy cipals are worried that ELs will affect the achieve- students, is judged by their exam-based proficiency. ment scores of their schools.” This belies the fact that They are institutionalized and legalized. Online, it is In the essay “How to Tame A Wild Tongue,” Chicana to effectively grapple with speaking two languages easy to find articles listing language-learning apps one feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa writes: (or more!) is an achievement within itself, and that can use to learn a new language during quarantine, but rewarding schools based on achievement leads to the shockingly harder to find stories of those categorized “Attacks on one’s form of expression with the perpetual underfunding and intentional ignoring as English learners within schools. They should be intent to censor are a violation of the First of the most marginalized communities. Instead, sidelined no longer. Amendment. El Anglo con cara de innocente nos “achievement” must be expanded to see that emerarrancó la lengua. Wild tongues can’t be tamed, gent bilingualism and a critical pedagogy of English One day, LEELA BERMAN B’23 will have a conversation with her grandparents in kannada.
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
METRO
10
O, IT'S O, It’s Manifold I. They embalmed all the women in one Museum. Critics write, What a surfeit Of hidden beauty! Competence pulses Through limbs, loins. Exhibit 3b reveals Quality that derives only from repeated Effort. Thin red strokes juxtaposed with More elliptical hues of purple, blue— Expertly placed to jolt you. II. Our skeletons were entombed By fats and flesh and anything Brainless. Heaps and heaps of Adipose tissues made metallic
My God, it’s Skeletal Poolside with his mother I reminisce His pelvic anchor. My buoyant ribs. Brains a-whir to keep the meat fresh, Our bodies twirl helically, tendrilled. Somewhere inside are golden bones— Hopelessly stiff as voraciously honed. Blueprinted. Before long we’ll sicken Of fleshy gymnastic and resort to the Skeleton. Exhaust every monomer of Collagen, neutralize every eighth ion Of calcium carbonate, sabotage its Restriction to the frame. Taste our Marrows, nutty, swish it all into our Salivas, sit by the pool a while.
By one too many sick children Masquerading with chalice in Hand. Brimmed by reception Of touch, language. Swallow.
III. A displacement. Cotton, perhaps. By the centimeter, two milliseconds elapsed. Fellatio has too many syllables. One.
Pterodactyl Girl 90 miles per hour romanticize our Windows, blissful, whisking fistful By fistful the palette once painted: Trees and shrubs, pedestrian hugs, Child shoelaces undone. Time yet To begin satanic blasphemy upon The back—shortest distance twixt Two points: tail bone and tippy top Vertebrae. 20 years added, 30 some Subtracted. Two metal bars collapsing Pterodactyl wings. Her brain sings, Makes Lysergic Acid Diethylamide Worth something.
11 LITERARY
BY Natalie Zummer ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt
24 APR 2020
MANIFOLD POEMS AND FLASH FICTION
time it’s there it’s already not, and he is left, again, to sleepless imaginings.
Roo Bas I’m in line for coffee with a beautiful woman who An Exhibit holds her head in a way I have never held mine, They embalmed all the women in one museum. Now maybe could never hold mine, and there are 62 cents the critics are crying, O, what unfound beauty! O, in my bank account. When she orders a tea I have what an ode to the pulverized raspberry! O, what never heard of, something that sounds like Roo Bas, divine mimicry of this incomprehensible galaxy! it makes me want to cry, because for a split second I Purple! Blue! Red! O, how it roils! see my chin tilted a little higher and the Roo Bas that I bought is in my hand and I’m okay. Colostrum The neighbor eats onions when he is sad. He’s always Lemons chop-chop-chopping, rattling our forks and skewing Her hand and my thigh are doing the thing that our paintings. He must think the real tears syncing hands and thighs do on dates. Maybe we’re on one, up with the onion tears will amount to tears in the because when she tells me something about lemons middle, less sad. The logic isn’t bad. I find it very very amazing even though it’s not. I can still taste the meringue she fed me across the table, Sometimes his misery bleeds through the wall and and I’m still blissfully ignorant of the fact that she’s into our dinner. Last night, we tasted loneliness in already started to believe—I mean truly believe— the green beans and resentment in the potatoes. His that we are creatures of parallel galaxies, condemned anxiety about the afterlife spiced the entire meal. to miss each other over and over forever, our love so heartbreakingly close to shattering that parallelism, Tonight, my kids are crying. The months I nursed their even though we’ve only been on the one date with lungs ring in the pitch. I sink into it, the way I sunk the lemons. into their infant ribs buzzing my nipples with purpose. They cried, so I didn’t. They cry, so I don’t. I think The Hug about the neighbor, how he is alone, has no one not He hasn’t slept for weeks because he imagines it in to cry for. bed: what little circumference he’ll need to envelop you, your 63.5-inch stature perfect to masquerade scalp whiffs. Most nights he gets anxious, because none of it is sure. Every fifth night he forces himself to picture your Don’t touch me body language as a sort of exposure therapy. Otherwise, he likes to think about his hands—the left cradling a shoulder blade (to know your skeleton), the right pressing the small of your back (to know your flesh), the number of seconds (3) he can keep one on your ass before he won’t be able to deny it was ever there. By the
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
12 LITERARY
BY Iryumugaba Biko ILLUSTRATION Alex Westfall DESIGN Sara Van Horn
