bloom: identity

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issue #1

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The Disturbances in the Garden

By Jamaica Kincaid

identity

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rice pudding recipe

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m 8 Frida Kahlo

52 Joan Didion

recipe

prologue

18 rice pudding susan becker

prologue 4 Contributors

5 Letter from the Editor by genevieve vahl

feature

24 The Disturbances in the Garden by jamaica kincaid

sessions 40 my women bloom archive

ntity

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poetry & quotes

13 Unorthodox quotes deborah feldman 21 Still I Rise poetry by maya angelou 32 tall skinny plain poetry by ericka huggins

voices

19 One Day by genevieve vahl 22 Explaining OCD by luisa de vogel 38 When I Step Outside, I Step Into A Country of Men Who Stare by fatima bhojani

interviews

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12 FEMALE 54 I am me by sampa the great

14 On the Black Panther’s 50th Anniversary, We Checked in With One of the Group’s Former Leaders with ericka huggins from mother jones 30 Shake Appeal with 070 shake from office magazine

33 Becoming quotes michelle obama 34 Manifesto, or Ars Poetica #2 poetry by krista franklin 37 Swing Time quotes zadie smith

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m 7 a touch poetry by genevieve vahl

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contributors 4

Doreen Garner Visual

Maya Angelou Poetry

prologue

Zadie Smith Quotes Susan Becker Recipe Fatima Bhojani Voices Ericka Huggins Interview Poetry

Krista Franklin Poetry Visual

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Jamaica Kincaid Feature

Deborah Feldman Quotes

Luisa de vogel Voices

Genevieve Vahl Editor in Chief

Eloisa Negrete Garcia Visual

Shiloah Coley Visual

Melissa Thorne Visual

Sampa the Great Lyrics

070 Shake Interview

Payton Anapol Visual

photo by payton anapol

prologue

B

loom has been a personal project years in the making. It started as a creative vision in a time when I was struggling with my own identity. I was empty of myself. Until Bloom.

It was in a coffee shop in Colorado the genesis of the brand originated. An outlet to bloom into myself. A project to immerse myself – to find myself, my style, my creative tendencies. To give myself purpose without any limitations.

Magazines have a unique ability to display varying mediums. From poems and lyrics, essays and articles, longer form pieces. It can also house visual counterparts not limited to any one form. Painting, photography, posters, illustration, informational graphics, collage. It gives space to any medium

one chooses to express themselves in.

I like to think of magazines as galleries. Moving through a curated space of works under an umbrella theme with written and visual coherence.

I thought it appropriate for this pilot issue to render its genesis meaning. To finally use this outlet for its original purpose: to bloom into one’s identity through creative practice.

With that, the poems and written works are either about someone’s identity, how they have used their medium to process it. How they have come to terms with it. How they have gotten to where they are today. Or I have chosen works that have spoken to my identity – something I resonated with in my own experience. I have

with love, genevieve vahl editor in chief

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letter from the editor

included pieces of my own, that I have created in reflection of my identity, in challenge of my identity, to have changed it indefinitely. Like the piece titled “A touch” that I wrote after I spent time in Mexico with my soul sister and her family. A faucet that ran adry sat me in my place, challenging what I knew. Forcing me to reconsider my expectations. A lesson that has shaped my identity going forward.

I have sourced these pieces from various outlets I encountered along my artistic journey as inspiration for my own practice. I have found these particular works or women to have spoken to myself, or the theme “identity” specifically.

It is my goal to dedicate space to voices and identities that have been systemically silenced for far too long in this country. To create a space to showcase the beauty in our constantly blooming identities.

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photo by genevieve vahl

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mexico

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a touch

Back to abuela’s we drove.

Crawling under the stars like a bettle on a leaf, we move, unnoticed.

Outside abuela’s, we fall silent, stunned by the silence of the night.

Gawking at the same sky as those far beyond me, abuela opens the door and wishes us inside.

poetry

We debrief over the croaks of the night.

To bed we must go, a long day to retxrace, a long day we anticipate.

Winter in México brings a chill disguised by the day’s warm sunshine, reaching summer temperatures

by Wisconsin standards.

But nighttime proves its deception, sending shivers down your back; a thief of my daytime dreams.

I stare at myself in the mirror, reflecting on my gratitude.

What an opportunity I had to travel with my best friend in her home country, coddled by her family’s unquestioning acceptance.

After immigrating to the US, they were attentive to include me too familiar with the feeling of exclusion.

My depth of privilege turned on with the faucet as a flood of silence filled the bathroom.

Dry, the drain stared back at me, mocking my expectation Running water is like love.

At times, it comes unconditionally, like parents’ unwavering obsession with their kin.

But in others, it’s like counting down the days until a loved one leaves, an exact moment when it is gone, empty and silent.

We expect luxury as our standard here in the US. Flushing drinkable water, sipping the tap, watering our grass.

Although different in México, it is really no inconvenience.

Expanding perspective actually, realizing we can do without until morning.

It’s moments like these when a faucet lacks its fruit and makeup to be removed, that we are snapped back into reality, our expectation shifted and we can then understand our touch of privilege.

photo by genevieve vahl

We rumble along dirt roads, dodging potholes in the suv that has enough room for everyone.

Mexican culture is built to welcome, embracing outsiders like me as their own.

Layers assembled, ready for bed.

Commencing my nightly routine, I head to the bathroom for freshening.

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illustration by genevieve vahl

by genevieve vahl

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Frida Kahlo a r t i s t ,

1/3 of her 200 paintings were self portraits

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In 1925, when she was only 18, Frida suffered a terrible accident when coming home from school woth her boyfriend; their bus got hit by a streetcar, seriously injuring Frida. She broke her back, ribs, collarbone, left shoulder and right leg when a metal handrail pierced her abdomen and womb, smashing through her pelvis and exiting the other side.

p a i n t e r

Frida had been marked physically by a bout of polio at the age of 6. This left her with a shorter, misshapen and troublesome right leg – as well as a legacy of childhood teasing.

While recovering bed ridden for many months, she began to paint.

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Frida played with notions of identity throughout her life. Painting became a way to communicate her pain – both physically and emotionally – as well as her joy. And her 'self' was to become her dominant artistic output.

The hybrid Indian-Spanish origins of her mother became an important source of inspiration for Frida - She began wearing traditional Tehuana dresses from the southeast Mexican state of Oaxaca, home to her mother’s family, a rare matriarchal society within a largely patriarchal country. This costume was a symbol of female power. It also covered up her deformed body.

Frida was interested in fluid gender identities - she would cross dress in men’s clothing in early photos her father took of her. She would have lovers without gendered bounds.

"they thought I

The stills were indirect self-portraiture, paintings that continued to reflect her internal reality potentially because as she aged, she no longer saw herself as beautiful and did not want to keep seeing herself OR they could have been a meditation on death. - “I will paint flowers so they will not die.”

was a surrealist, but I wasn’t.

I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

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Frida’s self-portraits carry references to birth, babies and the reproductive organs, revealing a source of pain: her inability to bear children. She terminataed her baby when her health was at great risk and lost two others to miscarriages.

