Volume 76 - Issue 4

The Yale Herald

Cover Letter on Institutional Neutrality Page 14 - Joshua Ching profiles Henry Roe Cloud Fellow Māhealani Ahia Page 26 - Robert Gao interviews directors Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel

Yale's Most Daring Volume LXXVI Issue 4 October 9, 2024

AGAINST INSTITUTIONAL NEUTRALITY Institutional neutrality is a destructive myth. It presumes that institutional speech can be separated from action, in the name of an illusory moral objectivity. Institutional neutrality takes the word as the end in itself. Instead, it is a convenient resignation from the social and financial stake that Yale University holds—in the very issues that it would be barred from making statements on.

Yale University has a $40.7 billion endowment— the world’s second-largest university endowment— which the institution has been criticized for because it refused to disclose and divest its shares from the ongoing genocide in Gaza. One year later, we still call on Yale to disclose and divest. For a university beholden to its corporate interests, neutrality can never be neutral—especially as it fails to be accompanied by any further action. Instead, neutrality simulates responsibility while simultaneously abdicating any duty that the university has to the community of which it is a part.

On September 10, President Maurie McInnis announced that Yale would begin to have conversations surrounding the topic of institutional neutrality.

She convened a committee of seven staff members, chaired by Michael Della Rocca, Sterling Professor of Philosophy, and Cristina Rodríguez, Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law. Throughout September, the so-called Committee on Institutional Voice hosted a series of listening sessions, three of which were open to students at Yale College and Yale’s graduate schools. In addition, they created an online web forum for public opinions, that remained open until the conclusion of the last listening session.

During student listening sessions, the committee has expressed its plans to present its policy recommendations sometime between October and November.

By the end of the semester, President McKinnis will decide on whether or not Yale will follow suit with recent decisions by the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University, and adopt a policy of institutional neutrality.

The formation of the committee misguidedly presumes that institutional neutrality has not yet been an agenda of the university. The Yale Police Department’s clearing of the Beinecke Plaza encampment and subsequent arrests of 47 Pro-Palestine student protestors last semester were the culmination of Yale’s repression of student speech. In mid-August, the Yale Office of the Secretary cracked down on University regulations of free expression, now banning posters and signs, in addition to walls, barriers, tents, sculptures, and art, unless special permission from the university is granted. And now, as trials for student protestors continue, the message remains clear: the university draws the line far before peaceful humanitarian activism. What do the ethical principles behind institutional voice mean, when

neither divestment nor student free speech have been achieved?

The Committee on Institutional Voice, alone, has its obvious limitations. It is composed of seven faculty members; neither undergraduate nor graduate students are represented. The scope of the Committee's decision has yet to be fully or clearly outlined, leaving grave ambiguities as to how far a policy of neutrality would extend. Would the university be barred from commenting on local issues, as well as national and international ones? If institutional neutrality is enforced, which campus leaders are precluded from speaking on current issues? What precedent could a decision in favor of neutrality set—for Yale’s faculty, staff, and students’s abilities to freely express thought?

The Yale Herald is committed to representing the voices of the undergraduate community that our publication serves—those voices that will be directly impacted by the Committee’s decision. For the rest of the semester, the Herald invites student organizations, cultural centers, and Yale community members to author and publish op-eds concerning the Committee for Institutional Voice and institutional neutrality. We hope our publication can be a platform for those who seek accountability for the university to uphold itself above neutrality.

Connor Arakaki and Madelyn Dawson

Photograph by Tashroom Ahsan, DC ’26

The Yale Herald

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS What is the scale of a story?

Is a story measured by its characters, the places they travel? Or is a story measured by its age, the mouths that have spoken it, the ears that have carefully listened?

Is it defined by the tender minds that commit it to memory—or the rigorous ones that strive to transform it?

The stories and narratives of this university are never neutral. Volume 76 Issue 4 of the Yale Herald opens with a cover letter against institutional neutrality, in which we articulate our view on President McKinnis’ Committee on Institutional Voice and invite student organizations and community members of campus to write op-eds concerning neutrality.

Inside this issue, writers of the Yale Herald explore the boundless nature of storytelling. Robert Gao

’27 sits down with directors Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel to discuss the blurred lines between reality and film; Hudson Warm ’27 reviews Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s debut novel, Catalina, and interrogates the anatomies of fiction, nonfiction, and autofiction. Cameron Jones ’26 limns the character of a quirky entomologist by describing her room. Richie George ’27 critiques recent Yale guest speaker Ben Shapiro and the implosive and algorithmic speech of the far right. Finally, in this week’s cover story, Joshua Ching ’26 talks to Māhealani Ahia, Yale’s 20242025 Henry Roe Cloud Fellow, and guides readers through the stories she has carried, from her native Hawai‘i to New Haven.

On behalf of our publication, we extend our gratitude to Māhealani Ahia for allowing us to hold her stories, both in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i—the Native Hawaiian language—and in English. We also thank Howard R.

Lamar Professor of History Ned Blackhawk and Assistant Professor of Native and Indigenous Studies Hi‘ilei Hobart for their time and dedication in the reportage of this week’s cover feature.

As Joshua notes, for Māhealani Ahia, stories are measured by their power to heal. In this way, we hope that the stories in this week’s issue can be the connective tissue between our publication’s community, and you, our reader.

Yours most daringly, Connor Arakaki and Madelyn Dawson

❧

YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST DARING! YALE'S MOST

THE MASTHEAD Editors-In-Chief Connor Arakaki/ Madelyn Dawson

Culture Editors Sophie Lamb / Alex Sobrino / Will Sussbauer

Malina Reber / Alina Susani / Claire SooHoo / Sarah Sun / Nicole Tian

Managing Editors Emily Aikens / Eva Kottou/ Jack Reed

Opinion Editors Richie George/ Oscar Heller

Photography Editors Tashroom Ahsan / Natalie Leung

Creative Directors Alexa Druyanoff / Alex Nelson

Arts Editors Diego Del Aguila / Ashley Wang / Everett Yum

Reviews Editors Sara Cao / Theo Kubovy-Weiss / Thea Robertson

Publisher Bella Panico

Copy Editors Lu Arie / Elizabeth Chivers / Diana Contreras Niño / Cameron Jones / Irene Kim / Alina Susani/ Alina Vaidya Mahadevan / Liz Shvarts / Reese Weiden

Reflections Editors Amanda Cao / Jack Rodriquez-Vars

Social Media Manager Jess Liu

Staff Writers Robert Gao / Cameron Jones / Anna Kaloustian / Natalie Semmel

Features Editors Amber Nobriga / Calista Oetama / Jisu Oh

Business Avery Lenihan

This Week's Cover Alexa Druyanoff

Voices Editors Gavin Guerrette/Lana Perice

Design Editors Michelle J Lee / Natalie Leung / Matthew Messaye /

October 9th, 2024

IN THIS ISSUE: COVER LETTER

24

Against Institutional Neutrality

by Connor Arakaki and Madelyn Dawson 4

How To Free Speech

by Richie George On imagining what a better life could be.

REVIEWS

Hudson Warm on Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s Catalina

26

Diego Suchenski Loustaunau and Gabriella Cohen on SWEAT Tour

REFLECTIONS Trees 25

by Abby Davis Reopening a childhood treasure chest of foliage.

Let Me Tell You What I Think

by Jack Rodriquez-Vars Slouching Towards Northern New Jersey.

ARTS

The Minor Films of Their Lives: A Conversation with Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel

by Robert Gao The camera’s give and take.

Calista Oetama on “Direction” by Interpol

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OPINION

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INSERTS Michelob Ultra Review: Your Least Interesting Friend’s Favorite Beer

by Theo Kubovy-Weiss, Aengus Cox, and Gavin Guerette Calendar

by Herald Staff

A Sincere Shabbos

by Chloe Solomon Shiffman It's a sin to light a Shabbos candle and kill the flame.

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CULTURE Grove Street, Between Sitar and a Smoke Shop

by Cameron Jones In this installment of Inside Voice, we buzz through an entomologist’s bedroom.

Derange the Language

by Elena Unger Tear, strike, / italicize an entire stanza.

—— i elv —— P n ——— — America

Cat Burger

by Kira Tang A seven-step journey of finding a lost relic of sisterhood.

—— a — Gr —— ——————— 2024

Leaflings, Sprouting Stacked From My Stems

by Will Sussbauer The grass shimmers to its pitch.

c

VOICES 20

Fl — o o —— r As sociation ———

Shapeshifting Currents: Stories from Hawai‘i with Māhealani Ahia

by Joshua Ching How a Native Hawaiian tale has shaped this year’s Henry Roe Cloud Fellow.

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COVER STORY

FEATURES

VOTED YALE'S MOST READABLE MAGAZINE

nd — Priz —— e Wi — — nner ————

The Sparkling Singularity of Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s Catalina

Hudson Warm, MC ’27

IS IT EVEN GOOD? SEND PITCHES TO SARA.CAO, THEO.KUBOVY-WEISS & DOROTHEA.ROBERTSON

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K

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arla Cornejo Villavicencio’s debut novel, Catalina, is a hagiographic narrative beginning in 2010, is so realistic and meandering that it could almost be unreadable.

But a miraculous lifeblood animates the book, like Victor Frankenstein’s mysterious spark—perhaps, here, a voice of passion and intelligence.

The novel’s retrospective narrator, Catalina Ituralde, is a college student and undocumented immigrant from Ecuador who has grown up under the care of her grandparents in Queens, NY, following her parents’ young deaths. She is ambivalent about God, contemptuous of nature, and admittedly desirous of an “artificial and white” Christmas tree. A senior at Harvard, she trudges through her literature thesis, thorny relationships, and her grandfather’s impending deportation, caught in a chasm between the prestigious higher education milieu and her problem-beset family.

I hesitate to follow in the tired tra-

Designs by Madelyn Dawson, SM ’25 dition of pasting the title of autofiction onto women’s work. There are, however, inextricable resemblances between Cornejo Villavicencio’s life and Catalina’s: the author is also an Ecuadorian immigrant writer who was raised in Queens, NY, and she also graduated from Harvard.

The ubiquity of Catalina’s name in the text emblemizes her singularity; it beats throughout the novel as a melody, a promise, an incantation.

She exists at the center of her own universe, at one point narrating, “I listened to more songs I imagined might remind Nathaniel of me.” Much of her relationship with Nathaniel takes place at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, where Catalina works: a quirky offshoot of the prestigious institution that “felt like someone’s Connecticut mansion that happened to have on display a bear claw necklace acquired by Lewis and Clark.”