THE EFF AND THE ANTICOLONIAL STRUGGLE It has been nearly three decades since Black people in South Africa emerged victorious from the bitter struggle against apartheid through a social movement spearheaded by the African Nation Congress (ANC), the party of Nelson Mandela. Mandela, who spent 27 years in jail for resisting an oppressive racist regime, is remembered for leading a peaceful transition of power from the white Nationalist Party of Fredrik Willem de Klerk of South Africa to the now-centrist ANC by championing a program of unity and reconciliation. However, the impact of Mandela’s decisions has reignited a divisive debate in South Africa over whether he made the right choice by opting for land reform over starvation, and joblessness. But those are the symp- and his successors set in motion a violent pattern repatriation during this historic transition. The land toms. The root problem is landlessness.” Mr Floyd’s that initiated the transatlantic slave trade, and when reform policy asked millions of Black people to put in articulation re-affirms Frantz Fanon’s assertion in his European leaders met in Berlin in 1884-85 to carve more time and labor by filing claims for compensation, book The Wretched of the Earth that “for a colonized Africa into nations (with a new notion of national and those who had no land had to wait for the govern- people the most essential value, because the most sovereignty), they were initiating a process that would ment's programs of land redistribution. This is where concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which create conditions for the expansion of European states. Mandela made the compromise, for the burden that will bring them bread and, above all dignity.” The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt was to be shared by both Black and White people was It comes as no surprise, therefore, that some young wrote in her book On the Origin of Totalitarianism left to the Black people. While the security of property South Africans claim that Mandela was bought out by that imperialism assumes that “without the imperiownership was guaranteed for whites—meaning they Oppenheimer and the South African industrialist and alist expansion for expansion's sake, the world might practically had to do nothing to maintain their prop- mining magnate, among other white businessmen. never have become one. Without the bourgeoisie erties—who acquired them through colonialism and Some argue that he sold out because of a sense of political device of power for power’s sake, the extent apartheid systemic displacement, economic freedom hopelessness resulting from his 27 years in prison, of human strength might never have been discovered.” relied either on faith and patience or injecting more while others maintain that the decision he made was This logic is at the heart of the logic of imperialism and time and labor for Black South Africans who had intended to preserve the social fabric of South African colonialism. undergone 400 years of white terror. society. The assumption deeply ingrained in this impeAs early as 1995, for instance, people like Dr. The EFF carefully avoids naming Mandela as rialist sense of reality is problematic for two reasons. Henrik Clarke, professor and pioneer in the creation a “sellout.” The EFF believes that Mandela, Oliver First, the doctrine of economic growth is predicated on of Pan-African and African studies, were raising ques- Tambo, Winnie Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and Walter the idea that future resources are unlimited. How did tions about Mandela and ANC’s land reform. Clarke Sisulu can fight to a certain point and it is up for the economics, the discipline created to manage scarce exclaimed in one of his speeches that he remained “a generation to follow to pick up from where they halted. resources, end up with a doctrine that assumes that little less enthusiastic about Nelson Mandela, for he The fact that Mandela’s wisdom and decision are those resources are unlimited in the future? This is the has never asked for land.” Indeed, Nelson Mandela now being questioned, however, reveals the deeply primary contradiction of imperialism. By trusting that never asked for land. For Clarke, land is the basis of entrenched conditions of economic inequality that the future will yield more than the present, governthe nation. In making an inventory of nationhood that have persisted in South Africa until today. White South ments and banks can circulate money that would be contains the hopes, aspirations, and dreams of Black Africans who only make up 8.9 percent of the popula- made from selling increased production of the future people as well, land is of great importance. If land is not tion still own 72 percent of the land. The ANC, which to finance current investment. Financing growth with available for Black people to cultivate, build on, mine, had originally promised to redistribute 30 percent future resources only keeps nations in permanent or rent, how could they flourish in a territory that is of the land within five years, has only redistributed 8 states of debt, and the unlimited injection of money economically hostile to them? percent after 25 years. In addition to the recent resigna- into the economy is concerning to say the least. tion of Jacob Zuma, the former ANC President of South Second, even if future resources were unlimited, +++ Africa, who was acquitted on charges of corruption and at what point should the expansion of production and embezzlement of people’s funds, this failure of redis- property end? The EFF takes a stand against imperiThat Black South Africans who are indigenous to tribution only highlights the systemic abuse of power alism because this force is responsible for the misery the African land cannot live in a country that feels and mismanagement of resources that has plagued the of most South Africans and Africans in general. It is foreign to them is what Economic Freedom Fighters country for decades. This unresponsiveness created a currently embedded in neo-liberal policies put forth by (EFF) seeks to confront. Colonization was a process of political vacuum that needed to be filled. the Reagan and Thatcher cult that emerged in the ruins violent cultural and physical confrontation between of the Soviet Union that advocated for less state interEuropean settlers and indigenous Black South +++ vention. This cult was threatening nations of Africa Africans. The process of economic oppression and with words like “Privatize or Perish” or “There is