S
W
A
R T
H
M
O
NOVEMBER 2015
Identity: Scientist Nehmat Kaur on what it’s like to be a female scientist at Swarthmore
R E
CONTRIBUTORS Grace Baker is a junior from Corpus Christi, TX studying German and peace and conflict studies, but mostly spends class time writing poems of dubious quality. Eden Barnett is a junior philosophy major from Phoenix, AZ, just trying her hardest. Anya Bernhard is a sophomore at Haverford College from Gainesville, FL studying biology with a minor in neuroscience. Maria Castaneda is a sophomore from Charlotte, NC studying peace and conflict studies and Spanish. She really likes cats and memes. Cara Ehlenfeldt is a senior from Tabernacle, NJ majoring in linguistics and minoring in English literature. She is an aspiring science writer, who also draws cartoons for the Daily Gazette and writes poetry for no one. Leo Elliot is a sophomore from Brooklyn studying political science and growing increasingly wary of big questions, coming to prefer small questions, like, “what will I eat for lunch today?” Liliana Frankel is a junior studying English, education and Latin American studies. You can check out her straight-news pieces about the migrant crisis in Mexico on warnewsradio.org. Colette Gerstmann doesn’t even go here, or does she? She wishes that she could bake a cake out of rainbows and smiles (she’s working on the recipe). Philip Harris is a senior from Austin, TX studying English. Max Hernandez is a junior currently studying abroad in Florence, Italy.
Letter policy Letters are welcome from all readers. We will not ever publish letters anonymously and we reserve the right to edit all letters for length and clarity without contacting the letter writer. Letters generally should run no longer than 1,000 words. They should be sent to agonzal4@swarthmore.edu.
How to contribute We solicit pieces from writers, though we will also accept submissions of long-form reporting, personal, argumentative and photo essays, book and movie reviews, short stories, poems, and anything else that seems suitable. Submissions will be considered from Swarthmore students, alumni, faculty, and staff, and will be considered anonymously, though we will not, except in rare cases, publish anonymously. Submissions should generally not go longer than 10,000 words. Contact: agonzal4@swarthmore.edu, nbattel1@swarthmore.edu, lfranke1@swarthmore.edu.
Alexander Jimenez is a senior from La Palma, CA, studying English literature and French with a penchant for European experimental films and long walks on the beach.
EDITOR IN CHIEF ANNA GONZALES
PHOTO ESSAYS NOAH MORRISON
Allison Hrabar ’16 is a political science and film major from Tucson, AZ. She frequently cries while watching Lin-Manuel Miranda’s vines.
MANAGING EDITORS LILIANA FRANKEL NORA BATTELLE
POETRY VICTORIA STITT Z.L. ZHOU
Nehmat Kaur is a senior from Gurgaon, India studying political science and English, and she is trying really, really hard, honest.
COPY PRIYA DIETERICH ART STEVE SEKULA
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS ISABEL CRISTO LEO ELLIOT IAN HOLLOWAY
BOOKS PHILIP HARRIS
EDITOR AT LARGE IZZY KORNBLATT
Xavier Gerard Lee is a junior studying comparative literature, French and Black studies. Other than writing, he enjoys contemplating the peculiarities of everyday life, obscure foreign cinema, and scowling.
Philip Queen is a senior philosophy major from Richmond, VA is True if and only if Philip Queen is a senior philosophy major from Richmond, VA. Thomas L. Ruan ’16, a philosophy and chemistry major from Hong Kong, edits the Swarthmore Journal of Theory. Steve Sekula is a junior from Richboro, PA, majoring in computer science and studio art. Natalia “Danger” Sucher ’16 is a Latina geek double majoring in honors Latin and Greek from Brooklyn. You’ve probably never heard of it.
S W A R T H M O R E
RJ Tischler is a senior from Mount Airy, Maryland studying English and religion who has watched “The Grand Budapest Hotel” approximately 47 times. Anna Weber is a freshman from Minnetonka, MN planning on studying peace journalism, political science, and gender & sexuality studies. She loves Virginia Woolf above all else. Eva Winter is a senior from Eugene, OR studying English and biology. She also swims for the college. Rachel Yang is a senior from Minnetonka, MN studying English literature and education. A professor she admires recently accused her of being an “aggressive ruminator.”
MOVIES & TV RACHEL YANG
Published by the Swarthmore Phoenix swarthmorephoenix.com Founded 2012 | Vol. 4, No. 2
Design © 2015 the Swarthmore Phoenix. All content © 2015 by its listed author unless otherwise noted. The “R” logo is based on the font Layer Cake by Luzia Prado. The “Review” logo is based on the font Soraya by Pactrice Scott. Printed at Bartash Printing, Philadelphia, PA. Please recycle this magazine.
「 不論白貓黑貓，抓到老鼠就是好貓 。」 “No matter whether the cat is black or white: a cat that catches mice is a good cat.” 鄧小平 Deng Xiaoping
S
W
A
R T
H
M
O
REPORT
R E
November 2015
Arts
PERSONAL ESSAYS
Identity: Scientist
BOOKS
by Nehmat Kaur
I think, therefore I am unhappy 30 On David Foster Wallace by Philip Harris
ESSAYS
The body electric: Cara Ehlenfeldt on science and empathy 9
‘The Argonauts’ 33
Maggie Nelson’s newest offering by Thomas Ruan
New Lovers 35
In search of better erotica by Grace Baker
Undocumented visibility Life as an undocumented immigrant at Swarthmore
Achilles at Swarthmore: Natalia Sucher on civilian trauma 12
21
Can nature handle Hollywood? by Philip Queen
‘Inside Out’ 38
A review of Pixar’s most recent film by Anna Weber
TELEVISION
Schumer and Simone 39 ‘The Second Sex’ lives on by Eden Barnett
FICTION
Déjà vu by Xavier Lee
MOVIES
A wild Everest walk 36
4
Suggested by Leo Elliot and Colette Gerstmann 19
Getting the story Dispatch from a migrant shelter in southern Mexico by Lily Frankel
24
POETRY
Canoe by Eva Winter
14
the mirror box by RJ Tischler
The language burden Translating family stories by Rachel Yang
16
26
7
ILLUSTRATIONS
Steve Sekula
21, 22
MUSIC
Lonely Beaches, CA 40 Lana Del Rey’s new album by Alex Jimenez
THEATER
Hold it down
Finding real grief 42 An essay on ‘Hamilton’ by Allison Hrabar
photo essay by Max Hernandez
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
15
NOVEMBER 2015
3
REPORT
Identity: Scientist An exploration of female students’ experiences in chemistry, computer science, biology, and engineering at the college
by Nehmat Kaur
* Note: Names followed by an asterisk (*) indicate pseudonyms created by the Review.
