The College Hill Independent —Vol 46 Issue 6

the

Volume 46 Issue 06 24 March 2023

03 SEARCH(ING) FOR MY TONGUE 07 BLOGGING UTOPIA 14 LANA AND ME

THE COMMITMENT ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

46 06 03.24

This Issue 00 ACCURACY Lara Karadogan

02 WEEK IN WESTMINSTER ST. Eric Guo & Ben Balint-Kurti

03 SEARCH(ING) FOR MY TONGUE Tanvi Anand

05 BITES FOR BREAK

Cecilia Barron, Mariana Fajnzylber, Justin Scheer & Jane Wang

06 DEATH OF THE COLLECTIVE MATERIAL SELF Elisa Kim

07 BLOGGING UTOPIA Charlie Medeiros

09 MARCH MADNESS 11 POEMS

Morgan Varnado, Zihan Zhang & Keelin Gaughan

13 LACE CAR Ines Sawiris

Masthead* MANAGING EDITORS Zachary Braner Lucia Kan-Sperling Ella Spungen WEEK IN REVIEW Karlos Bautista Morgan Varnado ARTS Kian Braulik Corinne Leong Charlie Medeiros EPHEMERA Ayça Ülgen Livia Weiner FEATURES Madeline Canfield Jane Wang LITERARY Ryan Chuang Evan Donnachie Anabelle Johnston METRO Jack Doughty Rose Houglet Sacha Sloan SCIENCE + TECH Eric Guo Angela Qian Katherine Xiong WORLD Everest Maya-Tudor Lily Seltz X Claire Chasse DEAR INDY Annie Stein

14 LANA AND ME

BULLETIN BOARD Mark Buckley Kayla Morrison

16 RIDOT DRIVES ON

SENIOR EDITORS Sage Jennings Anabelle Johnston Corinne Leong Isaac McKenna Sacha Sloan Jane Wang

Jenny Hu

Madeleine Young

18 RICE PURE-INDIE TEST Annie Stein

19 BULLETIN

Mark Buckley & Kayla Morrison

From the Editors The sudden excess of warmth this week felt like nature unleashing some pent-up joy. The parallel to the soundtrack for Sony Animated Picture’s 2006 kids film Open Season is irresistible.

Almost 20 years after the dissolution of The Replacements, the indie rock band whose ragged anguish made them the voice of a generation and no real money, lead singer-songwriter Paul Westerberg signed a lucrative Hollywood contract. He penned eight tracks to chart the emotional journey of a talking bear and its deer friend, lending his desperate cathartic yowl to mid-tempo ballads (“I Belong”) and buoyant power pop (“Love You In the Fall”). The songs are not outstanding, but they are more affecting and memorable than the movie they’re in. Westerberg—whose most famous lyric is the wretched scream that starts “Bastard of Young”—sounds unburdened. The first song he wrote was “Right to Arm Bears.”

Watching a punk hero emerge from seclusion for the sake of the second best animated movie about a talking animal rebellion of 2006 should be disheartening, but it’s not. Westerberg disappeared again after Open Season; thankfully, the warm weather is here a while longer.

-ZB

STAFF WRITERS Tanvi Anand Cecilia Barron Graciela Bautista Mariana Fajnzylber Saraphina Forman Keelin Gaughan Sarah Goldman Jonathan Green Sarah Holloway Anushka Kataruka Roza Kavak Nicole Konecke Cameron Leo Abani Neferkara Justin Scheer Julia Vaz Kathy/Siqi Wang Madeleine Young COPY CHIEF Addie Allen COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS Qiaoying Chen Veronica Dickstein Eleanor Dushin Aidan Harbison Doren Hsiao-Wecksler Jasmine Li Rebecca Martin-Welp Kabir Narayanan Eleanor Peters Angelina Rios-Galindo Taleen Sample Angela Sha Jean Wanlass Michelle Yuan DEVELOPMENT COORDINATOR Angela Lian SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM Kian Braulik Angela Lian Natalie Mitchell WEB MANAGER Isaac McKenna WEB EDITORS Hadley Dalton Arman Deendar Ash Ma GAMEMAKERS Alyscia Batista Anna Wang

COVER COORDINATOR Zora Gamberg DESIGN EDITORS Anna Brinkhuis Sam Stewart DESIGNERS Nicole Ban Brianna Cheng Ri Choi Ashley Guo Kira Held Xinyu/Sara Hu Gina Kang Amy/Youjin Lim Andrew Liu Ash Ma Jaesun Myung Tanya Qu Zoe Rudolph-Larrea Floria Tsui Anna Wang ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Sophie Foulkes Izzy Roth-Dishy ILLUSTRATORS Sylvie Bartusek Lucy Carpenter Bethenie Carriaga Julia/Shuo Yun Cheng Avanee Dalmia Michelle Ding Nicholas Edwards Jameson Enriquez Lillyanne Fisher Haimeng Ge Jacob Gong Ned Kennedy Elisa Kim Sarosh Nadeem Hannah Park Luca Suarez Yanning Sun Anna Wang Camilla Watson Iris Wright Nor Wu Celine Yeh Jane Zhou MVP Anna & Sam — The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI in Seekonk, MA

*Our Beloved Staff

Mission Statement The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power.

We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and selfcritical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

Letters to the editor are welcome; scan the QR code here or email us at theindy@gmail.com!

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

T R S E M T E S S WEEK IN W T. IN Arcade Inquiry

their store at 10 Westminster Street can do just this in the following ways: One, browse a massive collection of literature and potpourri (most of which is actually housed in an overflowing basement and side storage rooms). At one point this included a 1914 farmers’ guide to beet growing, a non-standard-but-passable translation of Wittgenstein’s later work, and some prints of British fishermen—although this was before I bought all of the above. Two, see exhibits on black abolitionist Christiana Carteaux Bannister, world-renowned soprano Sissieretta Jones, and the once-vibrant Rhode Island black press’ Providence Watchman and Colored American Magazine, tastefully accompanied by various 45-second audio loops from digital exhibits set up on laptops around the room. Three, be regaled with tales of Providence’s yesteryear, along with a free apple on the way out. So come check it out, why don’t ya. You just might find a circa 1950s comic about a kid playing baseball indoors—although, again, chances are slim, because it’s currently hanging on my wall.

-BBK

VOLUME 46 ISSUE 06

ILLUSTRATION JACOB GONG

In need of well-used books, friendly conversation and/or light exercise? APPARENTLY NOT: Even though it is a five minute walk from the Brown’s Main Green and is in close proximity to RISD, downtown Providence’s Stages of Freedom does not attract as many students as its directors hoped when they opened their 10 Westminster Street storefront in 2016. Stages is run by long-time fixtures of Rhode Island civil society, Ray Rickman and Robb Dimmick. Rickman is a former State Representative and Deputy Secretary of State. Since he moved to Providence, he has continued the work he started in 1966 marching during the Civil Rights movement by remaining active in the city’s non-profit sphere. Rounding out the team is protégé Alexander Gim-Fain and a rotation of intermittent helpers (including, for transparency, myself). The storefront triples as a bookstore, a museum of Rhode Island black history, and the headquarters of their non-profit organization.

All proceeds from book sales go towards their Swim Empowerment Program, which offers free swim lessons to black and underprivileged children across Rhode Island. (This means that, even if nothing for sale interests you, you may be gently encouraged by Ray to give a couple of bucks anyway.)

In addition to the store and museum, Stages offers a historical tour of downtown Providence led by Rickman. It also puts on black histo-

ry-themed events, such as the premiere of an upcoming PBS program about Frederick Douglass on which they had consulted, and a talk this past July by Douglass biographer David Blight at the Newport Athenaeum. At these events, more than I had found possible at the store/museum, I got a sense of what Stages, Ray, and Robb mean to Rhode Islanders and the value of what they do.

I unexpectedly had to voice this when Ray, to my horror, had me kick off the post-documentary discussion to a hundred people at the Congdon Street Baptist Church: “What do you think, Ben?” he asked, passing a microphone my way. What I said was terrible, but a heartening discussion ensued as young and old talked about how Douglass’ depictions of his own life in slavery propelled abolition, as well as the attempts by politicians like Ron DeSantis to remove these narratives from school curriculums. The need for organizations like Stages to shine light on Rhode Island’s past was more apparent to me than ever. This reminded me of a particular set of items Ray once showed me: racist cartoons and caricatures that had been proudly displayed by whites in Rhode Island for decades before they surreptitiously offloaded or destroyed them after the Civil Rights Movement. Despite their shocking images, Ray now collects them as evidence of the darker parts of our history.

A simpler goal of Ray and Robb’s, though, is to have students engage with Providence instead of resting content on College Hill, detached from its surrounding city and people. Visitors to

DESIGN SAM STEWART

Bookstore Museum

the most recent renovation attempts, I feel that the guide was correct in its statement—emptiness reigns across the Arcade, caught perpetually in a rhythm of low occupancy.

I am not quite ready to recommend that you, dear reader, visit the Arcade more than once. You may find it disappointing and dispiriting. You may find the exterior a pretentious invocation of the gods of capitalism. But you may also find a deeper connection with the decaying tradition of shopping arcades as you pick up your own copy of the Guide to Providence Architecture and get riled up in larger discussions of historical preservation.

As I left the Arcade, my eyes turned toward a plaque above the doorway with the words “ARCADE ERECTED” surrounding the number “1828.” Perhaps there was some truth to what I said to my editor.

-EG

TEXT ERIC GUO & BEN BALINT-KURTI

A couple weeks ago, I quipped to my editor that there is only one interesting thing about the Providence Arcade: completed in 1828, it is the nation’s oldest indoor shopping mall. I proceeded to speak fervently about my extensive research on it, through which I traced a historical and theoretically-inclined analysis of the building I had initially thought was drab and boring. Sometimes I forget that my words have unforeseen consequences. Days later, my editor approached me with an assignment to write about the Arcade. It may be fatuous to say this, but I am often hesitant to write about things I know. I never know where to begin.