no displacement created alienation that was characteralternative.” This irresponsible economic practice that ized by extreme living conditions that undermined the “Expansion is everything,” once said Cecil Rhodes. “I sought to minimize the role of the state in regulating humanity of Black South Africans. It is this alienation would annex the planet if I could.” Imperialism and economic activities has been beneficial for imperialthat oppresses the ego, that sense of self-satisfaction colonialism mark what Europeans call “expansionism ists while condemning the greater majority of poor that inhibits every soul, that EFF deems the root cause through discovery.” This expansionism signified and oppressed people. The insidious role of imperial of most problems. In the EFF understanding of core different realities for the colonized individuals: inva- power is integral to the occupation and displacement problems of South Africa, land is central because it is sion and displacement. The economic system that of Palestinians in the West Bank. British imperialists a marker of justice, the ultimate restoration of African justified ownership and expansionism was private in partership with Zionist forces are also key cases of pride. According to Floyd Shivambu, the deputy pres- ownership financed by European credit markets how this force manifests. The EFF recognizes that to ident of the EFF, “the problem with the ruling party in partnership with the European state-financed be successful, it must ally with other social movements is that they say the problems are inequality, poverty, Catholic missionary. When Christopher Colombus against the economic and racial injustice perpetrated
WHAT CAN STUDENTS LEARN FROM SOUTH AFRICA'S FASTEST GROWING POLITICAL MOVEMENT?
13
NEWS
24 APR 2020
by global imperialism.
the fall of the apartheid regime. The EFF believes that about 831 protesters were arrested. But the decolonial this racial injustice must be fought. In his book Black work does not end in schools. These social movements It is also this process of “expansion” that paved the Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist and and student leaders go beyond university halls; it’s a way for increased European influence and for capi- political philosopher from Martinique, contended that struggle for life and for the freedom to participate in talists like Cecil Rhodes, whose influence remains in “if there is an inferiority complex, it is the outcome the economy that they ought to call their own. De Beers (a company that he founded) and a network of a double process: primarily, economic—subseFor these students, EFF provides hope in the of minders such as Lonmin, which has monopolized quently, the internalization—or, better, the epi-der- struggle to liberate the colonized people of the world. the network of diamond markets. Cecil Rhodes, the malization—of this inferiority.” Fanon argues that the Moreover, what draws many students, including diamond magnate and an ardent believer in British economic disparities—rooted in historical colonial myself, to EFF is not only Malema and his militant, imperialism, was on the forefront of creating colonies practices—create conditions of inferiority for the Black charismatic appeal but rather the movement’s ability that later became nations and reinforced the pattern people who internalize them. Because the acquisition to articulate the exploitative conditions of the workers of exploiting Black South Africans. The mines he of property happened through theft and negligence, and the pressing demands of students. The EFF moveannexed are still being controlled by his companies. correcting injustice necessitates giving the land back ment also offers a nuanced articulation of intersecting to its rightful owners: the Black people of South Africa. systems of oppression to the intellectual left. The left +++ must consider EFF as a potential base for its ability +++ to articulate a position that takes into account white In the context of a lack of accountability and imperial supremacy, predatory capitalism, patriarchy, and the annexation in Africa, particularly in the South, the The EFF movement is led by Julius Malema, a polit- demands of youth and the poor, who have been alienemergence of the EFF as one of the most dynamic ical and economic activist and politician who was ated by the white monopoly capital that controls land political movements of South Africa—and perhaps once a protegee of Jacob Zuma (whom he later helped and capital in South Africa and many other places even all of Africa—is but a small surprise. The main impeach) while he was a youth leader in the ANC across the world. objective of this Marxist-Leninist-Fanonian political (which, according to an ANC report, fired him). But the For young political activists today, the question party is to achieve economic freedom for South Africa movement is not about Malema; it is made up of a coali- of how to define decolonial movements—and on what within a generation. To do this, the group demands tion of students and youths across South Africa. frontier of power these movements should focus their the repatriation of land from the white South African In a speech at the Oxford Union, the largest and energy—remains pressing. As Frantz Fanon once minority to the Black majority without compensation perhaps most famous debating society, Malema was declared, “Each generation must, out of relative obscuand by nationalizing key sectors of the economy such asked whether he should change his message, which rity, discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it.” With the as mining. The policy aims to reflect the demographic many new commentators and Western pundits call rising fears, anxiety, and distrust that have accomrepresentation of the nation. EFF believes it is unjust radical, to appeal to a broader audience. His response panied the coronavirus pandemic and its attendant that Black people comprise more than 80 percent of was unexpected. “We won’t change the message,” economic meltdown, the expectations are that the the population but own less than 20 percent of the land. he said. “Why change the message that works?” world must emerge from this