caro
EVERYTHING IN THIS ZINE WAS CREATED BY MARIE ANNETOINETTE, UNLESS OTHERWISE STATED
Issue 1: The Introduction 3
The End of All Things
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Letter From the Editor
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Mixtape: Starview Avenue
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But You Can’t Stand to See Me
That Way
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The Girl I Am and the Girl You
Want Me
to Be, Pt. 1 11
Let’s Talk About: ANIMORPHS
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The Girl I Am and the Girl You
to Be, Pt. 2
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Want Me
The End of All Things I'm having one of those experiences; you know the ones: you're looking at a picture of yourself in the past and thinking "I was small , I was cute, If I could have seen myself then with the eyes I have now." But I couldn't then and I can't now. Hammered into my mind are the same epithets from 5th grade that refuse to be worn away by time: Hurricane. Tornado. GorillaGodzilla. It's difficult to erase words associated with natural destruction. For a long time I refused to acknowledge them at all; but while I was pretending that I hadn't been called a disaster of epic proportions just because my body took up more room. But an idea is an unkillable virus and as I grew (older and fatter) the sickness took hold. It was hard to feel my heart breaking on the rocks of an 11-year-old's words, and more difficult to understand that the only reason his words were so effective was because I believe them and continued to believe them. The picture in this poetic collage is myself and it's not my most flattering or my best pose. It's not artful because I didn't feel artistic. This is just my body... parts of it anyway. But parts that are unavoidably fat and trouble to the rest of me. For a long time I've avoided looking at them while bemoaning the fact that I have no pictures of myself. No more avoidance. If I'm going to be a disaster I'm going to be a magical one, answering unspoken questions, and hiding the answers everyone already thinks they know. I will only allow myself to be touched by the pure-of-heart, by those who mean me no harm.
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Thank you for reading caro! Caro is a perzine in the truest sense of the term; it’s a public journal; a place for the germination of my art, academic writing, and poetry; a conversation starter; and—if you know how to read it right—a folded and faded map to my innermost being. I’ve included original writing, collage art, and the ubiquitous mixtapes. (see right ->)
I’m reminded of a quote from Book about Zines here, “Sometimes only the page will listen” As a young poor Southern Black girl, it was true; sometimes I only had the pages of my journal to express everything I felt and feared. But while I enjoyed writing, the anonymity— the quiet— the cloistered and private nature of journaling never sat-
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isfied my exhibitionist itch. I’ve been publishing newsletters, zines, and chapbooks for family and close friends since I was nine and I’ve been working on this project for about four years. While there may be contributions from other friends of mine who love to share, most of the art and writing you see here will be mine. I’ll be discussing my personal perspective on everything from family, culture, race, class, art, religion, entertainment, fashion, gender and sexuality, history, philosophy… Honestly anything that comes to mind that I’d like to share. I hope you enjoy the experience and don’t be afraid to email me in response to anything you see here! My contact info is on the back cover and I’d love to reason together. :)
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I know that the manic-pixie-dream-girl trope isn't seen as very feminist but you have to understand that-to reference Kerry Washington- it's not often that we as Black women get to be seen as beautiful, delicate, eccentric, otherworldly, and fey, even when we have those traits! So it's a step up for me to even be considered a MPDG, you know? There’s this...feminine persona that is widely appreciated and I see that it’s a part me a part of who I am. I identify with that narrative. But I also realize that few others see this persona in me, the way I do. I caught and still sometimes catch myself trying to massage away the aspects of myself that stopped others from seeing the manic pixie dream girl in me (my fatness, my blackness). I remember walking in this park in my town after I'd gotten off work and it was the perfect place to do a photo shoot. I was seeing myself in different dresses and poses and honestly? It was a lot of stuff that, I felt (feel) would never happen, and even if it did it wouldn't look the way I planned and would basically be an utter failure and I would be a pitiable laughing stock. Not because the visual concepts were shitty, but because I was too fat, too black, and too broke to ever pull it off. And it just dropped into my mind that I never got the chance to be the girl I wanted to be.