In Catalina, the exterior plot is meager; voice and emotion propel

the novel. As the reader becomes entangled within Catalina’s dangerous brain, Catalina’s depression becomes more penetrating, her indifferences more painful. Still, Cornejo Villavicencio does not offer us a satisfying resolution. Catalina submits her thesis, but she does not win the prize that she impassively expected; she ends her romantic relationship; and she secures a job at a tutoring company, as her ambitions to be a “capital-A artist” buckle beneath her depression.

Catalina is witty, though this wit sometimes comes at the expense of believability. When Nathaniel asks, “Why are you here?” at an awards ceremony, she quips back with, “Why are any of us here?” These pithy contrivances are the largest drawbacks of the novel.

But quite successfully, Catalina is a novel of history lessons, whose namesake is our interlocutor between past and present, both as a Peabody employee and as a storytell-

REVIEWS

October 9th, 2024

er. Late in the novel, Catalina is transferred to Peabody’s Vault to “forestall the inevitable transformation of ancient artifacts into dust.” Writing, like the work of a museum, has a way of immortalizing, or bestowing permanence upon, the ephemeral: Cornejo Villavicencio writes of scary histories—women stuffing themselves with potatoes to prevent rape, girls forced to traffic drugs and defecate small pellets of cocaine. Nothing is shrouded; everything is on the table.

Cornejo Villavicencio, whose nonfiction The Undocumented Americans was a National Book Award finalist, brings this research expertise to her debut fiction, weaving it through these historical asides in educative but adroit executions.

Her novel is also one of interiority and descent. The eponymous protagonist drinks vodka in the morning, vomits, and has sex with strangers.

She neglects herself and her loved ones. She shirks her responsibilities.

Cornejo Villavicencio illustrates these patterns of neglect to be generational: inherited from her grandparents, who avoid opening important mail—bills, court notices—to Catalina, who is undoubtedly brilliant yet self-destructive. She leaves her inbox flooded and jumps out of a moving car amidst a fight with her love interest.

Catalina is a meta-textual and tactile ode. It is a book about family loyalty and not cleaning up messes. Our titular character says, with her entry into Nathaniel’s social scene, that newly accumulating party invitations make her feel like “a fugitive, a wanted woman.”

There’s the illicit meaning to the adjective “wanted”—a criminal fleeing, evading search. But wanted might also simply mean desired. The phrase becomes a metonym of a central theme in Catalina: to be chased, to be craved, and the tension that exists between the two. If she hopes to be coveted and then runs when she is, how do we reconcile the warring impulses, and where should we chisel the demarcations? ❧

“Direction”: Interpol’s Closed Chamber Calista Oetama, DC ’27 , Herald staff

D

etachment and immediacy collide on Antics, Interpol’s seminal sophomore album. Dark, robust production—full-bodied bass snarling beneath each chorus on “Slow Hands,” guitar wailing siren-like through “Length of Love”—offsets the theme of distance central to the record’s lyrics. To celebrate the album’s twentieth anniversary, the band has recently released an expanded version of the record. The reissue includes a full live recording of the band’s 2005 performance in Mexico City and introduces one-off single “Direction” to streaming platforms for the first time.

Originally featured on the soundtrack for Alan Ball’s HBO drama Six Feet Under in 2005, “Direction” sees Interpol exercising restraint. A focus on mood shrinks the usual broad swaths of the band’s postpunk landscape. The guitar that once seared through the record vaporizes under reverb, drifting through the song like fog. Gone are the clear, long notes that soar from Paul Banks’ diaphragm to the front of the mix: here, his vocals are hushed, buried. Repetitive lyrics—which consist of only the word “direction” sung nineteen times—and unvaried instrumentation threaten to flatten the track into monotony. Evoking but never interrogating melancholy, the inertia of “Direction” seals the song shut.

Only the pulse of the bass drum grounds the track with a sense of ur-

gency, building momentum as Carlos Dengler’s bassline thickens and braids itself around emerging snare hits. For a moment, the track teeters on the edge of a climax, like a tidal wave about to break. But even this is impermanent. Each instrumental layer falls away just as it begins to settle; the track undoes itself.

As the last note recedes, wisps of something trail in its wake. A sense of catharsis—or a sense of loss? I used to think the track cleanses, but now I wonder if it empties instead. This distinction collapses within the closed chamber of “Direction,” leaving you weightless, suspended, right where you started. ❧

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REVIEWS

The Yale Herald

The Contradictory and Undeniable Pulse of SWEAT Tour Diego Suchenski Loustaunau, JE ’27, and Gabriella Cohen, SM ’27

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t first, you see the girl sitting a few rows up on the Metro-North wearing a T-shirt that reads “Charli likes boys but she knows I’d hit it.” Then, a plastic miniskirt reflecting the fluorescent lighting on the subway, and a crowd of tiny tops and even tinier sunglasses outside Penn Station. Before you know it you’re among a sea of bright green and references to drugs and angels.

Brat summer is on its way to the grave, but something is undeniably pulsing, breathing, and alive inside a sold-out Madison Square Garden.

Welcome to the SWEAT Tour.

A collaborative concert headlined

by Charli XCX and Troye Sivan, the SWEAT Tour builds on a pop culture tilt towards electronic club music a decade in the making. Charli’s latest album, brat, found itself in uncharted territory within her decade-anda-half-long career. It was met with smashing critical acclaim, spawned a viral TikTok dance trend, and confused the majority of the American electorate as political candidates co-opted the album’s green-tinged image. On the 2023 Something To Give Each Other, Sivan shirks the softboy yearning of his earlier projects with unabashedly erotic music videos and sensual lyricism. SWEAT gifts 2024 with the energy and sexual intensity of an early 2000’s club bathroom.

For a tour marked by images of intimate, druggy basements and sexed-up singles, the process of walking through security and finding our seats felt almost vanilla. The guards seemed much more concerned with directing us toward the stairwell and reciting a script about lithium-ion batteries than with complimenting our carefully curated ensembles. You want to scan me for metal, but not guess the color of my underwear?

Even the arena itself felt sterile.

Opener Shygirl whipped around platinum blonde hair while backup dancers twerked in rhythm with her song “FREAK” for a still-fillingin arena. Troye Sivan opened the headlining set with a tightly choreographed dance number to “Got Me Started.” The show was musically and aesthetically flawless—where was the sleaze, the messiness, the I-just-did-aline mindset that brat summer promised?

Sivan left the stage in a cloud of fog.. A hyperpop beat started playing while a 50-foot tall “brat” curtain dropped over the front of the stage.

Flashing strobe lights intensified with the screaming of the crowd. And then, for a moment, it all went quiet.

The lights turned off. The curtain fell.

Standing alone, in front of a crowd of 20,000 was Charli XCX. The crowd instantly cheered as she began playing the “365” remix with Shygirl, calling back to her February Boiler Room set which christened the brat era.

As impressive as the stage and lighting design of the show is, there is no confusing MSG with the kinds of clubs Charli has been playing since she was 14. Is it sacrilegious to listen to club classics on a second-balcony arena seat with a Yale-branded tote bag propped in front of us? With blasting AC preventing a single drop of perspiration from emerging from our bodies during the entire 120-minute set? Is the SWEAT tour an inherently impossible concept?

Charli and Troye swung between moments of high-autotune solos and unabashedly homoerotic dance ensembles, each transition marked by a playful “Give it up for Troye Sivan!” or “What the fuck is up Charli?” As Troye sang into a microphone posi tioned allusively between his backup dancer’s legs during “Got Me Start-

October 9th, 2024

ed,” or Charli licked the glass catwalk stage during “Guess,” it felt like the exceptionally hedonistic brat summer had morphed into a nudist retreat. Bodies and innuendo were on full display, but all so expected—so sexy, in such a sexless setting.

As soon as “Spring Breakers” mellows into a serene ballad, an angelic Addison Rae emerges from a snowwhite balcony, and the beginning notes of “Diet Pepsi” reverberate throughout Manhattan to screaming applause. She moves onto the main stage to perform the “Von dutch” remix she features on, running around barefoot, being lifted by a swarthy backup dancer, and screaming on the floor.

Just a few minutes later, Charli is joined on stage by Lorde to perform “Girl, so confusing”. Charli wears white and Lorde is all clad in black while they strut across the stage— fully embracing the doppelganger comparisons with their long black hair styled in the same textured, loose curl. Addison and Lorde’s surprise appearances are deeply rewarding for fans who have followed Charli’s mentorship of Addison’s turn from TikTok star to popstar, or the beef between Charli and Lorde, spotlighted and squashed on a single track. In a sense, these surprise appearances are not surprising at all. After months of obsession over not only her music, but also her persona, it is hard for Charli XCX to truly surprise us. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be enraptured by her digital world brought to life, that we can’t keep bumping that 365.

SWEAT is where the chronically online meets the deeply communal. It’s where the intimate and incessantly horny meets the industrial and sterile. In a world that treats 4x6 screens as sacred, Charli and Troye extend an invitation to stop scrolling and start participating—to feel something visceral, even when the arena feels more like a mall than a warehouse rave. ❧

REVIEWS

Designs by Madelyn Dawson, SM ’25

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A Sincere Shabbos Chloe Solomon Shiffman, SM ’26

PERSONAL ESSAYS OF ALL STRIPES. SEND PITCHES AND SUBMISSIONS TO JACK.RODRIQUEZ-VARS & AMANDA.CAO

REFLECTIONS

The Yale Herald

Design by Alex Nelson, SM ’25

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o here we are, in my fourthfloor walkup, lighting society candlesticks on my faux-wood, Yale-supplied desk. The candles have been lit and blown out so many times that their glass trees are moldy with wax. It's a sin to light a shabbos candle and kill the flame. Tragic as it is, the smoke detectors in my dorm room offer no mercy to millennia of Jewish Tradition.

Our challah is a cold Taco Bell burrito that my roommate and her boyfriend DoorDashed while high. Our wine is a Yale-branded bottled water. It is cool to the touch; my roommate keeps a reserve of them in our mini-fridge for occa-

sions less special than these. Five new friends crowd the ridiculous desk altar, trading names and residential colleges. I google ‘shabbat prayers jewish’ on my MacBook. I know the songs by heart, but I’m still terrified of fucking up.

I bless the candles in a velveteen voice left over from junior cantorship. Baruch Atah Adonai, I chant.