nightmare changed. The Moreover, the EFF is determined to fight the monop- According to Malema, the EFF knows its constituency. EFF offers us a living example of a social movement olization of power and economic resources by white Most of Malema’s coalition is made up of youth who that situates decolonialism within a crucial economic Europeans. were on the forefront of the Rhodes Must Fall move- context. The struggle for national independence in Africa ment, a student run organization that originated from diminished the power of European direct influence Cape Town University, that sought to bring down Cecil IRYUMUGABA BIKO B’21 does not believe that and physical occupation. In many cases, including Rhodes’s statue on university campuses. Its main goal, “expansion is everything.” South Africa, the power moved from the hands of beyond removing symbolic statues, was to expose the white minorities to political parties founded and run institutional racism and colonialism in South African by Africans. This simultaneously took place under higher learning institutions. University students the tension of the Cold War where African countries requested that the statue be taken down, for it symbolbecame battle grounds for powerful nations. In South ized the colonial legacy and celebrated the European Africa, the struggle lasted even longer, for the ANC imagination. The Rhodes Must Fall movement attained its victory in 1994. evolved into Fees Must Fall, a movement of students Twenty-five years after apartheid, conditions for demanding free and decolonial education that chalBlack Africans have still not improved, especially in lenges the fundamental structural premises upon relation to the hopes and sacrifices of freedom fighters which their curriculum was based. The majority of the who lost their lives to attain this change. Instead, this students involved in Fees Must Fall were expelled and inaction and oppressive conditions have led to the terrifying growth of political parties and have created a class of African elites who represent the extension of the capitalist financial global system—led by America and other imperialist nations such as Britain, China, and France. The EFF understands this power struggle through the Marxist lens of class struggle. The voting base for the EFF is the alienated communities who receive neither adequate political representation nor equitable financial compensation for their labor. Capitalists who control the means of production—such as diamond mines, media, and pharmaceutical companies— continue to exploit workers while undermining their contribution to the success of the company on the whole. Workers are deemed insignificant even after paying with their lives. In 2012, for example, the EFF gained momentum for standing up against the South African government and its attendant police force that shot 34 mine workers dead. These workers of the Marikana platinum mine were protesting against Lonmin, a mining company headquartered in London. They were requesting a doubling of their wages from $500 to $1,000. After the South African police fired on the unarmed protesters, the company only increased the workers salaries from $500 to $575. One of the major shareholders of this company is the current president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa. The merging of European capital and exploitative corrupt African elites, as exemplified by Ramaphosa’s involvement in Lonmin, is the dynamic that the EFF seeks to challenge. As reflected by the history of South Africa, race also plays a big role in this struggle. The fact that white people in South Africa comprise less than 10 percent of the population yet control almost 80 percent of South Africa’s economy is unacceptable. This continual ownership of property and resources was not shaken by
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
NEWS
14
gold, alone on finding beauty in moments of solitude I took a photo of the crown before I knew what it meant. +++ the crown I saw in New York. At first, it was thrilling It looked like a flimsy grade-school art project, someto believe I was the sole beholder of such scarce beauty, thing my younger cousin crafted out of old Amazon At first, being alone is “good,”—necessary, even. the kind a photograph could compromise. I worried boxes on a restless snow day. I could imagine her using I’m told it’s especially good for women. Not only is that a photograph would take the solid gold I saw safety-guarded scissors to transform the ordinary into it important for us to be independent, we need to before me and morph it into flimsy cardboard, making something regal, like watching a frog become a prince prove that we are, constantly. When I was young, any my sacred experience something all too readily shared. or Sleeping Beauty awaken. glimmer of newly ripe independence was remarkable. As Sontag notes, “To photograph is to appropriate the I was in Manhattan for the weekend with my friend It felt like licking ice cream cones on the porch of the thing photographed.” I did not want to spread this Julia, who thought that both of us enrolling in visual shop on Michigan Avenue, driving a few friends across moment thinly amongst my Instagram followers, or art classes warranted a trip to the Museum of Arts town, making bad decisions I felt proud were finally my anyone who could have shared in this beauty, evapoand Design. “How do you think this cardboard crown own. Later, it felt like downloading maps on my phone rating its value altogether. But this strange strand of wound up in a glass display case?” I wondered out loud. before taking a bus deep into the Panamanian jungle, greed did not serve me for long. Julia laughed, accustomed to my lack of attention to successfully navigating my course, once again proving detail, and pointed to the plaque below. The crown, it my self-sufficiency. But as I grew older, the novelty +++ turned out, was not constructed out of cardboard at all. dried up, blurring the line between independence and It was made entirely of gold, down to the staples care- loneliness. Now, it often feels more rotten than ripe— In my Scandinavian art and architecture class, I learned lessly piecing it together. like doing taxes, or the week-old bag of spinach decom- about Stendhal syndrome, a psychosomatic condiMeaning collects in an object as a result of posing in my fridge, slowly melting into a smelly slime. tion induced when individuals have been exposed to materiality and intention, the plaque reminded me. This loneliness is a muscle of mine, surely excessive amounts of beauty. Characterized by a rapid Disguising gold as cardboard had eclipsed its value— underutilized. I decided to flex it by moving to Sweden heartbeat, fainting, confusion, and hallucinations, its meaning—entirely. A solid-gold crown is worn by for a semester. (A young woman moving across the this peculiar affliction was named after French author monarchs, deities. A cardboard crown is worn by my world in a desperate attempt to recreate herself? Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name, Kool-Aid-stained cousin. A crown is not a hat, not a How original!) A week before my flight, I ordered a Stendhal. After visiting Florence, he was flooded with halo. Meaning ascribed. few items from Glossier, an online makeup shop that such profound emotion that he found himself “in a sort Economists have been grappling with this boasts products for enhancing your natural features of ecstasy.” In his journal, he described the experience so-called “Paradox of Value” for ages now. Originally and being OKAY with yourself, TODAY! Maybe I could as an “absorption in the contemplation of sublime presented by philosopher Adam Smith in the late 18th get that ripe independence back, nicely packaged in a beauty,” which eventually became so powerful it century, the contradiction asks why gold, a commodity bottle for only $16.99! I fantasized about visiting art consumed every part of his being. Solemnly, he wrote, without intrinsic value, is more expensive than water, galleries while wearing pale gold eyeliner, how chic I “Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of an element essential to life. According to economists, would appear in coffee shops with a full, glossy lip. I am falling.” It was all too much. water is in such high supply around the world that the well aware this is the exact type of vanity Glossier has While Stendhal noted that his condition allowed value of an additional unit of water for any given person capitalized on: milky white oils and pink, gelatinous everything to “speak so vividly” to his soul, I felt as is low, whereas the opposite is true for gold. According formulas substituting for new beginnings. As I landed though everything was escaping mine. I thought my to the plaque, gold influences all opinions, blinding us in unfamiliar territory, I thought about how this loneliness was sharp enough to define my voice, but to content and form. But I think it is because beauty is sudden urge to enhance my natural features implies instead it had evaporated it. The craving for shared necessary to our survival, as well. that there’s something to be enhanced in the first place. presence—for someone to tell me what it all meant— Throughout my life, this belief has manifested That, perhaps, beauty is best interrupted. had become so ferocious, so human, that it deafened, itself in a variety of ways. Last year I took one of those the same way gold blinds. “Strengthsfinder” tests to figure out what meaning +++ One fall morning, I gaze out at the Baltic Sea, I had, or perhaps to reassure myself I had any at all. I sucking all of the crystalized sugar at the bottom of rated a series of statements on a scale from “Very Much When I first arrived in Sweden, I decided to limit the my iced coffee through a bright pink straw. The water Like Me” to “Very Much Unlike Me,” and an algorithm number of photographs I took. I did not want to spend is high, and the sunshine has just begun to fossilize on spat out my “Strengths Profile,” which listed 34 of my time capturing my life through a lens when I could its surface—at first furiously dappling, and then, all at top strengths. My primary strength was not one I was spend it being present, intentional, taking in all the once, fixing itself in place. I realize I’m afraid of this expecting; as my friends’ results read “Courage” or beauty for myself. beauty. I’m afraid I don’t have the capacity to absorb “Love,” mine was “Appreciation of Beauty.” Noticing This decision was absolutely grounded in a desire it all myself, to understand its value, to understand and appreciating beauty, excellence, and/or skilled to escape the stereotype of my generation: we spend what it all means. Does beauty necessitate evidence or performance in various domains of life, from nature too much time living through screens and seeking witness? to art to mathematics to science to everyday experi- validation through likes. This critique is neither novel Overwhelmed, I fail Sontag, and snap a photo of ence. I felt cheated, almost embarrassed to tell my nor unjust. In her essay collection On Photography, the sea. Photography provides me with near-instant friends, as I feared being perceived as shallow or mate- Susan Sontag writes that “needing to have reality relief: if I can’t hold or make sense of it all on my own, rialistic. I tried to reflect upon the moments that had confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs at least I have a photograph to share with someone later. played to this strength, and slowly began to realize is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is Someone whose presence may magically excavate its they were nearly all spent alone. Perhaps it wasn’t that now addicted.” Interpreting her words as a cautionary meaning and do it all justice. I was attached to beauty in a trivial sense, but rather, tale—a challenge, even—I proclaimed myself present. I I become a compulsive photographer, snapping ascribing beauty in moments of solitude allowed me to will confirm my own reality, thank you very much. shots of everything that comes along—a ladybug find meaning when no one else was there to provide it. At the Moderna Museet, I imagined that each with broken wings, a far-too-expensive latte, a poster painting I passed was crafted from pure gold, just like floating down a stream for a concert I missed last night.