“H
e pegs you,” Sam* pins the air in front of her face and continues, “that’s something I say that professor does. He labels students… and unfortunately, often they are attractive to mildly attractive women. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him do that to a guy.” It was her freshman spring and so far Sam had sailed through Swarthmore, making the most of Pub Nite and pass/ fail. Her rigorous IB curriculum put her ahead in terms of coursework, and her naturally confident persona got her noticed in a class of 100 people. At first, Sam didn’t think much of her professor’s attention: she put it down to her participation in class. But as the semester went on, she noticed that his attempts to engage her with chemistry and implied
4
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
interest in a mentor-mentee relationship weren’t offered to everyone in the class. Describing this realization as “off-putting,” Sam decided to distance herself from him, making it clear that she wasn’t interested in little chats or life advice. Sam was intent on keeping things strictly professional. But the professor in question didn’t respond well to this distancing. Sam recalls a tension in their interactions, brought on by his realization that “We weren’t going to have what he thought were going to have.” Though Sam is quick to assure me that her grades never suffered because of this particular experience, she is also fairly sure her disinterest translated to his attitude in class. At one point, she recalls being admonished for being loud in class. Now Sam is the first to admit that she can’t help being loud and maybe deserved a quick check on her side-conversations— but she is also quick to point out that she was the only one singled out from 100 people. Surely there were other students who were also loud and disruptive
that went unchecked. Elizabeth* and Susan* too had an uncomfortable experience their freshman year. As part of a biology lab group with another girl, all three girls noticed the special attention they received from the professor in charge. He would spend more time at their table, and emailed them all multiple times encouraging them to take up the special major run by him. What could have been really valuable encouragement was made distinctly uncomfortable by the fact that it was directed towards a few select women in the class, Elizabeth and Susan. Elizabeth recalls getting the professor’s emails a couple times but it was their third friend who received the most. She dealt with the special attention much the same way Sam did, quietly distancing and being non-responsive because she didn’t want to risk offending the professor, or worse, somehow realize that she had misread the situation. While Elizabeth and Susan didn’t experience the increasing harshness that Sam was subjected to, Elizabeth does recall special treatment, such as when she got a higher grade than the men in her class, even though she got a question wrong. “It was one of those ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions, you either got it right or you didn’t, and I circled the wrong answer but got half a point for it! None of the men got that extra point for nothing,” Elizabeth said. While there was nothing explicitly sexual about any of these interactions, Sam, Susan and Elizabeth all felt uncomfortable with the professor-student dynamic in these relationships. Sam especially made the observation that the idea of a sexual relationship with her professor was simply beyond the realm of possibility in her mind and so the idea never even occurred to her. But she had heard rumors about the professor having inappropriately close relationships with his female students and that he was required to have his door open while meeting with students in his office. These stories, combined with her own experiences, led her to believe that the rumors must have some truth in them. Elizabeth echoed the same sentiments. At a small school like Swarthmore,
impressions form and spread rapidly but also stick around for years, shaping the impressions of generations of students. On the flip side, professors’ inattention to women in large male-dominated classrooms can cause its own set of problems. Mia Ferguson ’15, who was one of only two women to graduate as engineers in her class year, dismissively rolled her eyes at the niggling memories of engineering at Swarthmore when we talked over Skype. Now that she is graduated and works as a software engineer in California, she’s free from the bubble and more open with her criticism of the department and the challenges that women face when it comes to working with professors and classmates. Sitting in male-dominated classrooms, there were often times when Ferguson noticed a difference in the way she was treated compared to the men around her. In one class where she was the only woman, she recalls, “There was this one professor…I would respond to his questions with an answer and he’d ignore me. But then one of my male peers would answer the same thing and he’d accept the answer.” Ferguson also noticed that she was relatively more likely to participate in female-dominated sociology-anthropology classrooms than the male-dominated spaces in engineering. Part of that came from the professors in each department. Sociology-anthropology professors were interested in knowing their students’ personal experiences, and Ferguson felt comfortable enough to take more risks in those classes than engineering. She was more likely to risk answering and getting it wrong in a socio-anth class. Ferguson illustrated how she would feel if that happened in an engineering classroom: “My intelligence would be judged in a way that was potentially related to my gender. I would be very, very conscious that someone would be like, now, ‘Mia is someone who doesn’t know how to add. She is therefore not smart enough for Swarthmore or the engineering department.’” There is no space for women to be mediocre or simply average in engineering or computer science, because women run the risk of having it interpreted as a deep, defining flaw. “You can’t be mediocre or you will feel pushed out,” Ferguson said. “Whereas in other departments, it’s like, ‘Okay, you can still learn, it’s no big deal.’” Maggie* echoed the same sentiment
while talking about computer science. “There can be average or below-average men in tech, but never women,” she said.