Elohanu Melech Ha’olam. The tune turns the air in the room to molasses, thick and slow. I mellow. In singing the time-softened Hebrew, I feel like I’m borrowing an ancient scroll from the library of Babel. It’s not difficult to imagine the name-date-places on the prayers’ impossible loan cards. Bathsheba,

wife of Uriah the Hittite, 789 B.C., Jerusalem. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, 1703 A.D., Jewish Quarter of Prague. Stephen and Melissa Shiffman, 2004 A.D., Eastern scoop of Manhattan Island. The couple loop their signatures into the parchment, archiving their legacy in sticky blue Bic. Mr. Shiffman lifts their pinked baby to the candleglow. His wife unrolls the prayer book. They sing.

I move onto the Kiddush, the blessing over wine. I’m ashamed that I take my janky ritual so seriously. These Shabbos prayers are antique, splendid. As the sabbath moon rises, voices around the globe are singing these same

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October 9th, 2024

prayers over rich, maple dining tables, over doilies and infused honeys and sterling silver platters.

I offer Adonai ritual in the clothes of jest: crinkling plastic for a Kiddush goblet, muddy beans, and tortilla for bread. I cannot pretend this is dignified. But I cannot deny the sincerity of using what I have.

Hundreds of years ago, in Poland or Germany or Russia, a famous Rabbi sang with his congregation. In the back of the synagogue, a boy—I always imagined him around ten—chanted the first four letters of the Hebrew alphabet: Alef, Bet, Vet, Gimmel.

Alef, Bet, Vet, Gimmel. The congregants complained to the Rabbi: the boy was a distraction, and he needed to be taught a lesson.

When the last Deborah Goldblum and Milton Solomon hobbled out of the temple, the Rabbi walked to

the back pew and slid in beside the child.

“So here we are,” sighed the Rabbi. “Tell me: why were you chanting the alphabet?”

“I don’t know how the prayers go,” replied the Boy. “I don’t know the Hebrew language. I don't know how to read from the siddur. All I know in Hebrew are the first four letters of the Alef Bet. So that is what I sang.” This is the story I remember best from religious school, from childrens’ Rosh Hashanah services, from PJ library books. Believing one isn’t “Jewish enough” is so quintessentially Jewish that it might as well have been amended into the commandments on the hike down Sinai. I have these conversations with friends from all Jewish sects: Hasidim, Reform Jews, even culturally Jewish Atheists. Is it un-Jewish to let men

MY AD? HERE?

MY AD? HERE?

and women mingle during services? Is it un-Jewish to eat a Clif bar on Yom Kippur? What we miss is that asking these questions at all means we care. To care about our Judaism is to be Jewish enough.

Whether my shabbat blessings are over homemade challah or little Debbie’s easter carrot cake, my respect and intentions make the ceremony Jewish. The best way to win is to try. ❧

MY AD? HERE?

connor.arakaki @yale.edu madelyn.dawson@yale.edu

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REFLECTIONS

The Yale Herald

” Born on the wrong It’s been over a year since I wrote Let Me Tell You “California. coast, I could not be “California,” that. I’m not sure which of my maybe, with enough travel- emotions spurred it forward. It What I Think but ing and posturing and quoting, I could have been envy for a cosmo-

Jack Rodriquez-Vars, TD ’26, Herald Staff

M

y first memory of Didion is when she died. I was seventeen and working in a local Jersey bookshop whose owners mourned her death like Britain did Diana’s.

But it wasn’t until college—surrounded by Manhattanites and Chicagoans and teens who split time between Singapore and Milan—that I finally read her work.

It was in an English class. I’d enrolled because I liked to read. I did not realize that in college, English class is for students who like to quote (“Oh, but my favorite Derrida…”). Didion’s name was invoked the most, often alongside “cool” or

could be cool.

My big break came in the spring when my friend invited me to a party in France. Desperate to escape London’s smog, her childhood mate had rented a chateau. I imagined myself in a linen suit I did not own. I could taste the sweet prosecco bouncing on my tongue as I chatted with Eton boys. We’d discuss our favorite Austen novels. They’d call me smart. With each fantasy, France became cooler. It seemed something Didion might do.

But cool came at too high a cost.I spent my vacation days closer to Princeton than Paris, wearing athleisure and sleeping until noon.

While Didion had a notebook, I have a Notes app. When a thought takes shape in my mind, whether it be saccharine or pithy, I pull out my phone and, using both thumbs, digitize it before it disappears.

Over spring break, I punched out a single thought: Slouching Towards Northern New Jersey.

politan childhood or frustration with failed plans. It could be a tribute: to Didion or my hometown, I don’t know. I can’t tell you how it felt to me then, so I’ll tell you how it feels to me now. Reading that note is nauseating. Since that first English class, I have devoured Didion. I have stuffed myself with her words, regurgitating lines as a party trick. But now I’ve grown queasy. Was anyone ever so insufferable? I am here to tell you that someone was. I just can’t decide if it was her or me. ❧

Design by Madelyn Dawson, SM ’25

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REFLECTIONS

October 9th, 2024

Another Tree

Design by Natalie Leung, SY ’27

Abby Davis, MC ’25

W

hen I was young, I used to collect fragments of trees— crepe myrtle, pinecone, flake of birch—and stow them away in a cardboard box. One summer morning, I was sentenced to “room time.” It was a godawful punishment to be locked in that drowsy bedroom. I was itching to make a break for the bushes and not look back. Instead, I pulled the box from underneath my bunk bed.

My thumb brushed against a wilting poppy. I pressed the sungold petal to my cheek. The touch of its velvety skin against mine was effused with a creamy fragrance, with base notes of rotting needles and bark; this transported me to a past afternoon, when I sat back to back against a ponderosa pine.

I listened to the swish of foliage above me—spruce against swaying dogwood. A sycamore seed caught my eye as it twirled in pirouettes towards the mossy floor. I snatched it from its path and tucked it into

my pocket. I’ll add this to my collection later. Then something pierced my toe: a sweetgum’s prickly orb, left conspicuously in the center of my path.

I followed these tokens of trees until I saw it—a blink of amber in the mosaic of green. I climbed through webs and briars until it loomed above, bathing me in champagne light. Yes, a beech. I pulled out my knife and etched my name into its milky flesh. It was our little secret, this meeting in the woods. I didn’t want either of us to forget. *** Every August, we set aside a day to plant trees. I raced my cousins to the barn, and scrambled for my favorite shovel or hoe. We spent hours bent over the searing earth: scoop and toss, scoop and toss.

I could feel the throb of blisters through my gloves. A few hours in and my bare feet were stained the

red of Carolina clay. I envied my boy cousins, who could peel the T-shirts from their dripping backs and toss them aside. After the seedlings were dropped into place, we stomped the extra clay around them. Then we wait.

There is one tree I always return to. After Frosty died in a thunderstorm, I watched Dad haul her limp body into the back of the truck. We drove in silence to the edge of the pasture, where she used to graze on wild oat grass.

He gently laid her into the earth and piled on fresh soil. I watched, motionless. He disappeared for a moment, returning with a tiny oak sapling. I placed it gently into the hollow Dad had left in the mound, and pressed soft loam around it.

When we drive past it, my dad and I silently acknowledge that moment. My siblings take no notice.

To them, it is just another tree. ❧

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Grove Street, Between Sitar and a Smoke Shop Cameron Jones, BF ’26, Herald staff

FINGER ON THE PULSE. SEND PITCHES TO ALEX.SOBRINO, WILL.SUSSBAUER & SOPHIE.LAMB

CULTURE

The Yale Herald

Design by Alexa Druyanoff, SY ’26 Inside Voice is a new column by Cameron Jones, highlighting the eccentric decor choices of Yalies and the even more eccentric personalities behind them.

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team rises from a kettle on the stove. I sit in the corner, at a hand-me-down wooden table with a rosy glass of cherry liqueur. Maya Sestan, JE ’26, buzzes around the room, apt for an entomologist. She radiates the same giddy energy as when I first met her (she approached me, grinning with a big white box in hand, and asked, “Wanna see my bugs?”) Every insect has a story.

And everything in the apartment has a story: the blanket draped on the couch is from an old German lady, the Studio Ghibli posters

were stolen from her siblings, the ceramic lamps and bowls were found in her mother’s hometown in Croatia. The bouquet was a gift from her mom.

Maya cares for her items with the minute attention a worker bee pays his hive. Her plants flourish from frequent care. She’s painted every ready-made piece of Ikea furniture with marching beetles and weaving butterflies.

Even a humble tissue box is plastered with paper mache scenes from Castle in the Sky. “That’s my first memory,” Maya tells me, “watching that movie with my brother.”

Her bedroom marks the rhythms of her frantic present. A towering white bookshelf groans under the weight of entomolo-

gy textbooks. At its side, a net and a blue bug-catching hat; at its base, a thicket of yarn and thread Maya pulls from to make her cross-stitch creations. “Come here,” Maya says from the door, “Look at this mirror. See, you have to bend over!” Next to the door frame, she’s hung a small mirror at exactly five feet and four inches off the ground. It’s the last look she gets at herself before rushing out the door and into her day.

Like a dried riverbed speckled with fossils in amber, Maya’s bedroom enshrines her family’s past. An icon of St. Anna, who shares her name with Maya’s “baka,” or grandmother, guards one corner of the room. Letters and drawings from old friends

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CULTURE

paper the wall. Perfume from her mother and wine bottles from her father collect on the vanity. Old pictures cloud the edges of a standing mirror. A Parisian lady depicted in a grand Impressionist poster, a gift from Maya’s sister, stares through the veil of time into her new Edenic home.

I think she likes the origami butterflies that flutter up the wall and the cross stitch cats that linger above the door frame.

As the tour winds down, Maya alights on overlooked items, nonetheless essential to her. She presents a white rock she collected with her dad on a walk along the beach. Sharpied on is the enigmatic inscription, “boner :).” She points to a nametag where, for the first time in the US, her last name was written in the proper Croatian way: Šestan. It would be easy to think Maya’s lovely decor is all a part of a brand. But, no, she bares all, down to dick jokes and diacritics. When I compliment her golden, crane-shaped knitting scissors, she says, “Want to see something cooler?” before rifling through the drawers of her stately dresser. She brandishes a gleaming combat knife with a rosewood handle. The long blade curves into a threatening tip. “It’s my favorite gift,” she says, “Very violent. Banned in the UK. It’s for self defense.” I keep my eyes off the blade and glance around the room. As I sit in her cozy knitting chair, the scent of grapefruit and sage incense drifting around me, it’s hard not to feel as if I were in some cozy naturalist’s lodge deep in the hills. I understand the knife: a home like this is worth defending. ❧

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COVER STORY

The Yale Herald

Shapeshifting Currents: Stories From Hawai ‘ i with Māhealani Ahia Joshua Ching, ES ’26

Translation Note: ‘Ōlelo Hawaiʻi—the Native Hawaiian language—is a multivalent language in which meaning cannot be captured wholly by a single definition in English. The Yale Herald has decided not to italicize words in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi and instead to italicize translations in English, following the translation policies of Kanaka Maoli scholar Noenoe Silva.