15
FEATURES
24 APRIL 2020
BY Marie Lachance ILLUSTRATION Eliza Macneal DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt It’s like I’m on a mission to collect evidence of my own consciousness, anxiously awaiting an affidavit, an occasion to prove all I am living through. +++ I traveled to Paris and walked to the Eiffel Tower alone. Experiencing possibly the most romanticized destination in the Western canon by myself was like watching my favorite movie for the thousandth time and realizing that someone had changed the words. Or listening to the album I always listened to on days like that one, except that day someone had put it on shuffle, destroying the integrity of the story, the beauty. Or, actually, it was like peeling a ripe sumo orange, and just the first whiff of the overwhelming juice, just the grit of the peel under my fingernails, was enough to make my taste buds taste what they’d expected would come. But then I dropped it on the ground. And then, my mouth was wet for no reason. What I’m trying to say is that when experienced alone, it is just a tower. Daunting, yet upheld solely by prestige and tourism; colossal, yet only relatively. Acutely aware this was just another meaning I had ascribed to the tower, I reminded myself I was not the protagonist. In fact, Paris Syndrome was first identified in 1986 work, work to make them feel good all the time—yet regardless of your geographical coordinates. I begin to by Professor Hiroaki Ota, a Japanese psychiatrist somehow this work was pride, and there was a loneli- wish I had someone to share this silent moment with, living in France. Ota had noticed a number of tourists, ness to it. And it was this loneliness that began to paint as a woman enters the front door. She wears an elegant, especially “young women on their first international the exact boundaries of my body, showing me where deep purple, floor-length trench coat and tinted trip,” fade into a state of extreme shock upon discov- my skin ended and that of another began. sunglasses. She sits down, close enough for me to overering Paris was different from their expectations. I lay awake the majority of the night, wondering hear her order a hot chocolate and french fries, at a bar, This syndrome, characterized by sharp delusional if these men saw me as a cardboard body painted gold at 10:56 PM on a Friday. Like the waiter, I keep an eye states, hallucinations, depersonalization, and other or a golden body appearing as cardboard. Wondering on the door, waiting for someone to join her. No one unpleasant symptoms, is so widespread that there have what the difference was. Wondering what value I had, ever does. She cleans off half of the golden french fries, been hotlines set up by various embassies to counsel either way. wipes the excess grease on the napkin in her lap, and their citizens through the unraveling of their own This moment forced me to consider not only the cautiously sips the hot chocolate, which is still cooling. reality. I wondered what these phone calls sounded like. value others placed on me and my body, but how I She leaves enough money on the table to cover the bill, I wish I had called. I would have told them my number conceptualized myself, as well. Until this point, I had and I watch her vanish into the same beautiful city we one strength is Appreciation of Beauty. I would have assumed all of the answers to my questions would both appeared from. asked why I didn’t have the capacity to understand. I materialize externally—that I could trust the voices would have asked them to come and meet me, and tell of Sontag or Stendhal, but could never be certain of MARIE LACHANCE B’20 has 35,573 photos on her me what it means. And then, maybe they would have my own. But this newfound confidence in my soli- camera roll. asked, “Are you alone?” tude allowed me to realize I was capable of excavating meaning myself. And even if this task occasionally felt +++ insurmountable, I was reassured my life was a meaningful one, just to have bathed myself in such beauty. That night, I slept in a cheap hostel room with six men. To have discovered myself among it. When I left to change in the bathroom, one man let me know that I don’t have to leave the room to undress, you +++ know. As I lay in my bunk bed, I thought about how beauty could be construed as dangerous, too. Staring I wander into a small bar draped with ivy and rusted at the ceiling, I suddenly felt the urge to frantically pipes. I sip on a glass of acidic wine in the corner, where search for my keys, and wriggle them to a safe-keeping the waiter periodically visits me, asking if someone spot underneath my pillow. Feeling their sharp edges will be joining me this fine evening. I wave him off and provided me a semblance of safety, but something think of everyone who told me I would enjoy the wine else too: the sour tinge of pride, pride that my beauty in France. What they failed to mention is that a three was tangible enough to fear. Like my own beauty was dollar glass of wine is most likely going to taste like piss