N
avigating difficult relationships in the classroom is not just restricted to professors but can extend to lab partners and classmates as well. The sciences at Swarthmore, with the exception of biology, are male-dominated fields. Most of the work for these classes depends on lab work done with a lab partner. In Ferguson’s words, “It’s very different from writing a group paper because your entire grade doesn’t depend on [the paper]. Whereas with a lab partner, that’s the majority of what you’re assessed on.” It’s important for lab partnerships to go right. And sometimes it’s even harder to spot and address problems with peers than it is with professors. The first time Maggie noticed that her lab partner had rewritten her code and restructured her diagrams before submitting their computer science lab, she instinctively apologized for the extra four hours her partner had to put in to fix her mistakes. Sitting in my room on a Sunday night recounting this, she fiddled with her mug of tea, implicitly acknowledging that she assumed she had done the lab wrong. But as she alternated between twiddling the string of the tea bag and her hair, she hesitantly admitted, “I mean…I wasn’t sure that his word choices were all that different from mine. Normally that’s not the case with lab partners. We check over each other’s code and see if everything works. But we don’t rewrite the other person’s code.” As this rewriting became a regular occurrence, Maggie simply decided to let it go and let her partner take over all the writing. Usually meticulous about phrasing her sentences, this particular anecdote came out as a collection of half-halts. Though it’s been nearly half a year since she had to deal with this particular individual, it still gives her anxiety to talk about it. If you run into problems with your lab partner in the middle of the semester, the best option is splitting up and working alone, which sounds simple but actually means singlehandedly doing a lab designed for two people. It involves more work, more time spent in office hours, and possibly a reputation for being uncooperative or hard to work
with. Maggie was a junior at the time and knew that she was effectively locked into this partnership. Accommodating her partner’s ego seemed to be the best solution. However, her own self-esteem tanked over the course of the semester, resulting in multiple breakdowns and serious doubts in her ability to understand what was going on in the class. With some sense of finality, she explained, “I didn’t want to argue with him, but at the same time, I felt like I really couldn’t contribute anything that he would be happy with.” Dealing with a difficult lab partner turned out to be very different from Maggie’s interactions with competitive male peers in the classroom. She felt her dependence on her lab partner hampered her ability to trust her own intellect and ability, whereas she’d handled individual competition with men by working harder to prove herself. Sam, in her junior year, also found herself reacting to a competitive classmate by stepping up her aggressiveness in the classroom. She described her internal reaction to being undercut in front of her professor as, “Whoa, what did you just do?! You literally just took my idea that I told you and presented it to the professor. What are you doing?!” When Sam and her two classmates met to discuss the paper they were presenting for seminar, she put forward a different interpretation of the paper than one of her classmates. When the three of them met with the professor to talk about their presentation, Sam was in the middle of explaining the group’s process of understanding the paper when her classmate interrupted with Sam’s own alternative. The professor ended up agreeing with what was originally her idea. After that one instance, she ended up “playing his game,” making sure to present her ideas as separate from her male classmate’s. Sam had researched with the same professor and was confident that he knew “how smart or dumb” she really was, but she still felt the need to justify her ability to be in the seminar. The classmate in question has graduated, but a year on, Sam still sounds infuriated by the experience. Hand waving emphatically, she lets the person’s name slip and then catches herself. “This ‘competition’ with a guy was insufferable,” she said. In the past, when Sam found herself SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
5
in similar situations with female friends, she’d let it slide because she didn’t really care about the class as much or put it down to the person’s personality. It never felt like there was much at stake. But she isn’t sure why she reacted so strongly to a man attempting to upstage her in seminar. “I don’t know if it was just because it was a guy or because it was with my research professor, but I definitely cared a lot more.” She pauses for breath, and then, with her arms crossed decisively, she continues somewhat louder and more assured. “I honestly want to say that it was also just because it was a guy and I felt like I had to prove myself.”
Because engineering labs require multiple hours over weeks and aren’t confined to academic buildings, working in dormitories or other personal spaces can get very tricky. These difficult interactions go the other way too. In her senior year now, Sam says she’s come to appreciate the close knit community in Chemistry despite the handful of experiences that have dampened her love for the department. Engineering, however, evokes nothing but exasperation from her. She recalls an engineering class in which her partner insisted on coddling her. “He’d always say things like, ‘Oh, you’re so pretty,’ and ‘You’re so cute,’ and try to do all the work, [saying] ‘Oh no, I got this…’,” Sam said. She retaliated by firmly insisting that she could do her own work, making it clear that she wasn’t going to indulge that kind of invalidation. However lab partnership stories include a wide variety of events, showing the diversity of experiences that different women have had in different departments over their time at Swarthmore. Susan’s voice and expressions always seem measured, yet when I asked her about her experiences with lab partners, her face momentarily crumpled with 6
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
embarrassment before resuming its usual assurance. “It wasn’t until I started dating someone that I noticed I’d always been very careful of how I interacted with guy lab partners,” Susan said. “For some reason I was really anxious of them getting the wrong idea. I really didn’t want to be in a situation where someone thought I was interested in them and I was just being friendly!” She continued to say that she probably came across as an ice queen but preferred that to the alternative. This wasn’t a conscious effort on her part, but something she noticed about her behavior in hindsight: a careful reticence when it came to her interactions with lab partners to keep things clear-cut. Meanwhile, the semester that Maggie was dealing with her most disheartening lab partnership at Swarthmore, she found comfort in her other lab partner. They’d hooked up once at Halloween, but decided to be partners in the spring and the majority of the semester passed by with strict adherence to professionalism. But as the workload got more stressful and Maggie’s life narrowed into a never-ending tunnel of work, she made the first move. It’s not something she’s proud of, but it’s just how things worked out. They talked things out beforehand and defined work time and fun time, because Maggie was adamant about not mixing the two any more than they had to. Suffice to say it went well and things hit a natural end at the end of the year when her lab partner graduated. Maggie is fully aware that this was difficult territory to be in, because too often, things go the other way, and a woman is left to deal with unwanted attention from someone she needs to spend the majority of her time with.