I’ve been using the phrase “the girl I am and the girl you want me to be" over and over for the last few years, and I finally understood what I myself meant by that. Between the girl I am and the girl you--whoever “you” is; my mother, my family, society at large--want me to be, I never got to be the girl I wanted to be and... That was a hard revelation, you know? I'm 25, I never got to be the girl I wanted to be, and now that chance is completely gone. It hurt. I managed not to cry but only just. That revelation felt like an important part of my had died. After a while of trying to keep my composure, I just thought, "Well, what about the woman you want to be?" And I had to resign myself, you know, and about face. That point in my life is gone and it
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hurts that I felt (sometimes, still feel) so unfulfilled. But, I can still be the woman I have in mind, the woman I really am. It's true that this movie character trope is riddled with sexist male-gaze tripe, but it's funny. I mean this dream girl, basically a modern muse embodying every stereotype about women's mental instability, fickle nature, etc. wrapped up in one uber twee package. What should be appealing about that? I think that my favorite online discussion about this trope is actually from two years ago on Racialicious and by Tami Winfrey Harris* and the comments are mostly well thoughtout and insightful though they come from several different directions and perspectives. On one hand the trope is particularly problematic, in that it promotes a two-dimensional character that is really only created for the purpose of helping a male character deal with his problems and to better understand himself or the world, and that it is also a part of this movement back to harmless unaggressive traditional womanhood and promotes the idea of white female infantilization. However, what I've seen in more recent years—most notably on social media outlets, such as tumblr—are attempts to subvert or invert the idea of the carefree, diy, softgrunge, pastel goth, manic pixie, hipster muse, and make that adorable childlike girl the main character of the her own story. The focus is shifted to her ideas, her feelings, and her problems as a fully-fleshed out character, with the intent of taking back all expressions of femininity and womanhood. That is not to say that there aren’t still a myriad issues; much of the inversion/subversion is just as alienating as the original trope, because even though the male-gaze is being removed, the race, body, and class aspects of this trope are never addressed: which, let's be honest, is not unusual for mainstream (read: white) feminism. Black women
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are almost never acknowledged to be these women. And poor (fat) black woman doing any of these adorable twee hipster things are pretty much never seen as adorable or twee or hipsters by the general media-consuming public. On some level, this seems like a compliment; at least we aren't being reduced to super-feminine stereotypes and being infantilized, right? And I would agree until I realized what this means is that as a Black woman, I was not seen as capable of being feminine and pretty and dreamy or, or, or... impossibly twee. A black girl dyes her hair unnatural iridescent colors and she ends up on the Ratchet Mess tumbr. A white girl does the same and she ends up on trending the same media platform and pinned to Pinterest boards worldwide. And not only that, but Black female children weren’t allowed to be children, even in this context. They are labeled as hypersexual even before puberty, where white woman can and do embody the idea of sacred childlike-(non) sexuality aka virginity. And while both of these are oppressive... I'm not gonna lie, the grass looks greener. This is a problem in the Black community, as well, though the class, color, and body restrictions are slightly different than in the white community. However, there is still so much absorption of the white beauty ideal and the white feminine ideal, even among Black women. It's been remixed and refit to reflect the more of the African American aesthetic, but it is not removed... I remember going to a sleepover and apparently plenty of the girl had gas, we had all had barbecue food earlier so yeah beans, you've all been there. So the girls, the other girls, the thinner, lighter-skinned, looser-curled, socially-accepted-asadorable girls, fart and laugh at each other and think it's so funny. They have none of the fear that I have, that if I joined in, people (they) would look at me with reproach and disgust. And they never wonder why it is they are allowed to talk about their bodies and their bodily functions and I am not. Not without losing all desirability and any credibility as a “lady”. They burp the alphabet in front of their boyfriends and everyone think "Oh she's so down to earth and approachable, a cute girl who’s not stuck up at all!" I accidentally burp as quietly as possible with my
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mouth closed and my hand covering my mouth and politely say excuse afterward and... People’s faces change, they sneer, they're distant, they don’t look me in the eye and I can’t help but think they’re wondering why I was even allowed to be at this party or in this group. They express the fact that they are horny and the reaction is “Wow, a cute girl who is open and accepting of herself as a sexual being; that’s so awesome!” I express the same sentiment and—even though I’m the one with the least sexual experience— the looks of disgust return. Anything that strayed from the hyper-feminine behavior expected of me sent me from being the slightly invisible, supportive friend to the scary fat black sex monster; a succubus ugly, utterly undesirable, and frighteningly insatiable. But on the other hand, the rest of the world is telling me that I had better not strive too hard for that which is impossible, to be seen as feminine and womanly and attractive or I would become the butt of the joke, only worth noticing to note her failure at being woman. I hold no bitterness (I try to hold no bitterness) but these are my personal experiences, and many other black girls and women can corroborate them with similar experience. What the MPDG critics seem not to understand is that it is just as radical for a poor woman and/or fat woman and/or woman of color to declare herself a girl, as always having been a girl, as deserving of girlhood and the protections and value that come along with that, as anyone else. They don’t understand that it’s radical for a woman to say that the things she does because she is poor (knitting, gardening, sewing, biking, drink cheap beer, whatever) have just as much, IF NOT MORE, value when she does them than when someone does so because it's trendy and in. That the embracing of the manic pixie dream girl role/aesthetic is not to reinforce oppressive gender roles but to be human.
