2018 Iris: Art + Lit - 3 Diamonds

BOOK 3

Iris: Art + Lit

St. Paul Academy and Summit School

1712 Randolph Avenue

Saint Paul, MN 55105

651-698-2451

irisartlit.spa@gmail.com

Dear Reader,

Suits intermingle and most competitors strive to right chaos. Two pairs. Three of a kind. Full house. Cards create teams or provide a solitary experience; in every play, there lies a common thread in the guidelines and game plan.

Diamond, the third book in this series, represents courage, ambition, and truth. The speech by Lillian Pettigrew “This is Yours” (p.26) is the epitome of courage and strength.

LOST IN THE SHUFFLE

4 - Arizona - Jasmine White - Photo

6 - Life - Masha Ames - Poem

7 - Minimal Architecture - Ayla Straub - Clay

8 - Installation Detail - Eva Garcia - Art Installation

8 - Racialized Sexuality - Lucy Sandeen - Essay

14 - Street - Hannah Jacobs-Davis - Photo

14 - Chicago - Quinn Christensen - Poem

16 - Untitled - Mira Zelle - Acrylic

16 - Unwanted Change - Asher Sobotka - Poem

18 - Leaving - Adrienne Gaylord - Charcoal

21 - A Beginning - Paige Indritz - Poem

22 - A League Among Leagues - Lath Akpa - Poem

22 - Cyanot - Anna Commers - Photo

24 - Polly - Ian Mataener - Digital Photo Illustration

24 - An Essay Poem - Sam Hanson - Poem

25 - Double Talk - Kaia Larson - Photo

26 - 20th Century- Melissa Nie - Digital Art

26- This is Yours - Lillian Pettigrew - Speech

29 - Belle - Libby Woodson - Photo

30 - Assemblage - Olivia Lagos - Clay

31 - Grandpa’s Cooking - Tana Osoki - Documentary Film

Jasmine White

Life

By Masha Ames

It’s raining men while the women are barking at the full moon. The wild dogs from the village look like wet rats, The trees in the forest smell like crisp wintergreen, I hear the wolves howling powerfully in the snowy forest, I can taste the snowflakes falling one-by-one onto my tongue, The hat on my head is soggy from the snowfall. The silver moon tastes like cheese.

Carol works in New York, there are no wild dogs from the village. Sophisticated people are sitting by the beach, there’s pellegrino!

If you eat a burrito, time will stop. What’s cracking, not much. She swam away. He was as blue as the moon. They talked crisply and saw his heart beating, I play piano.

Ultimately, people will meet aliens. They will ignite my bitter fireplace.

I’ll have to see the sun to know that it’s over, The stars danced the night away. Women are the moon, the stars, and the rising sun.

Racialized Sexuality in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea

By Lucy Sandeen

Thesimilarities between Jane and Antoinette’s lives in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea lives are uncanny and no doubt intentional. In writing Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys had the opportunity to construct an entirely new character for Brontë’s Bertha Rochester, a marginalized and demonized obstacle to Jane and Rochester’s marriage. Rhys chose to give Bertha (or Antoinette, as she is known in Wide Sargasso Sea) a life that parallels Jane’s in many ways but is influenced and shaped by her experiences with race in the Jamaican colony. Both girls find themselves without a family at a very young age. Jane and Antoinette are both rejected by the mother figures: Jane’s aunt shuns and ridicules her, and Antoinette was neglected by her mother, who always “...

Eva Garcia

pushed [her] away, not roughly, but calmly, coldly, without a word, as if she had decided once and for all that I was useless to her” (Rhys 18). Most notably in both books, Antoinette and Jane were both in love with Rochester. Their relationships with Rochester, however, are drastically different in the power dynamics within and the depth of the relationship. Jane’s is based in intellectual and emotional compatibility and affection. Antoinette’s, however, is based in sexual desire and one-sided affection. While Antoinette and Jane share many parallels, the differences in the nature of their relationships with Rochester are determined by their respective racialized sexuality.

Wide Sargasso Sea is told by the alternating perspectives of Antoinette and Rochester, and both narrations are flawed and skewed by the narrator, which results in a fog of ambiguity surrounding her history and specifically her race, both in her lineage and appearance. The only glimpses of her appearance are given through her comparisons to others and through Rochester’s constant questioning. At the boarding school, Antoinette’s race is questioned in an interaction with one of her peers:

‘Please, Hélène, tell me how you do your hair, because when I grow up I want mine to look like yours.’