Silva writes in the introduction of her seminal text Aloha Betrayed that she does not italicize Hawaiian words in text “to resist making the native tongue appear foreign in writing produced in and about a native land and people.”

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The author has provided translations for the sake of clarity.

Interviews have been lightly edited for clarity.

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he goddess Hiʻiaka pauses.

Her eyes travel over her shoulder, squinting under furrowed brows at Lohiʻau and Wahineʻomaʻo. They are companions on her journey through Mānoa Valley on the island of O‘ahu. Thick underbrush and towering niu / coconut trees shield the rift in the mountain range ahead. Puddles from yesterday’s rain pool in the patches of dirt where green has yet to spring. But between the tangle of branches and leaves, the three travelers know powerful, shape-shifting moʻo / dragons lie in wait.

As the group trudges through the forest, Lohiʻau and Wahineʻomaʻo feel a tug at their ears. They pivot instinctively and swat behind their heads.

Their swings hit empty space.

Hiʻiaka pauses, uneasy.

“There is a moʻo with us,” she

whispers, her eyes darting along the tree line. A gust of wind billows behind them; the grip on Lohiʻau and Wahineʻomaʻo’s ears tightens. “Show yourself!”

Hiʻiaka demands. The forest falls silent, leaning in to hear her call. To watch her response.

A moʻo bursts through the treeline. Niu fronds hurl toward the traveling companions.

Kamōʻiliʻili, with olive scales and a spine blooming with orange pauldrons, charges at Hiʻiaka.

Bolts of lightning whip from the fluttering folds of Hi‘iaka’s pāʻū / outer skirt and crackle across the forest floor. Hiʻiaka braces for collision.

Silence cuts through the air as Māhea takes a breath between the beats of her moʻolelo / story. At home in New Haven, I lean forward in my seat, waiting

in suspense for the outcome of Hiʻiaka and Kamōʻiliʻili’s clash.

With a grin creeping across her face, Māhea continues.

“Hiʻiaka used her lightning to slash up the moʻo,” she says, “and Kamōʻiliʻili was spread in a thousand pieces; each of those little pieces became its moʻo. So now, instead of one, there’s thousands of moʻo running around.”

This story is one of many Māhea carries, but still a favorite she remembers fondly. The last time I remember being told a moʻolelo like this, I was a middle schooler at Kamehameha Schools, an all-Native Hawaiian educational institution, on the island of Oʻahu. From tales of Keanakamanō, the secret cave in Kalihi where the king of sharks, Kamohoaliʻi, rested, to the skirmishes between sisters Pelehonuamea and Nāmakaokahaʻi on the hills near Hāna,

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moʻolelo molded my conceptions of the world. Through Hiʻiaka and Kamōʻiliʻili, Māhea kindles memories of my childhood in our shared homeland, Hawai’i. Though we are virtually connected through Zoom in this storytelling session, her moʻolelo is a gift—one of many that she brings with her to Yale.

Māhealani Ahia (Kanaka Maoli), known to many as Māhea, left Hawaiʻi for New Haven in the waning heat of August. The first time I met her at Yale, I was huddled among a group of Pasifika students at the Native American Cultural Center’s (NACC) Welcome Back Mixer, in the Center’s parking lot on Crown Street. Māhea arrived with Hiʻilei Hobart (Kanaka Maoli), assistant professor of Native and Indigenous Studies in Yale’s Ethnicity, Race, and Migration program, and joined us with a familiar warmth, even though this was our first encounter. Our growing Pasifika circle asked her over slices of pizza about her jet lag, her preparation for New Haven winters, and her excitement for the year ahead. Conversations I’d lived through before—but ones that never get old.

Māhea’s arrival marks the beginning of a yearlong position she was selected to fill—the Henry Roe Cloud Dissertation Writing Fellowship, a program that funds one graduate student in the final year of their Ph.D to complete their dissertation in Native and Indigenous studies.

The fellowship operates out of the Yale Group for the Study of Native America, a consortium of faculty and graduate students dedicated to developing Native and Indigenous Studies at Yale.

The faculty coordinator of the

group, Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone), Howard R. Lamar Professor of History, describes the fellowship as a revolving door that stewards graduate students in the field of Native and Indigenous Studies through Yale, which, in turn, expands the field in the academy. “We’re helping, in a sense, build the field of Native and Indigenous Studies one graduate, one fellowship, one dissertation at a time,” Blackhawk remarks.

Founded in 2010, the fellowship honors the legacy of Henry Roe Cloud (Ho-Chunk), the first Native American graduate of Yale College. Roe Cloud was a fierce critic of federal American Indian assimilation policies after graduating in 1910, and a renowned advocate for increasing educational opportunities across Indian Country. Roe Cloud and his wife, Elizabeth Bender Cloud (Ojibwe), founded one of the first college preparatory schools for Native Americans in the country. Named the American Indian Institute, it marked a groundbreaking leap in the fight for Native education rights.

Following in Roe Cloud’s footsteps, over 14 scholars, primarily from public universities, have completed their dissertations and graduated from their respective Ph.D. programs in Native and Indigenous studies. This program, as Professor Blackhawk puts it, gifts time and resources to Ph.D. students, offering an opportunity to “finish their dissertations and get their career going.” Pursuing these degrees is a costly endeavor. In February 2024, the Education Data Initiative reported that the average cost of a Ph.D. was $81,900, not accounting for living, transportation, and other personal expenses. At the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa,

where Māhea attends, the estimated cost of attendance for Hawaiʻi residents pursuing their Ph.D. is $34,984 annually. Applying for grants and working as a teaching assistant are the primary mechanisms to offset costs—though, in combination with personal and familial obligations, these require siphoning significant time from completing the actual doctoral program.

Adam Ruben, in an article for Science, describes this cycle as the “never-ending Ph.D.”— which programs like the Henry Roe Cloud Fellowship, with the support of an Ivy League endowment, seek to alleviate.

The high price of entry into academia makes Indigenous scholars a rarity at any university across the country, let alone at Yale. With all three of Yale’s Indigenous tenured or tenure-track scholars in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences currently on leave, the addition of a new scholar to the university’s Native community is monumental.

This year, Māhea is not the only one. Dominic Leong (Kanaka Maoli) joins the Yale School of Architecture as a Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor, alongside Summer Sutton (Lumbee), who serves as a visiting fellow for the architectural firm, KPF. James Campbell (CHamoru) begins his time as an adjunct professor at Yale Law School, focusing his scholarship on Indigenous self-governance in U.S. constitutional thought; Noah Ramage (Cherokee) joins the History Department as a Cassius Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Associate.

This rapid expansion of Native and Indigenous faculty in visiting university positions mirrors the growth of Native and Indigenous Studies from just the contiguous U.S. to regions and Native communities across

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the globe. Professor Blackhawk points to the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) as evidence of this expansion. At the time of NAISA’s formal founding in 2009, the association held a global perspective on Native and Indigenous studies and continued to expand Indigenous scholarship beyond Native American and Native Alaskan tribal nations, to Indigenous scholarship and scholars in Canada, Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa, Australia, and the broader Pacific. Within Yale, the recent hiring of Professor Hobart in the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program and Pat Gonzales-Rogers (Sāmoan) in the Yale School of the Environment; the opening of the Pacific Wing at the Yale Peabody Museum; and the founding of the Indigenous Peoples of Oceania (IPO) at Yale student group represent a growing investment in the Pacific within the university’s broader Native community.

Māhea Ahia, the first Pasifika scholar ever chosen for the Henry Roe Cloud Fellowship, is a continuation of that trend. “This global vision of Indigenous Studies that includes what is not centered on the U.S. sphere of Indigeneity, but is, in fact, transnational and comparative, is a real clear sign of development,” Professor Blackhawk says. “This year’s selection really highlights the depth of that growth.”

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The inclusion of Pasifika scholars represents not only new regions of study in the broadening vision of Native and Indigenous Studies but also new epistemologies and pedagogies blooming from Moananuiākea / the Pacific Ocean. For Māhea, the ʻupena / web of knowledge she brings to the university space is

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grounded in her familial genealogy. Her moʻolelo begins in the realm of the gods.

Hawaiʻi was birthed from the powers of a cosmological pantheon. While Kānaka Maoli / Native Hawaiians memorialize the male deities of Kū, Lono, Kāne, and Kanaloa as the four tenants of Hawaiian society, female deities—like Papahānaumoku, Pele, and Kihawahine—were central in the creation of the Hawaiian world. Māhea tells me that, in her lineage, Kihawahine is “actually an ancestress,” a “family deity” that has protected her bloodline across time and space.

Born in Lāhainā on the island of Maui in the 16th century, Kihawahine was a descendant of a powerful family line, daughter of the aliʻi / nobility Piʻilani and Lāʻieloheloheikawai. “When she passed away,” Māhea recounts, “her bones were wrapped in yellow kapa / barkcloth, she was placed into Mokuhinia— the sacred pond [surrounding] Mokuʻula—and was deified.”

Kihawahine was reborn as a powerful moʻo, now a goddess that protects freshwater ponds and the royal residence, with the ability to also take the kino / physical forms of a spider, white dog, and a shapeshifting, seducing woman. Her primary residence is Mokuʻula—an island embedded in Lāhainā’s landscape, but in the 20th century, sugar companies drained the sacred pond to irrigate cane fields.

Māhea, like Kihawahine, traces her family roots to Maui, though she was born 2,500 miles from the island’s shores, on Tongva lands in present-day Los Angeles. Her family later moved to Acjachemen lands in present-day Dana Point, California. “I grew up doing music and clubs, and was lucky enough to dance,” she tells me. Despite liv-

ing in a thriving hub of Hawaiian cultural activity, diasporic longing pulled at Māhea’s heart.

