In Solidarity Fall 2013 by In Solidarity

Table of Contents Belle Espinal K r i s t a L a Fe n t r e s Sarah Lomax Ta n y a Tr a n a n d K a r l O r o z c o Brannon Rockwell-Charland Anonymous Dyaami D’Orazio Gabriela Hurtado-Ramos kaela sanborn-hum Jasmine Adams Anthony Moaton Ana Robelo Brenda (B) Álvarez V i c t o r i a Ve l a s c o Anonymous Joelle Eliza Ling at Ana Robelo

3 4 8 11 12 14 16 17 20 21 22 24 28 31 32 35 37

in SOLIDARITY From the Editors: Hello,

STAFF

Joelle Eliza Lingat kaela sanborn-hum Victoria Velasco

COVER ART BY

Brannon Rockwell-Charland edited by: kaela sanborn-hum

THANK YOU: Jan Cooper, advisor Multicultural Resource Center Contributors The Board of Trustees

In Solidarity is a publication created by and for students of Color at oberlin college. This is a compilation of artistic expressions in many forms reflective of our experiences on this campus and beyond. On October 10, a coalition of students presented five demands at the Board of Trustees Open Forum. These demands are rooted in student organizing and resistance to structural oppressions upheld—whether consciously or not—by this institution. The response to these students’ actions was not unfamiliar or surprising; students who venture to apply what they learn in the classroom to their practiced politics have continually been met with silencing “civility.” On October 17, Clyde S. McGregor (‘74) released the “Board of Trustees Update” on The Source. He critiqued the method of delivery, rather than the content, of the students’ demands, asserting that we “chose to express [our]selves in ways that belied our community’s expectations of respect and civility.” On October 30, our Beloved (President) Krislov published “Civil vs. Incivil Discourse.” This speaks for itself. For this issue, we chose to explore the theme of incivility. We claim this as our own. We will continue to uphold the voices of our community. We reaffirm our active presence on this campus. We hope In Solidarity continues to serve the purpose of motivating future students to continue the fight against these institutionalized struggles at oberlin college. Civil or not. In solidarity, Joelle Eliza Lingat kaela sanborn-hum Victoria Velasco

Belle Espinal 3

Krista LaFentres 4

Mother Krista LaFentres

My mother has a new boyfriend. I am not sure if this happened before or after the divorce. Either way, I have always agreed that my parents were the type of people to tear each other apart and feed off the broken pieces.

We don’t talk often but she sometimes calls me to tell me about her life. She’s started cooking again, often, and something she hasn’t done since before I left for college. She told me two weeks ago that she was making enchiladas and cheesecake for her man. I thought como abuela in my fragmented and poorly pronounced (even in my head) Spanish. I told her I needed to go.

My mother’s words are open and unadorned, her accent shifting and fitting always. She cusses without apology. She stands in line at the grocery store and asks the young couple in front of her about their favorite music, their jobs, tells them inappropriate jokes. When I picture her in my head, she is always wearing a t-shirt she took from my half-brother when they finally met a few years ago. Black, covered with the image of a tattooed hand, flipping off everyone.

The new boyfriend says that she says fuck so often it makes him blush. He says it is TOO MUCH. I want to say fuck that but I don’t. These things will only sound silly in my voice.

Krista LaFentres 7

Colony Sarah Lomax in case you forget that you are privileged, i took the liberty of making you a checklist. (to make sure you get this, i slipped it in the end of our script so you know where we left the scene unfinished.) i. i am not your colony. do not interrogate me as to why you think i’m shy, drilling holes into my head with a cure of pessimism and “reality,” this is not your body not your heart beat mind skin, or spirit. let go. ii. don’t tell me what to do as if you own me; your hypothesis yields no answers but the ones you want to see, so you’re just wasting my

time. iii. you don’t know me. no matter how many times your hands dip over my valleys or glide over my peaks spread-leg iron grip murmurs ‘yes’, you do not control me. (p.s, i’m not boring, you’re just hungry for more conquest.) iv. who do you think let you in? i did. i never had to share myself much less invite you; so don’t claim my space and silence me once we’re done being more-than-friends. if you think i’m just a sentence worth one line in your novel, here. let me spoil the plotline. (she left and that was the end.)