‘It’s very easy. You comb it upwards, like this and then push it a little forward, like that, and then you pin it here and here. Never too many pins.’

‘Yes, but Hélène, mine does not look like yours, whatever I do.’

Her eyelashes flickered, she turned away, too polite to say the obvious thing.’ (Rhys 49)

Hair is one of the most obvious indicators of race, and one of the most stigmatized, and the fact that Antoinette’s hair is fundamentally different from Hélène’s and Hélène is “too polite to say the obvious thing” suggests that Antoinette is of mixed ancestry and that her hair reveals her ethnicity. Rochester, too, is critical of Antoinette’s appearance and questions her true descent:

[Antoinette has] long, sad, dark alien eyes. Creole of pure English descent she may be, but they are not English or European either. And when did I begin to notice all this about my wife and

Antoinette? After we left Spanish Town I suppose. Or did I notice it before and refuse to admit what I saw? (Rhys 60)

Rochester’s insecurities about Antoinette color their relationship. His insecurity about her race—“Creole of pure English descent she may be, but [her eyes] are not English or European either”—and his belief that he has been deceived in marrying her ultimately doom their relationship. Antoinette’s mixed heritage is alluded to in Jane Eyre as well: Jane recounts her frightening experience with the “ghost” (Antoinette) in the night and refers to her “blackened inflation of the lineaments,” the “purple” hue of her complexion, and her “swelled and dark” lips—all characteristics that may be attributed to those of a person of color (Brontë 541).

Antoinette’s racial lineage is also ambiguous, and there’s question to whether or not she is actually her mother’s daughter; her mother undoubtedly loved her brother Pierre more than Antoinette and rejected her desperate pleas for affection. Antoinette’s father has also slept with other women and has children by different mothers. As a result, Antoinette has several half-siblings, many of whom are mixed-race. In general, the line between black and white in the colony is blurred. Racial castes are defined not by black and white but instead by European, White Creole, Black Creole, and Black. Antoinette’s family’s racial definitions are blurred as well, and Antoinette’s heritage is unknown, but her appearance reveals that she is mixed. In contrast, Jane Eyre is most definitely white—there is no question about her ancestry.

The differences in Antoinette and Jane’s ethnicities fundamentally alter the power dynamics and the nature of their relationships with Rochester. Although there are factors that set Jane and Rochester unequal in their relationship, these ultimately balance out and in the end; the two finish on relatively equal footing. They are only able to do so because of their one fundamental similarity: race. Antoinette, on the other hand, is in a perpetually subjugated position in her relationship with Rochester for numerous reasons, the most notable being race. The two are opposites: she is beautiful, he is not; he is wealthy, she is not; she is a mixed Creole

“Antoinette... is treated only as a sexual being.”

Jamaican girl, and he is from England. It takes time for the two to warm up to one another, but Rochester eventually gains Antoinette’s hard-earned trust:

She looked at me and I took her in my arms and kissed her.

‘You don’t know anything about me,’ she said.

‘I’ll trust you if you’ll trust me. Is that a bargain? You will make me very unhappy if you send me away without telling me what I have done to displease you. I will go with a sad heart.’

‘Your sad heart,’ she said, and touched my face. I kissed her fervently, promising her peace, happiness, safety… (Rhys 71)

Rochester gains Antoinette’s trust by promising her what she’s longed for: security, happiness, love. And they do finally find some happiness together; Antoinette opens up to Rochester and fully trusts and loves him. She gives herself completely to him and tells him, “I never wished to live before I knew you.” (Rhys 83) Their relationship, however, is mostly sexual. Rochester exploits her love and betrays her trust. He makes her life miserable on the island and then locks her away in a room in England for ten years. Because of her race, their relationship is never equal; he always has the upper hand in their relationship.

The sexual nature of Jane and Antoinette’s relationships with Rochester are dramatically different solely because of race. Jane is very clearly white, and because of this, Rochester’s treatment of her is exceedingly romantic. He tells her,

I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you-especially when you are near to men, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. (Brontë 270)

His declarations of love are declarations of romance and completely lacking in sexual nature. He respects Jane as an intellectual being and his treatment of her in their relationship reflects that. Antoinette, on the other hand, is treated only as a sexual being. While Rochester may not immediately realize it, this treatment is solely because she is mixed. When Rochester speaks to Antoinette romantically, he admits it’s only so that he can

sleep with her. He abuses her love for him and her trust of him for his sexual pleasure:

‘You are safe,’ I’d say. She’d liked that— to be told ‘you are safe.’ … As for the happiness I gave her, that was worse than nothing. I did not love her. I was thirsty for her, but that is not love. ...She was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did. (Rhys 84)