Perhaps I should begin with tradition: the Arcade extends a lineage of “shopping arcades” in 19th century Europe. Think of them as the 19th century version of the mall, but simpler— an arcade at its core is a single passageway with a roof over it and shops selling all sorts of ephemera on its sides. But arcades were essential to European urban life. Baudelaire’s flâneur cast its eyes on numerous Parisian arcades, and Walter Benjamin in the 20th century would return to them in his work The Arcades Project, a kaleidoscopic exploration of modernity.

Today, the Providence Arcade is a mixeduse building with retail on the first floor and residential spaces on the second and third. The exterior of the Arcade looks much the same as it did over a hundred years ago: six ionic columns

stand strong and, combined with the triangular roof, continue to evoke the feeling that one has encountered a Greek temple. No other building around it has a similar façade. It resembles a bank, a courthouse, or another neoclassical construction that relies on its style to announce its importance.

Yet something puzzles me. On my most recent visit, a few shops were open—a casual joint serving kebabs, a little bookstore—but even on a Saturday afternoon, there were remarkably few patrons. There’s a critical mass of people that must be reached for a place to feel truly inhabited. The Arcade, much like the surrounding downtown area, has not quite reached that point.

“Low occupancy rates have been, unfortunately, an almost-historic constant,” says the Providence Preservation Society’s 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture.

From the beginning, the Arcade faced its share of occupancy problems. In the years after it was built, it was referred to as “Butler’s Folly,” a dig at Cyrus Butler, the merchant who financed the building. But it gradually acquired popularity before further periods of decline. Now, its future is uncertain. Even after

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WORLD

SEARCH(ING) SEA FOR MY TONGUE

TEXT TANVI ANAND

DESIGN SARA HU

ILLUSTRATION HAIMENG GE

You ask me what I mean by saying I have lost my tongue.

I ask you, what would you do if you had two tongues in your mouth, and lost the first one, the mother tongue, and could not really know the other, the foreign tongue.

You could not use them both together even if you thought that way.

And if you lived in a place you had to speak a foreign tongue, your mother tongue would rot, rot and die in your mouth until you had to spit it out.

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This excerpt of Sujata Bhatt’s “Search for my Tongue” is one of those texts: one many 15- to 16-year old students in the UK have to read, because it’s in the compulsory GCSE curriculum. It details the Indian poet’s relationship with her mother tongue of Gujarati and the loss she feels as her understanding of her native language starts to fade away. GCSE-specific texts are a genre in their own right: the use of stylistic devices is obvious enough that 15-year-olds can easily identify them, the themes are “multicultural” enough that the GCSE board can evade accusations of Eurocentrism, and the texts are short enough that it only takes one lesson to cover its key aspects. I always thought of “Search for My Tongue” as a throwaway poem, a superficial attempt at introducing cultural themes that had been overlooked in previous Anglocentric texts within the GCSE canon.

Four years after my first encounter, though, I found the poem again while cleaning out my filing cabinet, stashed among crumpled looseleaf worksheets. As I read the piece in full, I found that it reflected my experiences in a way no poem had ever done before. +++ I went to nursery school in the UK, in Maidenhead, which is in one of the most reliably Conservative constituencies in the country.

My parents had left the multicultural buzz of their Greater London suburb for a quaint town in between London and Oxford to escape the densely-populated urban landscape. Although my parents no longer lived in a place where a Polish supermarket would stand beside a saree shop, they tried to maintain a strong connection with our South Indian culture. This was epitomized by our relationship with language: we considered English to be our “outside” language.

At home, we spoke our mother tongue of Kannada.

A “home language” feels intimate, secret even. When I was really young, I thought that Kannada was unique to my own family. We certainly used it that way—my mother would consistently use Kannada as a vehicle for gossip when out in public. We would also use it to share

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

stories that had been passed down for generations. I remember a Three Little Pigs–style story that involved a recipe for saaru, a lentil soup dish served with rice that is a staple in many Kannadiga households.

Kannada is the official language of Karnataka, a South Indian state. It is by no means an obscure or endangered language: it is one of the most spoken languages in the world, with a comparable number of speakers to Italian (exact numbers are hard to find, but there are around 60 million). A Dravidian language indigenous to southern India, it shares little resemblance to North Indian Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi, which the West more closely associates with India. Its script is round, almost elliptical—very different from Hindi’s rectangular Devanagari script.

When I started attending nursery school, the teachers were furious that my parents were teaching me a language other than English. They used pseudo-pedagogic justifications for their prejudice toward my multilingual upbringing, saying that I would be “confused” when other children were learning their ABCs. Britain is economically divided, and these economic divisions follow racial lines.

South Asians in the UK are one of the most segregated groups in the country. My school, located in one of the most affluent regions in the UK, was no exception to this rule, as I was one of the few non-white British children in my class. Having a different “home language” meant that I would stick out even more, so my parents complied with my teachers to avoid stigmatization. They immediately started only speaking to me in English.

I did not even consider the unlearning of my mother tongue as a loss at first. I just saw it as something that had to be done. In fact, I actually felt “more British” as my parents would speak to me in English, which meant that we evaded the dirty glances that used to follow us when we spoke Kannada in public. +++ When I was four years old, I moved to Lausanne, a city in the Francophone region of Switzerland known as “la Suisse Romande.” As soon as I moved to Switzerland, the role of my languages shifted. My relationship with English was now akin to the one I’d had with Kannada before it was forcibly erased. English was now my “home language” and French was the language I used for the “outside world.”

This form of bilingualism was immediately seen by white Europeans as a sign of a “cultured” child, not a “confused” one. Swiss and British adults praised my parents for “raising me so well,” citing scientific jargon about bilingualism and cognitive development. When I would go back to the UK, I would hear French being spoken in the “posh” West London district of South Kensington. Instead of receiving skeptical glances from passers-by, these Francophones are lauded for what they bring to London. A 2019 Vogue article celebrates the “avant-garde,” “golden touch” they bring to the city.

One of my first memories at Brown University was during international orientation. It was a family breakfast event just after I moved in, and my father and I were placed

at a table with a very wealthy family. When prompted about my background, I mentioned my upbringing in Switzerland, and when I confirmed that I spoke both French and English, the father of the family, deeply impressed, turned to my own father and said, “that is so good for the child.”

I yearned for my mother tongue then, knowing that I would have never received the same praise had I said that I speak both Kannada and English. +++

મને હતું કે આખ ્ ખી જીભ આખ ્ ખી ભાષા, મે ં થ ંૂ કી નાખી છે. પરં તુ રાત ્ રે સ ્ વપ ્ નામાં મારી ભાષા પાછી આવે છે કુલની જેમ મારી ભાષા મારી જીભ મોઢામાં ખીલે છે. ફળની જેમ મારી ભાષા મારી જીભ મોઢામાં પાકે છે.

Why is it that Kannada, a language with tens of millions of speakers, only has a handful of instructors within the U.S. higher education system? Based on my research, only three American institutions have at least one Kannada class with a dedicated instructor on their roster: the Kannada Studies initiative at UT Austin, the Penn Language Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Department of South Asian Studies at Cornell University.

I managed to get into contact with Dr. Meena Madhav Haribal, a Kannada instructor at Cornell. A semi-retired chemical ecologist and evolutionary biologist, she started teaching Kannada in 2018 as part of a pilot project for students studying abroad (Bangalore, the biggest city in Karnataka, has a bustling tech industry).

During my hour-long phone interview with the soft-spoken Dr. Haribal, I notice how her background in evolutionary biology weaves itself into the interview as she fixates on the ways in which the Kannada language has evolved.

The status of Kannada has been delicate since the formation of the Indian state by British colonial rule. Dr. Haribal tells me that the modern-day state of Karnataka only came to being in 1956, nine years after Indian independence. Before then (during the colonial period), the South Indian state was split among three territories: the Bombay Presidency, the Madras Presidency and the Kingdom of Mysore. Of these three ruling powers, only the Kingdom of Mysore, the smallest of the three, had Kannada as a dominant language.

Before British colonization, India as we know it today was divided into dozens of princely states, each with their own cultures and languages. British rule homogenized and stitched these princely states into a foreign fabric called “India.” Following Indian independence, the government was met with a challenge: how do you unite a country that was never meant to be united? Mahatma Gandhi thought that the answer was through the creation of an official language he dubbed “Hindustani,” a mixture of Hindi and Urdu. Language could serve as a unifying force for a region that was forcibly maimed into statehood. Gandhi’s echoes, albeit distorted, can still be heard today within India, with Hindutva Nationalist politician Amit Shah claiming that Hindi should be the “language of

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the whole country.”

By direct imposition, or implicitly through Bollywood, South Indian languages have always been secondary to Hindi and English. As a South Indian, being multilingual is not seen as a way of being more “cultured” or “well-educated”—it is a requirement; a necessity for survival. While South Indian states have their own movie studios, Bollywood still reigns supreme with its Hindi-language music videos played on televisions in restaurants all over South India.

Nothing, however, reflects this “forced multilingualism” more than the education system within Karnataka. It’s a tiered system, with English-language international schools for India’s elite, central government schools run by a national body for middle-class Indians, and then Karnataka state-run schools providing a basic education for those who might not have had prior access. Only state-run schools teach Kannada as a compulsory language. According to Dr. Haribal, this is an improvement from the 1960s and ’70s, following successful student protests against the widening prevalence of Hindi in state schools. Previously, Kannada had only been provided as a third language option.

