October 2017 by Counterpoint Magazine

COUNTERPOINT the wellesley college journal of campus life october 2017 volume 49 issue 2

C O N T E N T WA R N I N G S Implication of: Mention of: Description of: page 2

for content that seems to be implied in any given article, but does not actually name or give a description or discussion of said content for content that is named or defined in any given article, but does not provide specific details or descriptions in the usage of said content for content that is named and described in detail in any given article

counterpoint / october 2017

Images: Photo by Jane Hua â&#x20AC;&#x2122;21 (cover), Natassja Haught â&#x20AC;&#x2122;18 (left)

SUBMISSIONS Counterpoint invites all Wellesley students to submit articles, art, photography, comics, or other printable media. We accept all non-fiction submissions that are respectful, are submitted with sufficient time for editing, and have not been published elsewhere. Counterpoint encourages cooperation between writers and editors but reserves the right to edit all content for length and clarity. Email submissions, ideas, or questions to the Editor-in-Chief and/or Managing Editor. The views expressed in Counterpoint do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff or the Wellesley community.

E D I TO R I A L S TA F F Editor-inChief Managing Editor Features Editor Staff Editors

Olivia Funderburg ’18 Samantha English ’19 Rachele Byrd ’18 Nina-Marie Amadeo ’18 Lara Brennan ’18 Rachele Byrd ’18 Elizabeth Engel ’18 Molly Hoyer ’18 Jasmine Kaduthodil ’18 Elena Najjab ’18 Elizabeth Taft ’18 Denise Becerra ’19 Alexandra Cronin ’19 April Poole ’19 Yadira Ayala ’20 Francesca Gazzolo ’20 Ashley Anderson ’21 Grace Callahan ’21 Marina Furbush ’21 Tara Kohli ’21 Vanessa Ntungwanayo ’21 Seiyeon Park ’21 Uma Raja ’21 Seren Riggs-Davis ’21 Cheryn Shin ’21

D E S I G N S TA F F Production Manager

Natassja Haught ’18

Art Director

Jessica Maciuch ’20

Layout Editors

Roz Rea ’19 Jessica Maciuch ’20 Marinn Cedillo ’21 April Chu ’21 Marina Furbush ’21 Vanessa Ntungwanayo ’21

B U S I N E S S S TA F F Treasurer

COUNTERPOINT THE WELLESLEY COLLEGE JOURNAL OF CAMPUS LIFE OCTOBER 2017 Volume 49 / Issue 2

CAMPUS LIFE SIENA WISE

THAWED OUT

OLIVIA FUNDERBURG & JESSICA MACIUCH

IF POP STARS WENT TO WELLESLEY

IDENTITY EMILY DROMGOLD

HOME

ANONYMOUS

CONFLICTEDLY SUBMISSIVE

ALICIA MARGARITA OLIVO

AGUAS NEGRAS

ARIANA GONZALEZBONILLAS

A WELLESLEY STORY

A R T S & C U LT U R E PADYA PARAMITA

THE MS.-ING PIECE OF MARVEL

GILLIAN COURTNEY

OPEN LETTER TO RORY GILMORE

SAMANTHA ENGLISH

TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN

POLITICS ANONYMOUS

Samantha English ’19

Publicity Chair

Natassja Haught ’18

TRUSTEES Allyson Larcom ’17, Hanna DayTenerowicz ’16, Cecilia Nowell ’16, Oset Babur ’15, Alison Lanier ’15, Kristina Costa ’09, Kara Hadge ’08, Edward Summers MIT ’08

ACTIVIST IN THE MAKING

F E AT U R E S COUNTERPOINT STAFF

POLL: SEND NUDES

COUNTERPOINT STAFF

CROSSWORD: SUPERSTITION

counterpoint / october 2017

page 3

Thaw

CAMPUS LIFE

t u O BY SIENA WISE

he first red flag that alerted me to the fact that I’m no longer a stone cold bitch, came a month before I left for Sweden. I had just spent all of July sharing a room with my best friend of seven and a half years in Manhattan, cuddling while watching Newsies on Netflix and seeing every Broadway show we could afford from the last row of the rear mezzanine. But suddenly, our entire friendship stopped. She texted me an opinion I mildly disagreed with. I texted her back and never heard from her again. Strangely, we never got to actually have the disagreement. It was over before it began. I’ve never been in a romantic relationship, but this is what I imagine breakups must be like. The person I was before Wellesley, the person I thought I still was, would have taken this in stride and cut their former friend cleanly out of their life with a shrug.

page 4

Did I do that? Nope! Instead I cried about it for days and screamed about it on the phone to anyone who would listen. The loss of a close friend and lack of closure brought me aching levels of emotional pain. For some reason, I thought I could leave America and my entire support system without any problems. I was still able to adopt my trademark frigidity to deal with any excess feelings. Just because I wasn’t able to do it when my now-ex best friend dumped me surely didn’t mean I would never be able to do it again, right? I bet you can already tell how this will go. When people heard I was going to Stockholm, they told me that the country was notorious for both the physical and metaphorical cold. I blew it off. I thought I would be able to easily survive in a place like that. Imagine my surprise when I got to Sweden only to feel massively un-

counterpoint / october 2017

comfortable among the Swedish people. Imagine my surprise exacerbated when I realized I was just as uncomfortable among the students in my program. I obviously didn’t expect to reach the levels of friendship and platonic affection I had spent years carefully cultivating at Wellesley. However, I did expect to at least feel some sort of kinship with the other students; ostensibly they were people like me who would immerse themselves in a culture that doesn’t open up easily. This hasn’t been the case at all. My usually quick transition into crisis survival mode, a trusted coping mechanism of mine, has been slower than ever. I’ve found myself longing for human interaction in a way that would have made me sick two years ago. I desperately need the brisker and more calculated Siena of the past to return. What I’m left with right now is this mushy and emotional Siena

Images: eventsromagna.com (left)

Content warnings: implication of depression, description of anxiety, implication of cutting

of the present, yearning for casual intimacy and people who will already have full knowledge of my personal backstory without having to ask me questions. (That last one’s slightly unrealistic, but a pal can dream.) During my time at Wellesley, I’ve been taught that there are people in the world that will give me respect and love if I open myself up to receive it. It turns out that years of intense dinner discussions, fifteen-hour tech days in dark theaters, and support from friends have actually done a serious number on me. I have a deeper sense of self-worth than I’ve ever had before. I spent my pre-college life so scared of what was different about me, so afraid that no one would ever want to be near me, but now I’m surrounded by people who only want to hold me tighter. The collective mindset at Wellesley of receiving everyone’s stories with unyielding acceptance and a desire to listen has only served to make me surer of myself and how I live. I don’t feel shame anymore at sharing my past and present experiences. It’s as if my fear of public vulnerability has been slowly coaxed out of me with every office hours meeting and study session. Of course, my sudden realization of this major personality shift is a blindingly beautiful double-edged sword. Now I actually want to open myself up in the hopes of meeting new and wonderful people, but barely anyone here seems to be interested. It’s not a daily requirement of mine to put my entire person on display, and I definitely don’t want or need to do it all the time, but it’s become more of a default setting for me than it used to be. I know what the rewards of compassion and active socialization could be, so my normally introverted self is stuck chasing them while I reap nothing. I keep offering

help to other students who spend more time glaring at me than talking to me. I use an invisible knife to neatly slice the tension when people don’t laugh at my jokes. I can physically feel anxiety closing my throat at least twice a day. Sometimes I can feel people avoiding me from a mile away, something I hoped I wouldn’t have to feel during my college career. Have you made attempts to be social? my mother keeps asking me over the phone. It’s not healthy to just talk to your friends at school all the time! she keeps telling me, as if my friends at school aren’t the only people keeping me grounded. As if I don’t already beat myself up enough for not magically curing my social anxiety by now. I don’t have the heart to tell her that, despite all of my attempts, I feel like an ice sculpture in a humid room. I’m slowly melting, unnoticed, while the world gives me a general once-over but ultimately moves on. Sometimes I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to process a mental change this drastic. Then again, I suppose I’m more aware of the fact that my heart has grown three sizes because I’m feeling the effects of my support network being pulled out from under me. I’m able to preserve some semblance of emotional stability while at Wellesley, buoyed by my job, my friends, and my classes. Here, there is no stability. I can’t even curate stability. There are no emotional highs or lows, either. My emotional pendulum swings manically back and forth between content and numb. Even on my happiest days I’m exhausted and anxious and alone. I miss feeling supported by peers in my fight to not feel like an afterthought. Do I miss everything about Wellesley? Of course I don’t. The act of imagining Wellesley as some sort of collegiate utopia