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
FEATURES
16
BY Miranda Ruiz DESIGN Alex Westfall
THE IN BET WEEN T I M E S My mother used to tell me that we feel the blues because we’re Jews. We connect to the sound of suffering. It’s written in our DNA. I never trusted that logic, but I knew there was something deep between us and this music. The kind of thing that makes the world feel solid and fluid at the same time. When I called her tonight she was listening. 1. 1. 1. 1. 4. 4. 1. 1. 5. 4. 1. 5. She growls. Behind her he hits, kicks, pounds something vital out of himself that immateriality could never grasp. Together they glide above the space they’ve shifted, lifted, enchanted. They’re grooving, and I can hear it through two hundred miles and shitty iPhone speakers. She told me she bought a CD player to listen to all of her blues records after Bill Withers died. It’s been over a day and I still don’t know how he died, haven’t bothered to look it up. Don’t know if it’s because I don’t care or can’t bear it. He’d say she’d say baby, Grandma understands. I’d think okay baby, I trust you. My mother is wearing a jersey tee with black and white stripes and pink hemming, something that a seven-year-old would wear to summer camp. She lifts her wiry lenses with no frames to the bridge of her nose, squints and struggles to get the stems behind her ears. She looks at me with this empty gaze like my grandmother’s, and I half expect us to just sit there not talking, forgetting that people usually FaceTime to say things to each other. My mother scratches her chest, lightly dragging her fingernails across her seasoned skin. She picks off little bumps and blemishes, caressing the collarbone and poking at the tops of the fleshy parts. So close to the heart, so close to the neck, so warm and soft, the skin. She touches her tenderness the same way I do. Our fingers linger around the heat. My mother’s body feels like it’s lost forty years. I don’t recognize her wrinkles anymore. I imagine her skin is taut and bounces back, her stomach and thighs are tight and resilient. I imagine the fold of skin that slinks from the corner of her lip to the middle of her neck doesn’t exist. She’s a young twenty-year-old with buoyancy and jubilance when she scratches her chest like that. Bill sing-screams so deep that I forget I’m a supple twenty year-old. I don’t know what I am in that moment, but I come back soon enough, like always.
17
LITERARY
He said I’d say I’ll paint your pretty picture with a song. That I’ll sit and cry with you, my dear, when need be. She tells me Dad’s watching a movie. That he likes to indulge in a lot of media––books, shows, movies––things she can’t enjoy. She tells me it gets a bit lonely up there for her. But she’s writing, writing a lot despite working a lot, cooking a lot, walking a lot. It’s great, a writer’s dream. My father enters the room and they exchange terse glances. He says he’s okay. Pets the dog. They talk about meals and hikes and misremember details to one another. Dad, you look about ready to fall asleep. No sweetie, I’m alright. He said we’ve sat in the sunshine in summers of sadness, lived through the winter when lonely was here. He sings gospel and talks about how this time he didn’t want to die. When the groove got right, the reverend would get the feelin’ so good he’d just hit himself upside the head with the drumstick. His sound diffuses me. It osmotes me. It doesn’t take a whole lot, just a feeling. It doesn’t mean anything about harmony or theory or all that, it’s just a sound. It’s the sound of me and my mother. Our loneliness and the way we scratch our chest. His sound is the sound of my grandmother and me and the way we look at each other with empty eyes. Either he or the memories tell us that all the best times in our lifetimes are the times of yesteryear, taking us back to the lean times, the in-between times, the times when we knew fear. And there it is again, that sing-scream that makes my whole body feel like a nothing, like an everything. Bill (my mother) extends me in either direction into the abysses beyond life. I’m sent to and from my grandmother and my granddaughter, winter and summer, gas chambers and utopia, and the ethers of sound that tie a noose around space and time and squeeze them up into twelve bar blues. We squirm and push. We’re trying like these drummers to smack some sense into the world through restless diffusion or infusion. We scratch our chests to feel our flesh and check in with the clock we never trust. We ask our bodies what they know but reject the answer, telling them instead to do with it what they may. So they push, hit, growl, pluck, diffuse and infuse, extend and contract, sing-scream and gaze with emptiness. He told us and we told him to get down, to let the feelin’ do the rest.