Kannada’s fate within Karnataka is not representative of all South Indian languages. In the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, the dominant language of Tamil has had a different trajectory. According to Dr. Haribal, Tamil, which evolved a few hundred years before Kannada, is often considered the “oldest living language in the world.” Following the independence of India, a radical social movement based around Dravidian identity (a South Indian identity separate from the dominant Aryan-Sanskrit identity that is assumed as universal within India) gained traction within Tamil Nadu. The movement, whose remnants are still a significant part of the current political landscape within the Indian state, allowed Tamil Nadu to reclaim their subaltern language and form a basis for an identity from which people could build solidarity.

Karnataka’s fling with Dravidianism, on the other hand, was ephemeral: it influenced student protests in the ’60s and ’70s, but the current political climate in Karnataka is dominated by the Hindutva Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP, the dominant party within India, has recently faced criticisms of linguistic imperialism, which makes perfect sense for a party whose unofficial motto is “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan,” implying that India (Hindustan) is a nation of Hindi-speaking Hindus and there is little space for anyone else. In addition to its fractured colonial history, Kannada thus continues to be subjugated by current Indian political apparatuses within Karnataka.

webpage, going from department to department. No results. I broadened my search, and the results remained sparse. Aside from the disparate collection of Kannada instructors at US universities, the main ways in which people are able to learn Kannada outside of India is through informal community-led initiatives by the large diaspora population.

“Language learning is an art,” says Dr. Haribal. If learning Kannada is an “art,” why are we not given access to the art the language produces? Looking at the course rosters for language departments at the few institutions that teach Kannada show that the language is more so presented as a tool for students on their study abroad trips or for communicating with their family. It stops at a deeper exploration of Kannada culture and literature, whereas French, Italian, and even other more obscure European languages are given a full treatment: we are given access to a wide array of literary movements and dedicated classes on the film and music these European cultures produce.

It would, however, be disingenuous to place the onus completely on academic institutions to teach students about overlooked languages and cultures, no matter how large their native speaking population. As Dr. Haribal tells me, “language departments are having problems getting students… my colleagues try hard to get people, but students don’t want to learn languages anymore because it doesn’t pay.”

When a language is considered practical within the U.S., this is usually because it is commonly required for commerce, or beneficial for intelligence purposes. Other languages are therefore reduced to a “niche interest.”

It is an unfortunate cycle: Kannada will only be recognized as a legitimate form of knowledge in the West if it is validated through its inclusion and preservation in the academy. But, if it is not seen as practical to students, what is the incentive for the universities to provide them in the first place? Dr. Haribal puts it frankly: “teaching languages is expensive.” +++ it grows back, a stump of a shoot grows longer, grows moist, grows strong veins, it ties the other tongue in knots, the bud opens, the bud opens in my mouth, it pushes the other tongue aside.

Everytime I think I’ve forgotten,

I think I’ve lost the mother tongue, it blossoms out of my mouth.

Why, then, is there an incentive to learn one’s mother tongue? Kenyan author and academic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues that the starting point of decolonization is language, not geopolitics. Language is not neutral; it can be used as a tool for domination and erasure through its forced imposition. However, subjugated languages, when reclaimed through social movements or state apparatuses, can also serve as a liberating force to resist the domination of imposed languages.

Dr. Haribal tells me about a group of women in her Kannada classroom who have forged a sense of community through her class.

They have formed a small network of Kannada speakers, recommending the class to their friends. It is small steps like these that can help us move forward. While the academy provided Dr. Haribal’s students with the resources to learn Kannada in the first place, through community, they have formed their own modes of knowledge-making and knowledge-legitimization. Whether it is through a small support network or through a widespread radical social movement, we need to build community through language and recognize that having a mother tongue in a subaltern language is a form of knowledge in its own right. +++ As I was writing this piece, I realized that I was becoming obsessive about my mother tongue.

My YouTube feed was populated with Kannadalanguage cooking videos and slice-of-life vlogs.

I spent hours on the phone, speaking to my family about their relationship with Kannada. I interrogated my parents about my childhood. I was grasping at straws in search of some sort of key to my language, my heritage, my culture that had been taken away from me all those years ago. I wish that the search for my tongue could be similar to that of Sujata Bhatt, “blossoming” back when I think “I’ve forgotten.” The search for my tongue has not been futile by any means, but it still feels incomplete: when something is taken away from you so violently, it is hard for you to find it again, no matter how hard you try.

TANVI ANAND B’26 is not tongue-tied.

+++ If language can be framed as a form of knowledge, Kannada can be considered a subjugated knowledge. As subjugated knowledge, Kannada is enmeshed in “the struggle for epistemic justice” which “demands equality between knowledges and contests the order of knowledge imposed by the West,” according to Franco-Reunionese political scientist Françoise Vergès. The implications of this “struggle” are all-encompassing, as language serves as a metonym for other forms of culture in which it is employed (literature, music, theater).

Kannada’s position as subjugated knowledge is reflected in its lack of representation within the Western academy, the university being where knowledge is legitimized in the West. Upon entering Brown, I combed through the course roster looking for my language.

I spent hours methodically searching each

VOLUME 46 ISSUE 06

04

For the first time since I’ve been at school,

TEXT CECILIA BARRON, MARIANA FAJNZYLBER, JUSTIN SCHEER, & JANE WANG

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

ILLUSTRATION SYLVIE BARTUSEK

ARTS

In lieu of a week-long reprieve (from classes, meetings, tepid beers),

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I subsist off a phone propped on my kitchen counter, spewing soliloquies. It sings of the dangers and delights in hetero sex, de la Rentas, and the Big Apple. The poet in question? One Miss Carrie Bradshaw, heroine of the HBO sitcom Sex and the City.

As you may well know from the show’s two-decade tenure as a cultural touchstone, Carrie, a sex columnist for the fictional New York Star, and her friends are 30-something career women who spend the show’s six seasons gallivanting around New York City in pursuit of the ideal man. Yes, our protagonists also confront other realities—namely the processes of aging, having children, and settling down, which are, in fact, not so displaced from their usual quests for conjugality—but Carrie and company are ceaselessly captivated by this conceptualization of men as foreign species.

Carrie “can’t help but wonder” why the specimens she and her friends deal with can’t seem to keep their eyes from wandering, or find some real professional aspiration, or take pride in their micropenises! SATC sheds light on a reality (or is it a surreality?) of womanhood that I never quite arrived at, but that my seventh grade self dreamt of. Now, several decades out from its original airing—and one decade out from my first watch of it—this show provides a performance of femininity and a deference to the male gaze that is so dated (or at least so distant from my own experience) it reads as nostalgic.

I’ve spent all semester watching Sex and the City during my various in-betweens: waiting for water to boil, for the shower to free up, for the laundry to finish. Much like how Carrie understands her fascination with man as a kind of sociology, I see my pull toward her as my own academic project—a study of silly straight women. But it would be foolish to leave unacknowledged what binds us: a mutual obsession with love and loving, eyes that scan the floor for beautiful shoes, and the sweetest of spots for our friends. I smirk each time Carrie uses an ellipsis in her column (my count is approximately three per episode), knowing that what sits at either side of them are little kernels of myself.

I won’t be able to go home to Boston for spring break. I don’t really feel homesick, though.

There’s not much to miss about Boston in March—gray weather, slush piled up to your knees, St. Patrick’s Day. But I do find myself longing for the hopeless food scene. Restaurants overflowing with combed-over city officials; mediocre steaks that take up the whole plate; $4 oysters that reek of the Atlantic. I want to approximate the feeling of walking into a cavernous restaurant and treating myself to a nice thick portion of protein with a torched, garlicked vegetable side for a mere $37. So I will turn to Top Chef.

Season 12 of the cooking reality series takes the 20 or so competitors to “historic” Boston— and it’s really important to Padma Lakshmi that you know Boston is historic—to compete for the title of Top Chef. Watching the show feels like going home. The chefs come from all over the country, but they manage to meld their food to the expressly mediocre standards set by the Boston culinary intelligentsia. Perfectly square, blindingly white portions of fish usually woo the celebrity judges. Former Mayor Marty Walsh makes a cameo wherein he doles out a “nice work” to every single dish, even the Russian corn soup topped with salmon roe. In a competition judged by Boston first responders, simplicity seems to be the secret ingredient: “if you serve molecular gastronomy to a fire officer, they’re going to rip your head off.”

There’s something comforting about watching a cooking show where the challenge is to play down your culinary abilities. It’s a great metaphor for Boston, actually. Hours away from home, Top Chef reminds me that it’s ok to be a little bit in between greatness and failure. Most people, as Boston reminds us, lie somewhere in the middle.

CECILIA BARRON B’24 likes her steak medium rare.

to a Netflix page loaded with old favorites.

The algorithm must have developed a different consciousness overnight and begun to recognize me, not as a consumer of new and future content, but as a product of stories past.

Galloping through the dusty haze of daybreak, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron called my name softly, urgently.

When I lived in rural Pennsylvania, where the average drive time to anywhere worthwhile was 35 minutes, my mother carted my sister and me around in a silver 2008 Honda Odyssey that had a small television hanging before the sometimes-empty middle row (but of course we sat in the back, still operating in carseats). Because my mother’s hands were occupied, and we couldn’t reach the front, if a DVD was in the slot, it would be trapped there for three months at least. Spirit had its fair share of time in the DVD player, quilting my undeveloped imagination with

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

so the remainder of my spring semester needs to be as epic as possible. To that end, I’ve resolved to study hard through spring break to get the bulk of my work out of the way, which means I’ll have less time to consume the usual media (TV, movies, YouTube). I’m going on a media diet that will satisfy an appetite for affect and connection without my having to pay much conscious attention.

Youarelistening.to is a creation of web producer Eric Eberhard. The website is a bit dilapidated—lots of dead links, please-try-againlater banners and other web detritus you’d expect from a site that’s run by just some dude— but it basically works. The site plays SoundCloud ambient music playlists over live streams of emergency services radio or air traffic control transmissions in a city of your choice.