Antoinette is a “stranger to [him]” because they are two completely different people with different understandings of and places in the world. Because Antoinette is mixed, Rochester feels entitled to sex. While he never explicitly admits it, he relegates her to racial stereotypes of promiscuity that have long surrounded Black and mixed women and stem from the history of slavery. On slave plantations in the 19th Century, the rape of Black slave women was expected and criminally protected. Black women were often viewed as foreign, exotic, and not-quite-human sexual beings. Historian Elsa BarkleyBrown writes, “Throughout U.S. history Black women have been sexually stereotyped as immoral, insatiable, perverse; the initiators in all sexual contacts — abusive or otherwise” (Brown 305). Rochester subscribes to these stereotypes and describes Antoinette as a hyper-sexual creature. He claims, “She thirsts for anyone—not for me… She’ll loosen her black hair, and laugh and coax and flatter... She’ll moan and cry and give herself as no sane woman would—or could” (Rhys 149). Rochester claims that Antoinette’s hyper-sexuality is because of her insanity, but he has in reality labeled her as insane in another indication of his differing treatment of her because of her race. He is terrified of the idea that he has crossed racial boundaries and has instead labeled her as insane. When he claims that she gives herself as “no sane woman would,” his definition for sanity is racialized and rooted in his fear. Christophine confirms this: “It is in your mind to pretend she is mad. I know it. The doctors say what you tell them to say” (Rhys 145). Rochester wants escape from his marriage to a mixed-race girl, but the only way he can accomplish this without revealing

“[Rochester] relegates [Antoinette] to racial stereotypes of promiscuity.”

his condemning and humiliating secret is by deeming her insane. Because of her race and her perceived hyper-sexuality, Rochester is emboldened to sexually abuse her without consequences. Only Christophine finds out, and she confronts him: “I undress Antoinette so she can sleep cool and easy; it’s then I see you very rough with her eh?” (Rhys 137) While the difference in the two relationships could be attributed to the difference in Jane and Antoinette’s appearance—Jane is repeatedly described as plain while it is attested that Antoinette is exceedingly beautiful— Rochester does not base his relationships off of appearance. He chooses Jane over Ingram Blanche, who is described as beautiful, and he does not accept Antoinette’s beauty solely because of her ethnic ambiguity: “The girl is thought to be beautiful, she is beautiful. And yet…” (Rhys 64). He hesitates in acknowledging her beauty because she is not the “pretty English girl” he wishes she could be (Rhys 64).

Rochester treats Jane tenderly, romantically, and their relationship begins intellectually and ends with the two on largely equal standing. Antoinette is sexually used and abused and manipulated, then Rochester calls her mad, uses her sexuality as proof, and locks her up. He uses her as a sexual being and then stereotypes and shames her because of it—because she’s mixed. Her sexuality is no different than his, but she is not white and he is, and because of it, she is automatically promiscuous and therefore does not garner the same emotional and intellectual engagement and the same respect and love and that Jane does. Because she is mixed, she is doomed to a life of sexual abuse and neglect and darkness until she finally frees herself from her prison in Rochester’s attic.

Works Cited

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 3rd ed., Smith, Cornhill, 1847. Brown, Elsa B. “’What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics,” Feminist Studies 18, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 305, doi:10.2307/3178230.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. W.W. Norton & Company, 1966.

Hannah Davis-Jacobs

By Quinn Christensen

I feel you breathe for me.

All silver and sharp towers, catching glimpses of each building’s belly button as they reachreachreach towards endless blue.

I have fallen in love before, but you came as the biggest surprise. Because somehow, somehow all this silver comes with the gold of the prairiesSomehow this is still my Midwest.

I am unsettled

By how easily I might call you homeI never thought I’d dare to leave a piece of myself so close to the house I grew up in.

When my grandfather used to ask me every Thanksgiving if I had a boyfriend yet I always told him that I refused to fall in love with anything short of an adventure.

So Chicago, you midwestern masterpiece, you have made me wonder: if ours is the romance I choose will I have run away at all?

Zelle “Untitled”

Mira

Unwanted Change

By Asher Sobotka

The words you speak are those of a toddler.

The hats are taking down the professors

The sounds of the crowd of 700,000, cheering, booing, loud to my ears, though you claim twice that.

The sight of your crowd, red everywhere

The smell of diesel and fuel permeating the air

I feel the shove of those around me, sharp jabs, screams of anger

I taste the metallic taste of blood in my mouth

I smell the anger rising in the crowd

Would James Buchanan be proud?