It manifested in conversations with her father. “My dad was always like, ‘We’re going to move home this year. We’re going to move home’,” she recalls, “but there was always this sense of longing.” For Māhea, a looming homeland gazed from the shoal offshore, swept in ʻaumiki / outgoing currents that obscured the navigation back.

After receiving her B.A. in Theatre Arts from the University of California, Berkeley, she began a career that led her further from Hawaiʻi. “I performed theater in Los Angeles and San Francisco and New York,” she says, “I made a living as a freelance writer.” However, a sudden illness would end her journey in the theater and writing world.

Forced to leave her performance career behind, she turned back to academia.

While pursuing her M.A. in Mythological Studies & Depth Psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, Māhea began to have dreams. When her eyes would close in the evenings, her dreams would bloom into new worlds where ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi / Hawaiian language danced from her lips. Oli / chant trilled in her throat, reverberating in her nāʻau / gut. For Kānaka Maoli, dreams are hōʻailona: signs that demystify the shoal offshore; a call that awaits a response.

“I took it as a hōʻailona that I needed to come home to Maui and learn,” Māhea says. “The kūpuna have been leading me.”

And in 2008, she returned to Maui. She returned to Kihawahine.

Touching down on the tarmac of Kahului Airport was a moment of reconnection for

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September 10,2024 2023 October 9th,

Māhea—of retying a tether to Hawaiʻi. Following the path lit by the embers of her recurring dreams, Māhea began her time at the University of Hawaiʻi Maui College, studying Hawaiian Language and Studies. “We had fantastic professors there, like the very dynamic Kaleikoa Kaʻeo and Kahele Dukelow,” Māhea says, smiling. Kaʻeo, associate professor of Hawaiian Studies at UH Maui College, and Dukelow, UH Maui College Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs, are deeply involved in the community movement to defend Haleakalā—home to the highest peak on Maui—from State-sponsored construction efforts. Māhea, a kiaʻi / protector of Haleakalā herself, credits both of them for her thorough training and grounding in Hawaiian activist movements.

Hawaiian politics, however, are inextricably linked with Hawaiian culture. Māhea dedicated years to learning hula and oli under revered practitioners during her time on Maui. She trained under kumu hula / hula teacher Kealiʻi Reichel, a master of Hawaiian music and a founding director of the Hawaiian language immersion preschool, Pūnana Leo O Maui. She joined Hawaiian women’s circles and continued her study of oli under Kaponoʻai Molitau, kahuna nui / high priest of Puʻukoholā, a sacred monument on Hawaiʻi Island’s Kohala coast.

In August 2017, Māhea moved to Oʻahu in pursuit of an advanced degree at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is now a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department’s Indigenous Pacific Literature track and is simultaneously completing a graduate certificate in Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. As a graduate student in these programs, Māhea taught courses including

Island Feminisms and Indigenous Feminisms, Women & Revolution, and Intro to LGBTQ+ Studies. Her investments in Hawaiian literature and feminism are also deeply intertwined. “I go back and I look at gender and sexuality, disabilities in those stories,” she says. “I look at different kinds of relationality and how to help contemporary problems by using our ancestral stories as models.”

Hawaiian language, politics, lierature, and arts are the pōhaku / stones foundational to her academic trajectory. These constructions of identity help her articulate the nuances of a Hawaiian universe that is beginning to carve a space in the university. Professor Hobart believes that Māhea’s work can be understood to represent the direction of Hawaiian Studies as a whole. “Her command of language and her access to the language archives are so important,” she says.“And I think that’s where scholarship is going to go.”

Māhea’s dissertation, now ten years in the making, charts the evolution of moʻolelo and oli about Kihawahine: how she is received and perceived across the slips and sutures of time.

Drawing on troves of Hawaiian language archives and community-based oral histories, the project works to re-story Kihawahine and rehabilitate her place in the Hawaiian consciousness. Methodologically, Māhea’s work pushes the boundaries of Western understandings of the biography, centering on a deity that is constantly evolving. “My subject is human and non-human, alive and, some would say, no longer living,” she explains.

“She has all these forms simultaneously.”

For Professor Hobart, who has been following Māhea’s

work and trajectory for several years, these contemplations are proof of Māhea’s academic prowess. “Her understanding of Hawaiian history is really impressive and grounded,” Hobart remarks. “The bar’s getting set really high in this next generation of scholars. And I’m really happy to see the bar set the way that it is, knowing, of course, that it would take me [another] whole career to get there.”

Māhea’s journey through the academy, however, paused after moving to Oʻahu. She met her partner, Kahala Johnson, on Maui and became a mother: “We had a little girl, Hinaʻaiināmeleonālani. She was a joy,” she says. Hina was born with disabilities, which allowed Māhea to deeply learn how to mālama / care for. Before her third birthday, Hina returned to Papahānaumoku / earth mother.

In her honor, Māhea became invested in Indigenous disability studies—and the language of healing.

At the same time Māhea arrived at UH Mānoa in 2017, the State of Hawaiʻi recommenced construction of the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on the summit of Haleakalā—despite fierce backlash from the Hawaiian community. When convoys of trucks carrying construction equipment began scaling the mountain, Māhea and Kahala laid their bodies on the cold pavement before the trailers’ tires, arms linked by PVC pipes.

For both of them, defending Haleakalā was not a choice, but a kuleana / responsibility to their ancestors, and to their daughter Hina.

Standing in defense of sacred ʻāina did not end on Haleakalā.

In 2019, she traveled to Mau-

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18

na Kea in the wake of the State of Hawaiʻi’s renewed threats to commence construction of the Thirty-Meter Telescope on the mountain’s summit. A struggle between Kānaka Maoli and the State that has persisted for nearly a decade, the construction of a puʻuhonua / sanctuary—or encampment, as others have framed it—by protectors garnered international attention.

For Māhea, coming to Mauna Kea was also an act of reciprocity. Atop Haleakalā, protectors of Mauna Kea stood in solidarity with protectors on Maui. “We knew that when they called for the Mauna / mountain, we would go,” she says. “So I did.”

At the base of the summit, under the malu / shade of its icy caps, Māhea co-founded Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu University—an alternative model to the university encamped on the mountain’s access road—in collaboration with Kahala, ʻIlima Long, and Presley Keʻalaanuhea Ah Mook Sang. Over the course of eight months, hundreds of educators offered around 1,000 different classes to the community for free, teaching Hawaiian history, natural sciences, music, and politics. The Mauna Kea Syllabus Project sprang from the university’s pedagogy. The syllabus is a living document of thematic categories and guiding questions, readings and resources, built from the contributions of Kānaka Maoli, Native Americans, Palestinians, and Indigenous organizers from across the globe.

“That kind of work allowed me to make a wider Native network,” Māhea reflects, “and start to see how Native peoples navigate universities.”

Entangling and embedding Hawaiian culture into her academic work, Māhea’s drive remains rooted in her connection

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to, and protection of, ʻāina— particularly against the realities of settler militarism, colonialism, and imperialism in Hawaiʻi.

For Kānaka Maoli, as Māhea articulates, “we feel the bombing of Mākua, or when Kahoʻolawe was still being bombed, you could feel the earth underneath you shake. When they still do that on Hawaiʻi Island, when they’re practicing in Pōhakuloa, our bodies also shake with that.”

From Haleakalā to Mauna Kea, from Mākua to Kahoʻolawe, from Pōhakuloa to Mokuʻula, building the method to heal is essential for the survival of Hawaiʻi and its people. To Māhea, moʻolelo, like those that trace the body and shape of Kihawahine, become a potent response.

“I look at different forms of ancestral Hawaiian moʻolelo and their power for healing,” she says. “Our ancestral stories [are] models for pono / cosmologically balanced behavior and pono relations to the ʻāina.”

In the wake of wildfires that devastated Lāhainā and other parts of West Maui last August, Māhea’s work is critical. Like the draining of Mokuhinia in the 20th century, decades of stream diversion by sugar plantations dried the lands of Lāhainā, turning wetlands into a tinderbox.

When a powerline was downed by gusts of an offshore storm, sparks turned into flames, and flames into a wildfire. The deadliest fire in Hawaiʻi’s history— and a rupturing of the islands’ settler history—the Lāhainā fires claimed the lives of 102 residents and left countless others missing. Relics of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s former capital vanished up in smoke.

13 months later, Lāhainā is still recovering. State officials predict that rebuilding will take years. But from the rubble, trees grow. And in Lāhainā, the

moʻolelo of Kihawahine, the protector of fresh water, has grown from whispers to conversations. “People have been calling on her name again, new chants and new hula are being composed,” Māhea says.

At the time of our conversation, Māhea is back home in Maui, collecting these stories.

She sees a direction for the future in this community resurgence of Kihawahine. For her, old and new moʻolelo and oli “opens up space for people to start to bring her in different life forms again, calling on her as a water protector, to bring back the lands of Maui, to restore the diverted water and to regrow Maui in a way that’s pono and restores our sense of humanity and dignity.” Māhea’s restoring and restorying of Kihawahine is not only about honoring her kūpuna / elders, but honoring Papahānaumoku, the earth mother from whom we grow. In her protection of Kihawahine, Māhea articulates the body and shape of hope for generations she will never meet.

“We’re not doing it just for our selves,” she tells me. “I don’t do this work just for me. I do it for all of my kūpuna. I do it for my family.”

I take a moment to breathe, as Māhea finishes charting her personal and academic genealogy. She speaks poems and lives multitudes, all pointed in a direction homeward. Decolonizing methodologies—rearticulating the value of Indigenous knowledge production in the university—is a quest that many Native Hawaiian and Pasifika students at Yale have yet to answer.

Yet, Māhea brings to New Haven the epistemologies, pedagogies, and forms of knowledge production rooted in ʻāina,

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September 2023 October 9th,10,2024

rooted in Hawaiʻi. She not only hopes to leave these with the university’s Native community but to expand it with the help of the institution’s resources. Professor Hobart, looking forward to Māhea’s time here, hopes to “push all of what Yale can do in her direction.” Professor Blackhawk, reflecting on the growing number of scholars selected for the Henry Roe Cloud Fellowship, believes opportunities like these are “deeply transformative,” especially for communities underrepresented in higher education. Dissertation fellowships at Yale not only platform, but uplift voices that introduce new and exciting ways of knowing and being. Their creations reverberate in communities across the globe and begin a dialogue in those places, transforming the university from a dream to a possibility.

Within the university, these dialogues have begun. “Being welcomed by the NACC and IPO, that is automatically where I felt most at home,” she recalls.