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FEMALE

by sampa the great

Big bold women, round of applause Get-my-goals women, round of applause Know-my-roots women, round of applause It to come and getcha, getcha, getcha, Imma ‘dem, I swear to Gonna get a female Betcha, betcha, betcha She gon’ catch ya

Big bold women gonna come and applaud Got-my-back women, I do applaud I’m an F E M A L E From the ghetto, bet she got a brain and stilletos She work five to nine, still got time for the men, true There’s another way and forget about the echoes at the ghetto, got the giggles, since She never leave the ghetto Gotta tell ‘em, “Get the memo” ‘Cause in time she gonna let go

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F E M A L E, F E M A L E, F E M A L E, F E M A L E F E M A L E, F E M A L E, F E M A L E, F E M A L E Though she a queen And you know she never leave They be waitin’ for a stumble but she never trip again She got talent, class, brawn Askin’ me if “Baby got back?”, got it from the motherland Mother Mary never met a mother tell me like that So far only made in Africa ‘Cause the women in my village only carry five stars F E M (my god)

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She a queen And you know she never leave They be waitin’ for a stumble but she never trip again (My god)

photo from resident advisor

F E M A L E, F E M A L E, F E M A L E, F E M A L E F E M A L E, F E M A L E, F E M A L E, F E M A L E

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On the Black Panther's 50th Anniversary, We Checked in With One of the Group's Former Leaders

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interview

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photo from pbs

interview from mother jones with ericka huggins photo from stanford libraries

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f the group w e r e s t i l l around, this Saturday, October 15, would mark the Black Panther Party’s 50th birthday. The historical influence of the Panthers, perhaps best known for their early militant posture toward police violence, has been apparent recently in pop culture. In February, Beyonce rolled out a Panther-themed performance at that most all-American of events, the Super Bowl halftime show. A week later, the documentary Black Panthers: Vanguard of a Revolution introduced the group to a new generation of Americans. But the Panthers’ active legacy is undeniable, too.

Many leaders from the Black Lives Matter movement cite the Panthers’ influence on the work they do around police violence.

Ericka Huggins, who founded the Panther’s New Haven, Connecticut chapter, and later stood trial alongside Panther chairman Bobby Seale for their alleged roles in the killing of a New Haven member suspected of working with the FBI. Both were acquitted, though Huggins spent two years in prison before the case went to trial. I asked Huggins—who at 66 years old remains a social justice activist—to reflect on the Panthers’ legacy.

How would you say today’s Black Lives Matter movement draws on the Panthers’ influence?

EH: Everything draws on the things that came before. The Black Panther Party drew on the civil rights movement. All of the organizations in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s—the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, the Black Berets, the American Indian Movement, the Gay Liberation Front, the anti-war movement—drew on movements before them. In particular, the courage of the women in these movements is a legacy that the Movement for Black Lives draws on. I stand on their shoulders, and Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi [the founders of the Black Lives Matter national

network and creators of the hashtag], stand on theirs as well. The term Black Lives Matter is new. But there isn’t anything new about what is being requested of black people, of people of color, of white people. There is work that all of us must do, and because of social media we are more aware of it. That is the impact of Black Lives Matter. I’m particularly inspired that the people leading the movement are women—LGBT women.

middle schools, high school, colleges, community organizations. I also align myself with organizations that serve families or women and children. I go into the juvenile institutions and share whatever it is they’ve asked me to come and share—including my practice of meditation, which helped me to deal with the endless trajectory of time when I was incarcerated. I didn’t stop living when the Black Panther Party ended in 1982.

Would you say today’s movement is more progressive on that measure than the Black Panther Party used to be?

EH: That’s a loaded question. I don’t know that I could say the Black Panther Party is more progressive, for instance, than Fredrick Douglass. Or that Martin Luther King was more progressive than Malcolm X. Or that Malcolm X is more progressive than Marcus Garvey. A movement brings together all kinds of peoples with differing perspectives, but the same goal.

If you compare the Ten Point Program of the Black Panther Party to the platform of the Movement for Black Lives, you’ll see similar language. It isn’t that anybody copied the language. Anyone who has an open heart can see the violence of, for instance, the police today, the so-called correctional system today. Anyone with compassion will come to the same conclusion—that it has to stop. And the it that has to stop is racialized thinking, racist behavior, violent means to control people. Our response to that violence is sourced in love. So I don’t know about more progressive—everything has its purpose in its time.

The Philando Castile shooting was unsettling for many people because Castile appeared to have followed all the officer’s orders. There was also Tamir Rice and John Crawford, both killed while carrying toy guns. And more recently Korryn Gaines was killed in an armed standoff with Baltimore County police.

I’m curious where you think we stand today in terms of black people’s relationship with guns?

EH: I was raised in DC and my mother was raised in the South. People protecting themselves against police violence—against Klan violence—against white council violence, was very common. Even clergy went to church with guns. Everyone has a right to defend themselves. What I hope this country will eventually do is not allow guns to be in the hands of persons who should not have them. But I don’t feel that there’s anything wrong with a person defending themselves against an attack.

How do I feel about police violence? My heart is broken by it. I don’t have a political stance, because the word “politics”—when you look it up—means something that is debatable. And there’s nothing to debate.

I met Tamir Rice’s mother and about 20 mothers who gathered in Oakland to share their stories. They cited being inspired by others who’ve come before them about how to reduce the unbearable pain of losing their sons or daughters. It never goes away. I think that police re-training and education is paramount. We want to abolish punitive law enforcement just like we want to abolish prisons. But there are people in prisons that we need to think about. And there are police officers on the street that we need to think about.

What does activism look like for you personally these days?

EH: Now that I’m not teaching anymore, I travel around the country and share. One of the organizations I work with—world-trust.org—sends me out to foster conversations about systemic inequities—particularly racial inequities—in places where people never talk about race, and never think of a human being in terms of their coinciding identities. A man or woman can be black and queer and immigrant and differently abled, and poor—all in one body. And I go to elementary schools,

What’s your view on Colin Kaepernick’s silent protests during the national anthem?

EH: Celebrities are human beings.

His eyes are open. He can hear. He’s paying attention to what he’s listening to. His heart is open. He’s tired of it—why wouldn’t he be? So he spoke.

He’s not so worried about his paycheck or what people think. There’s something larger at stake. He’s a part of a multibillion-dollar industry and he’s breaking with the promise not to talk. That is what’s so beneficial about him. I cheer him on. When I was in DC at the new African American History and Culture Museum, the most celebrated statute in the museum on one floor was a statue of John Carlos and Tommie Smith who put their fists up at the Olympics in the ’60s. People were taking pictures with it. Kaepernick’s stance is empowering young black people today and it begs a look at history. He’s not the first, and he knows he’s not the first.

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photo from momentum

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to sanctify - to make holy

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Kiddush by payton anapol

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photos by genevieve vahl

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6 to 8 servings

recipe

this rich, creamy pudding is delicious served warm or cold. if you feel like dressing up the dessert a bit, add a cinnamon stick while the rice is cooking, or top the finished pudding with a sprinkling of raisins and a little freshly grated nutmeg just before serving.