The playlists tend toward the sentimental, which you might guess from track titles like “Maybe Tomorrow All My Dreams Come True” or “There Is No Time For Your Memories.”

Skidding on top of the music, ATC and emergency dispatch radio attest to the invisible goings-on of a vast and highly coordinated web of people and things around you, not as a banal fact of modern life but as somehow nostalgic or melancholic or hopeful, depending on the song playing beneath. The transmission from Boston Logan ATC clearing flight X to land on runway Y, which is not quite intelligible, doesn’t take me to Logan or the cockpit (or the flight attendants preparing for landing, the ground crew waving batons, the people untying shoes at security), but reaffirms my place, my being right here in my bedroom, relative to those people and things.

There’s pleasure in sensing that relation, even if subconsciously—of intuiting vaguely that I’m here and they’re there, moving along their course. Meanwhile, my attention is fixed on the assignment due in a few weeks, and there’s little risk that it will stray.

JUSTIN SCHEER B’23 probably won’t get any work done anyway

MARIANA FAJNZYLBER B’23.5 wants to go to church with you and your mommy.

One morning I woke up

I’m about to graduate from college,

handsome horses sporting dark eyebrows, evil cowboys with titillating Adam’s apples, and the unbreakable bond between family, both born and found. I can play the movie through minute by

minute in my mind—but it’s been years since we rode together in that car. The DVD’s been lost.

Captivity and heartbreak follow the opening lines to the song that overlays Spirit’s birth scene

on America’s western plains—here i am, this is me / i come into this world so wild and free. But in the end, everything comes back around. The (horse) guy gets the (horse) girl, develops a beautiful friendship with a human, disrupts the unstoppable process of ‘natural resource’ extraction, and is never broken. In the middle of a mad semester where I have too many emotions to deal with and I feel, above all, tethered, the freedom that Spirit promises is one that spurns the saddle. I need to be reminded of that defiance, that conviction, this spring break. They comprise a freedom that whinnies from the heart.

JANE WANG B’24 loves that one scene from Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron where Spirit and Rain help each other to pull an apple down from a tree and then split it in half, each of them taking a bite, so the juice drips down their long horse faces.

X

Elisa Kim B’24 Death of the Collective Material Self Collected keratin (bleached hair and nails), mirror shards, dried plants on dyed sand Through this composition, my intention is to express that humanity is bound together by infinite qualities, including the universal experiences of shedding and growth. All our actions are interconnected, uniting us all.

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BLOGGING UTOPIA S+T

On digital diva worship and The Nina Hagen Electronic Shrine

TEXT CHARLIE MEDEIROS

DESIGN GINA KANG

ILLUSTRATION JULIA CHENG

Track No. 1: The Change There is no such a thing called death / It’s just a transformation, yeah yeah yeah

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On September 17, 2017, the Nina Hagen Electronic Fan Shrine died. What remains are six links to click through, 28 pictures of Nina Hagen which fill the background of the webpage, and a goodbye post from blog owner Barry.

The post is titled “The Shrine’s final resting place(?)” and details the blog’s slow descent.

Under constant attack by spambots, Barry was forced to move the shrine off of its initial website and onto a free WordPress site where the blog remains, no longer receiving updates, now in “archive mode.”

The Nina Hagen Electronic Shrine was one of many fan blogs of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Blogging was a central part of fan engagement during this time period, allowing people to create digital communities through their shared posting on a webpage. “Fan blog” is a broad, unofficial term encompassing any blog dedicated solely to an artist. When asked about choosing the word “shrine” to title his site, Barry explained in an email exchange with the College Hill Independent that fans “liked to call her a goddess,” and that the word “shrine” represented this figurative ‘worship.’ The Nina Hagen Electronic Shrine served as a central hub of information on Hagen, where one could find lyrics, photos, tour dates on all things Nina.

In clicking through the Wayback Machine, a website which preserves archived screenshots of the internet since 1996, I found similar blogs dedicated to Björk, PJ Harvey, TLC, X-Ray Spex, Hole, Gregg Araki—I found seven just for Liz Phair! However, few are as well documented as the Nina Hagen Electronic Shrine.

Nina Hagen is a German punk singer, famous for her theatrical performances, eclectic personal style, and six-octave vocal range. Common themes in Hagen’s music include UFOs, television, animal rights, reincarnation, and her love of Jesus Christ. As a child, Hagen was deemed an opera prodigy and trained to become an official opera singer until the age of 16, when she ran away from home to pursue punk music. Hagen achieved brief commercial success in the U.S., in 1984 peaking at number nine on the dance charts with her single “New York / N.Y.” The song briefly resurfaced in 2003 from its inclusion in gay club-kid film Party Monster, before quickly disappearing back into the ether. Hagen never saw large-scale fame in the U.S. But based on what I can find online, she achieved some kind of niche celebrity status.

Track No. 2: Naturträne Das alles macht einen mächtig matt / Und ich tu’ einfach weiter flennen I was 15 when I first heard a Nina Hagen song.

My YouTube recommended page gave me something different from my standard feed of competitive Pokémon analysis videos and Brian Jordan Alvarez skits: “NINA HAGEN - Naturträne ‘Live’ 1978.” In this performance of her punk-opera song “Naturträne,” Hagen dons a pair of pacifiers for earrings, wears a wing of eyeliner up to the middle of her forehead, and sings up to the highest note I have ever heard.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

I was fascinated by this performance, even though I didn’t have the language to understand why at the time. There was just something so compelling about watching a freaky woman act like a freak onstage. I was drawn to Hagen’s otherworldliness, her strange way of singing and even stranger way of moving her face. It was as if an alien crashed onto Earth, and I was watching her best attempt at pretending to be human.

I think what I connected most with was Hagen’s irreverent performance style: rolling her eyes as she sang, headbanging as her guitarist soloed, clucking like a chicken at the end of her performance before pushing the microphone stand to the ground. Even the choice to sing as high as she did struck me as ridiculous. However, Hagen’s absurdity did not deter me. By matching her immense vocal talent with humor, it felt like Hagen letting me in on a joke, slyly throwing me a wink all the way from 1978 Berlin, letting me know that it’s not that serious.

For me, the fact that I could not understand German only made me enjoy “Naturträne” more. The music was separated from its lyrical meaning, so I could enjoy it as a pure sensation: watching her pacifier earring bang against her neck, following her as she stumbled around the stage, feeling the hair rise on the back of my neck as she squeaked up to her highest note and matched the pitch of her guitar player.

My YouTube recommended page quickly morphed into everything Nina: “NINA HAGEN ZIGGY STARDUST SWEDISH TV 1980,” “Nina Hagen Vocal Range (G#1-B7),” and, my personal favorite, “Lene Lovitch & Nina Hagen - Don’t Kill The Animals.” In this PETA-produced, vegetarian call to action, fellow German singer-songwriter Lene Lovich and Hagen prance around the stage in faux furs, singing: Those animal experiments don’t make sense / You’re getting nowhere with cruelty and death… If we want to avoid this endless human riot / Why don’t we start by changing our diet?

For a few months, I was completely obsessed with Nina, although for me nothing could top “Naturträne.” I found similarly enthralled viewers in the video’s comment section:

“Listening to people like her make [sic] me feel overwhelmingly trapped within my own mind. It brings to light how much fear and insecurity hold me back from truly expressing myself ” writes user @rockhill01.

“I don’t know if it’s an obsession or something but I have been watching this video 5 times at least every day since I discovered it…” writes user @FranciscoRodriguez-ik3gy My own Nina-fixation was mostly solitary. I only listened to her music alone. I never turned to talk online, never responded to another poster’s comment or chatted with strangers on message boards. It wasn’t until I was 18 that I would show friends the performance of “Naturträne,” on a laptop in Brown’s architecture studio, a patchouli candle casting a soft orange glow over the screaming German woman.

I am not interested in a retelling of a lonely queer male adolescence—despite how true it may be—because I would rather focus on hope as a main force of queer becoming. I would rather focus on love and on excitement, on secrets and fantasies, on finding refuge in a computer screen.

I did not keep these videos private out of shame or embarrassment, but to keep something just for myself, to have something that felt queer and mine.

Track No. 3: My Sensation We’re having fun when we are in action / Oh what a gift, to give satisfaction!

There is a phrase we have been dancing around: diva worship. Diva worship is a uniquely queer cultural phenomenon, wherein young queer men find solace in the visibility of women performers.

Diva worship began in the U.S. around the same time celebrity culture started to boom—the late 19th and early 20th century. Historically notable divas include Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Grace Jones, Kate Bush, Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson, Dolly Parton—the list goes on.

There are conflicting understandings as to why exactly so many young queer boys

S+T

are captivated by female performers. Some queer theorists work in negative terms—the gay boy identifying with the social ostracization of women. Others write in positive terms—the queer boy identifying with the feminine strength of the woman. I find myself most drawn to writer Steve Wiecking’s definition: “Diva worship is a sensitivity to life’s endless possibilities and our ability to transcend acceptance or oppression.”

Here, diva worship becomes a tool to be used by the queer boy, rather than a fixed identificatory relationship, connecting with his diva based on his own needs. Diva worship, much like queer being, is not a static position, but rather one of interrelationality, with each child-diva relationship taking a different shape: I love Courtney Love because I connect with anger towards a masculinist society, and I love Madonna because she gets me into the groove.

While Nina Hagen’s music may have been a way I, and many other white gay boys, found a sense of queer becoming, it is not the only way, and represents only a small piece of a much larger picture. Discourses on diva worship often privilege white queer becoming achieved through a white ideal of femininity, which can obscure the experiences of queer becoming and diva worship that don’t center on whiteness.

Indeed, the Nina Hagen Electronic Shrine seems to have been mainly frequented by white gay men based on the photos on the site, and Nina Hagen herself can be read as a figure of the white femininity that often becomes the focus of diva worship.