requires a special brand of rose-colored nostalgia that I neither appreciate nor have the emotional capacity for. I don’t miss the social drama, the steep hills, or the consistent nagging feeling that you’re forgetting a deadline that doesn’t exist. And I love living in Stockholm, I really do - its walkability and rivers and gorgeous architecture, its rich artistic culture and coffee strong enough to slay me in battle. I take every opportunity to be outside and walk along the water, and sometimes I even go to community brunches at my local feminist co-op and eat waffles with cream and jam. But I miss my home. More than anything, I miss my friends. I really, really miss my friends. After careful deliberation, I’ve concluded that I’m about 85% thawed out. I don’t see myself hardening back up anytime soon, which scares me to no end, but I don’t think I miss my cold side as much as I miss the emotional protection that came with it. It is hard to be vulnerable: to put yourself out there constantly and perform confidence when you’re anything but. It is scary to feel as if your socialization efforts are for naught even though you’re trying so hard, radiating warmth from all parts of your body even though it’s the last thing you want to be doing. For as long as I’m away, I’ll stick with chasing the mutual respect and kindness that I know I can find. It has to be somewhere around here. I just need to keep looking. Besides, if I can’t find it, I know it’ll be waiting for me at home. Siena Wise ’19 (swise2@wellesley.edu) is known primarily for their distinctive presence that continues to haunt the ones they love like a spiritual raincloud.

counterpoint / october 2017

page 5

CAMPUS LIFE

If Pop Stars Went to Wellesley BY OLIVIA FUNDERBURG & JESSICA MACIUCH

Ariana Grande: Philosophy major. Shows up at everyone’s events (cultural, political, and performance orgs). She LOVES when the dining hall serves those cheesecake brownies and is always running late to class. She regularly has loud conversations in the stairwell with her beloved Nonna. Works at the Child Study Center and definitely has at least eight Junie B. Jones books on her at all times. Has been to at least one meeting of every org on campus, but isn’t really a part of any of any. Taylor Swift: That PoliSci major (IR concentration) and Econ minor who does her papers on the treadmill and makes home-cooked meals in the basement kitchen in Shafer. She’s probably in AKX and is an Albright student. She’s in bed every night at 10:30 SHARP. Only dates boys from Harvard or MIT (although she had that one pub night fling with Karlie Kloss that people would know better than to mention). Definition Wendy. page 6

Nicki Minaj: She’s always working the desk at the libraries. A SHE and an ASC (the artist formerly known as your local APT.) The well-known Mom Friend™ on campus whose door is always open for you to come in and vent. Incredibly sweet and everyone’s biggest cheerleader. Fiercely devoted to her friends, to the point where she will fight anyone who hurts them. Pre-med, but that pre-med who majors in Theatre Studies. She always have a snack on hand, and has so??? Much??? Tea??? Like seriously where does one acquire that much tea? Rihanna: She tea-ed TZE but didn’t actually join when invited. Has the entirety of the tunnels mapped out in her mind and smokes on the roof of the Science Center. She makes the BEST nachos at the Hoop. She waits until senior year to do her PE credits and stares down the instructor when they try to get her to put in any effort. No one actually knows what her major is. Unapproachably cool. Adele: She’s a Music and Classics double major, with a pending unofficial Education Studies minor. She and Beyoncé lived on the same floor as first-years and have been BFFs ever since. She joins SBOG her first year and is DOOCA her senior year. She’s also in choir and Shakes. Beyoncé: Class president all four years and does #TheMost but does everything well. She’s called Flawless for a reason.

counterpoint / october 2017

She’s an American Studies major and Psych minor. She does Wellesley In Washington the summer before her senior year. In a committed long-term relationship with someone who goes to a nearby college, probably Berkeley. Debate all-star. How does she make sweatpants look that good?? And show up to all of Michael Jeffries’ office hours??? Katy Perry: She’s a regular contributor to the Wellesley News and writes articles that always feel just a little iffy. She’s that Straight White Girl who always tries aggressively hard to prove how much of an “ally” she is. She talks about eating dining hall pizza and ice cream for every meal as though it’s an endearing personality trait and not a simple fact of dorm life at Wellesley. Zendaya: CAMS major and Geosciences minor, and on the Ethos Political Action Committee. She’s elected Chief Justice her senior year, in SLAP all four years, and shows the fuck up at rallies (usually the one holding the megaphone). Has an iconic wardrobe and regularly compliments other people’s outfits. Joins Counterpoint her first year and is Editorin-Chief by the time senior year rolls around. OBSESSED with Pom. Carly Rae Jepsen: A WGST and Religion double major. She’s somehow involved in almost every Upstage play, but she makes the transition from acting her

Images: vogue.com, last.fm, footwearnews.com (left), jlconlince.com (right)

orde: English and Art History double major. Frank Bidart is her advisor. She’s in Wellesley Out Loud and WZLY, and probably work on the staff of The Review. She’s the one student who has all her papers finished at least a week in advance. She can often be found on the Peter late on a weekday, not planning to get off anywhere, just dramatically staring out the window and contemplating life.

IDENTITY

H OM E

first and sophomore years to working tech as an upperclass student. May or may not eventually tea Shakes because she has her hands full with Upstage, but she loves all her theater peeps. You have fond memories of her as your RA first year. Miley Cyrus: Does she get in? Does she transfer? Is she That Girl Who Emails Everyone or That White Girl with Dreads? Is she That Girl Who Emails Everyone about how she’s That White Girl With Dreads? SZA: Africana studies and Music double major with a focus on jazz. A beloved, energetic, super friendly pubbie who goes hard and dances on the bar during pub night. Gives show stopping performances every karaoke night. Incredibly chill RA who leaves personalized notes of encouragement on every resident’s door. You haven’t seen her in a minute since she’s always super busy (visiting Harvard or MIT on weekends) but every time you bump into her you end up chatting for like 4 hours in the dining hall. Kesha: Astrophysics and Peace and Justice double major. Impossible to do, you say? Girl makes it work. She’s in A.S.T.R.O. club and is the star of their Lip Sync all four years. She’s also in Dead Serious and one of the most wellliked people on campus. She’s at Larry Rosenwald’s office hours on the regular. She’s that person on campus who seems to change her hair every week. Always asked to be a host for events on campus. Made you cry at least once when she did an acoustic guitar performance at Queer Open Mic. Olivia Funderburg ’18 (ofunderb@wellesley. edu) and Jessica Maciuch ’20 (jmaciuch@ wellesley.edu) would like to thank Allyson Larcom ’17 for her pop culture expertise and A+ pasta skills.

B Y E M I LY D RO M G O L D

oming home for the first time in six weeks is: Thanksgiving Day without the turkey. Comforting and warm. Appreciating family time in person. Eating all the eggs and cinnamon rolls at breakfast. Petting your dog for long periods of time. (Not like you didn’t do that before.) Looking at the rooms in your house as a part time inhabitant. Your perspectives stretched by an outside world of nights filled with spontaneity. Corners and doors and stairs and counters with light reflecting in ways you couldn’t see before. New habits like getting dressed before breakfast overlapping the slate of the everyday life before college. Having endless stories to share. New passions. New adventures. About unusual foods. (I never would have considered adding quinoa to my plate before.) That disco ball in Pendleton. (Mystery solved!) Late night theater. S’mores in microwaves and movie nights.