State of War Sarah Lomax Reclamation of her body was a declaration of war. Days didn’t yield to her an easy answer as she had hoped they would – only years were willing to give her the answer in the form of wrinkled tees and baggy jeans hidden in the bottom of the drawer, signs that she was beginning to grow out of this state of being. Her growth became a reward. By the time she hit the college doors, she had fit these clothes no longer. They obscured her frame; there was no good that came from the very material made her hide the curves of her hips, the swing of her thighs, and no blessed joy burst from her breath as she played like she wasn’t like ‘the other girls’. What ‘other girls?’ This isn’t some manic-pixie-dream-girl-turned-novella. Competition for ‘individuality’ was a bottle being sold by the higher-ups who made women believe they were all packaged the same, wrapped up tight in polished plastic and ready to go for tune-up by the highest bidder (usually the most incivil one with their fists banging on the cardboard). It’s a game with poor rules, so she quit. Insecurities were shed and she began working the skinny jeans, crop tops, tight tees and button-ups. Pride leaked from her pores as she let loose hair that used to hardly leave her head. Her make-up got bold. She, got bold. Battles were won. She was now queen; conqueror. No one could dare tell her femininity made her weak when she made it a display of her own brilliance, made it her new armor. Hostiles would keep away from the land that she owned. Her body? Her rules. (That is, my rules.)

Lights A Match and Counts to Three

Tanya Tran & Karl Orozco

Line The Walls With Newsprint

Brannon Rockwell-Charland 12

Nature’s Night Anonymous With dubious cause a day transpires. The night appears, Our sun expires. The moon befalls our rugged earth And coaxes the tide To greet her girth. Howling comes the impetuous wind, Yearning to graze Earth’s frigid skin. Conscience life dispels, for a moment, Bewitching death And its main proponent. The sun, so vain, peaks to see What such darkness Has done for thee. Alas, the night Removes her things Replaces tide, Pacifies the wind. For this is the way of nature’s whims.

I Am a Happy Sinner Anonymous Capitulate, Dear words of wisdom. For always it has been, That err is often sweet And sinfulness routine. Nourish me with Playful folly. Brim my body, Lies and Laughs. For unfaithful piety Can’t save eternal And righteous words Won’t sate my soul.

Mi Primer Half-Poema en Spanish Dyaami D’Orazio

Dedicated to Peter Saudek and Sophie Weinstein Yo casi no hablo el espanol Y perdon si tropiezo sobre mis verbos Yo casi no se donde van los acentos en las palabras Yo apredi hablar y escuchar Escuchando por much de mi juventud Porque Boriquas y Italians son habladoras El espanol, el ingles, y el e-Spanglish Mas a menudo yo y mi mama Cambiamos entre las tres Escogiendo las palabras according to ease Moviendo mi lengua, my tongue, pa’qi y pa’lla Y I didn’t want to take Spanish in school Nadie hablaba con mi acento Me senti mal I felt obnoxious Tossing my voice into the classroom Spanish poems falling out of my mouth, I thought they were so pretty, Pero nadien queria practicar conmigo No practice no attempts to join in Y que pasa when you speak better than your profesora? I had pride and shame in school Y en mi casa solo shame Porque mi mama me llamaba la gringa Gracias, Mami, tough love works Estoy aqui, no? Hablame, cantame Vamos aprendiendo Vamos hablando Vamos amando

The Texans Gabriela Hurtado -Ramos 17

untitled kaela sanborn-hum i exist in this world through many masks but I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re veiling one hidden underlying truth. i am not one, I am many. language is a mask. slurred, smooth slang coating comfortable conversation

i hold many truths.

or the clipped, serious intones infiltrating guarded, distant speech. i find myself navigating these verbose waters trying to find the (dis)course, to bring me home. i am adrift. when i started to conceal parts of myself. my nature is transitory, my evolutions my whole truths never truly understood but scattered among many.

i wonder when my parents started to lose me malleable

The Sum of Life Jasmine Adams Mathematically speaking 1+1=2 Since that’s the case what’s me+you? If we add feelings and multiply time does that make it true? Or is subtracting all the background noise what we need to do? 2+6-3=5 If we take the square root of love are we anymore alive? Or is the addition of our hearts an equation for lies?? Does the multiplication of our eyes make those lies magnified? 4x2=8 If loving God gets us to heavens gate Is true love worth the wait? Or does love x misunderstanding equal hate As simple as addition wouldn’t love minus hate be the solution? Or is the teaching of false love what leads to destitution? A heart hardened by the world In the body of a little girl Add a guy who could change it all Squared by love to break the fall. New beginnings is what the equation of love leads too. Just like math; me+you If we multiply our lives, Add our hopes & dreams Dedicate to one another time, even before the rings. Subtract the pain Divide by two Then love is what we will use to get through. 1+1 the simplest equation right? Add me+you+love and get the sum of life