1 1/2 3/4 1/4 3 1 1/2 1/2

cups water cup basmati rice teaspoon salt cups whole milk cup heaby whipping cream sugar vanilla bean, split lengthwise

bring 1 1/2 cups water, rice and salt to simmer in heavy large saucepan over medium-high heat. reduce heat to low; cover. simmer until water is absorbed about 10 minutes. Add milk, cream, and sugar. scrape in seeds from vanilla bean; add bean. increase heat to medium; cook uncovered until rice is tender and mixture thickens slightly to a soft, creamy texture, stirring occasionally, about 35 minutes. remove pudding from heat and discard vanilla bean. divide pudding evenly among small bowls. serve warm or press plastic wrap directly to surface of each pudding and chill thoroughly.

do ahead:

pudding can be made 2 days ahead.

Keep refrigerated.

photo from bloom archive

recipe from susan becker

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vanilla bean rice pudding

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can hear it in his voice. I don’t even have to be in the same physical space as him to know. I can pick up the phone and tell immediately when he starts speaking that he is drunk. It’s almost like a sixth sense. Innate.

My mom was always pulling wine bottles from my dad’s closet. The 1.5 liter ones. Hidden on the wire rack below his hanging clothes, sitting above the ground, they fell nicely into an indiscriminate abyss that, if left unexplored, would remain a black hole. But stick your arm in about elbow deep and you would strike gold.

My parents slept separately. Never married, and in my existence, never actually happy together. They had their own rooms, perfect for stashing vices. Like a high schooler hiding his booze from his parents, but this was a grown man hiding his booze from his partner and small daughter.

One Day

It was never a secret between my mom and I, but always a “secret” between the three of us. We all separately knew, but he wanted to believe that we didn’t. To this day he defends himself. I am NOT drunk. Don’t speak to your father like that!

Which then just turns into me telling him he is lying to my face and I am an adult and am well aware of what is going on. Click, dial tone...

To outsiders, it’s charismatic. It can come off jolly, friendly, chipper. Reaching decibels above an appropriate level while smacking them slightly too hard on the back in greeting. But they don’t know my dad. Quite a serious, straightfaced man actually. His brow usually furrowed and lips puckered. Grunting to agree.

He came to pick me up from after school care one day. To those around us, they saw a dad squat, maybe lower than expected, with his arms open wide and his face beaming, expecting me to run into his arms like a daughter who hasn’t seen her deployed father in months. But what I saw was his unstable wobble, his overcompensation, his face in a stupid grin like a golden retriever with its tongue slobbering out of the window of a moving car.

voices

by genevieve vahl

photo from bloom archive

He was wearing his infamous joggers – not the trending athleisure quick dry pant gathered at the ankle we are familiar with today. Certainly not. This was the mid-2000s.

These were forest green sweatpants, almost like a cotton sweatshirt for your legs, with a dangling draw string and what looked like scrunchies bunched at his ankles. Not to mention they were a size too small for public appearance.

I was already annoyed my dad had to be the one to pick me up in the first place, and then he had to wear the damn sweatpants. It was a cringey attempt to make things seem normal, nothing to see here, just a dad and his daughter finally reunited. I always vowed I would burn those sweatpants one day.

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photo from bloom archive

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Still I Rise by maya angelou You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops, Weakened by my soulfoul cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don’t you take it awful hard ‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I’ve got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs?

poetry

Adorn by doreen garner

Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slace.

I rise I rise I rise.

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Explaining OCD by luisa de vogel

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hen I was in middle school I got glasses for the first time. I picked them up from the eye doctors on my walk home from school.

I spent the remainder of the walk, switching between the HD world of my new glasses and the grainy world of my bare eyes. I can still picture the crisp bright green of each individual leaf hanging from the trees, each with their own complicated and unique pattern of veins.

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My discovery, that I had not been viewing the same world as everyone else, left me stunned.

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This is how it feels when I describe OCD to my friends.

I ask, “You know that feeling, when you stand too close to the edge of a building and you realize how easily you could jump, not fall, but jump.

Deliberately and purposefully jump over the edge. Plunging yourself down to the street below, flying for just a moment until you fall into the unknown. I’m not suicidal, I swear.

But don’t you ever just feel curious, and then worry that just maybe that curiosity will get the best of you, and you’ll take the jump?”

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He looks back at me with a straight face, a hint of pity mixed with a dash of concern lies behind his eyes and he responds with a simple “no.”

“Oh, well that’s how it feels, but even more so, it’s so convincing a feeling that I think I’ve already jumped, or fallen, or lied, or cheated, or not locked the door, or gotten pregnant, or…” The list goes on.

I’m taken aback by his lack of understanding. I know convincing yourself

that you’ve committed terrible acts is a symptom of OCD. I’ve taught myself how to decipher the dual languages of my brain. I know what to believe and what is a fiction written by my illness.

But, I thought that rush of exhilaration and fear upon realizing how easy it would be to jump off the building. I thought that was universal.

When I was twelve and diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I had a crude understanding of the illness. I understood it as the loud, mean voice which called me a liar and convinced me I’d stolen that skirt even though, I actually do remembered getting it as a gift, but can’t quite figure out when, so maybe it wasn’t a gift and I did steal it after all.

Slowly, though, I’m realizing OCD is like a pair of glasses, that only I wear.

I see things no one else can. Like that speck of dust on the floor, or that hairline crack in the ceiling, or the way the rug is tilted just slightly to the left.

When I was a child, my father always told me that I was the bravest person he knew. This didn’t make sense to me. I was afraid of everything. But, he told me. You can’t be brave without first having something to be afraid of. OCD has supplied me with ample material for fear.

Now, when I stand at the edge of a building and feel that fear that maybe, just maybe I’ll be overcome with the urge to jump off. I remember my father’s words.

I wish I could take off these glasses. But then I remember that these glasses, these glasses made of anxiety and confusion, they have created me.

Without them, I would not have the same strength or the same courage or the same presence of mind.

“No, I’ve never felt that way” he says.

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by melissa thorne

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by melissa thorne

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The Disturbances of the Garden in the garden, one performs the act of posessing

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y obsession with the garden and the events that take place in it began before I was familiar with that entity called consciousness. My mother taught me to read when I was very young, and she did this without telling me that there was something called the alphabet. I became familiar with words as if they were all wholly themselves, each one a world by itself, intact and self- contained, and able to be joined to other words if they wished to or if someone like me wanted them to. The book she taught me to read from was a biography of Louis Pasteur, the person she told me was responsible for her boiling the milk I drank daily, making sure that it would not infect me with something called tuberculosis. I never got tuberculosis, but I did get typhoid fever, whooping cough, measles, and persistent cases of hookworm and long worms. I was a “sickly child.” Much of the love I remember receiving from my mother came during the times I was sick.

I have such a lovely memory of her hovering over me with cups of barley water (that was for the measles) and giving me cups of tea made from herbs (bush) that she had gone out and gathered and steeped slowly (that was for the whooping cough). For the typhoid fever, she took me to the hospital, the children’s ward, but she visited me twice a day and brought me fresh juice that she had squeezed or grated from fruits or vegetables, because she was certain that the hospital would not provide me with proper nourishment. And so there I was, a

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collage by genevieve vahl

by jamaica kincaid

sickly child who could read but had no sense of consciousness, had no idea of how to understand and so make sense of the world into which she was born, a world that was always full of a yellow sun, green trees, a blue sea, and black people.