Surviving midterms. Obsessing over lotus paste mooncakes. (Those specific ones.) Now home is a new kind of vacation. No longer an everyday luxury. A fridge with beverages, assorted vegetables and cookie dough. No more walking down corridors to eat. Rooms and carpets. No unattached buildings. Cars and wheels, backyards and sidewalks. Same stoplights. Same intersections. Almost like the winding roads through campus. Almost. All in one place. All in one town. This town you’ve been away from for six weeks. Like you’ve travelled to another universe and no longer rely on this structure to be at home. Home has many definitions. And you’re learning all of them. Emily Dromgold ’21 (edromgol@wellesley. edu) is gluing feathers on her wings to make her way.

counterpoint / october 2017

page 7

IDENTITY

CONFLICTEDLYsubmissive

BY ANONYMOUS

t’s hard to be a black girl into BDSM. This is a statement that’s becoming a reality for me as I get older. BDSM has a variety of definitions, but it usually stands for a combination of Bondage/ Discipline, Dominant/Submissive, and Sadism/Masochism. When I first discovered the community, everything about sex was a taboo, so I didn’t really think of it it as any more off-limits than other naughty things I was looking up on the internet. But as I started to discover what I liked and disliked, and felt I wanted to try it in real life, I got nervous. I thought about all the portrayals of women I had been exposed to—for them the words slut and whore and bitch were only ever derogatory, and not exciting like they were for me. My boyfriend confirmed that for me—when I asked him to call me a slut for the first time during sex, he told me he respected me too much to do it. I had anticipated this. What kind of woman likes to be called awful words? Why did I want to be controlled and do what I was told? I didn’t really have answers to these questions. All I knew was that BDSM was something I liked, regardless of how wrong or right it was, and I continued to read and absorb all I could about the community. I learned I was a submissive, and that, for some unexplainable reason, I got off by giving my agency away to a person I trusted. I read about all different kinds of kinks and fetishes, roleplays and relationships, and it fascinated me. I convinced my partners to try different things with me to test myself and see if page 8

it was something I continuously enjoyed in real life and not just in the stories I got off to. In the back of my mind, I still wondered—am I the only person I know like this? I knew there were plenty of women online who shared my tastes (if you want to call it that), but I was a junior in high school before I began to wonder if it wasn’t just a taboo in sex, but also a taboo for black women as a whole. In all the stories I read, none of the women were women of color. Though I could find plenty of racially based stories (mostly with white women and black men) that offended me on multiple levels and which I never ever read, finding a story about a black woman submissive was basically impossible. Reading erotica is different from watching porn. It’s rare to find a story where the characters’ physical appearance isn’t described in vivid detail, because it’s the vivid details that make the stories so enticing. Knowing that my identity was never a part of the fantasies I indulged in, I started to overthink a lot of the things I had accepted about myself until then. Why couldn’t I find other black women who were into what I was into? Was I not looking hard enough? Was it wrong for a black woman to want to be tied up and degraded in the ways I was starting to want to be? These questions only got worse as I got to Wellesley and began to learn so much more about black women in America—our history with different racial groups and institutions and how all of those things shape me as a black

counterpoint / october 2017

woman today. Learning about self-hate, internalized misogyny, and the historical conditioning of women in this society, I couldn’t help but question why I was even into BDSM. Was it just something I been subconsciously ‘taught’ to like by all the media I consumed? Is it wrong to want to be controlled and dominated when all kinds of men have been doing that to black women for centuries? And now I have a choice and I’m choosing this kind of treatment? A lot of interracial BDSM stories are based on ’slaves’ and ‘sissies’, white women controlling black men, black men enslaving white women, black men cuckolding white men, etc. I have no tolerance for race play at all and just the fact that these dynamics exist really troubles and upsets me. They hit too close to home for me to just consider them fantasies or sexual preferences. And if that’s the case, how does my black woman body fit into this world? White men and black women have just as much traumatizing history between them as white women and black men do, so what happens to me if my partner ends up white? (That scenario is highly unlikely for me personally, but the thought still crossed my mind). Even if my partner was black or a non black person of color, those relationships are complicated as well. It would not be hard for anti-blackness or misogynoir to rear its ugly head, especially in a scenario where I’m willingly submitting myself to this person. I started to think that with everything I knew as a black woman, politically and

Images: emzae.com (left), lilahenoir.wordpress.com (right)

Content warnings: description of BDSM culture, mention of misogynistic language, slut shaming, and racism

socially, I shouldn’t be into BDSM at all. I started to feel guilty for something I had no control over, and it affected how I saw myself sexually for a long time. I’ve always been very open about the experiences I’ve had, but suddenly I felt like I couldn’t be. I felt that people would look at the color of my skin and think there was something wrong with me. I mentally withdrew from my sexual self. I would go through blocks of time when I wouldn’t be affected by anything, not even steamy scenes in movies. They gradually got longer and longer until I was going six to eight months without any kind of sexual stimulation at all, and not for lack of trying. But then, with the popularity of super compelling literary masterpieces like Fifty Shades of Grey, all of a sudden everyone was “into” BDSM and rough sex play. I saw all these memes and articles about choking, spanking, handcuffs and all different kinds of toys, etc. I saw “Daddy” jokes and fake “Doms” everywhere, like it was a bad case of chickenpox making its rounds in an elementary school. At first, it kind of made me happy, because my personal taboo was becoming more socially acceptable. But the more it became a trend for people the more upset I got. Though I’ve yet to be in a serious Dom/sub relationship, I felt like what I wanted was becoming trivialized somehow, like it became flavor-of-themonth for every woman who had the hots for Christian Grey. Though this spotlight and normalization of the lighter parts of BDSM that I was into made me less nervous about asking my partners to do certain things (“Oh like that book? Yeah, I’m into that”), and brought me a little closer to the sexual self I had previously abandoned, I still felt hesitation. What would my partner’s reaction be? Would I ever be able to share my true desires with a

person who didn’t identify as a Dom? Will I ever be truly satisfied if I can’t experience them? Will I ever find another black girl who can help me figure any of this out? As a black woman dating in Boston, I already have to consider a lot—whether the person I like even likes black girls, if they only date black girls and why, if they’ve never dated a black girl, and all of the stereotypes and expectations that are put on my black woman body before I even open my mouth. Being a submissive just reinforces and multiples all those worries by ten. I still think about these questions almost everyday. Though I’ve again accepted my submissive role/personality, I wonder if I could ever live without it or make myself live without it in a relationship. Sometimes I want to. I want to go back to the time before I ever discovered what a Dominant and submissive were and just get off to ‘normal’ boring porn like my other friends do. But other times, I realize there is absolutely nothing wrong with being black and being submissive. I’m not broken, and I’m not a disgrace. And though I constantly worry about it, I know I’ll find someone who loves me for every single part of me, including the submissive me. It’s a comforting thought, even if I go back to doubting it the very next day. For information about articles published anonomously, please contact the Editor-InChief (ofunderb@wellesley.edu).

counterpoint / october 2017

page 9

IDENTITY

Aguas Negras

B Y A L I C I A M A RG A R I TA O L I VO

eing at Wellesley makes me feel like I’m wading through flood waters (I remember when Tropical Storm Allison hit home and my dad took my hand and helped me walk through the water to see the cars stuck on the street; I thought they were sharks in the deep), or that I’m carrying a weight on my chest. Now that I’m 1,806 miles away from home (if I were to walk home— sometimes I imagine society collapsing and everything going to complete shit [more than it already has] and, stuck without the availability to drive, I would walk those 1,806 miles back home) and family, bringing up any topic that might be considered Heavy seems rude. It just doesn’t seem right to sit down at dinner and respond with, “Well, since you asked, here’s exactly how my family is directly impacted by drug cartels and the corruption of the Mexican government. Would you also like to hear how I have nightmares of being shot and bleeding out alone without being able to see my family one last time? I could also talk about how annoying it is when people complain about having “bad” food in the dining halls, when I spent days during Harvey looking at the pantry, worrying about when we would run out of goods and wondering when grocery stores would have food and water again. But I wouldn’t want to impose my pain, fear, and suffering and anger on your “poor innocent soul,” and hear your, “Oh, wow. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.” Of course, it isn’t your fault that I have page 10

to bottle up my feelings and thoughts until I feel like I’m choking on them (like how I would choke on the taste of the unpurified water from the water pump under my grandmother's land near the Rio Grande, where the maquiladoras would dump their waste), on my own guilt for being one of the lucky ones, one of the privileged ones. Even walking to class, I sometimes feel it all flooding my path, sloshing around my legs like las aguas negras in that river. What’s the point of being at Wellesley if I can’t even bring up my worries or be myself without having to explain to others or even, dare I say, make them uncomfortable? I can’t look at you without wanting to punch your gut, the way my gut gets punched every time I read a headline about the Mexican earthquakes, Puerto Rico underwater, the fires in California—I can’t be the only one who has these thoughts poking at the back of their eyes every time they have to speak up in class, whether it be to voice their opinion on Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco from an Objective, Literary Point of View, or talk about the effects of gentrification on communities of color in a Calm and Civilized manner (When did my family become your personal anthropology project?). I can’t be the only one carrying fury and sorrow even when they laugh at a joke their friend makes, right? Right? God, I feel so alone sometimes. It’s October 3rd, 2017. Even as we waited in line outside the House of Blues, I noticed the sheer number of Latinx

september 2017 counterpoint / october 2017

people attending the concert. I don’t think I’ve seen so many brown Latinx people in one place since going to church back home, or attending my old high school, or going to the supermarket—being home, in general, I guess. Hearing the blips of Spanish soothed me, throwing me back to the first time I heard Spanish in Boston (two older brown women sitting across from me on the subway car, too far away for me to understand what they were saying, they could’ve been talking shit about my outfit and I wouldn’t have cared, I was so goddamn happy—) Behind my friend Andrea and I, two Wellesley alums of color arrive. After hearing bits and pieces of our conversation, one of them asks us if we’re Wellesley students. We connect and start chatting. After a while, they ask us, “How do you like Wellesley so far?” I pause before I answer, “I love it, but I’m still very critical of it.” They nod. “That’s a pretty healthy amount to like Wellesley,” they respond. After we go through security (hands sweaty like whenever my family travels back from Mexico, the border patrol guard making us squirm under his severe gaze to make sure we aren’t lying about our citizenship status), we’re lucky enough to snag spots at the very front of the venue, right in front of where Café Tacvba would be performing in a couple of hours. We squeal and giggle like children (I remember my little sister and I jumping in a Whataburger parking lot after our parents agreed to let us go to

Images: www.pinterest.com (left. right)

Content warnings: description of violence, implication of depression, mention of hurricane, flood

the movie theater that evening, squealing and giggling). A Mexican person’s white partner beside us remarks, “I can’t wait to see how all these Mexican people are going to be dancing.” (Boy, did they learn.) Two hours later, the Tacvbos soon come on stage, in their outfits from their tongue-in-cheek music video lampooning major figures in the Mexican political sphere. We scream, a happy scream (like getting to go to San Antonio, a twohour drive from Houston, for the first time in our lives—my gift for handling my mental health to the point where I was comfortable guiding my Spanishspeaking parents). The audience screams with us. Song after song after song, beat in my ears and my heart, making me jump and dance and jump again. People around us make jokes about what is said onstage and what is heard, talking in doble sentido, throwing around slang I only hear when I’m walking in the plaza of Matamoros. The songs being played range from rock en español to straight up banda music (I wish I could share with you the moment when the extravagant trumpets of “El fin de la infancia” started blasting and Rubén, the leading man of the group, short and slim and sporting two space buns at the top of his head, started his rapid-fire delivery and danced on stage—no fucking way, I thought, it’s like every wedding I had ever gone to, with my family—), everyone singing along and jumping and dancing with me. At one point, Rubén pretends that

the band set has reached its end and they need to leave. The crowds protests. He asks us to chant that “pre-Hispanic chant that is deep inside of all us,” confusing the crowd. Some people get to sing the iconic beginning to their song, “El baile y el salón”—paparupapa euuuu eoooo—and the band laughs and shake their heads. Then, from the back of the House of Blues, comes that ancient chant within us: “¡CULERO! ¡CULERO!” Everyone joins in and we chant and sing “¡CULEEEEEEERO! ¡CULEEEEEEERO! ¡CULEEEEEEERO!” Even though we’re calling him not just an asshole, but a coward! I think of my dad shouting profanities at the TV when las Chivas fuck up while playing against another Mexican soccer team. Rubén stretches his arms out, lifts his chin up to the sky and soaks it all in, as if our vulgar insult, delivered with love, were sunshine. The concert rages on after that. It was the most Mexican event I’ve ever gone to, the happiest I’ve ever been since I came to Massachusetts from Texas. It’s almost a religious experience, I think, until I imagine my mom playfully slapping my head for comparing a rock band to the Catholic Church. Their closing song “1-2-3” sings about love in the face of the destruction of Mexico through the government’s corruption and mass murders of their youth, and the War on Drugs decimating us all. They smile as they sing to us, but no one in the crowd (except maybe the white person beside us, who has adopted a thoughtful, quiet

stance as the concert became more and more alive) doubts that they aren’t carrying their own guilt and shame and worry and anger wherever they go, sloshing around their legs like aguas negras. We’re always aware, we embrace the good and the bad, we can both feel deeply sad and happy at the same time. Rubén asks us to send our good thoughts and our hearts to the indigenous peoples, to our siblings who need strength in Mexico Puerto Rico Las Vegas Rio de Janeiro Texas, to our LGBTQ siblings, to the Earth itself. The band doesn’t shy away from saying what they think, they say what’s been on my mind, on all of our minds all along. Rubén speaks into his microphone, but it’s like I could hear him speaking in our minds, saying, “You’re not alone, and it’s okay to carry your burdens, we all have a burdens that we must dance with.” (La vida es un gran baile Y el mundo es un salón) And for the first time, I felt like I didn’t have to carve a place of my own in Massachusetts with my fingernails. I felt I had walked into my home, shaking the mud off my boots. Alicia Margarita Olivo ’19 (aolivo@ wellesley.edu) alcanzo las estrellas y entre ellas se perdió.

counterpoint / september counterpoint / october 2017

page 11

IDENTITY

Luisa and Luis Meet and Ariana Happens: A

Story

BY ARIANA GONZALEZ-BONILLAS Content warning: binary language to honor how Luisa and Azucena experienced Wellesley

page 12

if she was sure she was okay with going and How could she abandon her family? She decides that she is not going to watch history repeat itself, and she signs the slip. Azucena goes to Wellesley College, a sight unseen.

her youngest sister Luisa to think about the University of Arizona or Scripps instead. Luisa stands her ground and runs headfirst down the path that Azucena had paved with her extra classes, applications for financial aid, imposter syndrome, and protests. August 1990. Luisa arrives at Wellesley, Purple Class of 1994. The Latinas that Azucena had adopted and helped to grow in turn adopt and care for Luisa. Luisa majors in Latin American Studies, becomes a Mellon Mays Scholar, and struggles to learn how to be at a predominantly white institution. Soon, she will find a companion in her struggle who knows what she is going through, too.

August 1985 to May 1989. Azucena participates in Ethos as a non-voting member. Mezcla is defunct, and she works to revive it. She gets arrested for participating in a “die-in,” blocking the trustees to protest Wellesley College’s investments in apartheid South Africa. Wellesley eventually divested. She graduates Green Class of 1989, while her middle sister is at another women’s college near L.A. and her youngest sister is dreaming of coming to Wellesley. Azucena, traumatized from her experience at a predominantly white institution, asks

counterpoint / october 2017

November 1990. Mezcla gets handed a poster to a party, printed in black and white and hand-colored in marker, by LUChA, the Chicano org at MIT. The poster is of a white-passing Latino man and woman. The man is fully clothed in a suit. The woman is in a skimpy dress, her leg up on the man, and his huge hand on her thigh. Mezcla wants to protest the misogynistic manhandling so prominent on the poster. After a few debates, Mezcla decides to still go to the party, since Latino communities need to support one another at predominantly white institutions. So they go, and Luisa dances the night away. Everyone wonders about an after-party, so Luisa asks her MIT friend Kathy. Next to Kathy stands Luis, a junior in Course

Images: Ariana Gonzalez-Bonillas '18 (right, left)

Circa 1984. Border town of Nogales, Arizona. zucena is at her younger sister’s English class parent-teacher conference to translate for her parents, who immigrated here soon after their marriage in Sonora, Mexico, in 1966. Lindley Silverman—Ms. Silverman to the family—recognized a spark in Azucena. It was a spark she recognizes from her time at Wells College (a women’s college in New York). She continues to talk to Azucena after the meeting, and finds out that she is on a business track at Nogales High School. Ms. Silverman advises Azucena to take honors classes instead, because there is an amazing women’s college on the east coast, 3000 miles away, called Wellesley College. Ms. Silverman could see Azucena there, a firstgeneration ambitious Chicana. Azucena, after researching the school, could also see herself there, and changes her courses in high school, even taking extra classes to make up for not taking honors’ classes before her junior year. She sends in her application and waits in anticipation for an answer from a school she didn’t even know existed two years ago. She gets in, but then comes the part of convincing her (misogynistic) father to sign a paper saying that he approves of her going. He refuses. Not because he doesn’t want her to go to college, but because he wants her close to home at the University of Arizona. Her mother, her namesake, witnesses this. She remembers her own acceptance to a college in Mexico, being all packed up, and her father asking her

16 (Aero-astro). Damn, he thinks. Luisa sees Luis but doesn’t look at him—he is probably Kathy’s boyfriend or something. Instead, she meets David, a senior from Brown. Luisa continues dancing with David, ends up dating him, ends up breaking up with him three months later. March 1991. Luisa’s friend, also named Luisa (known as tocaya—namesake or “same name”— for the purposes of this story), tells Luisa about this guy, Luis, from that party last semester, who had asked for Luisa’s phone number soon after the party. Luisa asks her tocaya why she didn’t give it to him. “You were dating someone,” tocaya states. So Luisa gets Luis’s phone number from tocaya instead and calls him that night. They talk for hours. They talk for hours the next nine days. On the tenth day, Luisa tells her friends that if Luis doesn’t ask her on a date that night, it’s over. Luis, being a lucky man, asks Luisa on a date that night to go to Hoolihan’s near Faneuil Hall. They go out that weekend. Luis asks Luisa to steal the alcohol menu for him in her purse for his collection of alcohol menus. She thinks it’s weird, yet two months later, she knows she is going to marry him. She knew when he missed the bus and he walked in the rain to Bates from the train station. Luisa’s senior year, Luis starts working at Wellesley College Admissions a year after graduating MIT. He’s the only admissions counselor who is a man. That December, Luisa has to get her wisdom teeth removed, but has no dental insurance. Luis has dental insurance at Admissions so they get legally married at the Town of Wellesley’s Town Hall during his lunch hour, and Luisa’s reading period study break. The rumor goes around the Admissions office that Luis and Luisa got married. Luis arrives back at the office, where he is confronted with “So, what’d

you do during lunch?” “I…got married.” A student assistant is sent to find Luisa at Clapp Library so she and Luis can pop a bottle of champagne together. Another study break for Luisa.

is a guest-in-residence at Tower, where he plans snack breaks and watches ER with Luisa and the students on Thursday nights. Their first child is conceived in Tower.

May 1994. The day after Luisa graduates college, Luis and Luisa are married at the Wellesley College Chapel by the Dean of Religious Life. They take their photos around campus, and have a large Wellesley table at the reception. Their first dance as a married couple is to A Whole New World from the recent movie Aladdin.

Winter, 1995-1996. Luisa walks around, surrounded by two feet of snow, with her winter jacket open to compensate for the heat her pregnant belly brings her. Spring, 1996. Luis and Luisa put up a “name the baby contest” submission on the spam boards that stand in the entrance to Tower dining hall. Two rules: the name can be pronounced in both English and Spanish, and it has to be something you would name your own child. The winning names are Ariana if the baby is a girl, Nicolas if the baby is a boy. Ariana was a student’s best friend’s name from Hawai’i. Luis and Luisa move to Stone-Davis at the beginning of the summer to the room next to the living room on the first floor. June 20, 1996. Luisa’s contractions begin.

Circa March 1995. Azucena’s second child is born. Luis and Luisa meet the baby for the first time. Luisa falls in love, and decides to convince Luis to derail from their original plan to wait ten years to have children. Luisa develops a plan to convince Luis over the course of their next six-hour drive. Ten minutes into the drive, she says, “I want to have a baby.” Luis responds, “Okay.” Circa September 1995. On top of working at admissions, Luis

June 21, 1996. First day of summer, 3:15 AM, the baby that was 75% likely to be a girl, is born: Ariana Cristina Gonzalez-Bonillas. That afternoon, she is brought home to Stone-Davis. Luis’s coworkers at the admissions office are some of the first to hold her. August 1996 to April 2003. Luis, Luisa, and Ariana move to Northern California, then Arizona. Luis and Luisa’s second child, Andrés, is born in Arizona. Near the end of Ariana’s first-grade year, Luis and Luisa decide to move back to Massachusetts out of nostalgia—plus it will help Luisa’s

counterpoint / october 2017

page 13

IDENTITY

Winter, 2003-2004. Luisa suffers a fractured rib because she coughs too hard that winter. It was a record-breaking winter, not to be broken again until the winter of 2014-2015. The family decides to move back to Arizona. September 2004 to October 2013. Ariana pines for a return to Wellesley and does not return until Discover Wellesley Weekend her senior year, traveling with other travel grant recipients from Arizona. She is nervous, thinking that girls at a girl’s school are catty and mean. She has been thinking about Wellesley since third grade, and Luisa has tried to go easy on praising Wellesley because she does not want Ariana to hate her for not making her look at other colleges. Ariana is nervous until she gets to the Latina Cafe, where Mezcla, Cielito Lindo, Familia, and Fusion all offer a supportive and loving community to prospective Latina students. Ariana goes page 14

back home and writes her “Wellesley 100” essay about the campus’s beauty and the Latina community she fell in love with. She realizes she visited a women’s college, where women, femmes, and many intersecting identities want to support and be supported by one another. December 13, 2013. Ariana gets accepted Early Decision to Wellesley College, surrounded by Luisa, Luis, Andrés, and her baby cousin. She is Wellesley College Purple Class of 2018, and her parents get her a Wellesley sweatshirt to match. Ariana graduates high school exactly 20 years after Luis and Luisa got married. (Andrés will graduate exactly 25 years after they get married.) August 2014. Ariana moves into Caz, where Luisa lived one of her semesters here. Ariana is starting 29 years after Azucena first stepped onto campus, and 24 years after Luisa.

On June 1, 2018, Azucena the elder, who signed Azucena the younger’s college papers, will attend Ariana’s graduation, con el favor de Dios. Her husband, Gilberto, cannot attend for health reasons, but is extremely proud to be Wellesley Dad and Tata. Azucena the younger, the first to go to college in her family, will attend. Connie, the middle sister who followed Azucena’s path and was the first Dr. Bonillas in the family, will attend. Dr. Luisa Bonillas, with her matching class color, will attend, of course with Luis (who still thinks MIT’s building numbers make sense), and Andrés. Ariana plans to wear a purple dress to graduation, to match her mother, and a Mezcla stole to honor her Tía’s work. On June 1, 2018, Ariana will join her mother and Tía in Wellesley siblinghood, all having survived and thrived at an institution that was not originally meant for them. Wellesley Chicanas who did.

Academic Year 1976-1977. Yolette García is the first Latina House President of Wellesley College: House President of Beebe Hall. Academic Year 2017-2018. Forty years later, Ariana is House President of Beebe Hall, honored to be in the building where the first Latina House President once was. She has worked at Admissions as a student assistant since her first year, with a counselor that held her at three days old. She has not lived in Stone-Davis since she was two months old. She still attends Mezcla events, where the Executive Board alone is the size of the entire group that Luisa participated in and Azucena cultivated. She works under Mared like Luisa did. She goes out to parties at MIT and Harvard like Azucena and Luisa did.

counterpoint / october 2017

Ariana Gonzalez-Bonillas ’18 (agonzal6@ wellesley.edu) has started to identify as Xicana since getting to Wellesley, which recognizes the indigeneity in her background. She is trying to write everyday, and likes to tell this story in person.

Images: Ariana Gonzalez-Bonillas '18 (left) Jamie McKelvie (right)

research for her dissertation on Women of Color at Wellesley College. Andrés goes to the WCCC—Wellesley Community Children’s Center, next to the Child Study Center—in the purple room with a few professors’ kids. Ariana and Andrés get to be on the Wellesley College campus after school every day because Luis works in IT, and Luisa uses Clapp Library’s archives for her research. Ariana helps Luisa turn the pages of the giant bound books containing old copies of the Wellesley News while Luisa takes pictures. All the while, Ariana falls in love with the campus, with a particular Japanese flowering willow tree in the atrium, with Lake Waban, and with the Mezcla members who are her babysitters. Luisa assists Mared, the new Latina Student Advisor, while Ariana and Andrés play with the children of Mared and the children of Karen, the new Asian Student Advisor.

ARTS & CULTURE

Kamala Khan: The M .-Ing Piece of the Marvel Universe B Y PA D Y A PA R A M I TA

n the day after the 2016 US presidential elections, a queer international student of color found herself at a comic book store faceto-face with a superhero she had never seen before. In encountering Kamala Khan—known by her superhero alias, Ms. Marvel—I discovered a girl much like myself: brown, Muslim, fighting demons, trying to find a balance between Americanization and her South Asian roots. This discovery was incredibly surprising to me for a couple of reasons. First I wondered why I had never heard of her before. How come she wasn’t tearing up headlines and bookshelves everywhere? My second reaction was one of joy and relief. Growing up as a comic book fan, I wanted a brown female role model instead of big buff white men in tight suits fighting Nazis while women fawned over them. By acknowledging the importance of presenting different races in its predominantly white content, Marvel directly challenges the comic book canon in a way they never have before. With the emergence of heroes such as Ms. Marvel, America Chavez, and Miles Morales, perhaps the comic book industry, like other media platforms, has started to realize the importance of representation. Acknowledgement and increased diversity is a step in the right direction in ending people’s hesitation about categorizing comic books and graphic novels as works of literature. Debates in communi-

Content warning: mention of Nazis ties of color continue over what is “legiti- growing up as a Muslim-American! Ms. mate” and “acceptable” literature. Often, Marvel is a revelation, a gift from the comics are categorized strictly as part of comic gods for the young female fans of popular culture, meant for children and the genre, especially for brown girls, hopnot adults or “real readers.” A lot of non- ing to find someone to relate to. While Western women’s stories exist in graphic most female superheroes are older white form, for example, many female-centric women, confident and possessing a very Japanese manga highlight and celebrate specific body type not everyone can idendiversity of race, culture, and gender. tify with, Kamala Khan is a teenager from However, the moguls of the American Jersey City of Pakistani descent, strugsuperhero comics, Marvel and DC, espe- gling to balance her newfound shapeshiftcially in their feature films, have not pre- ing abilities with homework and strict viously showcased superheroes of Asian or family life. By the end of the first series, Latinx descent, nor have they presented she even becomes a part of Marvel’s seaopenly LGBTQ superheroes or mentally soned superhero team, the Avengers, a ill heroes as explicitly as television has. group she starts out as a superfan of. Only a few black leads fight on in the Marvel shapes the story of Ms. Marvel Marvel Cinematic Universe. Usually it is so that young girls can relate to her, which the side characters, such as Nick Fury in is an astoundingly bold step away from The Avengers and Sam Wilson in Captain its usual male-centered content. Marvel’s America—or worse, villains, like Mordo choice to expand their universe to cater to in Doctor Strange—who are portrayed by the diverse demographics of their readers the “minorities.” Asia is also exoticized is a move towards positivity and progress. and stereotyped in these movies, such as On November 9th, 2016, Ms. Marvel when Batman learns martial arts in Bat- helped me to remember there is hope man Begins from a white instructor in out there for anyone fighting for change. Bhutan. Even more formal scholarship It was not the end of the world. Standon graphic novels, like the work of leading there in the comic book store in the ing scholar Hillary Chute, has not been middle of Union Square, I felt seen, unopen to studying the work of artists of derstood, and represented. Even though color beyond the classic Persepolis by Mar- Marvel and DC had, and still have, a jane Satrapi. Scholars refuse to answer the long, long way to go, that day I found a overarching questions of why there is not superhero who is a breath of fresh air in enough autobiographical graphic work by an industry that has not always succeeded women of color, or why experiences from in acknowledging diversity. Holding Ms. and for a non-Western perspective are not Marvel in my hands, I couldn’t be happier portrayed in the canon. for myself and other young female comic Marvel has begun to acknowledge non- book readers out there. homogeneous patterns when it comes to race and reflecting demographics accordingly. Enter Sana Amanat’s Ms. Marvel— Padya Paramita ’18 (pparamit@wellesley. Marvel’s first brown, Muslim superhero, edu) is learning this year how much she who is inspired by Amanat’s experiences truly loves theater. counterpoint / october 2017 page 15

ARTS & CULTURE

An Open Letter to Rory Gilmore BY GILLIAN COURTNEY

ear Rory,

Images: April Chu '21 (left)

In the years to come, you will be criticized for this move. While I am referring in part to the stealing of the boat, I am also writing about your decision to drop out of Yale. I haven’t quite reached the point in Gilmore Guys where they talk about it, but I imagine they will not be kind. Nor was your mother, nor Paris, nor the many hordes of fans who have loved you over the years. But today, dear Rory, I am addressing this letter in your defense. I’ve always considered myself more of a Lorelai. I’m outgoing, outspoken, witty, tireless, and ever the fan of the not-so-funny. I live for celebrations, I occasionally lack groundedness, but the snow and I have a long love story. I, too, am always the mother in any group. I am known for my sage advice, and I think I’d do quite well as an inn owner. Despite all that, I address you today because you and I are also quite similar. For me, high school was about…well, school. I studied hard and—although my school had several—I too ended up valedictorian. Then, I went to a fancy private college, all the while with a mission: to be Great. It’s important, this idea of Greatness, Rory, because I think it’s one you and I are quite familiar with. Greatness is the stuff of all those authors we grew up on. Greatness is the stuff of our mutual hero: Hillary Clinton. Greatness is Christiane Amanpour and Janet Yellen. It’s all your amazing Yale professors, and all my inspiring Wellesley ones. Greatness is the stuff of our peers. I have spent

page 16

counterpoint / october 2017

countless moments feeling dwarfed by the talent of my sisters and friends. I suspect you feel similarly with Paris as a roommate and Logan as a boyfriend. Here’s the thing about this Greatness that you and I have been taught: it’s not just a goal, it’s the goal. As in, it’s the only one that matters. Someone, somewhere along the way, taught us that it’s completely unacceptable not to be newsworthy. We have to be someone, don’t we Rory? Maybe it came from all those years in Advanced Placement schooling with all those kids who schooled us in what our responsibilities were as “gifted” kids. Or maybe it’s our WASP-y grandparents, for whom we are the embodiment of all their hopes and dreams. Maybe it’s just us. We’re too damn ambitious for our own good. Whoever they were, they taught us that nothing short of being the best in our field will do. It doesn’t matter that yours is journalism, and mine is economics, because at the end of the day it boils down to the same thing: I have to be chief economic advisor to the White House, and you have to be a Pulitzer Prizewinning New York Times journalist. It’s just the way things are. I tell you all this, Rory, so you know I’m on your side. When I tell you that’s it okay that you had a meltdown when Mitchum Huntzberger told you that “you didn’t have it,” I really do get it. I want you to know that I’m just like you. I’m not encouraging yacht theft per-say, but I have to tell you that if I’d had a boyfriend like Logan, and access to a dock like that, I probably would’ve done the same thing. It really does suck. It sucks when you realize for the first time that maybe you’re not as Great as you thought you were. You and I used to think that with our brains, and the natural flair that everyone has commented on all our lives, all we had to do was work a little, put in a little sweat equity, “give it a little something”

as Babette would say, and Greatness would be ours. I mean, how could it not be? That’s how we got A’s in high school, right? For people like us, A’s in high school weren’t “nice” or “special”, or even celebratory; they were imperatives. Anything less was failure. We were taught to think of our eventual Greatness this way. It was something we were deserving of if we put in the appropriate work. It was not special. It was not chance. And it was certainly not optional. It’s safe to say that the kind of feedback you received from Mitchum was not just a harsh blow or a setback. What he dished out was the notion that you can’t just work your way up to Greatness. That kind of revelation is earth-shattering to people like you and me. It won’t be for anyone else, Rory. Your mom is never going to understand that. Logan, in his world of privilege, probably won’t either. Neither will Lane nor Luke nor Sooki nor Emily nor Richard. For them, stealing a boat and dropping out of Yale is just stupid, and melodramatic, and incomprehensible. It’s like making a fool out of yourself on national television after you didn’t get into Harvard. Sound familiar? That’s right–Paris Gellar. She, alone, might get this particular brand of heartbreak, but sadly, hers was too long ago and ultimately too inconsequential to be of any help to you. (I mean what really is the difference between Yale and Harvard in the Greatness measure?) No, Rory Gilmore, you’re all on your own. Even though I’m right here with you, I’m on the other side of a television screen and will therefore be no source of comfort. With that in mind that I not only accept, but also applaud, your time off from Yale. When an earthquake like Mitchum Huntsberger comes to topple the shaky ground your entire life plan is set upon, you have to go back to the drawing board.

First, you have to mourn the version of yourself that you have built up for so long. Sadly, she’s gone now. Not because you can’t still be Great, don’t get me wrong, but because that can’t be the goal anymore, Rory. When you let yourself believe that the goal is a version of yourself that’s prettier, smarter, more famous, more successful, and just generally Great, you’re missing the entire point. Trust me. Because the point, Ace (if I may), is to find what you love. It’s fine if what you were doing before is that thing, but what matters is that you have to want to do it, even if it’s not where you dreamed. Even if you’re only a journalist at the Stamford or even the Stars Hallow Gazette, and no one anywhere knows you by reputation (or byline) only, you have to want to go to work each day and do it. That has to be okay, because you’re doing what you love. And then you have to make a smaller plan. Because it’s those ten-year, twentyyear, fifty-year plans to success that’ll get you down. Your goal-oriented to-do list system was great for getting A’s, but it’s not gonna work in life. Life isn’t a series of items to check off the list. Once you’ve done all that, little Lorelai, you have to remind yourself how awesome you are. Maybe one in a million amazing people become Great, but that in no way diminishes how amazing they were to start. And, Rory, are you ever amazing. In the years to come, you’re going to become editor of the Yale Daily News, and a reporter for the Obama campaign. You’ll be published in the New Yorker and you’re even going to write a book. You’re a rockstar, Rory. All those people who cheered you on throughout your life weren’t lying. You deserve the world. Because the universe is a bitch, you’re not going to get it all, but I think if you do as I say, you’re going to earn a substantial bit of happiness. If you doubt me at all, just look at your mother. Like mine, she hasn’t had

counterpoint / october 2017

page 17

ARTS & CULTURE the life she thought she would at sixteen. And like mine, she still hasn’t figured it all out yet. However, you’ll notice your mom found something she loved and found praise through that. She didn’t make the Dragonfly into what it is because she wanted to be on the cover of a fancy travel magazine. Instead, she did what she loved and people noticed, because she, like you, is amazing. I think it’s fair to say she found a bit of happiness along the way, despite all the craziness that life throws at us. You said in your valedictorian speech when you graduated from Chilton that all you ever wanted to be was your mom, and Rory, boy do I know what that’s like. I think if we just try to forget our competitive upbringing, we might just have a shot at achieving that. Now I know that you won’t be following any of my advice, partly because you’re a fictional character who will never have the opportunity to read this letter, and partly because I suspect that Amy Sherman Pallidino didn’t grow up like us and subsequently wouldn’t have known just what you needed. But despite all that, I’ll just say one more thing before I go. I’m sure you remember the time during your first year at Yale when you had your first inkling that maybe you

weren’t cut out for Greatness. You got a D on a paper, had to drop a course, and ended up having a meltdown in front of Dean (who, by the way, was a big mistake at the time…but I digress). The first time I watched you melt down, I too began to cry. I was sitting in the basement of the social science building a week before Thanksgiving in my first year, frantically typing up economics notes because I was so convinced that I was going to fail all my classes. Only a few days earlier, I had sobbed out of a third-story window in the same building into the pouring rain to drown out the sound of my tears. While you were being comforted by Dean, I was being comforted by you and the very idea that someone somewhere might know what it felt like to be me. Even though you were fictional, in that moment, my impending failure didn’t seem so bad because I wasn’t alone. I suppose that’s why I’m writing this letter to you now. Ultimately, it’s for me. It’s a gentle reminder that I’m not alone. You see, Rory, like you, I recently was reminded just how rare Greatness can be through a series of rejections for summer internships, including a few I was sure I was going to get. Now I’m at home for the longest time in forever doing nothing.

In some ways I’m doing my own “time off from Yale” and I will say it’s pretty lonely. But with you, Rory Gilmore, it’s actually not so bad. So one final piece of advice, if I may: while you’re out there soul-searching, make sure you bring a friend along. I’m not talking about your grandmother, or the DAR ladies, or even Logan or Lane or Paris. Find someone who will remind you that you’re never alone, who knows that you’re amazing and tells you daily, and who is willing to drop down and meet you at your lowest low and pick you up to reach that high again. In your case, Rory, even though I know you will not heed this advice, you and I both know I’m talking about your mom. For anyone else who may read this letter, go find the Lorelai to your Rory. You just might make it. Because really, what’s the point of Greatness, or even greatness, if your “mom” isn’t around to revel in it. Anyway, that’s all. See you later, Gilmore. Lots of love, Gillian Gillian Courtney '18 (gcourtne@wellesley. edu) knows it's okay not to be okay.

Three Flakes, Then Four: John Green’s Turtles All The Way Down

hen I was fourteen years old, I bought The Fault in Our Stars at a Barnes and Noble in Darien, Illinois. It was a hot summer weekend, and I spent the afternoon in my grandmother's air-conditioned basement curled up on a blow-up mattress, falling in love with John Green's most recent novel of the time. That night, once I finished the book, I turned to call my mother on the phone. page 18

BY SAMANTHA ENGLISH

When she didn't answer the first time, I tried to tell myself she was fine. She must have just fallen asleep. I waited ten minutes and called her again. She didn't answer. I called again, and again, and again. No answer. I called my aunt, I called my house. No one knew where she was. I tried to calm down and convince myself that nothing could have happened, but I slowly dissolved into panicked tears. No

counterpoint / october 2017

matter how many times I told my mind that my mother was fine, I was utterly convinced she was dead. She wasn't. Her phone had died at her boyfriend's house. She was fine. I, clearly, was not. John Green has not released a book since I was fourteen years old. In that time, I have grown from a teenager with anxiety and OCD tendencies to a Wellesley student with a clearer understanding of

Images: drawingpencils.com (right)