F
erguson’s already strained experience with the Engineering Department only worsened after she brought a Title IX case against the college for mishandling complaints about sexual violence. Engineering, both inside the bubble and outside in the real world, is extremely skewed towards men. Only about 18 to 20 percent of all undergraduate engineering students in America identify as women, making it more male than comparable fields such as computer science. Notably, at Swarthmore, Lynne Molter is the only female professor in the entire Engineering Department.
Just stepping into Hicks for classes and labs required a different state of mind for Ferguson: “As soon as you walked into Hicks it was like: we’re not going to talk about identity, we’re not going to engage with race, sexuality or anything like that. Basically your only identity here can be engineer.” Ferguson felt as though she and other women in the department consciously or unconsciously took steps to minimize their femininity. Interacting with mostly male peers and professors, Ferguson picked up on their impressions of her. “There were so many times when my engineering cohorts thought I was flirting with them,” she said. One man even told her that when they first met, he’d checked to see if her pupils were dilated to see if she was interested in him. To which Ferguson responded with an emphatically loud, “No!,” her arms stretched out to physically repel the memory of that conversation. Because engineering labs require multiple hours over weeks and aren’t confined to academic buildings such as computer science is, working in dormitories or other personal spaces together can get very tricky for women in the department. Running through a mental list of female engineers, Ferguson is certain that most prefer to appear desexualized because “that’s the safer bet.” While she became more queer-presenting over her time at Swarthmore, others stick to an almost rigidly asexualized t-shirt and jeans combination, and a small number have boyfriends off-campus or in other departments, Ferguson recalled. Given all of this, the department never grew into a comfortable space for Ferguson. She and Allison*, the only other woman to graduate as an engineer that year, often skipped department events to avoid the discomfort of being the only women there. A particular example was the somewhat regular movie night in the Hicks lounge. “There were movie nights and that kind of thing, which sounds great, but when you go, it’s very much an insider circle where you have to have a certain kind of nerdy attitude and you have to not care about social issues,” Ferguson said. When she started having conversations about sexual violence at Swarthmore, she found that most people in other departments were willing and interested in those discussions, but in Hicks, she found herself shut down, with fellow engineers responding by talking
about “Archer,” which was blasting on the television in the department lounge. This avoidance or disinterest that is atypical in other departments at Swarthmore is the norm in Engineering, according to Ferguson. While interviewing people for a job in the department last semester, Ferguson asked a white male candidate how he would advocate for students from diverse backgrounds in the classroom. But she couldn’t complete the question. “I got very swiftly interrupted by someone who would identify as a ‘nerdy engineer,’ who insisted that Swarthmore was great and everyone there was supportive of each other,” Ferguson said. She thinks this encapsulated the general attitude of the engineers at Swarthmore, which she said could be summed up as, “‘My experience is great. You should shut up, because this is an escape for nerdy people and this is an escape for people who do technical things.’” The one exception to Ferguson’s uncomfortable experiences in the department was her relationship with Molter, who serves as a source of support for many of the students who don’t identify with the majority of cis white males in the department, Ferguson said. A former Swattie herself, Molter can be the only person to turn to if someone is struggling with non-academic issues. When it was time to pick an advisor for her final Engineering project, Ferguson went with Molter instead of another professor, even though her project fit his field of interest better. It was partly because she didn’t feel qualified enough to work with him, but she also clarified, “I wasn’t comfortable with anyone but Lynne.”
W
hile Mia has good reason to be unhappy with aspects of her Swarthmore career, Patricia*, an engineer and an important member of the Women in Engineering club, has a more positive outtake on the Engineering Department. While she can recall noticing the skewed gender ratios in her classes, and often feels like the men in her classes are academically ahead of her, she feels this is a result of societal conditioning. Starting with toddler boys being given Legos and girls playing with dolls, men just arrive at college knowing more about the field than most of their women peers, Patricia said. While there’s a frustration to it, Patricia doesn’t feel like she can fault the men she in-
the mirror box by RJ Tischler
// just how much have I forgotten // those flakes of skin floated past my eyes, twirling against the sanguine glow. I was swathed in waves of muffled chatter, couples sipping and spilling wine, were they whispering my name? // just how much have I forgotten // dropped into this mirror box full of golden, jagged light, frigid silver climbs the walls, winter squeezes the corners closer and closer together // just how much have I forgotten // why was I such an angry child why was I such an angry child mucus gushing out of my mouth mucus gushing out of my eyes why was I such an angry child why was I such an angry child … // just how much have I forgotten // teracts with in the department for this outcome. Patricia and Ferguson both agree that there is a lack of female professors in the department. However, Patricia has reason to be more positive about the future. While attending the Grace Hopper convention earlier this semester, she noticed that Carr Everbach, the chair of the engineering department, also attended in an effort to recruit a female software engineer for Swarthmore. So, Patricia feels, the department is beginning to take steps in one direction. Maggie has more mixed feelings about the connection between female professors and support. A naturally quiet person, she has never been particularly vocal in classes, and while some of this has to do with the anxiety of being wrong in front of a roomful of men, mostly she feels it’s just her natural inclination to listen over talking. While all the male professors she has had over her years at Swarthmore have let her be, female ones have taken it upon themselves to encourage her to
participate more. Once, in office hours, her professor attempted to connect with Maggie by admitting that she too feels intimidated talking in a room full of men but works to overcome it. However, Maggie interpreted this feedback as her professor saying that she was making all women look bad by being silent and not asserting herself. Elizabeth, too, feels as if her female professors in Biology, of which there are many, hold her to higher standards. But she doesn’t mind the pressure, because it comes with a better rapport and sense of understanding than she experiences with her male professors. She grew to appreciate Swarthmore’s culture even more this past summer while working with a particularly harsh supervisor for her research at another university. She was pulled aside and criticized for being too emotional and generally condescended to in a way she has never had to endure at Swat. She said, “I just feel like you wouldn’t ever say that to a guy.”
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
7
H
anging out in a nearly empty Sharples at 8 p.m., watching Susan and Elizabeth exchange department gossip, I was struck by the ease of their interaction. There’s an evident catharsis to sharing your problems with someone who does the same things as you, but most of the other women I talked to don’t think there’s much comfort in female companionship within their departments. For Susan and Elizabeth, their friendship is just something they fell into naturally. They didn’t have to strain to find peers they could identify with. However, according to Maggie, seeking out female peers in other natural sciences can feel like a politicised agenda, not a friendship. Despite difficult experiences with professors and lab partners, Ferguson spoke warmly of her close-knit group of engineering friends. They met their freshman year and stuck it out till graduation. She is certain that this circle of friends got her through engineering at Swarthmore. Her tense relationship with the Engineering Department, coupled with the rigor of the classes and tetchy lab partners and professors, meant that she relied on these friends to actually understand the material for her classes and not just for emotional wellbeing. Her freshman year, some of the engineering students developed a sort of “breakfast group” to eat together before their 8:30. Ferguson acknowledged her luck and the rarity of her experience: “I was part of this social group and dependable group of people who I could ask for homework help and who knew me and weren’t just going to be like ‘Oh, she’s just dumb cause she’s a girl.’” She characterizes this group of friends as “cousins or somehow family members.” On the downside, Ferguson acknowledged that going through engineering without such a group is probably a hard and isolating experience. Going through computer science, Maggie didn’t develop such a group or any close friendships with people from her department to protect herself from others’ judgment of her intelligence or ability to be here. She was afraid of asking anyone for homework help and revealing that she was somehow inferior or deficient. As she wraps up her time at Swarthmore, Maggie has settled into a rhythm of working alone and figuring things out for herself that can often be isolating, but is still preferable to the
8
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
added anxiety of social interaction.
M
aggie refuses to participate in groups of women in natural sciences or the one for computer science specifically. Next spring, Maggie is going to be the first woman in her family to graduate from college, and the struggles of going into an industry that she and her family know little about concerns her more than being a woman at Swarthmore does. “I feel like even in that group, the women in there all have their individual connections or family members or someone they know to help them out. I won’t get that from going to the group. So I don’t see the point,” she said. Part of why she reacted badly to her professor’s encouragement and avoids the women’s group is that she hates being reminded that she is a woman in a male-dominated field. “I don’t like to be reminded that I’m a woman in tech, because then I have to think about all the gender discrimination. I have to think about the fact that there’s a cap to how much I can achieve or how much I’ll earn once I start working. There’s just going to be a point that I can’t go beyond and there’s nothing I can do about that,” she said. From this perspective, it isn’t worth thinking about things that you can’t fix. One of ten or so majors in the Chemistry Department, Sam loves the tiny community but, like Maggie, refuses to identify as a woman in natural sciences. “I am not the kind of person who thinks about social injustice, or who thinks about the role of women at all. It’s not something I do, so in terms of that I never felt like I needed a support system just to deal with it,” Sam said. She feels alienated by the way Swarthmore groups approach the issue. Belonging to a group that pares her identity and problems down to her gender is a reductive approach to Sam. She doesn’t identify with just one aspect of herself at any given time and struggles to find groups that address the intersectionality that applies to her life. There’s a frustration when she talks about focusing on gender inequality while ignoring income inequality. Picking a race-based example, Sam explains, “You could be black but if you grew up in a wealthy, white neighborhood, you don’t get to speak for all black people. Their experiences might have been really really different from yours and you can’t just ignore
your own economic privilege.” Elizabeth may have taken a fair amount of academic invalidation at Swarthmore but has always loved the social culture of this place. But over three years in, she’s made peace with not being the best at everything she does and settled into the work she loves doing anyway. “I have great relationships with my professors, where I feel like they value me as a person. And that gives me a sense of ‘Oh, I belong here,’ which I didn’t have freshman year,” Elizabeth said. A lot of this validation comes from the women who teach in the Biology Department, which Elizabeth puts down to just a more naturally comfortable equation for her. Having a hard time this summer, Elizabeth started to wonder if Swarthmore’s female-dominated Biology Department and concern for social issues has coddled her to a point that will complicate her transition to the real world when she graduates next year. Talking to these women about their experiences, I often felt as if I was prying into their lives. Most of the women depicted here recounted their stories with a hesitant, disclamatory quality, giving me the impression that these were not stories they were accustomed to narrating. A lot of these experiences had been put away in their memories, as unimportant or simply unchangeable. The similarities of the experiences, revealed here, were not immediately obvious to either them or me over the course of our talks. The free chattiness of our conversations often took on a terse turn when we talked about what they’d done to improve things in the aftermath of their experiences. The nearly unanimous disavowal of “woman” as a label initially took me by surprise, but then I realised this firm refusal of labels was not a simple dismissal of the issues faced by women in natural sciences, but a more nuanced mediation of their individuality within an institutional system. Sam summed up this contradictory confusion with, “It’s an endemic problem that I don’t feel like I belong to…just because it’s not something that I think about,” she said. After a long pause, she continued, “in some sense, because I’m not thinking about it, I’m perpetuating what’s going on, you know?” u
ESSAY
The body electric “Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.” Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”
“To be really human…is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
by Cara Ehlenfeldt When the pristine, well-groomed scenes of “Ex Machina” fade to black, one expression comes to mind amidst the afterimages: human-hating. “One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction,” Nathan, the creator of the film’s principal artificial intelligence (AI), asserts. The entire movie considers humanity with an AI’s amorality, casting aside the “good” and “bad” human alike, suggesting that our humanity itself is the design flaw that will leave us in the dust. Science fiction has gone on in volumes1 about the tenuous divisions between man and the machine he makes in his own image. Somewhere in this genre’s tangle of wires, prominent writers have attempted to tease out what exactly defines humanity. Yet the message is often the same: humans care about humans, robots do not; woe to him who forgets this and stumbles his way into the machine’s poised and calculating embrace. In these stories, human heroes escape by the skin of their human teeth, if at all.2
1 About which sci-fi writer Sturgeon shrewdly remarks, “ninety percent of everything is crap.” 2 Dave Bowman may make it to Saturn/Jupiter
David Foster Wallace, “Infinite Jest” Yet even when heroes are fully aware of an intelligence’s machinery, their reluctance to treat an AI as a mere tool—whether a split-second hesitation or a full-blown romantic obsession—is a weakness. Human empathy makes them aging Lears among obsequious electric daughters.3 In these circumstances, choosing to eschew empathy could patch the weak spot in the armor. But empathy is beyond conscious control. In a future populated by AI, this presents an odd, unsettling implication: those who don’t empathize with humanity—in our modern society, the antisocial-, borderline-, and narcissistic-personality-disorder-diagnosed— likewise will not empathize with AIs. The current practice towards these individuals is to slap a diagnosis on the chart. Yet AIs are becoming more prevalent. The term artificial intelligence refers to more than mere robots; it is any system that exhibits intelligent behavior, even iPhone’s Siri. As our technological trajectory forges onwards, these AIs will become an increasingly larger presence in our social space. And in this future, non-empathizing humans might be the
in 2001: a Space Odyssey, but HAL still has a 4/5 murder success rate. 3 In a technological theater, where providence acts through technology, holograms replace dreams, and the Luddites are jesters in hand-stitched caps.