24 APRIL 2020
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
X
18
This week, and for the foreseeable future, the Indy will publish community aid funds and other ways you can contribute to coronavirus relief in lieu of our traditional event listings. If you are able, we encourage you to support these efforts to alleviate the financial and health burdens that coronavirus has taken on communities here in Providence. Para más asistencia en Español, llama el línea de apoyo de AMOR a 401-675-1414 HEALTHCARE RESOURCES These Community Health Centers accept all insurance, and have a sliding-scale system based on income for patients without insurance. • Blackstone Valley Community Health Center: Pawtucket & Central Falls - 722-0081 • Thundermist: West Warwick & Woonsocket - 615-2800 • Tri-County Health Center: Johnston & N. Providence - 351-2750 • Providence Community Health Center: Providence - 444-0570 • East Bay Community Action Program: Riverside & Newport - 437-1008 Free clinics - free and low-cost health services • Clinica Esperanza, Providence - 347-9093 • Rhode Island Free Clinic, Providence - 274-6347 If you have COVID-19 symptoms, there are several locations in Rhode Island where you can get tested. For more information, please visit health.ri.gov/covid/testing/. Several urgent care and primary care providers in RI have set up respiratory clinics to evaluate patients suspected of having COVID19. For a list of these clinics and more information, visit the link above. Clínica Esperanza/Hope Clinic is offering multilingual (including Spanish) drive-up testing. For information, call 401-408-0238. Drive-up testing sites are located at URI in South Kingstown, CCRI in Warwick, and Rhode Island College in Providence. These sites require that your doctor orders a test and a testing appointment is made in advance. These testing sites do not accommodate individuals who arrive on foot or via public transportation. CVS Health is operating drive-through Rapid COVID-19 Testing at Twin River Casino in Lincoln. In order to make an appointment, FOOD AND HOUSING RESOURCES Free meals for kids are being offered at most public schools; see www.health.ri.gov/diseases/ncov2019/about/foodsites/ for more. Project LETS intake form for people in need of immediate housing: tinyurl.com/requesthousing-ri Call United Way Rhode Island’s 2-1-1 hotline or visit rifoodbank.org/find-food/ to find a food bank or pantry near you. PETITIONS AND DONATION OPPORTUNITIES Rhode Island Pride has organized a large food drive, which you can support with a monetary donation. $20 will get food to four people, and $100 will get food to 19 people. More info on their website: prideri.org. The George Wiley Center is fundraising for community members. Donate at this link: tinyurl.com/ybhlh6ky. They are also holding a food drive Monday, April 27, 10 am-2pm. General AMOR COVID-19 Community support fund. Donations go to support sanitation equipment for vulnerable populations, as well as direct financial assistance to families in need. Donate here: bit.ly/2UmYJXr. To get involved as a volunteer, packaging and distributing mutual aid, visit tinyurl.com/amor-covid-volunteer. Prevent Coronavirus in the Criminal Justice System: FANG Collective community bail fund: As jails and prisons become coronavirus hotspots, they present unsafe conditions to inmates, many of whom haven’t been convicted of a crime and are held because they couldn’t afford bail. Help bail people out from the Bristol County House of Correction and the Ash Street Jail through this fundraiser organized by the FANG Collective. gofundme.com/f/fangbailfund Various local activist groups (AMOR, Never Again Action, Sunrise, DSA, Formerly Incarcerated Union, and many more) have organized a petition “asking Gina Raimondo to use her power during this state of emergency to grant parole to anyone eligible, allow medical furlough for all medically vulnerable incarcerated people, and ensure the ACI will provide adequate information and supplies to those held in detention.” You can sign here: bit.ly/2UzVNWg. ICE detainees at the Bristol County Correctional Center have written a letter to elected officials and activist groups raising concern about the spread of coronavirus in their unit, which includes many detainees with serious underlying medical conditions. The FANG Collective has mobilized in response. They explain: “The letter speaks of correctional officers who have continued to work their shifts despite having flu like symptoms, overcrowded conditions at the facility, and a medical professional at the facility telling people detained there that “infection of the whole ICE facility population is inevitable and will occur within the next 30 days.” To get involved: CALL and EMAIL the ICE facility in Bristol County and the County's congressional delegation and demand that the people held in ICE detention in Bristol County be released. Contact info: Bristol County ICE Detention Center: 508-995-6400, select option 6, then option 2; Senator Elizabeth Warren: (617) 565-3170; Senator Ed Markey: 508-999-6462; Representative Bill Keating: 508-999-6462 MASKS If you work in an industry or own a company with medical supplies: Donate them through the RI Department of Health Medical Supply intake form. Help alleviate the nationwide shortage of protective equipment for healthcare workers: bit.ly/2JeIaqf If you want to contribute to mask-making efforts for essential workers, or if you would like to receive handmade masks made by Rhode Islanders, sign up here: www.projectmaskri.com. PLUS: Ocean State Job Lot is giving out fabric for free.
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT