PLASTOS by Iconoclast Collective

Cover Art

Layout Editor

Kyra Karakatsanis

Evan Simpson

Directors

Graphic Designers

Sama Al-Zanoon Nara Monteiro Diyana Noory

Sissi Chen Edward Kim Evan Simpson Tracy Xie

Head of Layout Sama Al-Zanoon

photo by DIYANA NOORY

Editors’ Letter The word “plastic” comes from the Greek πλαστός (plastos), which means “molded”. Plastic, silicone, nylon - on both a material and ideological level, we live in a synthetic era, mass-produced and breakable. We are caught in a catch-22: we either manipulate or are molded by our environment. It’s easy to drown in the flood of pictures, people, and products that exemplify what a self-actualized life should look like, and it can be difficult to decipher reality from glossy idealizations. This volume explores elements of artificiality in our lives; deliberate and subconscious, harmless and destructive. Blue Alexander’s work depicts the body as both objective FONY and manufactured, exploring how a binary world influences our mental constructions of ourselves. Sama’s article opens up the liminal space in which both your home and host cultures perceive you as inauthentic, and examines the struggle of living comfortably and truthfully in this indefinable existence. Stef’s photograph embodies “plastos aesthetic” goals, with her hypebae model clad in trendy pink faux fur and a S V-files sports bra. The photo is embellished by reflective Now playing PLASTO foil and fragile bubbles that can pop at any moment, -2:30 1:03 a depiction of the oxymoronic depth of superficiality. Dalla and María’s intimate portraits of each other are soft and conversational, casting a warm girl gaze on the PWR OFF HOME confines of bedrooms and bathrooms where we shape our personal presentation. OPTION BACK

Ironically, for all our talk of bypassing exteriors, PLASTOS has its own highly curated aesthetic. We aren’t denouncing the importance of visual presentation - just look at our magazine. It’s been curated, laid out, edited, chopped up, and polished until the pages gleam. But we always strive for depth first. We hope you enjoy the publication on a multitude of levels - for real. You don’t have to lie about liking it ;) Welcome to PLASTOS. Love, Sama, Nara, and Diyana

art by SAMA AL-ZANOON

Table of Contents 4 8 12 16 20 24

Photos + Art Photos by Stef Eleoff Art by Sama Al-Zanoon

Photos by Alex Lam

Art Art by Blue Alexander + Christine Ellwood

Text + Photos Egg Whites by Nara Monteiro Hard to Kill by Becca Serena Photo by Derek Boswell

Text + Art + Photos Magic by Sydney Brooman Art by Shauna Valchuk Photos by Fayadh Ahmed

Art by Madelon DeCecco

10 14 18 22

Text + Photos Horses by Sydney Brooman Photo by Derek Boswell

Text + Art Third Culture Quandries + art by Sama Al-Zanoon

Text + Art Late Nights Junction by Rose Ghaedi Art by Shauna Valchuk

Photos by Stef Eleoff + Diyana Noory

Photos

by Dalla Zhao + María Angélica Moreno

On the Web Music by Christine Park - I’m Back Music by Del - Tonight + Andelé + Olé

photos by STEF ELEOFF

art by SAMA AL-ZANOON

Horses text by SYDNEY BROOMAN

I am figuring out how to be the best kind of liar

Luxury never did fit right. it swallows me

because choking on soap bubbles to strip and spit out the taste of my own mouth takes too much time and I’m tired of the tired.

wide but in half bites.

the money mask shrinks in the wash but I’ll fit if i want to My roommate asked me for a piece about stay here. horses and it puts me at peace to I’ll call you early ignore a hoarseness to which my thursday and tell you all about throat agrees to hand me the my horses. reins for one night 20 years of history feel more and I don’t know about horses visceral than my wrists and I’ll pretend that I do because i do not need to lie i know nothing better than the about my life because i’ve way I pretend to be memorized the ways in everything at which it buys ink once. pens and note pads when i run out. I am the softest touch of fingers laced through i am always in the process of love like cat’s cradle scripting myself because there’s somei only know what my thing own skin feels like not quite right in each and every poem with a draft I write but i can’t seem to find phantom bedframe and what’s gone sketches of wrong paragraph people are black-lit tracing paper the fun of playing self portraits. God by making horses with my finger tips is i give a lot of riding tips for that i get to pretend that i’ve been someone who’s never even around either seen the saddle. tripping over the off beat i know everyone I’ve ever created rhythm of knees so much better than I know myself the sky smiles back when I see it through a gaze that is not my own but

Stop spinning and the bees hum behind eyes while the blue melts drips and stains my blouse. i’m a little loud for your liking but betting on my horse might just suck the luck out of your life and place it like a lump in the palm of your hand

photo by DEREK BOSWELL

i lie to you and you like it because our play let’s us forget the gap where we think we are supposed to stand so far, it’s gone fine i named my horse after you but i cannot remember your name or mine.

photos by ALEX LAM

“You’re basically a white girl.” An honour bestowed on me by Breanna Anne from my 7th grade homeroom. At that point in my life, I was quietly delighted by the idea that I, an Arab Muslim, had been accepted into the white people club. I guess the process of inviting me to the white people club was easy enough since I’m pretty fair, and my Arabic features are relatively subtle. My other features separate me from actual white girls - my black hair is thick, and it grows between my eyebrows and along my arms. My name is weird and unpronounceable (despite being two syllables long), and I never respond when they try to call me Sam. When I was younger I didn’t know what meatloaf was, and I didn’t understand what they meant when they said they were “going up north” for the weekend. I’d have to explain why my lunches looked strange and had more than salt and pepper as seasoning (how do people not know what oregano is?). Even though I had been christened a white girl, I knew and they knew that it was fake.

text and art by SAMA AL-ZANOON

On the other hand, my Arabic language skills were lacking and I always tripped when other Arabs tried to make me dance dabke with them. When we prayed and recited passages from the Quran, I was mouthing nonwords and thinking about the za’atar manakish I had that morning. In a fit of stress over their children losing touch with their culture and faith, my parents moved us to Jordan in 2003. I was dumped into an Arabic as a Second Language class, and my parents hoped this would reverse all the white-washing that Canada had done. Instead of feeling at home in the Middle East, I was labeled as “that Canadian girl” and teased because I was the Arab who didn’t even know how to read Arabic. Years later when we moved back to Canada, I was thrown into English as Second Language classes because any foreigner is, of course, unable to to understand English. This was much to my surprise, since the only language I spoke fluently was English. My reality is that I’m too white to be Arab, and not white enough to be white.

Most of the time white people accept me until they’re clued into my Arab background, and then they see me as a little more like a terrorist than they would like. Many of them are a little shaken, as if being a white-passing person of colour (PoC) is deceptive - how can they safely decide whether or not to be racist in front of me? When people ask where I’m from, I often say I am an Arab from Palestine. But it always feels strange because I’ve never lived in Palestine, I don’t speak its language fluently, and I don’t observe most of the country’s traditional customs. I have as little a connection to “back home” as I do to Canada, my host home. This displacement narrative isn’t unique. Second generation immigrants, or third culture kids (TCK), who are raised in countries outside of their parents’ homeland fall along a spectrum of assimilation to their host culture. The issue becomes apparent when people from both of your cultures view you “other”, as if the othering that you experience from just being a PoC isn’t enough. TCKs don’t relate 50% to their host culture and 50% to their home culture; it could never be so simple for us. We adapt to our lack of belonging in different ways. Some, maybe out of fear that they are losing their heritage or pressure from their parents, try to hold on to every single shred of their home culture as possible. TCKs have little exposure to their home culture as it is in the present; the information they’ve gathered about the customs is obtained indirectly through their parents past recollections and possibly stereotyped media sources. Inevitably the perception of their home culture is not a true representation, but a constructed idea of what they think their home culture is. While the culture of people still living in their home country adapts to change, those who live outside of their home country hold on to an idealized version of their culture as their family had left it. As a result, their idea of what their heritage means is static. Others attempt to completely separate from their home culture and assimilate to their host culture. This is often influenced by an