Nevertheless, the Electronic Shrine presents one well-archived example of how a specific group of queer people found themselves drawn to a specific singer, one tied to my own history with Hagen’s music.

For the queer boy, the diva becomes a kind of utopian figure, one who can be feminine and performative and still find community in a patriarchal world. Like all children, the queer child is simply looking for a role model beyond their family who possess confidence and a defined sense of self. The diva can become this figure, offering a non-masculine alternative of self-determined life. Here, a gay kid can see Nina Hagen and want to have her confidence—her freedom in and embracing of being a non-masculine freak—without necessarily wanting to become Nina, or take on any literal characteristics of her life. Diva worship grants gay boys the promise of self-determination without defining what that has to look like, or who they have to become.

Track No. 4: Universal Radio I’m talking to myself / Talking to myself / I’m my own radio, my own radio The Nina Hagen Electronic Shrine is a fabulous example of diva worship. In this case, the

worship is visible through hundreds of photos of Hagen cataloged, collaged, and enshrined above a comment section teeming with adoration. Because the site allows for such fervent diva worship, it doubles as a great site of queer becoming, both for the blogger and the reader.

The blogger’s choices on the website implicitly draw out what they value about Nina—do they want to archive her lyrics, chat about her performances, upload pictures of her from their collection? The blogger then must actualize that desire, creating a digital product born from their care for Nina.

While this may seem like Internet-101, it is important to recognize how using the Electronic Shrine forced users to consider their self-presentation, allowing them to choose how they present themselves in this queer space. The site encouraged users to create a customized digital persona with a name and a profile picture, taking the pressure off users’ real identities, even allowing them anonymity. You could be anybody you wanted online! Thus, to digitally engage with their queer subject of adoration (Nina Hagen), bloggers first had to design themselves into their own idealized versions. Much like the Electronic Shrine itself, the blogger’s self-presentation was in a continuous state of editing, reinvention, and response. Neither were static, but instead were forever changing tools for interpersonal connection.

Track No. 5: Future is Now 1981 is over... Future is now!

You heard her: 1981 is over… 2023 is now, and the internet is used quite differently. Sites like the Nina Hagen Electronic shrine are HTML pages built from scratch, where every choice about how the website should look and func-

tion is decided by the person coding it. In Barry’s words, this freedom allowed him to transform the site’s design in individualistic, idiosyncratic ways: The Shrine is where I had the most fun. It was a pure HTML website built from scratch, so it was very labor-intensive with all the

custom graphics/formatting and whatnot, as you can see in the Flashbacks section—very different from the blog format it eventually switched to about 10 years later. I spent countless hours creating custom graphics, tweaking photos, changing up the design and formatting when I got bored...it was honestly kind of ridiculous.

However, in the 30 years since fan blogs’ heyday, the internet has become vastly more automated, and platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter have taken the place of HTML websites.

The DIY approach of HTML coding is gone: No longer do you have to write the code which allows your site to host videos, as now you can post them to YouTube. The shift away from HTML towards apps has also made digital fan culture more decentralized. Photo archives are now on Instagram; discussion threads are now on Twitter; tour information now on StubHub. Fans don’t even need to make a blog to blog anymore. Instead, companies like Squarespace, WordPress, Typepad, and Tumblr allow for fans to blog without having to create their own site.

While apps like these have streamlined access to blogging, they have also removed the rough-around-the-edges charm of a DIY blog.

There is less intentionality and control when creating blogs through these sites, as you are limited to the parameters of what the site allows.

This, in a way, limits the tools for queer self-presentation and becoming which enamored me with fan blogs in the first place. Blog creators no longer have to choose every aspect of their blog, as Squarespace can help decide for you. In HTML, the only limits to your fan blog were your technical skills and your imagination. Now with these sites, you are still working in the context of your limitless imagination, but within the confines and rules of billion-dollar companies.

While old-school DIY fan blogs may not foster the same communities they once did, I am grateful they remain online. There is something sad about the Nina Hagen Electronic Shrine’s inactivity, but I am more moved by it as a snapshot of history. It’s easy to forget that there was an internet before mass automation, before TikTok told you what to watch and Amazon algorithms told you what to buy. It’s nice to think of an internet with choice, one where you could design the life you wanted to live, even if just on your fingertips.

Of course, the Nina Hagen Electronic Shrine is not dead, it’s just transformed (yeah, yeah, yeah). For my coda, allow me to end with some lines from Nina Hagen’s “Future is Now.” Logging off now…

My love for you was bigger than my love for me Cheri you see / Now I am free, I found the key! And I love everybody / I’m gonna free everybody CHARLIE MEDEIROS B’24 is going disco!

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Miller High Life dirty fucking lowlife

SPORTS

Dunkin’ on Gano Street Starbucks on Angell Street pine nuts pining for deez nuts Invisalign the invisible hand of the market boygenius The MacArthur Genius Grant ChatGPT national GDP Providence hip-hop collective NOTSODIFFERENT “she’s just like me fr” ZEL Zelle oedipus rex premarital sex enemies enemas AS220 AARP MCM2100V: Sex. What is it? Why does it matter? having sex

DESIGN SAM STEWART

STS STIs drinking alone drinking in Copy Convenience Store Woman Florida Man

TEXT INDY STAFF

Living off Hope

09

Drunk on Power

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SPORTS

Jack and Rose, the Indy (2021-2023) Jack and Rose, Titanic (1997) love indifference UCS Recall LCD Soundsystem dry humor the dry humors (yellow and black bile) culture of fear non-hierarchical student leadership showing up to class depriving a village somewhere of an idiot Lana Del Rey The Remains of the Day naanwich Muggle ozempic face habsburg chin Cat in the Hat rat in a bag Lydia Tár CPax in that power suit necrophilia necropolitics “Sound Off ” by John Philip Sousa “Take Off Ur Pants” by Indigo De Souza Providence Roku City Sneaker Junkies date PVD Modern Nutrition funeral incoherence imperception

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Dear Septimus Empire’s edge looks blurred after you cross it.

The window reflections on the way down

LIT

pass like animated pictures, snapshots, gravity’s reel rotating your image until it’s inedible.

Did narcissus feel this way before succumbing?

Did his face look back like a pond disturbed by a pebble? Did all of London

TEXT MORGAN VARNADO

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

ILLUSTRATION YANNING SUN

stand behind him like a lover choking on the backwash of his words?

11

Samson before a Storm Ms. Dalloway Police sirens can’t mimic the birds but they try as they fly north.

has a white man beneath it and a dog much the same.

Blackbirds pull river water

The small city has inviting veins.

A stretchered woman calls a group of cells to her mouth.

colors from their chest, their eyes are rice grains poking from plums.

There is something more beautiful

Her face ponds into folds under the EMT’s hands.

A moment for her

than the flowers.

It took me this long to realize there’s a stage

cradled head and silver hair like the gold mossing atop the green domed buildings.

before fruit. The capitol lawn is always growing upward.

Grass never feels the tug

Under the craning, copper-molded eyes of the soldier statues

of drooping petals: new weight that leaves you tired and aching

they’re giving out food.

The other statue, the only above Providence that doesn’t look down

like the delta between lovesick rivers, or my stance as I bend to tie my shoe.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Atop the molehill reign red ants strawberry men forging battle lines between Old Navy flip flops and sweat My sister says she’d lend me her leg hair if mine hibernate another summer The trees un-embalmed from winter are soaked in humid molasses churning the sky into portraits of our melting vanilla-chocolate swirls “It smells like rain,” says my sister’s raised nose, “you smell it too?” there’s a shift, a change in stance, cold whispers before the jackal dance heat and devastation name children over If I could tell a story it’d say Samson first wanted to be a tree with willows long enough to banner in the wind But ice cream is molting down my forearm And I’ve seen this before and after sewer drain streets dense with fallen branches scattered like the lost tines of a broken comb

MORGAN VARNADO B’23 really needs a haircut.

LIT

dear, dive Glad I tasted your talk & tongue interiors are always assumed As brittle as piles of foliage– unwelcoming–in autumn, seas close themselves into the backdrops of childhood nomadic beige lights ultimately soft & bitter; beige walls; you are obsessed with textures as silkworms do Wrapping yourself up while bluntly loving the idea of breaking the soft ceramics; of new life under the tender suffocating loops of death’s narratives. I’m wearing your black T-shirt with white patches clinging onto my left shoulder: a dense concealment, perpetually silencing every naked rock of my body’s ridge.

Nakedness is when I’m standing in

reverse-colored skies & soils & itching like the labels; like the time you showed me your cocoon. 茧: vessels containing your inherited voices; telling me your fear of aging more than once frowning like waves. And we are dying to dive into the wrinkles. *茧=cocoon & love goes astray in the unintentional weaving of cocoons. Do not misread these filaments as a love poem ZIHAN ZHANG B’25.5 thinks banana is not a kind of fruit.

the leaves fall a little slower here sometimes i wonder if we’re underground.

lately i’ve been dwelling in the cavities of the earth eating dirt to fill the holes in my stomach and dreaming about fallen leaves and butterfly wings and the boy from grade school or other beautiful dead things. tomorrow i’d like to lie down with them like lichen on a skeletal root: seeping into the bedrock with soil-filled lungs and centipede-entwined ribs and i will feel so lovely as flowers grow from the rot.

KEELIN GAUGHAN B’25 was an entomologist in a past life.

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ILLUSTRATION YANNING SUN

and i watch the soap swirl like Charybdis swallowing ships lost at sea thinking what a pleasure it’s been to drown here: unraveling in threads like a hand-me-down or a heartache. my bones have grown softer now, malleable like those cheap rings that turn your fingers green to decay was its own kind of odyssey —but they paved parking lots over the seas where we used to dock our pirate ships— so i will sink back down toward the eluvium (because mom says to wash delicate fabrics on cold) and the fungi watch silently with their infinite eyes: i reckon the inside of me looks like a forest.