My mother was a gardener, and in her garden it was as if Vertumnus and Pomona had become one: she would find something growing in the wilds of her native island (Dominica) or the island on which she lived and gave birth to me (Antigua), and if it pleased her, or if it was in fruit and the taste of the fruit delighted her, she took a cutting of it (really she just broke off a shoot with her bare hands) or the seed (separating it from its pulpy substance and collecting it in her beautiful pink mouth) and brought it into her own garden and tended to it in a careless, everyday way, as if it were in the wild forest, or in the garden of a regal palace. The woods: The garden. For her, the wild and the cultivated were equal and yet separate, together and apart.

This wasn’t as clear to me then as I am stating it here. I had only just learned to read and the world outside a book I did not yet know how to reconcile.

The only book available to me, a book I was allowed to read all by myself without anyone paying attention to me, was the King James Version of the Bible. There’s no need for me to go into the troubles with the King James Version of the Bible here, but when I encountered the first book, the Book of Genesis, I immediately understood it to be a book for children. A person, I came to understand much later, exists in the kingdom of children no matter how old the person is; even Methuselah, I came to see, was a child. But never mind that, it was the creation story that was so compelling to me, especially the constant refrain “And God saw that it was good.” The God in the Book of Genesis made things, and at the end of each day he saw that they were good. But, I wondered, for something to be good would there not have to be something that was not good, or not as good? That was a problem, though I didn’t bother myself

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with it at the time, mainly because I didn’t know how to, and also because the story had an inexorableness to it: rolling on from one thing to another without a pause until, by the end of six days, there were a man and a woman made in God’s image, there were fish in the sea and animals creeping on land and birds flying in the air and plants growing, and God found it all good, because here we are.

It was in the week after this creation, on the eighth day, that the trouble began: loneliness set in. And so God made a garden, dividing it into four quarters by running water through it (the classic quadrilinear style that is still a standard in garden design) and placing borders, the

borders being the eternal good and evil: the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. One tree was to be partaken of, the other forbidden. I have since come to see that in the garden itself, throughout human association with it, the Edenic plan works in the same way: the Tree of Life is agriculture and the Tree of Knowledge is horticulture. We cultivate food, and when there is a surplus of it, producing wealth, we cultivate the spaces of contemplation, a garden of plants not necessary for physical survival. The awareness of that fact is what gives the garden its special, powerful place in our lives and our imaginations. The Tree of Knowledge holds unknown, and therefore dangerous possibilities; the Tree of Life is eternally necessary, and the Tree of Knowledge is deeply and divinely dependent on it. This is not a new thought for me. I could see it in my mother’s relationship to the things she grew, the kind of godlike domination she would display over them. She, I remember, didn’t make such fine distinctions, she only moved the plants around when they pleased her and destroyed them when they fell out of favor.

It is no surprise to me that my affection for the garden, including its most disturbing attributes, its most violent implications and associations, is intertwined with my mother. As a child, I did not know myself or the world I inhabited without her. She is the person who gave me and taught me the Word.

But where is the garden and where am I in it? This memory of growing things, anything, outside not inside, remained in my memory—or whatever

we call that haunting, invisible wisp that is steadily part of our being—and wherever I lived in my young years, in New York City in particular, I planted: marigolds, portulaca, herbs for cooking, petunias, and other things that were familiar to me, all reminding me of my mother, the place I came from. Those first plants were in pots and lived on the roof of a diner that served only breakfast and lunch, in a dilapidated building at 284 Hudson Street, whose ownership was uncertain, which is the fate of us all. Ownership of ourselves and of the ground on which we walk, ownership of the other beings with whom we share this and see that it is good, and ownership of the vegetable kingdom are all uncertain, too. Nevertheless, in the garden, we perform the act of possessing.

To name is to possess; possessing is the original violation bequeathed to Adam and his equal companion in creation, Eve, by their creator. It is their transgression in disregarding his command that leads him not only to cast them into the wilderness, the unknown, but also to cast out the other possession that he designed with great clarity and determination and purpose: the garden! For me, the story of the garden in Genesis is a way of understanding my garden obsession.

Then there is Lewis and Clark’s expedition from the Mississippi River to California. On that adventure, which was authorized by President Thomas Jefferson and was inspired

by Cook’s scientific and commercial interests, the explorers listed numerous plant species that were unknown to John Bartram, botanist to King George III, who ruled the United States when it was still a colony. Bartram’s son, William, a fellow-botanist, later wrote a book about his own explorations, which is said to have influenced Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other English Romantic poets.

There now, look at that: I am meaning to show how I came to seek the garden in corners of the world far away from where I make one, and I have got lost in thickets of words. It was after I started to put seeds in the ground and noticed that sometimes nothing happened that I reached for a book. The first ones I read were about how to make a perennial border or how to get the best out of annuals—the kind of books for people who want to increase the value of their home—but these books were so boring. I found an old magazine meant to help white

collage by genevieve vahl

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The appearance of the garden in our everyday life is so accepted that we embrace its presence as therapeutic. Some people say that weeding is a form of comfort and of settling into misery or happiness. The garden makes managing an excess of feelings—good feelings, bad feelings— rewarding in some way that I can never quite understand. The garden is a heap of disturbance, and it may be that my particular history, the history I share with millions of people, begins with our ancestors’ violent removal from an Eden. The regions of Africa from which they came would have been Eden-like, and the horror that met them in that “New World” could certainly be seen as the Fall.

Your home, the place you are from, is always Eden, the place where even imperfections were perfect, and everything that happened after that beginning interrupted your Paradise.

On August 3, 1492—the day that Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain, later having a fatal encounter with the indigenous people he met in the “West Indies”—the world of the garden changed. That endeavor, to me, anyway, is the way the world we now live in began; it not only affected the domestic life of Europeans (where did the people in a Rembrandt paint-

ing get all that stuff they are piling on?) but suddenly they were well-off enough to be interested in more than sustenance, or the Tree of Life (agriculture); they could now be interested in cultivating the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge (horticulture).

Suddenly, the conquerors could do more than feed themselves; they could also see and desire things that were of no use apart from the pleasure that they produced. When Cortés saw Montezuma’s garden, a garden that incorporated a lake on which the capital of Mexico now sits, he didn’t mention the profusion of exotic flowers that we now grow with ease in our own gardens (dahlias, zinnias, marigolds).

The garden figures prominently in the era of conquest, starting with Captain Cook’s voyage to regions that we now know as Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and Tahiti, its aim, ostensibly, to observe the rare event of the transit of Venus. On this trip, in 1768, the first of Cook’s three voyages around the world, he brought with him the botanist Joseph Banks and also Daniel Charles Solander, a student of Carolus Linnaeus. The two took careful notes on everything they saw. Banks decided that the breadfruit of the Pacific isles would make a good food for slaves on British-owned islands in the West Indies; the slaveholders were concerned with the amount of time it took the enslaved people to grow food to sustain themselves, and breadfruit grew with little cultivation. And so the Pacific Islands came to the West Indies. Banks also introduced the cultivation of tea (Camellia sinensis) to India.