environment that holds white people and “whiteness” at the highest desirability and excludes cultures that differ. “Whiteness” is a combination of values and lifestyles that white people think are only exclusive to them such as progressiveness, liberalism, politeness, intelligence, bland food, etc. However as hard as you try to whitewash yourself, PoC will always be PoC; no amount of pumpkin spice lattes will ever make you white. Even if there was, being white should not be seen as some kind of divine status which everyone should aspire to be. TCKs end up belonging to neither culture, hence creating a “third culture” and a feeling of homelessness. Sure, studies show that we are more likely to learn more languages, are more adaptable to change, have wider worldviews, and are more culturally aware, but these feel like small advantages considering that the cultures we belong to view us as fakes. Some people feel that their own experience as a TCK is freeing - we get to choose which identity you want to be a part of; we choose which mask we’ll put on. On some days I’ll call myself Canadian and on others I’ll say Arab-Canadian or Arab, showing a different side of my identity depending on the audience I’m interacting with. Is this freedom or is it a cascade of misrepresentations of my true self? We don’t have a stable identity; people are always skeptical of how we identify ourselves, and instead try to classify us according to their scale of how white or non-white we are. It takes us so many mistaken trials to conform to either culture until we realize that we shouldn’t need to choose one of our cultures in order to be accepted; we shouldn’t need to choose a facade for people to view our identity as legitimate. Recently, one of my professors told me that I seemed very progressive for someone from an Arab family. Another honorary invite to the white club. Although this one was articulated more elegantly than Breanna’s invitation, the underlying implications are the same - an attempt to classify what culture I belong to, and an insult to my heritage based on its nonwhiteness. This time, I declined the offer.

art by BLUE ALEXANDER

art by CHRISTINE ELLWOOD

Late Nights Junction text by ROSE GHAEDI There’s nothing quite like the cold, impersonal tile of a bathroom floor at the end of a long night. Outside the door the bass is pounding, shaking the floor and the window frames, but it feels far away from her, as if she’s underwater. An angry red indent is starting to form on her left thigh where it’s pressing into the floor, the fine fibers of her rayon tights slowly snapping apart one by one, a blazing highway of coldness on her side. She loves this, the point where she’s so tired she’s no longer a person. Eyes that can’t go any higher than half-mast, a world that’s not blurry but so sharply defined it’s grainy, like a computer processing a photo on dial-up. Like there’s a humming inside her skull. She looks up and sees herself in the mirror: she looks like a doll with all the insides taken out. The moment seems both infinitely lengthy and somewhat alien, like she’s taken a dainty step out of the stream of time. When the bathroom door clangs open, the cool bluewhite haze is thrust to the edges by garish sunset tones and all that time collapses, so that her moment of peace suddenly seemed impossibly short, a fraction of a fraction of a second. The heels come into view first, velvet and black and tottering casually on a pair of spindly, glacial stilettos. Cue the somewhat distasteful but classic slow pan up and down: heels, delicate ankle tattoo, shorts, silver top, shimmering lids, wild hair, stop. Heels blinks at her, flushes a blank smile, flips her gaze to the mirror, stares at her reflection- stares it down, more like. “Crazy night, huh?” Heels tries to say, but the moment she parts her lips a swarm of locusts fly out, drowning out the words with their screeching. She tilts her head, as if to dislodge something that’s blocking her hearing, and shakes her head at Heels. “I said-” The buzzing, again. Heels tries a few more times before giving up with a soft huff, and considers the seated girl for a few seconds: her droopy eyes, hair bone dry from the bright dye, rips running down her tights. Heels leans against the wall, looking down at her feet. The wall is tiled like the floor, with untold grime from countless girls and countless nights creeping out from between the edges. “You should probably throw those tights away,” Heels murmurs, as the white pattern starts to go out of focus, and Heels feels herself drifting away from her body, watching from over her own shoulder.