most secure of all.4
Empathic Wirings
Human cognition, with its sensory-perceptual flux, is a tempting analogy for an AI’s processing. But to account for differences in empathy, there is more than just the mechanisms of how humans and AIs process their surroundings. It is a matter of the differences in perspective, somewhat akin to reading a book either forwards or backwards. With humans, it’s as if we know the last lines of the book, perhaps even the last chapter, which characters live and which die. We exhibit the end result—our behavior. Yet, starting from this position and moving backwards, it’s more difficult to understand the means by which this ending came about. Only by moving back in the plot can we begin to understand the firestorm that gave rise to our cooled forms. Because we’re starting from the finished product, it’s difficult to pin down the series of neural networks and firings that explain why we do what we do. Holding the enigmatic, slimy mass of the human brain in consideration, neuroscientists are still striving to map out the three pounds we carry in our skulls. So far, we know that our ability to feel emotion and empathize deals closely with the brain’s limbic system—often referred to as the “reptile brain” because it contains basic, primal parts. Recent research suggests that empathy is linked with the right supramarginal gyrus, a region that allows us to distinguish our own self-perception from our perception of others.5 If this area doesn’t work properly, the empathic response doesn’t work properly either. Meanwhile, examining the “mind” of an AI is to read the book forwards. The creation of AIs is purpose-driven, with the structures arranged to best achieve specific purposes. Instead of trying to reason out the underlying bases of behavior from ready-made structures, we’re working from the beginning towards the end. That said, it would be difficult to program an AI with something we don’t yet fully
4 …writes the human who is very much doomed. 5 http://www.mpg.de/7560736/supramarginal-gyrus-empathy SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
9
understand within ourselves. Classically, humans have boasted empathy as their ensign. In Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”,6 empathy is the principal distinction between man and the manmade. In Dick’s universe, the physical difference between humans and AIs is negligible, and the android bounty hunter Rick Deckard cannot justifiably retire (i.e. destroy) an android without first confirming its non-humanity. To do so, he must administer the Voigt-Kampff test, which measures the timing of autonomic responses to determine whether empathy is genuine (in the case of humans) or simulated (in the case of androids). However, using empathy as distinction contains a crucial flaw: it suggests that those lacking the empathic response cannot be human. While our society may have mixed interpretations of its members that lack this response, these members are, if anything, undeniably human.
The Empathy Tendency
Mercifully, the stuff of spaceships and star-spotted screens has not yet come to pass. That is, it has not come to pass as we have predicted it. “The truth,” writes Arthur C. Clarke, “as always, will be far stranger.” In July 2014, Dr. David Smith and Dr. Frauke Zeller launched hitchBOT, “an outgoing and charismatic robot” whose goal was to hitchhike from Halifax to Victoria. HitchBOT was equipped with AI and a user interface (UI) that allowed speech processing and recognition, which enabled it to interact with its benefactors. “Usually, we are concerned with whether we can trust robots. This project asks: can robots trust human beings?”7 Zeller declared in a press release prior to the project’s launch,8 a question which became one of hitchBOT’s taglines. HitchBOT not only successfully completed its Canadian journey but went on to catch rides throughout the Netherlands and Germany. In July 2015, bolstered by this success, hitchBOT embarked on
6 Somewhat better known as its cringe-inducingly unfaithful movie adaptation, Bladerunner. 7 No. No, they cannot. 8 Ryerson University. MEET HITCHBOT—A HITCHHIKING ROBOT TRAVELING FROM COAST TO COAST THIS SUMMER. HitchBOT. N.p., 16 July 2014. Web. <http://hitchbotimg.blob. core.windows.net/img/PressRelease_07162014.pdf>. 10
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
yet another journey, this time across the United States. Few recent murders in Philadelphia have gotten as much attention as the August 1st “killing” of hitchBOT. HitchBOT’s remains, damaged beyond repair and stripped of several electronic components, were photographed on a Philadelphia street, to the dismay of his online followers. Comments and headlines throughout the hype generally refrained from casting hitchBOT as pseudo-human, though some sources, like the Guardian, boldly announced: “Hitchhiking robot dead as cross country trip cut short by vandals.” The most dramatic voices equated hitchBOT’s “demise” with actual danger to human hitchhikers; such commenters vowed not to travel alone in Philadelphia. Admittedly, this anthropomorphism may have originated from hitchBOT’s website, which describes Smith and Zeller as hitchBOT’s “guardians” and touts hitchBOT’s unconditional love for humanity. No one is claiming that hitchBOT is human. Yet, these events reveal something we perhaps already know: humans empathize with their machines. HitchBOT had wellingtons for feet, pool noodles for arms, and gloves for hands. His non-humanity was obvious, but his treatment prior to his disassembling was comparable to a being with human status. Arguably, in a society where 77 percent of people talk to their pets like humans,9 AIs like hitchBOT may be achieving the status of privileged pets, or even a superior one. Some have long held the Turing Test as a fallback against our empathic impulse towards AIs. In order to pass the Turing Test, a machine’s intelligent behavior must be indistinguishable from a human’s, as judged by a human examiner. But does being able to tell whether something is a machine even matter? In the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, a computerized “non-directive Rogerian therapist,” meaning that ELIZA was designed to recognize keywords in speech and ask follow-up questions based on those keywords.10 For example, “I’m feeling anxious,” would prompt the program to ask, “Why do you feel anxious?”