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ladies manage their domestic lives in the nineteen-fifties much more interesting (that kind of magazine, along with a copy of “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management,” is worthy of a day spent in bed while the sun is shining its brightest outside).

But where did plants, annual and perennial, pristinely set out in something called a border, and arranged sometimes according to color and sometimes according to height, come from? Those books had no answer for me. So one book led to another, and before long I had acquired (and read) so many books that it put a strain on my family’s budget. Resentment, a not unfamiliar feeling relating to the garden, set in.

I began to refer to plants by their Latin names, and this so irritated my editor at this magazine (Veronica Geng) that she made me promise that I would never learn the Latin name of another plant. I loved her very much, and so I promised that I would never do such a thing, but I did continue to learn the Latin names of plants and never told her. Betrayal, another feature of any garden.

How did plants get their names?

I looked to Linnaeus, who, it turned out, liked to name plants after people whose character they resembled.

feature

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Mischievous, yes, but not too different from the doctrine of signatures, which attempted to cure diseases by using plants that resembled the diseased part of the body. I was thinking about this one day, stooped over and admiring a colony of Jeffersonia diphylla, whose common name is twinleaf.

Jeffersonia diphylla is a short woodland herbaceous ephemeral whose leaf is perforated at the base so that it often looks like a luna moth, but the two leaflets are not identical at the margins, and each leaf is not evenly divided: the margins undulate, and one leaflet is a little bigger than the other. But isn’t Thomas Jefferson, the gardener, the liberty lover and slaveowner, often described as divided, and isn’t it appropriate that a plant such as the twinleaf is named for him? The name was bestowed by one of his contemporaries, Benjamin Smith Barton, who perhaps guessed at his true character.

It was through this plant that I became interested in Thomas Jefferson. I have read much of what he wrote and have firm opinions about him, including that his book “Notes on the State of Virginia” is a creation story.

It was only a matter of time before I stumbled on the plant hunters, although this inevitability was not clear to me at all. Look at me: my historical reality, my ancestral memory, which is so deeply embedded that I think the

whole world understands me before I even open my mouth. A big mistake, but a mistake not big enough for me to have learned anything from it. The plant hunters are the descendants of people and ideas that used to hunt people like me.

The first one I met, in a book, of course, was Frank Smythe. No one had ever made me think that finding a new primrose—or a new flower of any kind—was as special as finding a new island in the Caribbean Sea when I thought I was going to China to meet the Great Khan. A new primrose is more special than meeting any conqueror. But Smythe gave me more than that. I noticed, when reading his accounts, that he was always going off on little side journeys to climb some snow-covered protuberance not so far away, and then days later returning with a story of failure or success at reaching or not reaching the peak, and that by the way he had found some beauty of the vegetable kingdom on the banks of a hidden stream which would be new to every benighted soul in England. But his other gift to me was the pleasure to be had in going to see a plant that I might love or not, growing somewhere far away.

It was in his writing that I found the distance between the garden I was looking at and the garden in the wilderness, the garden cast out of its Eden which created a longing in me, the notion of “to go and to see.” Go see!

I end where I began: reading— learning to read and reading books, the words a form of food, a form of

collage by genevieve vahl

it was in his writing that I found the distance between the garden I was looking at and the garden in the wilderness, the garden cast out of its Eden, which created a longing in me.

life, and then knowledge. But also my mother. I don’t know exactly how old I was when she taught me to read, but I can say for certain that by the time I was three and a half I could read properly. This reading of mine so interfered with her own time to read that she enrolled me in school; but you could be enrolled in school only if you were five years old, and so she told me to remember to say, if asked, that I was five. My first performance as a writer of fiction? No, not that at all. Perhaps this: the first time I was asked who I was. And who am I? In an ideal world, a world in which the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge

stand before me, before all of us, we ask, Who am I? Among the many of us not given a chance to answer is the woman in the library in St. John’s, Antigua, two large rooms above the Treasury Department, a building that was steps away from the customs office and the wharf where things coming and going lay. On that wharf worked a stevedore who loaded onto ships bags of raw sugar en route to England, to be refined into white sugar, which was so expensive that we, in my family, had ivt only on Sundays, as a special treat. I did not know of the stevedore, the lover of this woman who would not allow her children to have much white sugar because, somewhere in the world of Dr. Pasteur and his cohort, they had come to all sorts of conclusions about diseases and their relationships to food (beriberi was a disease my mother succeeded in saving me from suffering). Her name was Annie Victoria Richardson Drew, and she was born in a village in Dominica, British West Indies.

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Shake Appeal:

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070 Shake 30

interview

photo from office magazine

interview from office magazine with 070 shake

A

s soon as people heard the tracks on West’s 2018 album, Shake was the name on the tip of the industry’s tongue. With her refusal to be tied to any single category—both in her music and with regards to her sexuality— the 22-year-old artist, born Danielle Balbuena, presented a uniquely modern response to our collective cultural desire to define everything and everyone. But if there is a defining singularity about her, it’s that she doesn’t follow anyone else’s rules. Even her forthcoming debut album, Modus Vivendi, which translates to “a way of living,” is about allowing “conflicting parties to coexist,” she tells me, “and put [their] differences to the side.”

Her strength—and, perhaps, her modus vivendi—is that she doesn’t care if people try to form some kind of narrative around her music and her identity, her connection with Kanye’s G.O.O.D. Music, or even her relationship with her partner, Sophia Diana Lodato. And it probably helps that she still doesn’t have a phone. Critics’ voices aside, Shake’s rejection of labels like “queer,” and “rapper,” is just another layer of her confidence. In an age where calling oneself an artist is as easy as typing it online, Shake’s reluctance to do so only makes her more appealing,and somehow makes the conviction with which writes her lyrics even more real. That’s why, when she says things like, “I’m just walking through this life, doing what I was meant to,” it’s easy to believe her. And when she spits, “The future’s bright,” we know it’s true.

How are you? It’s been a little over a year since you worked with Kanye and released your debut EP. Before that, you were really just making music at home. So, how have things been since then?

070: This year’s really just been about working on my album and finding inspiration outside of music. I needed to learn a lot of life lessons and grow as a person in order to grow with my music. I’ve actually been going back to working at home and not having to do all this commercial stuff. You know, going back to my roots and kind of simplifying everything.

Has that been important for you?

Getting away from all the noise and external parts of the industry?

070: Definitely, because when you’re in the scene too much, you’re getting inspired by outside sources. So, I like to get down with my own thoughts and see how original I can be, and how original my thoughts can be.

Obviously, no thought can be totally original, because someone else has thought of it before. It’s just, the less noise around you, the more you can trace back your own originality.

Do you think that’s a problem in music right now? That because we’re inundated with so much stuff, it’s not only harder to find music that’s unique, but to be an individual, especially as an artist?

070: Yeah, but part of music is not being original, you know what I’m saying? They’ve used every pattern, every melody, all types of drums. So, the challenge is trying to find a way to mix the past with the future, and not do what everyone else is doing in the present. I hear a lot of the same music all the time, and that’s cool—you can blend in and you’re going to be fine.

But a lot of the artists that I admire were doing things that were ahead of their time, and mixing those things with stuff from before it. And I don’t think that’s something a lot of people do nowadays—they don’t go back and find their inspiration. If you’re a hip hop artist, you should go back to the people who started it all—you have to study the greats to see what they did so you can have the tools to do something big with your own thoughts.

That’s what I do.

With who?

070: People like Michael Jackson. I study his music, and see what kind of melodies he used, what words he mixed with those melodies, and what kind of sounds Quincy Jones incorporated into the music. Kanye West is very important to me too—he’s a big example of someone who traces their roots but still gives it his own futuristic sound. For example, Yeezus was an album that was so ahead of its time, and nobody really understood it. And 808s and Heartbreak—that album was so ahead of its time, and definitely in-

spired a lot of people that are making music right now. If you look into rap and hip hop at the moment, it’s all 808s and autotune. All of it. In my opinion, Kanye birthed that sound and gave it life, andwe’re all living off it. Another artist I really admire is Thom Yorke— you know, Radiohead and all that shit.

There’s this magic that lives within the greats that’s passed on to younger artists. So, Michael’s magic was passed down to Kanye, and Kanye’s magic will be passed down to someone else.

You just have to be attentive and recognize it, and you have to be willing to indulge in it, embrace it and incorporate it in your music.

Do you feel like your music has been put in a box by others? Having worked with Kanye so early in your career, has it been hard for you to build an identity separate from the association with that and G.O.O.D. Music? 0S—No, I don’t really think of it that way. I think of it more as a bet I took in my life that I was supposed to take.

People know who I am because I know who I am, and I think people know what I’m about, because I say so. If they don’t, then I’m doing it wrong, because I have a responsibility to show them.

When it comes to “Ghost Town,” did you anticipate theoverwhelming response? There are so many great artists on that album, but every review was about that feature. Was that surprising? Or was it reassuring to know that you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to?

070: I feel like I’m very fourth-dimensional, or fifth- dimensional even, be-

Is that why you chose to isolate yourself while recording Modus Vivendi?

070: That process was a life lesson.

I disciplined myself, I went into an extreme focus, and showed myself and the people around me that when you’re focused on something, this is what you get. Like, when you want something and you actually focus, this is what’s going to happen. So, I had to seclude myself. I was in a room with no windows, there was no time—I mean, there was the time on the computer, but we actually put tape over it, so we didn’t know what time it was, if it was nighttime or daytime—we really just focused on the project and it was like practice for me in my life where I could just be very disciplined.

Do you try to approach everything with that same kind of hyper-focus? I know you don’t have a cell phone, is that so you’re not distracted by things like social media?

070: I have to give a hundred percent to everything that I’m doing or I won’t get the results that I want. If I’m half-assing something, it’s going to sound half-assed, you know? I won’t be the greatest if I’m only trying to be half-great. Michael Jackson wasn’t just like, “You know, I’ll do this later.”

Nah— it took a lot for him to become who he was. He definitely wasn’t just scrolling on fucking—I don’t even know what they had back then—and I don’t have a phone, so I’m almost there.

You do have social media, though you don’t use it very often. When you do, you usually share photos of you and your girlfriend, Sophia. I’ve also noticed you post about sustainability and the future of our planet. For someone who’s pretty anti-technology, why have

you chosen that as your medium to communicate that message?

070: If you want to help the world, you have to speak to the world. And in the time we’re living in, the best outlet to do that is social media. So, I find it’s important to use it in a positive way, and not just be selfish, but to think about something bigger, and spread something bigger—bigger than myself, bigger than my music, bigger than what’s going on in my life. I really have a drive to help people, and my girlfriend is very involved in the whole planet, earth, animal stuff—she always gets in my head about that. But I have always been into how I can help, and if you have an outlet, you should really use it and be positive, especially if you have a way to get to the world. It’s important. This is our home, this is our temple, this is part of us. Even though we don’t know it, we are one with this thing, and you should treat the earth like you treat your body. On a larger scale, it is our body—it’s part of us.

We’re only alive, we’re only breathing, because of the earth, because of the water and the leaves on the trees, and we’re cutting down our source of oxygen. On a smaller scale, we’re doing the same thing to our bodies. We’re fucking this whole shit up, and our kids are going to have to pay for it if we keep doing what we’re doing.

photos from office magazine

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Being inspired by everyone from Kanye to Radiohead — how do you incorporate all of that into your sound?

070: I don’t really know how to describe it. My sound is just my sound, and I don’t want to put it in a box, I don’t want to put it in a category, I don’t want to say what it is, because it really isn’t any one thing — it’s almost like its own being. Not a human being, it’s just something that exists. Music is just sounds and frequencies.

cause I don’t get caught up in things in 3D. I just do what I have to, what I know I’m supposed to. I have tunnel vision, in that sense. My mind has to stay focused only on what I want. I can’t get lost in articles, or critics and all that, because then I’m stepping off my path. I’m just walking through this life, doing what I was meant to. Things are going to happen that are meant to happen, and I can’t get surprised. I can’t get lost.

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tall skinny plain

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by ericka huggins

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poetry

Tall Skinny Plain I am Ericka, 22, Fuzzy hair Droopy eyes Long feet

I love people

Love nature

Love love I am a revolutionary Nothing special

One soul One life willing To give it

Ready to die...

photo from semantic scholar

For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forwrd motion.

You could almost feel something lifting off her as we drove, an unspooling of tension as the white-fenced horse farms surrounding Princeton gave way to choked highways and finally spires of the city rising in front of us.

New York was home for Czerny, the same way Chicago was home for me.

You don’t really know how attached you are until you move awat, until you’ve experienced what it means to be dislodged, a cork floating on the ocean of another place.

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If you don’t get out there and

define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others. I wasn’t interested in slotting myself into a passive role...

Becoming quotes

michelle obama

There’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.

I felt Nairobi’s foreignness – or really, my own foreignness in relation to it – immediately, even in the first strains of morning. It’s a sensation I’ve come to love as I’ve traveled more, the way a new place signals itself instantly and without pretense. The air has a different weight from what you’re used to; it carries smalls you can’t quite identify, a faint whiff of wood smoke or diesel fuel, maybe, or the sweetness of something blooming in the trees. The same sun comes up, but looking slightly different from what you know.

photo from the obama foundation

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Manifesto, or Ars Poetica #2 G by krista franklin

poetry

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Wanderlust Wonderland by krista franklin

ive me the night, you beasts hissing over the face of this dead woman, I climb into your eyes, looking. To those who would sleep through the wounds they inflict on others, I offer pain to help them awaken, Ju-Ju, Tom-Toms & the magic of talking burning bush. I am the queen of sleight of hand wandering the forest of motives, armed with horoscopes, cosmic encounters & an X-Acto knife. My right eye is a projector flickering Hottentot & Huey Newton, my left eye is prism of Wild Style, gold grills, lowriders, black dahlias, blunts & back alleys. At twwenty-one, I stood at the crossroad of Hell & Here, evil peering at me behind a blue-red eye. I armed myself with the memories of Pentecostal tent revivals, apple orchards, the strawberry fields I roamed with my & aunts in the summer, & the sightings of UFO lights blinking in the black of an Ohio nightsky. I am a weapon. I believe in hoodoo, voodoo, root workers, Dead Presidents, Black Tail, Black Inches & Banjees. I believe in the ghosts of 60 million or more & black bones disintegrating at the bottom of the Atlantic, below sea level, Not Just Knee Deep. I believe that children are the future: love them now or meet them at dusk at your doorstep, a 9mm in their right hand & a head noisy as a hornet’s nest later. Your choice.