“I think that that’s beautiful that our relationality is what allows us to stay in places like this, that aren’t necessarily built for us.”

As our conversation deepens, I reflect on my own journey to Yale—the pangs of homesickness that nearly broke my sense of self. It was the rapid growth and gradual cohesion of other Pasifika students that reminded me why I chose to come here.

As Māhea puts it, like moʻo, “the more of us that are here, the more we start to shapeshift around that.”

Māhea’s arrival at Yale and returning tales of the university’s Pasifika community have sparked the curiosity of Kānaka Maoli at home in Hawaiʻi. “I’ve been telling everyone,” she says through laughs, “and they’re like, wow, there’s that many

Kānaka and Pacific Islanders?

Maybe I would actually want to apply to Yale.” Māhea’s selection as the Henry Roe Cloud Fellow, beyond recognizing her academic prowess, opens new doors, new futures, for Indigenous peoples across the Pacific. And in our Pasifika student community here, Māhea represents a hope that, while she is one of the first visiting Pasifika scholars to our university, she will not be the last—that Yale can and should invest in more programs like the Henry Roe Cloud Fellowship.

As night descends along the walls of the NACC, I sit with Emma Slagle (Kanaka Maoli), BF ’26, in the first floor’s conference room. The evenings we’ve spent here, as members of IPO and the NACC House Staff, are uncountable. Emma, who had recently discovered that she’s related to Māhea, recognizes her arrival at the university as “powerful and wonderful.” Looking to the year ahead, Emma seeks to deepen her pilina / intimacies with Māhea. “I hope to hear her perspective and moʻolelo, to hear her life experience, and to keep learning from her.”

When Kamōʻiliʻili was diced into thousands of tiny moʻo, each of them scattered to different places across Mānoa Valley and Hawaiʻi. Māhea reveals why it’s her favorite moʻolelo: “I think of us as these moʻo. And moʻo are also short stories. So each one of us who ventures to Yale has our own little moʻo, our own moʻolelo.” She pauses. “I feel like putting all of the parts of the moʻo body back together when we’re all together makes all the mana / spiritual power that much stronger.”

Coming to Yale, and bringing

Kihawahine with her, Māhea does more than just restory her legacy—she articulates the unspoken, and often undervalued, kuleana of protection to the entire Hawaiian diaspora. “There need to be people,” Māhea says, “like those moʻo protecting small water ponds.” These moʻo, she continues, “hold this wellspring of Hawaiian manaʻo / thought and ʻike / knowledge in these random universities and places.” They are “holding open those spaces for our people to go and find those kīpuka / oases.”

Though only at Yale for a year, Māhea is building, strengthening, and protecting kīpuka. In her footsteps, more moʻo will voyage to New Haven, perpetuating the legacy of Kihawahine.

Kanaka Maoli scholar Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, in her book Remembering Our Intimacies, writes that “instead of being frozen in time or ink, moʻolelo move and shape-shift.”

In Culture and Imperialism, Palestinian scholar Edward Said argues that stories are “the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.”

For Māhea, moʻolelo are measures of repair. They heal a person and mend a community— they are the connective tissue between our past, present, and future.

“Every time we tell the story,” Māhea says, “we’re bringing Kihawahine back to life.” ❧

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Leaflings, Sprouting Stacked From Many Stems Will Sussbauer, JE ’27, Herald staff I think he watched his eyeball disappear. In death and detachment the taut, thin skin begins to leak, thus flatten, sink, down into itself, irising lenslike until the screen goes dark and he cannot see anymore. The scientists will say the eyeball went somewhere; I cannot help but hate them for it. He cried, “My eye has fallen empty! My eye has died and soaked the dirt not with tears but with the wet of its skin! Oh, may the worms see clearly now in light!”

I cannot remember how I spoke back. His words floated, fell, folded in lenslike, or eyelike.

I think turtles like it when I cry. I can see their eyes poking just past their shellridges, heads like kindhearted double-sized cashews. The turtle watching me now has a stripe stretching front-left to back-right, like a racecar confused. Stripey, I will call her. Stripey watches with a grin as my tears land soft on the arm above or below the fingers I use to wipe my running nose. Perhaps the smirk is sympathetic; turtles emote unlike you and I, and you unlike I, for I unlike anyone I can remember. The tears fall in bushels, as if my tear ducts are hoses and God or my mind or Determinism keep shifting the settings, and thus create many brief pauses when the hose must decide how next to release its cyphered blood. I think my fish died. They laid in tanks facing each other at the pet store, before I bought Johan and left Stripey caged. She is not a bird, so she cannot sing her sorrows skyward. So she smiles, it seems, at least with satisfaction.

I think I gave this letter to a worm. He curled up around it, wriggled and slithered forward and back, then laid his lithe weight upon the formerly fire-lit wax. Perhaps he could still feel the flames and wished his belly licked lengthwise (as otherwise would not function). Perhaps he thought he could read the indents of my seal, in case it had my name (worms, despite their faceless state, are nosy creatures). Perhaps he believed this seal the key to me, and thus sunk himself and the letter beneath the loam. Grass and sadness crumbled atop like cilantro and salt. I cannot remember what I wrote; you would have to ask him.

I think I slithered through the grass like a narrow fellow, too cool for corn. My arms and legs limply scurried newtlike, but could not regrow. I wondered if the grass would recover from my weight, from my many toes and fingers pressing down upon their lower backs until each blade was paralyzed. It must be funny; only then could they cut my skin. I had not forethought that my creeping along the forest wall may leave my chest slathered in slits, each divine and finger-width but nonetheless distraught. Learning is cool, but I am tired.

The birds shriek ghoullike. I think their necks must be hole-struck, for the air flying through their windpipes appears constant, ceaseless, endlessly shrieking like a now-blown nail-crafted whistle scraping against a chalkboard. The grass shimmers to its pitch; the sun stretches to the grass; my eyes eat the sun, then gush with magma; I faint upwards into a locked-knee erection and the magma floods into every slit like whispers into ears, except instead of insidiously becoming infiltrated my body simply bursts like an engorged louse. I am dizzy. I need water, just a gulp. ❧ 20

VOICES

September October 9th, 10,2024 2023

Cat Burger Kira Tang, TC ’27 I don’t know when exactly I lost Cat Burger. What I do know is this: 1. At 10:28 am on Wednesday, March 27th, 2024, I hurriedly boarded the Yuttle, swearing that I would never be late to my Gen Chem lecture ever again.

2. Catching my breath, I hugged my backpack in my lap, reaching for the main pocket zipper to fiddle with the little keychain that dangled from it.

3. I grasped at nothing but air.

Two weeks earlier, Cat Burger had tumbled into my life, encased in a little translucent box, out from a random vending machine in the back of the Japanese grocery store in Coolidge Corner.

“Do you want it?” I asked, opening the box and cradling the flat piece of rubbery plastic. A very two-dimensional white and brown cat, blanketed by a green piece of lettuce and nestled between two burger buns, stared blankly up at me.

“Let’s see what else we get,” Joyce replied, slipping in more of the tokens she had bought with the $10 bill in her purse. She adjusted her glasses as the machine made a whooshing noise. Another keychain emerged, this time depicting an orange cat inside of what resembled a chicken sandwich. “I think I’ll take this one!”

4. Frantic, I opened GroupMe, tapped on the Trumbull ’27 group chat, and typed, “I lost a cat burger (literally a cat inside a burger) keychain on my way from the 5th floor of Bingham to the shuttle (College/Wall N)—lmk if you happen to see it!”

I used to tell people that Joyce and I grew up together. Even though she and I are first cousins, I always call her jie jie, older sister. As a kid, I spent a lot of time at my aunt and uncle’s house. Joyce would let me play on the rug in her room, and she would show me how to draw. She would let me borrow her things: her Little Mermaid beach towel, countless Hello Kitty hair ties, and the entire Harry Potter series, except for The Deathly Hallows, which she had bought in hardback.

At some point, I realized that it would be more accurate to say that I grew up with Joyce around. The year I graduated from high school was also the year Joyce graduated from med school. This fact had only really sunk in that May, when she had pulled out her Nikon and her tripod and suggested a joint graduation photoshoot. Even though she had gone to Chicago for med school, the pandemic had meant that I wasn’t seeing her much then anyways. In my head, we were still both in Massachusetts the entire time, living in parallel.

5. After my classes were over for the day, I walked from Science Hill back down to Old Campus, scouring the path I’d taken in the morning.

“Update: I walked the whole way back and can’t find Cat Burger :(” 21

VOICES

The Yale Herald

The summer before we left for college, my best friend from high school dragged me to the Warby Parker in the Burlington Mall, where he was picking up his glasses. Joyce and I used to go to the mall with my aunt, where we would window shop at the Lego store and feast on mediocre teriyaki chicken from the food court.

The Lego store is still there these days; the chicken place is not.

I marveled at the towering rows of glasses and grimaced at the price tags.

“Maybe this is your sign!” my friend joked. “Then you won’t have to squint in lecture.”

I gingerly plucked a pair of green, oval-shaped frames from the tallest shelf I could reach.

“Well, what do you think? Does it feel like you?”

I looked at myself in the mirror and laughed a little awkwardly.

“I look like my cousin,” I said. “I think I look like Joyce.”

6. I took the elevator up to the fifth floor of Bingham and shuffled into my suite.

I stood in front of the full-length mirror. I felt like I was about to cry.

Because I mostly saw her at my aunt and uncle’s as a kid, I barely spoke in English with Joyce until my senior year in high school. It was then that I realized that—due to my waning Mandarin fluency and the fact that we never spent time together without other family members around—my knowledge of her vaguely fits into a “likes and dislikes” format, as follows: Likes: cats; Harry Potter (views on J.K. Rowling unknown); sewing (people up); baking; drawing; photography; cute socks; noodles; microwave popcorn; Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, in which Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams pretend to be from a small town in Iceland.

Dislikes: small children; indecisiveness; patients who forget to fast before a colonoscopy; patients who ask if she and the other East Asian doctor she works with are siblings.

I wish I knew more of the stories behind these things. I wish I could construct categories beyond “likes” and “dislikes.” At the very least, I wish I had more things I could add definitively to each list.

It would feel weird to ask Joyce directly. But it’s also strange that it would feel weird to ask, after knowing her all this time.

7. At 4:37 pm, two notifications popped up on my phone screen.

“Hey, by any chance is this what you were looking for?”