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

i miss my hands when they were speckled with blisters and picking up caterpillars, stained with paint streaks and paste and pomegranate juice; perhaps those seeds remain buried in the sock drawer or stuck below the eyelids of some unripened fruit with a hope as perennial as the daylilies and a garden of earthworms lingering under her skin. but then, on a tuesday in february, [dangling carelessly at the end of winter] i saw an angel at the laundromat and he offered me a dryer sheet.

TEXT ZIHAN ZHANG & KEELIN GAUGHAN

before the maggots

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EPHEMERA

Ines Sawiris B’24.5 Lace Car Assortment of found fabrics, acrylic, craft paper An exploration on the fragility of memory. Old shower curtains, denim jeans, lace sheets — all cut, torn, draped, and layered over one another instinctively in an attempt to recreate my mental images of where I grew up in Egypt.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

FEATS

Lana and Me On immigrant daughters and Lana Del Rey content warning: disordered eating

+++ The second place I encountered Lana was darker, grittier. In the mid-2010s, the heyday of Tumblr, Lana became the patron goddess of the depressive teenage girl. Pro-anorexia internet forums hailed her as their heroine, spreading her lyrics across pictures of Kate Moss and praising a version of feminine smallness that shrunk hordes of 13-year-old girls down to our

VOLUME 46 ISSUE 06

ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES

My first taste of Lana Del Rey was in third or fourth grade: I pranced around my bedroom to “Video Games,” putting on stolen lipstick and wearing my prettiest dresses and imagining reallife weddings with every boy I’d ever loved and married on the playground, of which there were already many. Heaven is a place on earth with you / Tell me all the things you wanna do.

Already I knew I was a girl with feelings too big to hold inside of me, and I was always

bones. Lana sang about fragility, unavailable men, a type of sadness as beautiful as it was poignant. Even without explicit references to self-starvation, her music was a playground for the Teenage Anorexic.

Her lyrics were the soundtrack to our miseries, the playlist of our bitterness. Set to the tune of her melodies, brokenness could be lovely. After school, my friends and I would blast “Ultraviolence” in the bathroom and smear on coats of crusted mascara, preening in the mirror and listing out the things we hated most about ourselves. There was no shame left in sadness, not when it came in such a pretty package.

For the Chinese girls I grew up with, this sadness was something that pressed down deep roots and twisted us into dark, distorted shapes.

It wrapped itself around our hearts and squeezed our throats and choked the air out of us before we could breathe. We spent gray Sunday afternoons together in silence as our parents talked in the faded background, each one of us lost in thought. On those days, listening to our parents’ faint Mandarin, I felt so horrifically aimless that I thought I could kill myself. Detached, and weary, and disenchanted, most of all.

That disenchantment was the worst of it.

We’d been spoon-fed the Americana of movies and Disneyland; we’d been promised Happy Meals and television and golden-haired boys who smiled whenever you looked at them. We had submerged ourselves in kaleidoscopic fantasies of heady romance and being swept away like Asian Cinderellas, glass slippers on, tiaras tight.

Instead, we had rows of brick houses and schools made of cement and roads that stretched on and on and on into the cornfields until they disappeared. We had angry old men who screamed at us for coming to this country and old women who petted us in restaurants because they’d never seen Asians before. We had parents who shouted at us in their mother tongues until we wept; mothers who made us starve ourselves; fathers who went days without a smile. We had wrinkled fingers braiding our hair and poetry about sliced fruit that was meant to morph our

DESIGN TANYA QU

+++

overflowing at the edges, always thrumming with pungent fear and rabid excitement.

Happiness was neon pink and sickly sweet; sadness was tsunami-big and felt like drowning.

In contrast, my hometown was small and semirural and staunchly traditional, suffocating.

Classroom walls were painted eggshell and had the tendency to close inward, making the toss and turmoil of my internal world even louder. My mother dressed me in pinafore dresses and white leather Mary Janes to go to church on Sundays, where I would take my place in a wooden pew and swing my legs and listen to hours of sermons on the myriad ways to be condemned to the eternal fires of Hell.

On the outside, it was a version of Americana identical to the one Lana paints.

Suburbia at its finest: condominiums and minivans and cul-de-sacs. Monday through Friday, I went to a little private elementary school on a grassy green hill, where the teachers compared my hair to silk and called me a china doll.

Weekends, I sat dutifully at my wooden desk for hours, scribbling out stories and poems and nonsensical fairy tales in the hope that my father, once an acclaimed author in the motherland, might be proud of me. I remember him back then as a largely symbolic figure, appearing ever so often in my life to take family photos or scream at my mother or dole out occasional lines of criticism.

I’ve been out on that open road / But you can be my full-time daddy, white and gold, Lana sings in “Ride.” More than anything, that was what I wanted: freedom, glamor, the adoration of a father. That, I was certain, was the American Dream, and Lana Del Rey was the only one who could articulate it.

TEXT JENNY HU

It is the first week of January and Abby and I are driving in the dark with all our windows down, frosty and flushed and delirious, watching shadowed cornfields unfurl beyond us on either side. The obscurity of night, coupled with our time away at university, has turned the sprawling farmland of rural Ohio into the setting of a Midwestern Gothic. HELL IS REAL, a flashing billboard declares as it looms over us.

There isn’t really anything to laugh at but we are laughing, like children, just to fill the space. If there is one thing about our hometown, it is that the emptiness comes alive, monstrous, whenever it can: long drives like this one, lonely nights in the wake of a breakup, family dinners spent in stifling silence. Abby reaches out and turns on the radio—the dramatic orchestral strains of Lana Del Rey’s “Carmen” begin to play.

Darling, darling, doesn’t have a problem, Lana’s velvet voice croons. Lying to herself, ‘cause her liquor’s top shelf.

“I wish this song didn’t hit so hard,” Abby says. She shakes her head and grins, almost embarrassed.

After all, we are freshly 19 and painfully aware of the brink of 20. There are things that are excusable at 16, 17, 18, and become indecorous or humiliating once one has left the teen years behind. Hooking up with high school classmates, for example, or spending weekends getting stoned at the park, or being a public fan of Lana Del Rey. And yet, almost unconsciously, as the car continues down the empty road and the song unravels itself in the frigid winter air, we both open our mouths and sing along.

14

FEATS

bitterness into beauty. Was this love? Was this all we were doomed to have? We wanted more, more of it—we wanted to be loved hungrily and loudly and ostentatiously. We wanted to be seen.

We wanted to be held.

Is it any surprise that we found resonance in Lana Del Rey? That her music about longing and jealousy and despair found a willing audience amongst the immigrant daughters of my suburban hometown? That on Friday afternoons, we’d throw down the windows of my battered gray car and stick out our arms and drive to the mall, blasting “Video Games” on the shitty car speaker? We’d let our hair loose and flood our skin with sunlight and scream the lyrics out into the winding streets: Heaven is a place on earth with you / Tell me all the things you wanna do / I heard that you like the bad girls / Honey, is that true?

None of us were bad girls. None of us were even close to being bad girls. But in the midst of our terrible, mundane existences—our days of crying in school bathrooms and lying to our mothers and pinching our waists in bedroom mirrors—sometimes it was exciting to pretend.

In the spring of 2020, when most white artists were preparing statements denouncing racism and their own privilege, Lana Del Rey posted a contentious series of paragraphs titled “Question for the Culture.” Why, she asked, were women such as Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, and Beyoncé allowed to make music about sex and sexuality, while she was judged for her songs about love and ‘delicate femininity’?

This post went down in infamy, prompting reactions and criticism across the Internet.

Considering the artists of color Lana namedropped in comparison, delicate was no more than a synonym for white. Whiteness, once again, became the standard for softness and womanhood and beauty. Lana framed herself as the victim of mainstream—white—feminism, despite it being a movement championed for and by women who look like her. Instead of denouncing the men in the music industry who persistently objectified, slut-shamed, and even assaulted their female peers, Lana’s post targeted other women—especially women of color.

“Question for the Culture” forced me to evaluate how many times I could defend her, an artist who had already been accused repeatedly of glamorizing domestic abuse, romanticizing toxic relationships, and promoting eating

TEXT JENNY HU

DESIGN TANYA QU

ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES

+++

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

disorders. None of the accusations had particularly landed with me before; it would be one thing to encourage harmful behaviors, after all, but I didn’t find it wrong for her to sing about her personal experiences. For example, Lana herself never endorsed the pro-anorexia communities of the mid-2010s; it was them who had adopted her as their icon and saint. The aestheticization of pain, for me and many others, was the only way to survive it.

And yet, this time, there was no personal justification to be made. There was no emotional backing on Lana’s part, no substantive reasoning. Just another instance of a white woman proving that she really didn’t, and couldn’t, understand, no matter how many times she claimed she did. Our sadnesses were not her sadnesses. Our sadnesses were not allowed to be her sadnesses. She sings in “Cola,” I fall asleep in an American flag / I wear my diamonds on Skid Row. Did she not care that half of America didn’t even want us here? Did she not care that we couldn’t be young, be dope, be proud / Like an American, not when men shouted ni-hao at us on the streets and said they liked how we looked Oriental?

On paper, I am not supposed to listen to Lana Del Rey. I am not white enough for her album covers or her fanbase or the heroines of her songs. I grew up in suburban Ohio and my teenage years were not spent having passionate sex with rockstars or getting high by the beach. I have never tried cocaine.