Black, still, in the hour of chaos, I believe in Royal Crown, Afro-Sheen, Vaseline, Jergens & baby powder on breasts, the collective conscious, cellular memory, Public Enemies, outlaws, Outkast, elevations, “Elevators” & Encyclopedia Britannica. Under my knife, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz laughs with Muhammad Ali, a Lady named Day cuddles with a Boxer named Mister after traumatically stumbling on strange fruit dangling from one of the most beautiful Sycamores evah. Under my knife, Marilyn Monroe enjoys an evening out with Ella Fitzgerald, meanwhile, Life shows me a gigantic photo. I am a weapon. I chart voyages of unlove, high on a man called crazy who turns nigger into prince. I believe in Jong, Clifton, “Dirty Diana” & Dilla, paper, scrilla, greem gumbo, coins, Batty Bois & Video Vixens. I believe that beads at the ends of braids are percussive instruments in double Dutch. In the reflection of my knife, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington & Thelonious Monk argue in a Basquiat heroin nod. I am a weapon. I believe in goo-gobs of deep brown apple butter, alphabets, Alaga Syrup, Affrilachians, A-salaam Alaikum, Wa-Alaikum-Salaam, & African Hebrew Israelites. I believe in Octoroons, Quadroons, Culluds, Cooley High, Commodores, Krumpin, Krunk & Burn, Hollywood Burn.

I am Sethe crawling a field toward freedom with a whitegirl talking about velvet. I believe in tumbleweaves, hot combs & hair lyes, Chaka Khan, Shaka Zulu, Mau Mau, Slum Village & Buhloone Mindstate: “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless. Like water.” I believe in water. My body is pulp.

I bleed ink. I believe in the Fantastic, Vol. 2, The Low End Theory, Space Is the Place & The Hissing of Summer Lawns.

Tucked in the corner of my right ventricle sprouts a Tree of Knowledge, lives a Shining Serpent & a middle finger. I’m on a quest for the Marvelous. My face is a mask of malehood, malevolence, one big masquerade. Metaphysically niggerish, I am a weapon wandering the forest of motives, a machete in one hand, a mirror in the other, searching for the nearest body of water.

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Rita by shiloah coley

photo by genevieve vahl

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photo from financial times

zadie smith

It was the season of sex, yes, but it was also, in all vital ways, without sex itself – and isn’t that one useful definition of a happy girlhood? I didn’t know or appreciate this aspect of my luck until well into adulthood, when I began to find, in more cases than I would have guessed, that among my women friends, irrespective of background, their own childhood sex seasons had been exploited and destroyed by the misdeeds of uncles and fathers, cousins, friends, strangers.

Who might have run faster than a speeding train, if they had been free to do so, but for whom, born in the wrong time, in the wrong place, all stops were closed, who were never even permitted to enter the station. And wasn’t I so much freer than any of them – born in England, in modern time – not to mention so much lighter, so much straighter of a nose, so much less likely to be mistaken for the very essence of Blackness itself?”

She believed in her own good timing, in timing itself, as a mystical force, a form of fate, operating at the global and cosmic level as much as at the personal.

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No one is more ingenious

than the poor, wherever you find them. When you are poor, every stage has to be thought through. Wealth is

quotes

Swing Time

A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.

the opposite. With wealth you get to be thoughtless.

Romance was beyond me: it required a form of personal mystery I couldn’t manufacture and disliked in others. I couldn’t pretend that my legs do not grow hair or that my body does not excrete a variety of foul substances or that my feet aren’t flat as pancakes. I could not flirt and saw no purpose in flirting. I did not mind dressing up for strangers – when out at college parties or if we went up to London for the clubs – but in our rooms, within our intimacy, I could not be a girl, nor could I be anybody’s baby, I could only be a female human.

by fatima bhojani

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan –

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I

voices

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illustration by genevieve vahl

am angry. All the time. I’ve been angry for years. Ever since I began to grasp the staggering extent of violence — emotional, mental and physical — against women in Pakistan. Women here, all 100 million of us, exist in collective fury.

“Every day, I am reminded of a reason I shouldn’t exist,” my 19-year-old friend recently told me in a cafe in Islamabad. When she gets into an Uber, she sits right behind the driver so that he can’t reach back and grab her. We agreed that we would jump out of a moving car if that ever happened. We debated whether pepper spray was better than a knife.

When I step outside, I step into a country of men who stare. I could be making the short walk from my car to the bookstore or walking through the aisles at the supermarket. I could be wrapped in a shawl or behind two layers of face mask. But I will be followed by searing eyes, X-raying me. Because here, it is culturally acceptable for men to gape at women unblinkingly, as if we are all in a staring contest that nobody told half the population about, a contest hinged on a subtle form of psychological violence.

“Wolves,” my friend, Maryam, called them, as she recounted the time a man grazed her shoulder as he sped by on a motorbike. “From now on, I am going to stare back, make them uncomfortable.” Maryam runs a company that takes tourists to the mountainous north. “People are shocked to see a woman leading tours on her own,” she told me.

We exchanged hiking stories. We had never encountered a solo female

photo by new york times magazine

When I Step Outside, I Step Into A Country of Men Who Stare

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honor is in your own hands. In Pakistan, sexual assault comes with stigma, the notion that a woman by being on the receiving end of a violent crime has brought shame to herself and her family. Societal judgment is a major reason survivors don’t come forward.

Responding to the Lahore assault, Prime Minister Imran Khan proposed chemical castration of the rapists. His endorsement of archaic punishments rather than a sincere promise to undertake the difficult, lengthy and necessary work of reforming criminal and legal procedures is part of the problem. The conviction rate for sexual assault is around 3 percent, according to War Against Rape, a local nonprofit.

Mr. Khan’s analysis of the prevalence of gender-based violence is even more regressive. Fahashi (indecency) in society is the culprit, deflecting responsibility from the police and government. Mr. Khan blamed Bollywood for widespread incidents of rape in neighboring New Delhi, missing the point that, like Pakistan, India suffers from similar issues with policing, public safety and the judicial system.

The highway attack shook the women of Pakistan, but it did not shock us. We grew up with stories of women killed for “honor” and women raped for revenge. Women doused with acid and women burned with stoves. Pakistan ranks 164 out of 167 countries on the Women, Peace and Security Index 2019-2020, barely hovering above Yemen, Afghanistan and Syria.