Below was a photo of Cat Burger, a little scuffed up but staring blankly as ever. ❧

22

Designs by Nicole Tian, MY ’26, and Alexa Driuyanoff, SY '26

VOICES

September October 9th,10,2024 2023

Derange the Language Elena Unger, BR ’25 Peel, pervert, clasp, and grasp. Derange the language, steal without sorry, adjective, adjective, adjective, adjective.

Douse the sentence in delusion and don’t wring it out to dry.

Fuck the rule that says anything about adjectives. Add four adverbs.

Twist and twine with the force of your forearms and stop asking for permission. Poetry is ours.

Bite, chew, spit in a cup. Save the cup, adjective. Tear, strike, italicize an entire stanza.

Chicken scratch a mess and laugh something that turns into tears. ❧

23

WHAT DO YOU THINK? DO YOU EVEN CARE? SEND PITCHES TO OSCAR HELLER AND RICHARD GEORGE

OPINION

The Yale Herald

24

How to Free Speech Richie George, GH ’25

B

en Shapiro will speak at Yale.

He is hosted by the Buckley Institute. The topic: “How October 7 Broke America’s Colleges.” This is how I think it will go. Eager undergraduates spill out of Sheffield-Sterling Strathcona Hall, as a voice of unruly petulance echoes into the tense space. Inflammatory speech prompts impassioned questions with even more incendiary responses––looped into a destructive cycle of inflammation. Screams are heard.

A performative stoicism marks the face of one of America’s venerated voices on the far right. In the following days, a flurry of writers launch critiques on Ben Shapiro’s arrival.

A single man alters discourse with a few hundred breaths. The topic: “How October 7 Was the Turning Point for My Continued Political Relevance.” Ben Shapiro leaves the Omni, or the Graduate, or another hotel enraptured by worker organizing. He makes his way to another college—an itinerant preacher of the more modern kind. In the tour bus, his team clips, splices, and blends the media he generates from his “encounter with woke Yale students,” published on his social media accounts. Every view, every comment, every like, every slur, every defense, every attack, and every mode of engagement are tools for his survival.

Ben Shapiro speaks at Yale for his survival.

Ben Shapiro’s speech is not the worst of failed speech. It is, rather, the quintessence of a contemporary approach to speech. And it is successful. When every letter is accountable for and accompanied by capital, this era of speech inaugurates a more efficient media operation, inscribing every form of agreement and dissent

into itself. Shapiro represents the new media personality insofar as he, implicitly, rejects control over the narrative. Regardless of the diverse reception, the world listens to him, and him alone.

I am tired of implosive speech. It engenders the same, violent repetitions of our dispossessed state and the broken means by which we foolishly repair them. Implosive speech is the AI-generated, SEO-optimal Instagram page of the climate activist-turned-influencer; the mansion molded from George Floyd’s last breath-turned-sampling material by entrepreneurial activists; and the gunfights whose bullets are not made of metal but the material produced by those who call themselves “the master race” in hidden Reddit servers. Implosive speech is always accounted for. It captures the algorithm with masterful “engagement,” achieving a social existence measured in the movements of vectors in computer code. The deathly inflammation of implosive speech has already happened, and its spirited representations, e.g., Ben Shapiro, return again and again.

The solution isn’t to author a better version of totalizing speech. The left (and the right) invoke counter-readings to the dominant speakers in public discourse. Discourse becomes a battle to write the better take; to reclaim Archimedes’ Eureka!; to systematically account for the world and its failings, or at least to imagine something different. There is no end to this project. The limits of speech force the world to offer itself up again, anew. In expressing its incompleteness, a freer speech never stagnates. It stirs, provokes, disrupts, and demands—demands for, hope-

fully, better.

Speech is, by nature, limited. Use it. Turn the limits of speech from sites of pure anxiety to sites of generativity. Its existence as a partial object only demands its continued survival—its reverberations into the thoughts of listeners force them to decide on what to do with speech.

Speech can only be poetic if it is to resist its subjection to algorithmic death. It must violate the normative rules placed upon itself with unexpected syntax, unreal metaphor, and unseen metonyms. It destroys its own architecture and builds a shantytown of alternative futures—one that will, inevitably, fail but soon demands a better one, made right in its wake. It explodes the algorithm so that we begin to see the distortions of our social life.

Abandon the halls of SSS to imagine what a better life could be beyond Beinecke; to recite the living lyric of the dead Palestinian poet; to perform the obeah rituals of the Haitian Revolution; to replay the harmonics of We Shall Overcome; to greet the woman whose plate you laded at the Community Soup Kitchen.

Make each syllable a seed for more life. ❧

INSERTS

October 9th, 2024

Design by Matthew Messaye, PC ’26

Michelob Ultra Review: Your Least Interesting Friend’s Favorite Beer

By Theo Kubovy-Weiss, BR ’26, Aengus Cox, MC ’26, Gavin Guerrette, BR ’25 A splash of sandy liquid thrashes against your tongue's ridges; the fizz dissipates in a fiery hiss. A gulp flushes the substance down, an ethanol waterfall splashing down into the acidic abyss.

Zoom out. You’re sitting on the back of a golf cart, a tender breeze tugging at the wisps of hair kissing your scalp. The sun beats down on your scaly skin, but you aren’t concerned: you remembered to lather yourself with your favorite SPF 70 sunscreen. The vehicle chugs over freshly cut grass and weaves through towering oaks towards hole 18—the only thing standing between and your late afternoon siesta. Well, that and a swervy drive across Montclair, NJ. (Good thing your BMW X5 has lane assist). You take another swig. You feel alright.

Zoom out. You are one of thousands of people who, at this very moment, have just taken a sip of Michelob Ultra. And just like those thousands of people, you feel alright. Not euphoric, not bitter, not proud— just alright.

Michelob Ultra is the alcoholic equivalent of a Target ad: the least unpalatable, most unremarkable beer you’ve ever tasted. It is the Wonderbread of brewed beverages, the Kraft Mac & Cheese of canned drinks. It is the Kidz Bop version of a Fred again.. remix of a Drake song. It is (and we mean this honestly) so unmemorable that we are struggling to find another thing to compare it to. And that’s precisely why you like it.

Rating: 5.0/10 ❧

25

ARTS: ARTS SCENE: YALE AND NEW HAVEN. SEND PITCHES TO EVERETT.YUM, DIEGO.DELAGUILA & ASHLEY.WANG

ARTS

The Yale Herald

Interviews have been lightly edited for clarity.

26

The Minor Films of Their Lives: A Conversation with Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel Robert Gao, BF ’27

I

was inexplicably intrigued by the posters for “Retrospective with Tizza Covi & Rainer Frimmel” plastered around the Humanities Quadrangle.

Directors routinely come to Yale, but co-directors are rare. I was surprised to find that they were partners who had shared a decades-long career.

I began to see the retrospective as an opportunity to understand the creative duo.

According to Professor Fatima Naqvi, the chair of Film & Media Studies at Yale and the organizer of the retrospective, Covi and Frimmel have an unorthodox approach to political cinema. “I was interested in bringing Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel to Yale because they make a wonderful kind of ‘minor’ cinema,” she says. “Not minor in any pejorative sense, but in the way it is commonly used in reference to minor literature.”

As I joined Covi and Frimmel during the week at a lecture for Professor Naqvi’s class, a screening of Vera (2022) followed by a Q&A, and even a tour of the Film Archive, I began to understand the “minor” nature of their cinema. They focus on characters on the margins, intimate in scale but emblematic of societal malaise. Yet, compared to most social realist cinema on the festival circuit, Covi and Frimmel’s work pays special attention to the working-class subjects they seek to represent. They often cast non-professionals as themselves and source script materials only from the actors’ real lives.

Vera, Covi and Frimmel’s newest film, is a departure from their previous works, featuring Vera Gemma, daughter of legendary Italian actor Giuliano Gemma, who plays a ver-

sion of herself navigating the world of fame. Still, Vera remains refreshingly down-to-earth and thematically cohesive with their filmography. *** Robert Gao: So first thing, how does it feel to be at Yale right now?

Tizza Covi: Well, to be at Yale for us is something special because we’re dealing with a very young public compared to [the public in] Vienna, so this is very beautiful.

Rainer Frimmel: And to a very interested audience that also comes from different disciplines. So that they are not only film students, they are all kinds of studies. Everyone sees a different topic in our movies, and that's always very interesting to get inputs from.

RG: Something you said that really struck me was “speaking at Yale is very glamorous, but the reality of an artist and doing the work that we do is very different.” Especially when you said that Babooska [the protagonist of their documentary Babooska (2005), who works at a circus] said “my life is so lousy, but your life is even lousier.” I usually think of filmmakers as people who have a lot of power.

When they tell stories about ordinary people, they have leverage against them. But in your work, I don’t see that dynamic at all.

TC: As an artist, first of all, you don't have a [stable] income. You have to deal with sometimes gaining good money, but sometimes for a long period not gaining money at all.

Even when I talk with colleagues who are quite famous, it’s very difficult for them. Also, you have to always invent new films. You can’t just work on one film after the other, and you have to think about what is the aim of your movies: why do you want to ask for a lot of time from a lot of people, and what are the topics. So, I think it’s very important to say that the life of an artist is not what people imagine.

It's a really, really tough life with ups and downs.

RF: So we are not pretending to be at the same level, but we really are at the same level as our protagonists.

When we shot Babooska, we lived

with them in their trailers that were being rained into. We wanted to share their lives so they feel that we are taking our work seriously. This kind of trust is very important for us.

TC: For Vera, we also had to live in a very bad hotel in the outskirts of Rome in a small room with all our stuff. We don't come from a five-star hotel with assistants and trucks with catering. But this way, people see that we need help, and they help us. So it's giving and taking for both parties. As we are just two people, everyone in the outskirts knew us and they were bringing down coffee to the street or helping us with the bags. They invite us into their homes to eat. They make us one of them.

RG: Because you see similarities between yourselves and the protagonists in your film, I wonder how personal your films are in general, even though they are not autobiographical.

For example in Vera, I see that there were a lot of ideas about filmmaking in there, through Vera going to a casting for example.

RF: I think in Vera it was obvious because Vera comes from a family of cinema. She was raised with cinema around directors like Sergio Leone and actors like her father [Giuliano Gemma]. But in all our movies you can find some reflections on cinema or on old movies. We love cinema and we also want to preserve some experience of silent movies. That's why Vera goes to the silent movie in this. So that was something very personal.