9 https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner/201105/do-we-treat-dogs-the-sameway-children-in-our-modern-families 10 http://www.radiolab.org/story/137466-clever-bots/
Even the simplest machines can surprise their creators. Weizenbaum’s students, even those who wrote the program, were opting to spend time alone with ELIZA, drawing out long conversations sustained by its programmatic probing. “You’re like my father in some ways,” a female student remarks to ELIZA in one conversation transcript, revealing profound anthropomorphism. The extent of these reactions was so unnerving to Weizenbaum that he chose to deactivate ELIZA. The chilling crux in the case of ELIZA is that the Turing Test need not apply. Several of the program’s creators, arguably those most aware that the program was non-human, were perfectly willing to let ELIZA play a human role. All this speaks to the fact that as humans, we exhibit a penchant for empathy and personification, even more than the mere capacity for it. After all, who doesn’t feel a chill run down their spine when HAL (of “2001: A Space Odyssey”) meekly and monotonously intones, “I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave”?
In Defense of the Decapitation
Vandalization of property is wrong. The disassembling of hitchBOT falls into this category. But perhaps what’s more wrong is the dissembling of hitchBOT’s true identity as a machine. While the destroyer of hitchBOT likely had no lofty motives, one wonders: is this what a defense of humanity would look like? In another context, could this appear as an act of rebellion against the growing influence of AIs? In fact, a lot of correlative quandaries arise when we try to equate hitchBOT with a human. Could a human hitchhiker accrue hitchBOT’s celebrity? Would a human hitchhiker with equal charisma surface as a trusted figure? Would he meet a similar fate? HitchBOT’s fate was intrinsically linked with its machinery. Simply put, people perceived hitchBOT as harmless. I asked my family whether hitchBOT was more likely to get picked up than a human hitchhiker. My mother’s response: “Well, hitchBOT isn’t going to kill you.” But when we strip the situation to its bones, an intriguing choice emerges: hitchBOT vs. a hitchhiker. In this situation, humans and an AI were in direct competition for the resource of transportation, or more broadly, the resource of human charity.
Prior to his end, hitchBOT was almost certainly winning.
Even Stranger
Empathy is but one facet of emotion that falls under the broad umbrella of concern. For ages, this concern, for the self and for others—giving rise to the group as a social unit—was an asset to survival. Yet with every passing year, our need to rely on, and even interact with each other, diminishes. We are walking towards a future where the pharmacist is replaced by a 3D printer, chauffeurs by self-driving cars, and face-to-face contact by video chat, all without even watching where we are going. Although it’s questionable whether we’ll ever face our own AIs as direct competitors for our livelihood and resources, we’re already seeing that an increase in technology gives rise to a world where emotionality hinders well-being. To love a machine is to fail to see it for what it really is, perhaps even what it can and should be used for. Reliance becomes a factor. So when technology, AI or otherwise, clashes
To love a machine is to fail to see it for what it really is, perhaps even what it can and should be used for. with our need for emotional give-andtake, what are the consequences? It’s no news that technology’s capacity to replace human interdependence can contribute to unhappiness. As early as 1998, studies found a positive correlation between depression/loneliness and the amount of time spent online.11 With the advent of Facebook, further studies of social media have elaborated on these findings. Ethan Kross’s 2013 study neatly sums up Facebook’s detrimental effect on life-satisfaction: “On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however…Facebook may undermine it.”12
11 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9841579 12 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/arti-
The New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova attributes such effects to active versus passive use.13 On Facebook, the majority of use is passive—scrolling and skimming posts—rather than active—contributing content. “Passive experiences,” Konnikova explains, “no matter the medium, translate to feelings of disconnection and boredom.” This suggests that any technology which makes humans monitors of activity rather than participants potentializes feelings of isolation and emotional atrophy. Everyone has heard that negative emotions, namely stress, contribute to poor health. However, new research by UCLA’s Steve Cole suggests that social isolation— even more so than stress—is the biggest physiological risk factor.14 Cole examined case studies, assessing the overall social support for homosexual HIV carriers and more recently, children living in poverty. According to Cole, social isolation alone embodies “the best-established, most robust social or psychological risk factor for disease out there” against which “nothing can compete.” Social isolation does more than induce negative emotions; it affects gene expression, which in turn impacts the effectiveness of the immune response. In other words, spending excessive time on electronic devices instead of socializing is bad for a lot more than just the eyesight. Facebook, AIs, and even phones play different functional roles in our lives, but combined, they form the sides of a deep hole into which we pour endless amounts of emotional energy. They are where our energy hits an end, gets absorbed. They divert its human-to-human flow into a large silver receptacle that remains sealed to the real, feeling world.15 Does our technology care about us? It cares about our data. It cares about how our data contributes to its overall goals. But our love is not data. Or if it is, it is data that is not useful.
cle?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0069841 13 http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/howfacebook-makes-us-unhappy 14 Dobbs, David. “The Social Life of Genes.” 2014. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014. Ed. Deborah Blum and Time Folger. N.p.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. 19-34. Print. 15 Indeed, if hitchBOT hadn’t been a social experiment, what else was hitchBOT but bread that sopped up our emotional soup, or something that allowed us to pat ourselves on the back for being “charitable”?