There is, after all, a certain kind of magic in the world that only comes out after two am. It’s the kind where the chill sets in on the top layers of her skin and seeps in, calming the constant racket of being a person. On one side of her temple, there’s a vague, dispersed kind of pressure, diffused around a feeling of sharpness that doesn’t quite hurt- it’s that ridiculous plastic headband, an almost offensively bright color, pleasingly smooth with a futuristic sheen of plastic. She takes it off reverently, with two hands, runs a finger over the rounded pinprick edges, each spike a little reminder, and then drops it to the floor next to her heels. The girl sitting on the ground watches it roll for a second, and another, and another, until it tips over onto its side, shiny and discarded. Her throat’s dry; her kohl-lined eyes inch over to the sink. She’s watching the drip-drip of the faucet when suddenly the light oscillates: dim-bright-dim, cool-warm-cool, and the sound follows: far-near-far, real, not real? There’s the whine and swing of a door. A pair of hands with fine, elegantly tapering fingers cleverly flick the faucet open. She doesn’t want to look up- what face could possibly match those hands? Heels looks up from the floor, no longer taking those deep in-out breaths, meets Hands’ eyes. Blank smile, back to the floor. She looks back at the hands, now dry and tapping an off-beat tune on the sink. They don’t look like much anymore. “That’s not very hygienic,” she tries to say, but the buzzing stops her. Heels and Hands look at her with mild curiosity and she runs her tongue along the inside of her teeth, checking for the source of the buzzing. She catches a glance of Hands’ face. It has all the features of a face, but she can’t quite recognize it as one. Hands turns off the faucet finally, painted nails shifting colors under the surgical light. She’s tempted to look at Heels, to check if the world has finally lapsed into facelessness, or, more likely, if the acid is starting to kick in. A smattering of knocks against the door makes her jump. The door threatens to swing open but doesn’t quite manage to.

art by SHAUNA VALCHUK

“Lily, you still in there? We’re about to bounce, come on.” Another sprinkle of taps against the door, her friend’s nails sharp against the shitty paint. She can’t quite remember her friend’s name and wonders if she’ll even be able to recognize her friend once she leaves the bathroom. Heels is peering out from under her bangs. She has a face, at least.

HARD-TO-KILL text by BECCA SERENA

The plants are always dying no matter where I prop them up Little plastic labels (moist dirt clinging to the bottom), online guides burning retinas in post-midnight moonlight, the advice of the short woman at the flower shop (at the market back home, even) Yet the green crisps to brown, moss fried and ivy falling, the light never quite right to sustain such simple life

photo by DEREK BOSWELL

EGG WHITES A Poem by a Yolk text by NARA MONTEIRO My mother kept saying it was hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk so I tried it. I never got to see if it worked, but grounded in the kitchen, I imagined the yolk popping under somebody’s heel and the clear goo going milky. When we moved here I knew it was cold enough to make ice cubes outside but by then I kept food off the floor. The egg didn’t turn white in my daydreams anymore; it doesn’t get that hot here. But I learned the whites are better for you and I learned that I’m a yolkier colour (with the u). Did you know, I only noticed that when I came here? I only noticed with you. When I went back, I learned what my mother meant so I sat on the sidewalk myself and I turned less and less white. Here, my tongue looks too pink for my face in the winter and I don’t want to close my mouth anymore. I know it actually does get that hot here, a couple of times a year, but there’s something still paler about the colour of the sun (with the u).

photo by STEF ELEOFF

photo by DIYANA NOORY

photos by FAYADH AHMED

art by SHAUNA VALCHUK

Magic Magic Magic Magic text by SYDNEY BROOMAN

It doesn’t stop itching because oatmeal bathes don’t do wonders for wanting to die but i guess chicken pox leaves scars too and is just as contagious does your breath feel the same coming out as it does going in? marks on plaster drawn without rulers we used the Crayola colours no one wants and i’m pretty sure dandelion yellow lost us the rental security deposit mr. clean erasers do the trick well but only later was it clear that the magic is only chemical burning nothing really leaves this world for good unless you feel it hurt on the way

out

MARÍA ANGÉLICA MORENO shot by DALLA ZHAO

DALLA ZHAO shot by MARÍA ANGÉLICA MORENO

art by MADELON DECECCO

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