Will you become a resident of Embarrass, Minnesota?

Red was not everywhere in your crowd

It is nice to enjoy the fresh air

You claim you are a frondeur but you repeat old sayings

If you close your eyes, we are not here

What happens in the future is not the future

We turned off the news

As delighted as a mourners

He leapt up ten stories, to take a seat

Ash had hopes

We eventually will say goodbye

You stole my biodegradable hopes

I want to forget you so I will always look for you.

Oy Vey! Don’t be a schande, I respect your chutzpah.

Our signs screamed, blamed, cried

The anger, the fear.

Adrienne Gaylord Leaving

A Beginning

By Paige Indritz

Her lips were cracking, fractals of blood against the elements. She faced the wind, earth, sky stars; falling as gently as they could. But fire rages at its own pace and water carves through mountains. Oh yes, her lips were breaking but she was far from cracked.

Ian Matenaer

Anna Commers “Cyanot”

A League Among Leagues

By Lath Akpa

Now true friends stab you in the front

But the goats rule over everyone

A game where the goats smell the worst the squeaks sound like a chorus of athletic angels

Magic, Oh My Days

Boston Loves to bicker for the slightest reason and never seems solve their problems equally

Old school and new school, they are all the same New cities following up after the legacies of the originals I can task every part of the history, every fact is another sweet layer to savor and enjoy the goats are ignored and disapproved by everyone inequality concealed in every corner but everything is fair and it’s constructed to help the ones in need if you are clutch, there will be no one in the risers hating on you how is this happening it is a disgrace, it is a damn disgrace to the face they cut the yarn from the old woman’s grasp, and now they cut the dreams of so many they are as proud of the murderers and too scared to say anything, so they do everything hang time is all that matters they are forced to fly for the sake of bank Lath watches dreams being crushed and he is in utter disbelief he can’t go on like this and neither can they but everything comes back around and they will get posterized their most powerful and influential crowd waiting to tear them apart thanks,

but I can’t make that my last priority I love what they do and I live what they do I sleep what they do and I eat what they do

pisan zapra the sticky ball called out for Texas why are they so different I want them to be like you

Nothing i love is as good as the way you do things and it is painful to be a part of anything else

But in extreme measures, they tear up the planks of wood that they use for guidance

A game that mothered them

An Essay Poem

By Sam Hanson

Sometimes, the idea of transparency

Is dangerous, surrounded by glass walls, And obsessed: (it picks up the pen) with sestina Who starves behind her iron bars, a tier Above freedom. And I inside a mirror, paranoid by the eerie sound Of truth, who burrows under the mossy poem: my antithesis.

That was my introduction, now for my anti-thesis: Am I an essay or a poem? A transparent Claim or a gypsy seer sounding My fate? For if you believe in a poem, well, You believe in anything, little boy, who gazes from a tier, Who bounds in boundlessness, who eats sestina

(it likes the taste of essays) after his siesta. He is stubbornly and devoutly anti-thesis And weathers like the storm on the Great Western Tiers, sitting atop this indent, sans parent. (long words dribble down its mouth) sesquipedalian pleonasms wall Him indoors: He attempts his essay, sounds

A howl at the prompt: A fowl sound

Indeed. (it pries open double space font) he vegetates over sestina, Ponders the heavy rhythm of silence echoing off walls, (it runs on New Roman time) awaiting the violin’s thesis

In Sibelius, but finds none, he trembles against the string’s transparency,

The surface mirroring a failed artist, and now the boy is punchdrunk at the edge of a tier,

Teetering on dissonance, at the edge of tears

Waving at his fifth paragraph chugging across the sound. But the ship sees him in distress, distorted by apparent Fog, it radios on all frequencies, but all it hears is sestina,

Recited from a war-torn mind - an undeclared war - the thesis

Lost in the depth along the margins of storm walls,

Yes, a storm is coming. And I, lost in thunder and walled In by cascading arpeggios, driving, my tires

Spewing up discarded consonants, searching the lined road for a synthesis. But thunder strikes the page (the ultimate critic) who wakes the fragile artist from an unsound Dream, and boy is swept away by words, desperately holding on to sestina, And the storm wall breaks and any notion of transparency

Shatters: my antithesis whispers away in a wall of my making, Shaking from the violence of transparent order, the boy’s hand reaches from the tier, Grasps a radiant sound, lets go of sestina, whispers away.