RG: I was fascinated by the fact that the two of you do everything on set. Most sets are much bigger, even if they are independent films. How do you work together as a team? Are there disagreements as co-directors?

TC: In terms of working together, we are so different. We have different views and really different personalities. It's always half part of Rainer and half part of me. Normally we begin shooting with a general idea of the scene. After the first take, we discuss it. What did you like, not like?

Should we add this? Should we be more mobile? We also never rehearse the first take.

RF: It's always a very intense pro-

ARTS

September 2023 October 9th,10,2024

cess because we have all the duties [camera, sound, etc.] usually for a bunch of people. But that makes for exciting filmmaking. If we make mistakes, it's really our mistake. Still, filmmaking is a teamwork for us.

We are collaborating also with our protagonists.

TC: We always ask them: how much from your real life do you want to put into this scene? What do you prefer not to say? etc. A small team makes the actors comfortable, especially because we work a lot with children.

The people we work with, they are friends before we start working with them. And they stay friends when we stop working with them. Everybody we ever worked with is family.

RF: To make a conclusion to this question, Tizza always checks that dialogues are working, more the fiction parts. And I'm more the documentary type. I like more the cinematography. If we can say it like that.

TC: Yes, absolutely. You would maybe, without me, never make a fiction with dialogues.

RF: Yes, maybe.

RG: As you are partners in real life, how does that make a difference in your artistic collaboration?

TC: In fact, we cannot answer this easily because we just know it this way. We have been together since we were very young, since we were 21 years old. We started to take photographs together before even making films. We could not do a movie without the other.

However, the beautiful thing of this career is that you at times have completely different lives. I spend much time researching, looking for locations, registering stories. I love to write and to put information together and see what story I can invent.

Looking for the money, that is Rainer’s part. This is also for us a very, almost political and social statement on our work. They [the financiers] offer us a lot more money than we work now. We don't want this money because this is public money. We just want the money we need. Every cent we need, we ask for it. But we don't need so much money like a young person who starts the first fiction film.

In Europe it's now around one million and a half for first fiction.

We work much, much less. We pay our actors always very well, this we calculate. And we don't make international co-productions because co-productions make a movie even more expensive.

RF: We also lose our independence.

TC: For us, our independence is doing what we believe in. And to be also free to do movies that maybe people don't like so much but for us to experience something new. Film is an art that always evolves and you have to try to do new things. We do this job because we're independent.

Otherwise we would not do it.

RG: I was surprised to find that you were primarily filming in Italy.

Because all the advertising around campus was done by the German department and Professor Naqvi [the organizer] is teaching German cinema. Also, Vera was the Austrian Oscar international submission last year. It seems like Austria has really been the country celebrating your films.

TC: The problem is that the nationality of a film you get it simply through production. As we can easily produce with our own production company in Austria, we don't look for other money in other places like Italy.

Also when we shoot a film, we want to do it right now because we know in two years, maybe we will have another idea. And doing co-production or asking money in Italy for example that would take a lot, a lot of time away.

RF: But after Austria chose the movie [as the Oscar submission], the movie appeared in the media in Italy for the first time. Before it was not so seen because Vera Gemma is also a very ambiguous figure in Italy. But immediately after that she was invited to TV shows. So the Italians were quite proud of that, which is funny.

TC: For us it's a pity, because I would love to have Austria-Italy as the nationalities of our movies. I'm from Italy and he [Rainer] is from Austria. But it's not possible.

RG: Going off of nationalities, what is your general relationship with place in your work?

TC: Environment is crucial for us.

We choose our protagonists because we like the environment they live in.

That's why we have worked so much with circus people because we love this environment.

RF: Even if we don't show it directly in the movies. But it's very present.

TC: Yes, and this change [that circus people go through] is in an artist's life . You change every week, you change places, you go to another place, you go to another school, you do your performances.

RG: For our closing question: I actually first found out about Vera and you because Sean Baker was posting reviews for this movie and he was doing Q&As in Los Angeles, which compelled me to reach out. I think his work has a lot of the same ethos.

I was just wondering if you guys have seen his work and if you know him personally?

TC: Yes, we are friends. We started making movies at the same time and our paths always crossed. I think he's a really great filmmaker that also fights independently to make his movie like he wants to. So we like his work very much.

RF: Very much. He works with a small budget, with a small team. He has more success, but it's a similar approach to cinema. And a similar love for cinema.

*** After the interview, Rainer offered to take a photo of me and Tizza on his camera. Under the glare of the camera flash, I realized that I, just like their actors, had engaged in a collaboration with them. Tizza thanked me for asking them about their lives as artists, because it’s “rarely talked about in the industry.” I expressed gratitude to them for their words of wisdom, for making me feel less alone in wanting to pursue filmmaking. There was giving and taking from both parties.

I escorted Tizza and Rainer out of Bass Library and showed them the way to the Yale University Art Gallery. I watched them walk away, having witnessed a part of the minor film of their lives. ❧

27

The Yale Herald

wed. 10/9

thurs. 10/10

Brooklyn Rider. Listen to the 20th anniversary season launch of the master interpreters of Philip Glass. The string quartet has performed in venues from New York City’s Lincoln Center to Mexico City’s Demo. 4p.m. Schwarzman Center.

Gilder Lehrman Center Book Talk: The Education Wars and the Battle for Democracy.

Join the book talk moderated by Sterling Professor of History David Blight. 5:30p.m. Wilbur Cross High School Auditorium. 181 Mitchell Dr.

Trivia Night. Join the weekly Wednesday trivia night hosted by the water at Dockside Brewery.

7p.m. 40 Bridgeport Ave.

Intercultural Panel on Political Engagement. Join the AfAm House, Asian American Cultural Center, La Casa, Native American Cultural Center, and the MENA cultural suite for a panel discussion on political engagement, featuring student and faculty representatives from each cultural space. 6 p.m. The AfAm House. 211 Park St.

Stripes / Skavs / Avoidants. Listen to Brooklyn-based Stripes, led by vocalist and songwriter Izzy MK, and sets from local Connecticut bands Skavs and Avoidants. 8p.m. Cafe Nine. 250 State St.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY Screening. Watch the 80th anniversary screening of DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944), adapted from the James M. Cain novel by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler. 7 p.m. 35mm in the Yale Film Archive.

Silkscreen and Serigraph Printmaking. Attend a multimedia art class and print onto paper, fabric, and wood panels, hosted by the Creative Arts Workshop of New Haven. 7p.m. 80 Audobon St.

mon. 10/14

ongoing

Prison Arts Program Annual Show. Attend the exhibition featuring the work of incarcerated, or formerly incarcerated artists from Connecticut’s prisons. 9:00a.m. Hans Weiss Newspace Gallery.

In the First Person: The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Visit the first large-scale public exhibition of the Holocaust Survivors Film Project, a grassroots community initiative based in New Haven. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Jul. 25, 2024 through Jan. 28, 2025.

Indigenous Peoples Day. Attend a community gathering honoring Indigenous Peoples Day, hosted by Native and Indigenous Students at Yale, Indigenous Peoples of Oceania, and Yale American Indian Science and Engineering Society. 1p.m. Cross Campus.

Indigenous Peoples and Climate Change: Yaku Pérez Guartambel. Attend the Indigenous Peoples Day lecture, presented by Kichwa Kanari leader, lawyer, professor, activist and author, Yaku Pérez Guartambel. 4:30p.m.-5:30p.m. Henry Luce Hall. 34 Hillhouse Avenue.

28

The Dance of Life: Figure and Imagination in American Art, 1876–1917. Visit the latest exhibition in the Yale University Art Gallery and see the working sketches, studies, and models from American masters including Violet Oakley, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and John Singer Sargent. Sept.

6, 2024 through Jan. 5, 2025.

September October 9th, 10,2024 2023

sat. 10/12

sun. 10/13

Documenting War: A Veteran Photojournalist’s Journey. Award-winning documentary photojournalist will speak about her experiences documenting the war in Ukraine since 2018, and her new book “Snapshots Sent Home: From Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine—A Memoir.” 12p.m WLH 114.

25th Annual Connecticut Renaissance Fair.

Watch jousting knights and circus-style performances, and try a variety of loc al craft brews and wines at New England’s largest outdoor artisan marketplace. 10:30a.m.-6p.m. Lebanon County Fairgrounds. 122 Mack Rd.

Redscroll Records Fair. Search through thousands of hand-picked records from music dealers across the Northeast. 11a.m.-5p.m. Counterweight Brewing Co. 7 Diana Court.

Jazz at the Institute. Join the Institute Library’s weekly listening session of classic jazz LPs. 5p.m.

Institute Library. 847 Chapel St.

Stupid Fucking Bird. Watch an irreverent, contemporary, and funny remix of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Stupid Fucking Bird is written by Anton Chekhov and features original music composed by James Sugg. 2p.m. and 8p.m. Iseman Theatre. 1156 Chapel St.

World Premiere: falcon girls. Watch the coming-of-age memoir of six teenage girls, set in the 90's in rural Falcon, Colorado. 8p.m. Directed by May Andrales and written by Hilary Bettis, falcon girl is the recipient of the the Edgerton Foundation New Play Award. 8p.m. Yale Repertory Theatre. 1120 Chapel St.

Museum Ballroom Dance. Dance in the elegant ballroom of the historic New Haven Museum.

Singles and couples of all dance experience levels welcome. 6p.m.-9p.m. New Haven Museum. 114 Whitney Ave.

Illustration and Original Design by Cleo Maloney

fri. 10/11

Lyman Orchards Haunted House. Face your fears at Connecticut’s spookiest farm. 6:30p.m.10p.m. Lyman Orchards. 32 Reeds Gap Rd.

The Rocky Horror Pitcure Show Screening.

Watch a screening of the original, unedited Halloween classic, with a live shadow cast and a costume contest. 8:00p.m.-10:00p.m. Shubert Theatre. 247 College St.

Oct. 9th 2024 To submit events for inclusion in the Herald calendar, contact Connor Arakaki at connor.arakaki@yale.edu or Madelyn Dawson at madelyn.dawson@yale.edu.

29

BLOCKLIST

(Things we hate this week) YDN Sex Column The blind leading the blind.

Donald Trump Is it just me, or is this guy kind of an asshole?

Windham-Campbell Oh, so they can put a tent on Cross Campus?

Jill Stein Green Party more like White Dumbass The New York Times Institutionally neutral before it was cool.

Publius Oh gosh, is that still going?

YCC Elections Finally, my vote counts!

Yale College Council Give me my 100k back.