But I know how to feel every emotion with the violence of a gunshot. This is something Lana and I both know. Her music is imbued with a deep and insatiable need to love and be loved, a need viscerally present in the immigrant daughters I grew up with. We earned perfect report cards and lied to our parents and got wasted on weekends when we could muster up the right excuses; we drove past rows and rows and rows of identical houses and couldn’t imagine ourselves living inside them. Most of all we searched for beauty in everything we saw, in the hopes that one day we’d find something or somewhere or someone who reflected ourselves back at us. We belonged to nothing and wanted everything.

Even if she is not singing about me, I can hear myself in her words. +++ In 2021, Lana released Blue Banisters, a somber, sweeping album framed as a response to various

criticisms and detractions she had received over recent years. The songs painted the picture of someone who had come to accept herself, even if she didn’t know how to love herself yet. Baby, I’ll be like a wildflower / I live on sheer willpower / I’ll do my best never to turn into something / That burns, burns, burns, she sings in “Wildflower Wildfire.”

The first time I heard it, I nearly cried.

Lana and I don’t share the same miseries, nor the same desires. She will never know the humiliation of exoticization, the loneliness of growing up foreign, the quiet devastation of hearing my mother lose her mother tongue. I will never attain the vintage Americana and the Old Hollywood glamor she describes.

But what we share is that we have both been miserable, and we are both still full of desires.

This, for me, is enough. +++ At a party in some sports team’s basement, “Summertime Sadness” is playing. It is September and still Rhode Island summertime, heavy and thick with the residual anticipation of arrival on campus. I’m in a little white top and my grimiest jeans; Natalia is in all black. We are shoved against each other, jostled between bodies. Some girls are wearing glow sticks around their necks. The dark is pulsing and electric.

“Lana at a party?” I ask, laughing.

“Only at Brown,” Natalia says. She grabs my hands and whirls me around. We scream the lyrics together: I got my red dress on tonight / Dancin’ in the dark, in the pale moonlight / Done my hair up real big, beauty queen style / High heels off, I’m feelin’ alive.

This, this, I think to myself, is all it takes to feel like a Real Person. A red dress and big hair and pale moonlight. The hollowness inside of me is met by the crush of skin on skin, spinning, spiraling. In the shadowy basement, shouting Lana’s lyrics until I can’t feel myself at all, I decide it doesn’t matter if she is singing about herself or me or anyone. It doesn’t matter because the moment is mine, and mine alone.

JENNY HU B’26 will be listening to Lana Del Rey’s new album, Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard, tonight (March 24, 2023!!!).

METRO

RIDOT DRIVES ON All urgencies created equal

are

not

+++ In 2018, when it was clear that this section of the highway was in disrepair, the communities neighboring the highway called to tear down the massive interchange and opt instead for a neighborhood boulevard.

This proposal began in 2014, when James Kennedy recommended replacing the highway with a multimodal boulevard on his blog, “Transport Providence,” according to Mann.

The idea continued to gain traction among residents in the area and local transportation advocates. This proposed project would bring together the communities that had been split by the highway during Providence’s period of urban renewal following World War II, when the Providence Redevelopment Agency forced 14,000 people out of their homes between 1949 and 1960 for the construction of freeways.

The boulevard that was proposed in theory aimed to include lanes for the movement of 10,000 vehicles each day, bike lanes and bus stops, as well as sidewalks for pedestrians. Further, up to 80 acres of land, at this time not in use because of its proximity to the highway, could have been converted into usable real estate for the community. For decades, Federal Hill and the West End have been isolated from Valley, Olneyville, and Silver Lake despite these neighborhoods sharing borders—only connected by uninviting overpasses and underpasses. By creating a public space that was oriented toward the communities surrounding the existing highway, Kennedy’s plan sought to reintegrate communities.

During a community meeting in March

2016, RIDOT Director Peter Alviti voiced his concerns with this proposed project, arguing that a boulevard could not service the capacity of the existing interchange. Alviti also advocated for regional users of the highway. “When you have regional users that would be inconvenienced for the sake of the local conveniences that would be afforded through highway removal, how do you reconcile those two?” he asked.

Ian Lockwood, a transportation engineer who focuses on urban design and who was also present at the meeting, disagreed. “There comes a point, from a policy perspective, where it makes sense for the community to have regional commuters driving on the community’s terms,” he said. “If they decide they want to live 20 miles away and commute downtown, then they need to pay that time tax. City residents shouldn’t have to pay with their quality of life, health, and everything else.”

At the 2016 meeting, Alviti also unveiled the renderings of the designs for the new 6/10 Interchange, the project which is being constructed today. The renderings included structures built over the highway to facilitate local roads, bike paths, and parking space. But Lockwood argued that these additions were not an act of change. The new structures above the highway “[give] the illusion that you can have it both ways. However, it still creates parking issues, requires a ramp…it still has the baggage,” he said.

ILLUSTRATION CAMILLA WATSON

Before feeding into the I-95, Route 6 services traffic flowing in from the west. Route 10 comes from the south, before merging with Route 6 at the interchange. This convergence, called the Route 6/10 Interchange, is planted between the neighborhoods of Federal Hill, Olneyville, and Silver Lake. Since its construction in the 1950s, this massive roadway has allowed for the flow of 100,000 cars each day—but has more recently been deemed a safety hazard, which this project aims to resolve.

When it is completed later this year, the highway renovation project will have replaced seven of nine structurally deficient bridges, built two new ramps, and added bicycle and pedestrian paths, making it the most expensive project in RIDOT’s history with a $410 million budget. The “Excellence in Teamwork Award” credits the project’s cost effectiveness, use of green construction technology and planning, as well as the implementation of the Every Day Counts model in its deployment—a method of highway planning and construction created by the FHWA that aims to reduce construction time and deploy safe and environmentally-conscious construction innovations.

However, this January, the Rhode Island Attorney General’s office charged both Barletta Heavy Division, Inc., the Massachusetts-based construction firm overseeing the interchange project, and Dennis Ferreira, a former senior

employee of Barletta, with “illegally dumping thousands of tons of contaminated fill at project sites in Providence” during its construction, according to Uprise RI.

DESIGN RI CHOI

+++

TEXT MADELEINE YOUNG

On March 8, the Rhode Island Department of Transportation (RIDOT) was awarded the “Excellence in Teamwork Award.” This award, granted to RIDOT by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), came in the last year of the five year project to entirely reconstruct the existing Route 6/10 Highway Interchange.

RIDOT has been calling this project a “transformation” of the existing highway infrastructure—called an “interchange” because it provides an opportunity for drivers to switch between, enter, and exit Routes 6 and 10. But local transportation experts and advocates have argued that RIDOT is over-prioritizing the continued growth of car-centric infrastructure.

“RIDOT’s priorities are fundamentally broken,” AS220 Operations Director Jonesy Mann—one of the lead authors and coordinators of an open letter delivered to the candidates for the Governor of Rhode Island this past summer and a local transportation advocate—told the College Hill Independent. “9 percent of households in Rhode Island don’t have access to a motor vehicle. People with disabilities that prevent them from accessing a motor vehicle and young people without driver’s licenses cannot use motor vehicles independently. When this is people’s only way of getting around, it limits their access to their community.” Despite the praise that RIDOT receives from the FHWA, these changes to the Route 6/10 Interchange continue to advance a car-centric agenda rather than invest in diverse forms of mobility.

+++ When the Route 6/10 Interchange Project was announced in 2016, RIDOT stated, “We have to do this work—it cannot wait any longer,” citing the degradation of the existing highway as a major safety issue for the vehicles that use the interchange. But how do we assign urgency when it comes to these types of public projects? What

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METRO WORLD ILLUSTRATION CAMILLA WATSON DESIGN RI CHOI

stories and perspectives are overlooked?

Rather than divert some or all of the funds for this project to implement some of the multimodal transportation programs, RIDOT continues to build up the highways. Alviti gave his reasoning as to why RIDOT is not going to increase budget allocations toward multimodal transportation programs in a recent interview with RI Public Radio: “Right now, according to our counts, and according to the data we have, about 2 percent of Rhode Islanders are availing themselves to active transportation modes. I see it would be irresponsible for us to take half of our capital budget to devote to the benefit of 2 percent of its users.”

Alviti’s logic is self-reinforcing. Rhode Island has been supporting car travel for nearly a hundred years through heavy subsidies, highway expansions, and now projects like the reconstruction and reinforcement of the Route 6/10 Interchange that will cement it as a permanent fixture in our transportation system for another hundred years. Travelers will respond to their environments and act based on what options are afforded to them, so when most of the built environment is designed to be hospitable to car users, and inhospitable to those who might commute via bus, bike, or on foot, it makes sense why commuters are unlikely to use the minimal alternatives to motor vehicles available to them.

When RIDOT says “we need to do this work now,” we are presented with only one option.

And with large and fast infrastructures like the Route 6/10 Interchange Project displayed as always necessary, it’s hard to imagine a world without them—with a neighborhood boulevard instead of a multi-lane overpass.

It’s not that this world is impossible, though.

Rather, there seems to be an aimless prioritization of certain infrastructures over others. The open letter sent to the Governor candidates this summer cited two states for their legislative reform and successful projects that Rhode Island could emulate. In 2020, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation began to require state traffic engineers to include sidewalks, crosswalks, bus stops, and high-quality bus facilities as they design upgrades to major roadways, and, in 2021, the Colorado Department of Transportation diverted $6.7 billion toward clean transportation projects.

TEXT MADELEINE YOUNG

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17

Several more of the speakers who attended this meeting in 2016, aside from Alviti and Lockwood, cited the importance of municipal leadership to improve neighborhood health through transportation. RIDOT sustains highway growth, and the department’s plan to leave local roadways intact with a new bike lane and sidewalk is just one concession to local residents’ demands, not a reevaluation of their responsibility to travelers.

At the end of it all, Alviti’s unveiling of the renderings and plans for the Route 6/10 Interchange Project demonstrated this, as the highway reconstruction was favored over the community’s calls for a local roadway, and it is now the project we see underway today. While the proposed community boulevard might have stitched together the communities separated by the highway decades ago, the bolstering of the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

highway continues this interruption, this cutting off.