Call Me RuPaul Anthony Moaton The first time I ever saw the drag goddess RuPaul was when she was in The Brady Bunch Movie. She played Jen’s guidance counselor, and was beautiful, vivacious, and always ready to tell it like it is, in typical RuPaul fashion. At the time, it did not strike me that RuPaul was a man who was dressed up in women’s clothing, RuPaul just simply existed for me as a very funny character in a horrible movie. However, I remember my dad telling me in his straightforward manner “Tony, don’t ever become a transsexual.” Transsexual. What did that mean? At the time, at which I couldn’t be any older than 9 or 10, I probably thought that it had something to do with being gay, something that my family had issues with. Not only were the concepts of homosexuality and transsexualism controversial ideas in my family, but they also seemed to be comedic targets in black culture. I remember many times in “African-American TV shows” where if a black male character acts effeminate or is, God forbid, a homosexual, he would be compared to the famous drag queen. It seemed that any depiction of queer male blackness revolved around drag queens and limp wrists and high-pitched voices and sashaying around which were definitely not the archetype for black masculinity. Given these images at such a young age, I had started to develop an idea of what it meant to be a black man. Yet when I started developing my first real crush in the 5th grade, I was horrified that it was not the sweet, cute, and black girl Parker but it was the sweet, cute, and white boy Nate. I could not count the amount of times that I prayed to God, not really knowing what to say, but asking him to “help me stop liking guys.” My imminent homosexuality eventually became one of two main influences on my ideas of my black culture, tied together with the fact that I always came off as white to people. Being called an “Oreo” (black on the outside, white on the inside) from a young age was something that made me question what exactly made me so white on the inside. Was it because most of my friends were white, due to the fact that I was in a lot of classes with white kids? When I got older, I wondered if it was because I chose to act in a way that was not characteristic of the images of black men presented in the media. I was always confused. I was raised on Motown. I watched a lot of “Black TV shows” with my parents, and I loved going to my grandparents to eat “Soul Food.” To me, that seemed pretty black, but apparently, that wasn’t enough. The thing was, I knew that at a young age, when in the 5th grade a girl told me that everyone thought I was gay, so she was going to teach me how to be a man, that part of being a black man in today›s society revolved around rejecting not only “White culture,” but also rejecting “feminine qualities” in male-bodied individuals, something that seemed to be more accepted in “White culture.” I only ever heard about breaking the male stereotypes from white people, so it was easier for me to do so around them. As I grew older, I found myself in the midst of a black culture war, in which there seemed to be two sides. Either I was supposed to have sagging pants, wear hoodies, listen to rap all of the time, say nigga this and nigga that all of the time and be angry, or I was supposed to reject all of those things because they caused the black community to regress by centuries, and I needed to be educated, because black women constitute 2/3rds of the amount of African-Ameri-

cans that go on to get Bachelor’s degrees, and then they go off and marry white men, and if I get educated, I can keep the black woman from getting taken, and we can raise strong black children together. No one really told me how to rationalize all of that with the fact that I like other men. Could a strong educated black man marry another black man, educated or not, and raise strong black children together? Could a strong college educated black man marry someone who was not black? There were so many unanswered questions. It seemed that there was no such thing as a complex black male queer person, and I had to struggle for years to try to create that space for myself, since the only other ones I ever knew were pigeon-holed into RuPaul ripoffs and/or promiscuous symbols of the destruction of the black community. No one likes being forced into categories, especially when the categories have never been truly defined. My queer male blackness does not translate into RuPaul, and I learned that if I was going to be comfortable with an identity as a queer black man, I had to stop identifying myself by other people’s presumptions. Maybe then, I can really create a space for myself.

Mamá’s College Records, Saturday Night Fever

Ana Robelo 24

Don Albertoâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;When I was young and met the alcalde

Don Albertoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mountain

Dear White People Brenda (B) Álvarez Dear white people, it’s not always about you. stop asking how you can navigate our spaces and how you can better interact with different races and how you can feel a little less uncomfortable in a space that is not meant for you. stop asking these questions to brown visiting speakers and professors you tokenize because you feel like they have the answer since their older, outsiders and well brown. because when you do that. you shit on the people whose spaces you are trying to get into. and more specifically you shit on their space. i mean while we’re being honest. so stop just stop. the thing you don’t understand, and i will tell you just this once because now i need to take a stand is this. safe spaces were created because we need spaces spaces where we escape people like you you who puts us under a microscope and wonders what the brown person thinks

you who thinks those thoughts are different because it’s a colored thought and you who thinks a colored thought is a real thing now, at this point, if you think this poem is about you. it probably is. and no i don’t hate white people. no I’m not racist towards white people because that shit does not exist. there is no such thing as reversed racism THAT shit doesn’t exist. see. let me drop some knowledge on you. racism is racial prejudice plus power. it’s when racial and cultural prejudice and discrimination are supported intentionally or unintentionally by institutional power and authority, used to the advantage of one race and the disadvantage of other races. and i will tell you this right now. brown people. In america. are not reaping the benefits of institutional power. don’t let oprah fool you. because that’s tokenization too people of color are not the races that are at the advantage. (continued on page 30)

it is YOU white people. so stop trying to navigate through the designated space meant to keep you out. and stop self-identifying as an ally because that shit isn’t an identity it’s an action. and you identifying as an ally puts-you-in-a-pool-you-are-trying-to-swim-out-of-honey so stop. please. stop. stop tokenizing. stop appropriating. start appreciating. and start asking. us. not the visiting professor who doesn’t know shit about what it means to be a person of color at oberlin college. start asking us. the people of color at oberlin college and please. don’t get offended when you are told the space is not meant for you. because dear white people, it’s not always about you.