Content warnings: description of anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder

her mental illness and a container filled with blue pills. Green, too, has changed, even if he remains the same author with underlying nerdy references, quotes from long-dead literary figures, and characters with quirks that are hilariously outrageous. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love John Green or think him the greatest author of our generation at one point in my adolescent career. Green is successful because he gets teenagers; he puts himself back into their brains and immortalizes their realities, for better or worse. That being said, Turtles All The Way Down is perhaps Green’s greatest work yet, purely because he doesn’t just illuminate the consciousness of a modern teenager. He gives a glimpse into his own mind— and his own mental illness. Green’s protagonist, Aza Holmes, is sixteen and fears her life is fictional. She repeatedly reopens a wound on her finger, cleans it out, covers it in hand sanitizer, and puts a bandage on it, because she fears she will catch a terrible disease if she doesn’t, or the bacteria in her body will take over because her body really isn’t hers. She likes a boy, but she’s afraid to kiss him, or be close to him, or afraid that when he asks her what she’s thinking about, she’ll have to reveal what goes on inside her head. She spends time reading the same Wikipedia articles over and over, scavenging the Internet for statistics and possibilities about rare infections. She feels her thoughts have a mind of their own. She thinks that no matter how deep down she goes, she never has a self that is truly her. Green’s Aza felt real to me in a way I’ve rarely seen in fiction. Daniel Handler’s Why We Broke Up came pretty close to an internal monologue that I could recognize in my sixteen-year-old self, and Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger presents another, maturer consciousness that I deeply relate to. Green’s novel, though, verbalizes an everyday nightmare that individuals

who suffer with chronic mental illness find as their unintelligible reality. Aza’s streams of inner dialogue between the rational and irrational are versions of arguments that I’ve repeatedly had in my head throughout the years, waiting for someone on the outside to validate my experience in a way that was neither apologetic nor condescending. Even Aza’s own relationship to literature mirrored the reflections I saw myself having with her story and other literature I love. In a particularly poignant scene, Aza quotes Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Not So Far as the Forest,” which describes a snowfall. Aza compares her destructive thoughts to Millay’s observation of “Three flakes, then four / Arrive, then many more,” showing in practice the power of words to reveal inner truths. Sure, Green’s novel still has some of his common tricks (and mistakes). His plot revolves around a missing billionaire, and said-missing-billionaire has a son who is, surprise, Aza’s love interest. He has many one-liners, some of which are clever, many of which are cheesy. Some of Green’s characters might be a bit too intellectually witty for teenagers. Still, they are a far cry from Hazel Grace and Augustus Waters, Green’s teenage protagonists in The Fault in Our Stars who are regularly criticized by readers for their cognitive superiority. Further, this time around, Green’s love story in many ways fails to be a love story. It is instead a friendship story, or, maybe even better, an understanding story. Green’s determination to reveal is what makes this work his strongest. His characters become more real even as they write fanfiction and create a new face from photographs of a hundred real ones; his protagonist portrays reality even as she worries over her own fictionality. Good literature always hopes to reveal a truth of some sort. Whether or not that truth resonates with its readers as real determines that literature’s legitimacy.

Green's Turtles All The Way Down was the truth I needed when I was fourteen and obsessively calling my mom on the phone, when I was fifteen and turned a boy down after saying yes because I panicked over my inability to conceptualize romance, when I was sixteen and couldn’t learn to drive because I was afraid to trust other drivers on the road, and when I was seventeen and convinced no one could ever want me because I was crazy. Through Turtles All The Way Down, John Green has given me the gift of a written consciousness, a novel I can hand to people and say, “See her? That’s me. That’s what it is sort of like to be in my head.” Is Turtles my favorite book? Not even close. Is it perfect? No, certainly not. Neither are we, though. Neither am I. That’s what makes us real. That’s what keeps me trying.

Samantha English ’19 (senglis2@wellesley. edu) still constructs her reality through fiction.

counterpoint / october 2017

page 19

POLITICS

ACTIVIST IN THE MAKING

mmigration policies have always threatened my family’s well-being. I have learned to live in constant fear of deportation and separation. When I was able to understand how one’s citizenship status could determine their “right” to stay in this country, I worried whenever my parents were late in picking me up from school or coming home from work. To me, it didn’t take the election to realize how xenophobic citizens of the United States can be. It didn’t take the election for me to become aware of the broken immigration system. It didn’t take the election for me to want to do something. During my time here, I have realized how real the Wellesley bubble is. It’s so easy to get sucked into academics and extracurriculars to the point where the world becomes so small. But for me, it’s impossible to live in that world. page 20

As a first-year, I came to Wellesley full of ideas and expectations that were fueled by the school’s portrayal of an inclusive and diverse community. Slowly, and painfully, I learned that support cannot simply be advertised on a website or sent through mass emails. Support cannot be shown by vaguely denouncing racist, misogynist, homophobic, and xenophobic rhetoric simply because it goes against “the values of the institution.” Support has to be loud, clear, active, and ongoing. I clearly saw that Wellesley, as an institution, wasn’t going to provide me the tools and support I needed to learn how to organize, so I turned to my community at Wellesley. Many people shared their stories and their complaints about how Wellesley can do better, but they made little to no effort to try to change things. While I understood that

counterpoint / october 2017

BY ANONYMOUS most of them were tired of dealing with constant microaggressions, as well as the weight of being a person of color on this campus and in this country, I was still disappointed. Late in my first semester of my first year, I finally found a group of people that gave me the opportunity I needed to organize and try to push for change. I was grateful to have found these people because I was tired of being angry. I was tired of being tired. I just wanted to do something. However, all this taking action came with a cost. Because the issue of immigration is so personal, advocating for immigrant rights — specifically undocumented immigrants —and feeling little to no support or understanding from faculty and other students, takes an emotional toll on me. I feel drained when

Images: veronicalawlor.com (right, left)

Content warnings: mentions of xenophobia, racism, misogyny, homophobia

I have to answer the question “Why does this matter to you?” over and over again or am appointed to explain this issue to other students during class discussion. This toll on my mental health impedes my ability to perform well academically and enjoy being a college student. At the same time, academics also impede me from putting my all into my activist work. After I stepped into a position of leadership for a political organization on campus, I quickly noticed how I was treated differently than I was before becoming a leader. I was constantly being thanked or told how proud people were of me. This would bother me because I didn’t want to be the sole person being thanked for taking part in larger movement that consists of many activists, past and present. I also didn’t want any sort of validation for my work. I wanted support. I wanted the person, whether someone directly affected or an ally, who said “thank you” or “I’m proud of you” to stand next to me as we push for change rather than just admire me doing this work. At this point in the semester, I face a dilemma. I am stuck between continuing my activism or being complacent with this institution. I realize how much easier it would be to solely focus on my academics and my two jobs. How much easier it would be to keep my head down and do my own thing in order to receive my degree and leave Wellesley. Because after all, that’s why I am here. I came here to be the first person in my family to attend and graduate from college—in order to break the cycle of poverty. Doing this work ultimately feels like I am only hurting myself. Activism takes a toll on my academic performance and my mental and physical health. At the end of the day, the college benefits from all of my work, and the work of other students. Wellesley claims activists’ accomplishments as their own without any acknowledgement of the free student labor that was needed to

push the college to recognize and “fix” the problem. So why do I keep trying? Because that’s all I know how to do. I grew up continually having to fight and having to place others before me. I grew up knowing that I had to leverage any privilege I have to create change and make it easier for the next generation. I learned that you can’t wait for others. You have to get yourself into these positions of leadership and do something. If you don’t do it, no one will. This is not to say this is okay, because it’s not. Every single person on this campus should be advocating for and creating change because this world needs to be fixed. All I’m saying is that you might have to take the first step in order for others to follow. You might not be able to solve all the problems, or even many of them, during your time here, but you can set a foundation for those who come after. Then again, the job is not done after graduation. It’s a lifelong commitment. There are no excuses preventing you from starting now. It sucks. I’m not going to lie to you. I can’t find a way to end this heartwarmingly, because doing this work is fucking hard, but I also can’t end this bitterly, because this work is fucking worth it. This piece was meant to put my story out there for others to read, but more importantly, it was for me to find some sort of solution to this dilemma: between advocating for change versus taking care of myself. But at the end of the day, it’s your call. Some of you might decide that trying to change this place is not worth your time and energy. That’s okay. However, I choose to continue fighting and refusing to remain silent.

I choose to resist. I choose la lucha. I choose el pueblo.

For information about articles published anonomously, please contact the Editor-InChief (ofunderb@wellesley.edu).

counterpoint / october 2017

page 21