Yes. It's true. Sometimes, I can be impossibly adorable. And *sorry, not sorry* everyone should recognize it.
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A few weeks ago I logged onto tumblr (who am I kidding, I just typed ‘t’ into my address bar, I don’t log out and Chrome already knows to take me directly to my dashboard). I scrolled past the styling of my peers, rants about when a post from fyanimorphs.tumblr.com caught my attention: Animorphs had been added to Netflix. Animorphs was originally a book series written by K.A. Applegate and ghostwritten by several others for the Scholastic Reading Club. The novel series was about four teenagers and an alien from the Andalite homeworld fighting an invasion of other slug -like aliens called Yeerks, who invaded humans brains with the plan to take over the planet. The teens (Jake, Marco, Rachel, Cassie, and Tobias) encounter the crashed ship of the Andalite prince, Elfangor. Elfangor gives the teens the ability acquire the dna o an living being and morph into it before he is captured and eaten by Visser 3, the only Yeerk to take over an Andalite body and therefore the only Yeerk with morphing capbilites like the Andalites. The young adolescent Andalite— Aximili Esgarrouth Isthill followed his brother Elfangor to Earth. Ax is found by the teens and joins the them in their efforts at guerilla warfare against the Yeerk invasion. I regularly gathered my pennies, nickel, dimes, and quarters to buy the Animorphs books and checked out the ones I couldn’t buy from the school library. For a good portion of the students in my fourth and fifth grade class, Animorphs and any memorabilia associated with it was hot shit. Reminiscing
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over Animorphs brings back not only memories of the books themselves but of furious classroom trading to make sure everyone who was interested go a chance to read the latest novel. I’ve been trying to buy the full set of novels and spinoffs for awhile but the money just hasn't been there and being able to watch the series Nickelodeon produced was the next best thing. I sat one weekend for my usual binge watch and was thrown back in time. I remember the profound mixed feeling of excitement and disappointment: excitement at the prospect of a long-loved favorite of mine was being realized as a television show—one of the first in what is now a well-established trend of turning YA novels into movies and TV shows—and disappointment at the casting, the writing, the obviously limited budget, and the overall execution of the series. I knew it wasn’t going to last for that reason alone, and it didn’t. Also we were just entering the world of creating actually compelling series for teens involving real moral dilemmas, real blood, and real character development. Animorphs was groundbreaking as a Scholastic series and is known by its fans for one of the few if not the only children’s series dealing with the realities of being at war. It’s apparent that the TV show attempted to capture the essence of the series, but the limitations of a Nickelodeon budget at that time worked against what could have been a mind-altering sci-fi premier for kids was instead a parade of whitewashing, racial stereotypes, badly constructed costumes and bad animation. Cassie is much lighter than the medium dark brown depicted in the books, all the characters are a older (not unusual nowadays with actors in their mid-twenties playing fifteen year olds; fortunately it’s not that bad), and Marco uses an amount of what the producers must have thought was appropriate street slang I don’t remember from the character in the books. His sense of humor also isn’t quite the same and Marco's humor is one of the *highlights* of the novel series. However even with all those drawbacks the series still had the power to pull me in. By the third episode the actors find their stride and while there are some changes in how Yeerk bi-
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ology is explained, for the most part the TV series is faithful to the novels. I hope that the renewed interest in 1990s nostalgia will prompt a television or movie series remake that will deliver on the efforts of the Nickelodeon series and do justice to beloved work of K.A. Applegate.
(Two) Animorphs Fansites 1. http://cinnamonbunzuh.blogspot.com Cinnamon Bunzuh offers comprehensive and absolutely hilarious reviews of every Animorphs book, incluing the Megamorphs series, the Chronicles series, and the Alternamorphs series with original graphics. The blog (run by Ifi and Adam) is a great way to catch up on any of the books you’ve missed! Don’ t be afraid to drop by and leave a comment or two :). 2. http://fyanimorphs.tumblr.com Fuck Yeah Animorphs is a tumblr that hosts fanart, pictures of Animorphs fans’ collections, and pulls some of the most pithy or poignant quotes from the book. 3. Honestly, there are many many more than this but you can find them yourself! Enjoy!
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CREATOR/EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MARIE ANNETOINETTE marieannetoinette@gmail.com
ABOUT Caro Sometimes you just need an outlet for all the questions; caro is an invitation for brain dump and discussion, to marvel and to reason together.
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