Pavement is a connector. Roads link us from place to place, from home to work or school, to our family and friends. They are how we get around. But they can also be devices for alienation. Pavement is embedded and fissured in the soil, and barriers and posts are buried and bolted deep in the earth. They prevent us from diverging from their directed path.

This slicing of communities through road-building across North America is an act written about by Canadian writer Sina Queryas. Their poetry collection, Expressway, illustrates how highways dismember humans from their locales until the landscape blends to a mush—the redwoods are no longer a unique element of the Pacific Northwest in the paradox of car-centric mobility.

The road cutting through cities, Slicing towns, dividing parks, The road over lakes, under rivers, The road right through a redwood, Driving on top of cities, all eyes On the DVD screen – Sina Queryras, “Endless Inter-states” The more ‘connections’ we build, the more separation we feel. +++

Advocates supported the 2016 boulevard proposal for its accommodation of commuters while improving the quality of air and life of the residents in the adjacent neighborhoods.

It would have been a complete reconstruction of not just the roadways but also the priorities of transportation planning in Providence and Rhode Island. In 2016, when the public meeting was held in support of the multimodal connector project, 300 members of the public attended to voice their support—across environmental groups, neighborhood associations, developers, and downtown businesses. These are the individuals who are directly impacted by these roadways each day, whether they choose to use them or not.

Highways and roads are a sort of commons in this way—they provide us with conduits to move through as we navigate the city, but they are also impossible to disregard for those who do not use them. We see them from the park, from our neighborhoods. We can hear them from our apartments late at night. They affect the whole of

a community, but not by choice.

The final construction plans for the Route 6/10 Interchange include a bus lane and bike lane parallel to the highway. Sam Coren, a PhD candidate in American Studies at Brown University who is currently looking at the history of locations such as the Route 6/10 Interchange, explained to the Indy that “these are concessions to the main vision, or rather, lack of vision” from RIDOT. Concessions are not compromises.

Concessions also do not mean that the community has an active voice in the city’s planning projects. Connections that exist via overpasses and underpasses along the interchange are not inviting to pedestrians. A sidewalk does not make a walkway. +++ In the last few months, and since the open letter was sent to the gubernatorial candidates, transportation advocates have secured small wins. The Driver’s Licenses for All bill was passed to support licenses for undocumented individuals, and RIDOT is starting to apply for funds to electrify the commuter rail.

But “I don’t think of either of those things as ones that signal a transformation of priorities,” Mann said. “RIDOT, right now, is still functionally for building car infrastructure, when what it needs to do is restructure its vision as a department of transportation.”

Beyond the Route 6/10 Interchange Project, there are other plans waiting in the wings. While RIDOT has a transit master plan that includes bike and pedestrian spaces, the department is loath to allocate funds to these projects.

“There is this idea that these kinds of largescale motor vehicle projects create jobs, but we bring up as a counter, that actually the massive scale of the construction diverts a great amount of their funding toward materials and away from labor,” Mann explained to the Indy. “Concrete and steel in such mass amounts are expensive.

A lot of green projects, such as those created for buses and pedestrians, are able to put a much higher percentage of the money into the labor for building them.” Projects like the neighborhood boulevard that might have replaced the Route 6/10 Interchange would still provide jobs.

The Route 6/10 Interchange project will be completed later this year, and it will likely become a permanent fixture in the city for decades to come. It should be—it has come at the cost of $410 million and five years of planning and building. But this should also be a moment to pause and consider how RIDOT uses calls of immediacy and urgency to justify reproducing its car-centric agenda.

MADELEINE YOUNG R’23 is beyond logic.

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VOLUME 46 ISSUE 06

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bulel Upcoming Actions & Community Events Sign Brown Students for Justice in Palestine’s Petition Brown Students for Justice in Palestine created a petition addressed to President Christina Paxson and the Brown Corporation to demand the university withdraw investments in companies profiting from Israeli apartheid and human rights abuses against Palestinians. Sign their petition at tinyurl.com/DivestDemocratize.

Saturday 3/24 @6PM: Women’s History Month Liberation Flick and Discussion Join the Party for Socialism and Liberation Rhode Island in celebrating Women’s History Month with a screening of the film Fannie Lou Hamer’s America. Hamer was a Mississippi sharecropper who organized thousands of people to fight for voting rights in one of the largest mobilizations of disenfranchised Black people in the country’s history. Registration for this event is not required, attendants are asked to wear masks indoors, and food will be provided.

Location: DARE, 340 Lockwood St., Providence, RI 02907 Saturday 4/1 @9AM-5:30PM: Reimagining Schools Conference The Education Justice Coalition of Vermont is hosting a Reimagining Schools, Connecting Communities Conference that will bring together educational justice leaders and community members to reimagine schools as places of belonging. Musical artist Rebel Diaz and the student organization Providence Student Union are featured guests.

Currently, in-person registration is closed, but there is an option to join a waitlist or to attend virtually. You can register to virtually attend any number of workshops during the event here: https://tinyurl.com/ Reimagining-Schools-Conference.

Location: Virtual

Arts Tuesday 3/28 @6:30-9PM: Principled Unity Tour: Discussion with Revolutionary Authors Join a discussion about community organizing and coalition building hosted at Red Ink Library. Featured speakers will be Hy Thurman, an author and former member of the famous Rainbow Coalition, and Kwame Shakur, a formerly incarcerated author and self-described revolutionary.

Location: Red Ink Community Library, 130 Cypress Street, Providence, RI 02906 Wednesday 3/29 @6-7:30PM: Make Your Own Book Workshop This workshop led by Rhode Island-based photographer Drew Leventhal will walk attendees through the steps of creating a simple book with paper, needle and thread, along with a presentation about the printing process. Supplies are provided. Register for the event for free: https:// tinyurl.com/Make-Your-Own-Book-Workshop.

Location: Community Libraries of Providence: Rochambeau Library, 708 Hope Street Providence, RI 02906 Saturday 4/1 @10AM-1PM: Silkscreening with The Womxn Project and RISD Join the RISD Club of Rhode Island and The Womxn Project Education Fund for RISD’s Founders Day. The Womxn Project Education Fund works with artists and designers to create art interventions that promote social justice and equity. At this event, attendees will be silkscreening and creating posters and banners. If you would like to propose artwork to be screen printed at the event, email Club Chair Carl Henschel (carlhenschel@yahoo.com).

Location: RISD Frazier Terrace, 223 Benefit Street, Providence, RI 02903

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

TEXT MARK BUCKLEY & KAYLA MORRISON

ILLUSTRATION LARA KARADOGAN

BULLETIN

tin

Mutual Aid* & Community Fundraisers

19

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

*Mutual aid is “survival pending revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to a system of institutions that have failed or harmed our communities. + Help a Recently Detained Father Donate at https://givebutter.com/amor4wilan Father and husband Wilian Pineda is a Central Falls community member who was recently detained by ICE. The Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance (AMOR) is fundraising for Pineda, who has a debt from a bond of $5,000.

Support Pineda as he fights his case to stay together with his family and his community.

+

Pioneer Tenant Support Fund Donate here: tinyurl.com/pioneer-support-fund.

Tenants of Pioneer Investments properties have spoken out against unsanitary and unsafe conditions in their buildings. In response, Pioneer Investments owner Anurag Sureka issued retaliatory evictions and terminations of tenancy to five tenant households. Pioneer Tenant Union is trying to raise $50,000 in the coming weeks in order to cover first and last month’s rent and security deposits for the evicted tenants, and to prepare for further evictions.

+

Support a Formerly Incarcerated Owned Business Donate here: https://down-the-road-movers.snwbll.com/ support-down-the-road Down the Road Movers is a Black-owned cooperative staffed by formerly incarcerated people who are currently working 100+ hours/week to stay afloat as costs rise. They are raising money to hire new employees and buy their own truck.

BULLETIN SPOTLIGHT: Black PAEC and Affordable Housing Advocacy Last Thursday, a hearing chamber in the Rhode Island State House was packed to capacity with attendees. The Municipal Government and Housing Committee was scheduled to hear a collection of bills proposed to make housing more affordable in Rhode Island and create new housing. H6087, one of the bills included in this package, seeks to eliminate application fees for prospective renters. H6090 will amend zoning laws to make it easier to convert commercially-zoned land into housing.

Among the attendees were members of the Black PAEC (pronounced “pack”), an organization hoping to “promote autonomy, representation, and education for Black people throughout Rhode Island.” Advocating for affordable housing is part of that vision, according to David Pierre, the Black PAEC’s outreach coordinator.

By submitting testimony online or coming in-person to testify, activists sent a message to this committee that the housing crisis in Rhode Island is not going unnoticed.

According to statistics compiled by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), there are 49,032 extremely low-income households in Rhode Island, but only 24,516 affordable and available rental units. The lack of affordable units puts thousands of families at risk of homelessness, argues the NLIHC. Pierre said he was present to advocate for a bill which would expedite the process of building low-income housing. “We are endorsing this bill because it is one step towards establishing housing in Rhode Island for those who need it most,” stated Pierre.

Most of the bills presented at the hearing were designated by the committee for “further consideration,” meaning they enter a sort of political limbo and must wait to be scheduled for another committee hearing.

Pierre notes that the Black PAEC’s activist efforts go beyond these bills. Besides the group’s lobbying efforts, the Black PAEC hosts food drives, community clean ups, and education events. “[The Black PAEC’s] goal is to give the people the resources, power and education needed to protect their interests in the community and take control of their political destinies,” Pierre said.

To contact the Black PAEC, reach out to riblackpoliticalactioned@gmail.com.

For event updates, follow the Black PAEC on Instagram: @blackpaec.

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