In the two months since the highway assault, a police officer raped a woman in her home. A girl was murdered by her cousin and uncle

photo by new york times magazine

hiker up north. When I hike solo, men, apart from their usual leering, offer unsolicited advice, ask patronizing questions and, on occasion, follow in silence. I pretend to receive a call from my imaginary husband who happens to be nearby and wants to know exactly where I am. Even in the wilderness, you can’t escape.

Years ago, a friend told me about the time her dad beat her up after he saw her talking to a boy outside school.

It wasn’t the first time. Until she left for college in the United States, she lived in constant terror of when the next wave of violence would arrive.

Her mother stood by and let it happen.

Internalized patriarchy rears its head often when aunties (an auntie is any older woman who exists to profess her uninvited opinion) are concerned that you are not married.

Aunties emphasize that motherhood is your assigned purpose on this planet. Aunties comment on your body as if you are not there.

This country fails its women from the very top of government leadership to those who live with us in our homes.

In September, a woman was raped beside a major highway near Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. Around 1 a.m., her car ran out of fuel. She called the police and waited. Two armed men broke through the windows and assaulted her in a nearby field.

The most senior police official in Lahore remarked that the survivor was assaulted because, he assumed, she “was traveling late at night without her husband’s permission.”

An elderly woman in my apartment building in Islamabad, remarked, “Apni izzat apnay haath mein” — Your

for speaking to a male friend on her phone. A woman waiting for a bus after work was kidnapped and raped. A teenager committed suicide after being blackmailed by the men who raped her and videotaped the assault. A 6-yearold was clubbed to death by her father for making noise. Between January and June alone, there have been 3,148 reported cases of violence against women and children. Many go unreported.

There are slices of Pakistan where a woman can bare her arms, smoke, drink, escape abroad, become a minister. But class does not protect her from the stares and the fears of assault when she ventures outside. Yet for women in the lower socio-economic strata of society, women in rural Pakistan, things are much worse. The insecurity and harassment working-class women face daily at a bus stop are experiences that are foreign to those behind the wheel of a Mercedes.

On a recent afternoon, I pulled up to a traffic stop. Twenty or so motorcycles zigzagged their way up to right under the light, as they commonly do here. The riders were men. With one exception. I noticed her only because the men around her were consuming her. It’s rare to see women driving bikes in Pakistan — probably because when they do, they’re on display.

Although she had her back to me, face obscured by a helmet, I imagined her staring resolutely ahead, pushing through the discomfort, the sheer creepiness, of being watched. A wave of fury passed over me. Don’t let the bastards grind you down, I tried to telepathically transmit to her, a refrain from “The Handmaid’s Tale” that frequently floats through my head when I’m back here.

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my women

including among the most important women involved in making me the woman I am today

a photo session from the bloom archive

my mom, susan

my mom and I and

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snowman harry

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my mom and I

my aunt LuAnn and I

my aunt LuAnn

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my aunt LuAnn and I

my aunt LuAnn my mom's sister

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top: my mom with stacy and hattie, longtime family my mom's sister,

friends

christine, my aunt

bottom: my mom

my paternal grandma frances on the left, me in the middle, my aunt christine on the right

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my maternal grandma, genevieve

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hattie hugging baby josie in

stacy with baby

stacy's belliy

josie in her belly

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hattie feeling baby josie in stacy's belly

my mom and I riding the ferry across lake

my aunt linda, from my dad's side, and I

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michigan

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my aunt linda and I

longtime family friends mother daughter marylin and alyssa

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my paternal cousin isa

my maternal cousin

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vanessa

session

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eagle river, wi

my mom

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my mom

Joan Didion w r i t e r,

j o u r n a l i s t Her works address the growing dissatisfaction in society owing to the disintegrating American social morals.

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Because her family was constantly moving around, young Didion was always feeling like an outsider. Thus she found solace in reading. She never imagined becoming a professional writer, but she was always immersed in books often far older than her age would typically find interest in.

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Joan Didion was born on December 5, 1934 into an army family.

Her family was constantly moving around until they settled into her hometown Sacramento, California.

She graduated in 1956 with a degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

During her last year at university,

info

she won an essay contest by Vogue where she went on to take a job as a research assistant, copywriter and eventually associate feature editor.

In 1968, she published a collection of magazine columns turned essays in her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem covering life in the 60s in California, famously known for her work covering the Haight Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco during the hippie movement.

Didion is known for her contribution to the New Journalism movement taking hold during this time. Journalists were beginning to immerse themselves in their subject, centering themselves in their reporting. Rather than relying on "objective" reporting, New Journalists like Didion experienced in real time, and would later recount their observations in their reporting, using their own perspective to guide their narrative. Her work in literary journalism has paved the war for lirary technique and reporting to coalesce in the formerly rigid industry.

Didion has received the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Blue Nights.

Character – the

She won the St. Louis Lit-

willingness to

for Distinguished Amer-

accept responsibil-

orary doctorates from Har-

erary Award and the Medal ican Letters. She got honvard and Yale Universities.

ity for one's own life – is the source from which selfrespect springs

53 In 1964, Joan married author John Gregory Dunne. Two years later they adopted their daughter Quintana Roo Dunne. Dunne died from a heart attack in 2003 and Quintana died of pancreatitis and substance abuse less than two years later, experiences Didion reflects on in her memoir Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking.

I am me by sampa the great

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Up again looking at the mirror making sure it's all the same Has it been a year making sure I understand That I'm looking here in the present where I am Breathe Cheers to the long night sessions Cheers to the times they had turned to confessions When you write your fears and hopes on a paper Music is the way I acknowledge the maker Fortunately it's my art What you listening to is my heart I probably lose heart cos I share it so much I probably lose friends 'cos I care about my people more than cashing out stars Peace to the ones on my side as my equals Peace to the ones bridging gaps of the people No my strength don't come from the evil I sing songs from the heart cos

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IFromam me the day I started To the day I depart it's all that I want to be

I am me

From the day I started To the day I depart it's all that I want to be

lyrics

I am me

I ain't going nowhere I ain't going nowhere It's all that I wanted

I am me

I ain't going nowhere I ain't going nowhere It's all that I wanted

Me Greater than a pot of gold Greater 'cos of heart and soul Greater in the end for the lessons I know Greater for the strength that I see I hold Greater than the I I see deeper than the I Glitter in gold not I Wondering why now I really understand why Music is still my life Yes it's the greatest Now I sing high of my greatness All my kids sing my praises Yes it's amazing negativity is fading Positive anticipation Feeling like My joy comes in the morning My joy comes in cos photo

from behype

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To the day I depart it's all that I want to be

I am me

From the day I started To the day I depart it's all that I want to be

I am me

I ain't going nowhere I ain't going nowhere It's all that I wanted

I am me

I ain't going nowhere I ain't going nowhere It's all that I wanted

Peace to the ones who have made it Peace to the love never fading Peace to the Peace to the Art Love for the love and the patience Strength and the humiliation Peace to the ones who have made it Peace to the love never fading

Peace to the Peace to the Art Love for the love and the patience Strength and the humiliation You ain't never gonna take it from me I ain't never gonna take it from me You ain't never gonna take it from me I ain't never gonna I ain't never gonna I ain't going nowhere I ain't going nowhere It's all that I want to be

Cos I am me

photos by genevieve vahl

IFromam me the day I started

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