Kaia Larsen

“Double Talk”

This is Yours

Lillian Pettigrew

I am sick and tired of the way this world treats its girls. I am sick of watching the strongest and most beautiful people I know believe that they are the opposite, sick of seeing the scars on their wrists and their hearts. I am sick of trying to disappear, of trying to take up less space in the world, of looking for my worth in the shape of my stomach or in other people’s words. When I was thirteen, I met a girl. She was lovely in a dusky, unassuming way. I liked the way her soft dark hair fell about her cheeks

Melissa Nie

“20th Century”

and the way she covered her mouth when she laughed (sudden and shameless and barely stifled). I liked her doe eyes and her lopsided nose, and she liked me. She was tall and thin, and I admired this too until I learned why.

We emailed each other constantly. I don’t remember it, but there they are, dozens of messages in my inbox from years ago, rapid-fire and not cohesive and words tumbling over each other and scrambling to be heard, just like we were, in our emptiness and loneliness and confusion. It makes me cringe to read them now, these reminders of how half-formed and desperate we were. How much we were reaching out, reaching blindly for some anchor to tell us that we belonged, we deserved, we loved and we were loved. We reached out blindly in the darkness and caught each other’s hands, and only stumbled further down.

I told her that I loved her and I still don’t know if it was a lie or not. I let her take me by the hand at a dance, feeling small and cinematic under the disco balls and purple-blue lights, and we sat with our knees toughing on a ferris wheel. I wrote her a letter asking her to be my girlfriend, and I folded it up and threw it away before anyone could see, lay awake in bed that night wondering if I was gay, feeling that thought weigh heavy on my chest and sting tears into my eyes. She came out to me in a note passed in history class, a word in cramped looping script I’d never seen be fore. She taught me what bisexuality was, but she also taught me what fear was, what depression was, and these words tangled themselves up in my chest, became foggy and indistinguishable and I thought I saw beauty in them that way. She asked me once if I had a thigh gap, and I didn’t even know what that was so I told her I did and learned to hate my lack thereof later.

We drifted apart. She told me that she liked me one more time, scribbled it in code in my yearbook on the last day of school with her purple pen, and we faded into different futures. I Google her name sometimes, wanting to find her, not wanting to think about what it might mean if I do. But then she shows up in Facebook photos, a friend of a friend’s, and I am grateful. Sometimes she looks like a ghost, distant and blurred and lonely, and sometimes she looks like sunshine, wide grin and eyes full of life. She’s with a girl, their arms touching, in colorful eyeshadow in someone else’s prom photo. She’s in the honor society, a gold sash over her shoulders, and my pride for her is fireworks. I told you I was sick of how the world treats its girls, and how it makes the girls treat themselves, and I am. This feeling,

this anger overwhelms me sometimes, and I let it, because anger is a thousand times better than emptiness. I let myself be full of anger now, instead of pushing it down and hiding it away, and I let myself be full of love and warmth and inspiration and sadness too. I don’t exactly know how I did it, because the process was slow and painstaking and sometimes accidental. But I can tell you it’s possible, possible to fill those aching spaces inside you with other things, and I’m begging you, to all the empty girls, and to anyone else who’s felt that pain, start today.

Take a moment for yourself. Just a second, to breathe the air and remember that it’s your lungs moving in and out. Feel the ground beneath your feet and remember that it is yours as much as it is anyone else’s, that you have fought and lost and won and learned and that this earth is yours. Fill your room and your chest with flowers, with stories and music and laughter. Find the things that you love about yourself, or even the things that you don’t mind so much, and remind yourself of them. Find the rosy color of the stretch marks on your hip that tell the world how much you’ve grown. Find the freckles on your knees and your eyelids that come from stolen moments in the sun. Find the braveness and the hope and the wonder inside of you, and hold on to them. Let them get bigger and bigger. Let yourself grow.

I am a rebel, because I am a girl in this world who loves herself, truly and fully and finally. I am no longer the frightened frizzy-haired girl who didn’t even have the words to realize that she was hurting, and who hurt someone else because of it. I have strengthened her, and I have hurt someone else because of it. I have strengthened her, and I have softened her. I have let vines grow up from the ruins of her, and I have watched and prayed as the grow up from the ruins of her, and I have watched and prayed as the girls I love grow too. I want nothing more than for every one of you to find the solace in yourselves that I have found. So take this moment. Take this breath. This is yours.

Take this moment. Take this breath.

This is yours.

Libby Woodson

Olivia Lagos

Assemblage 7x11x5

Scan here to see Tana Osoki’s film, “Grandpa’s Cooking”