Victoria Velasco 31

I Will Not Be Silent Anonymous It happens too often that women of color are emotionally and physically abused in relationships, and the abuse goes unrecognized. I wrote this piece as a result of my own experiences. I want this abuse to stop. Too many women have come to me, I have heard too many stories about people being cheated on, disrespected, and abused in relationships. Bring the politics you preach back home. Cis-men, get your shit together. Treat people with respect, own up to your decisions, hold yourself accountable, hold each other accountable. Process your feelings and consider the effects your power as a man has on other people. Or just start thinking for once, really. I What the fuck. I suddenly find myself a huge advocate of women hitting men The satisfaction of returning at least some kind of violence I yearn for the opportunity To share the burden of this shame Fucking what? But really honestly truly I hate you This is the most degrading experience of my life. You motherfucking dick. II This might be a little extreme but I think I should be named a saint. omg I think Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m hilarious Is that bad? . . .

. . . . . . . nah. Mother ******* has a nice ring to it III I want to rip your heart from my heart, for all those moments you were never there. I’ll let your brown skin run red as I peel away strips of my skin, starting with that spot on my shoulder, ripping off every part you’ve touched and letting myself bleed on you. I’d hand you over if I could if but then I’d lose my sainthood and I won’t let you destroy who I am. I’d throw you in the pit along with your boys, along with Uncle Sam, and watch you all drown because you’re all the same anyway. I’d take his 9mm and turn it on you, Katniss would be proud. Because upon your pedestal, you unapologetically reveal the cadavers that are hidden in a public display case, but you shamefully do not reveal your own. You who throw the first stone, are not without sin. I’d cast you out into the desert to find your way back home, barefoot and alone. You’d stop on the way to look at the refrigerated rooms through old rusted windows. Again upon your pedestal, you ask if this is what freedom looks like. You collect the discarded bottle caps as if to memorialize the scene. And then, hidden in secret among all the lies, you’d commit your 12th act of infidelity and have sex in there. And the bottle caps would clink in your pockets with every thrust that you said was my love. So fuck it, you can walk home barefoot, not alone, dick hard and throbbing. Maybe someone will patch your wounds and blisters but it won’t be me anymore. Now I know the vices don’t only claw at your ankles. They claw at your heart, at your dick, at that soft spot that I was supposedly the first person to touch. But now I know the truth. I will no longer participate in this circus of a lie. We are all leaches. IV The question will always be why? And the answer will always be patriarchy. And that will never be an answer enough for me. We all make choices to go down one path or the other, and unfortunately you made your choice for us. Now this is the way we go, apart, hoping that one day our paths will cross again. Maybe I’ll see you through the trees and we can see how time has changed us, nurtured us, or damaged us.

I cannot rebuild what has been lost. It is not within my capacity to pick up so many stones that have been thrown at me myself and I. Stones do not heal bruises or erase scars. The stones are rough and sear with the pain of openness as they are dragged across my skin. For a moment the pain is refreshing. Now the pain is real, now I can finally identify this year of infidelity as violence. Now I can scream and yell and throw stones back. All I see is Red. But I pause. It is not within my capacity to throw the same stones that have tortured me. These stones lied to you with their ability to comfort, and I know that they lie to me. I asked when the cycle ends, and it will end now with me. It ends when I lay down the stones that tempt me with vengeance. It ends when I tend to my wounds, these deep rooted scars that I thought were long past healed but opened with the newness of comprehension. It ends when I tend to my wounds because I never tended to them before. Now they are open, now I can take out all the dirt, deep inside yet long forgotten. It ends when I take care of myself for once in the past two and a half years. I will take care of myself now. This is why we were never meant to survive. You cast the first stone, but if I throw back what does that mean? We were never meant to survive not only because of the violence caused to me, but because of the violence you may cause to someone else in turn. But maybe these stones can be used for more than violence. Maybe if we soften the edges, I can pick up these stones and see how I learned something - something ugly, something hurtful, or something beautiful. And maybe the next time, these stones wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be so hurtful anymore.

Lock Her Room

Joelle Eliza Lingat 35

Spectators and Sight

Joelle Eliza Lingat

León’s history stares back through the walls

Ana Robelo 37