A Technological Evolution
Either humanity will have to change or the technology will. It’s one thing for technology to damage psychological well-being, but now the effect bleeds into the physiological. Yet to swear off technology is nearly unthinkable. So what must happen to humanity? Those of us who are able to disinvest ourselves—whether from our desire for Facebook popularity, our bemoaning of hitchBOT’s end, or our need to empathize with other humanoids—may be the best equipped for survival. Low levels of emotional sensitivity, either to the negative effects of social distancing or to developing a fond reliance on technology, may be assets in a future where face-to-face human interactions are fewer and farther between. There is an oddball theory of ambiguous origin that our image of aliens—big, black eyes and long, slender fingers—is actually future humans evolved to use technology more efficiently.16 But this idea of technological selection may speak to our future in deeper ways than we anticipate. Those who can extricate their emotions from the technology that toys with them may be the most resilient, the most successful on material and emotional scales. While the present world isn’t made for those who rely on themselves rather than “the group,” the future perhaps will be. Of course, defining what makes us human in this future will be as maddeningly complex as ever. For those of us who cannot adapt, what remains? I, relating this status quo, am doomed as much as any. Yet there’s a certain romanticism to endings. Many a poet depicts the blood of sunsets, dusky twilights, the slow burn of autumn into the winter’s blue, cold shine. It’s even said that those freezing to death, at the very end, feel suddenly warm and comforted. If I log onto Facebook, see a red square indicating there’s a message waiting for me, something is still loosed. It’s like leaves being shaken down inside, falling all rust and umber. In these moments, one wants to believe there’s a human overhead, rattling and thrashing the branches—someone making sure that even if technology is at the end, we have one last long fall. u
16 The time travel aspect of this being its own can of wormholes. SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
11
ESSAY
Achilles at Swarthmore Civilian trauma and the making of character
by Natalia Sucher *Content warning for mentions of trauma, child abuse, sexual violence, and domestic violence. Stories often go unrecognized for what they are. People, influenced by society’s narratives of expected behavior, construct and present their own identities. As Jonathan Shay, a clinical psychiatrist and MacArthur fellow, writes in his groundbreaking book “Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character,” experiencing trauma ruptures the safety and continuity that traditional narratives give to society and individuals. Shay compares the first-hand testimonies of loss, cruelty, and injustice faced by those who fought in the Vietnam War with the “Iliad”’s account of the Ancient Greek hero Achilles’s betrayal by his commander Agamemnon and the death of Patroclus, Achilles’ θεράπων (companion, second in command, and emotional stabilizer). In order to promote a public attitude of care for those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Shay emphasizes how severe combat trauma undoes a sense of identity held before war. The “Iliad” also describes characters with civilian PTSD caused by child abuse (Hera beats her daughter Artemis), sexual assault (Paris rapes Helen), and domestic violence (Zeus threatens to beat Hera). While Shay presents combat trauma as an undoing of previously established character, there also exist people who have 12
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
experienced trauma from such an early age that the trauma has informed the construction of their characters. I want to expand Shay’s focus on how combat trauma undoes character to demonstrate the ways that experiencing trauma builds a sense of self. Achilles, traumatized by both his commander’s betrayal and the death of Patroclus, provides an excellent example of how somebody who has experienced trauma can progress from destructive guilt, anger, and grief to magnanimity. The “Iliad” begins by invoking the muse to sing a song about the wrath of Achilles: Anger be now your song, immortal one, Akhilleus’ anger, doomed and ruinous...
The epic traces the causes and effects of the μῆνις (indignant wrath) of Achilles, who is the best soldier of the Greek army. The first main event that angers Achilles is his commander Agamemnon’s betrayal of θέμις (the commonly understood standards of behavior in society, or “what’s right,” as Shay defines it). Agamemnon steals Achilles’s prize of war, a woman named Briseis. Achilles responds by withdrawing from the war in anger, resulting in many deaths of his fellow soldiers. The army is such a strong and binding social construction of shared values and expectations that it motivates soldiers to go into the line of fire. When Agamemnon seizes Briseis, a woman who symbolizes Achilles’ self-sacrifice and valor in war, he abuses his power as a leader and undermines the expectation of respect-
ing and protecting those who risk their lives in war. At first, Achilles attempts to murder Agamemnon, but is restrained by the goddess Athena. Achilles then turns his anger towards himself, destroying emotional ties with his fellow soldiers and driving away those closest to him. Achilles’s indignant rage in reaction to Agamemnon’s social betrayal of “what’s right” depicts a fundamental reaction to traumatic violence or exploitation, which dramatically alters his perception. In order to understand the terror and anger both Achilles and Vietnam soldiers feel in reaction to their superiors’ betrayal, Shay writes that “paradoxically, the reader must respond emotionally to the reality of combat danger in order to make rational sense of the injury inflicted when those in charge violate ‘what’s right.’” When someone faces the threat of serious harm, their world becomes unsafe. Unless the reader feels the violation, helplessness, and horror these individuals have lived and relived, it is very difficult to empathize with the logic behind their behaviors. Society provides a narrative of “what’s right” that differs greatly from the experiences of individuals born into abusive families. Child abuse skews the idea that parents protect and nurture their children. Sexual assault denies that one’s body is one’s own. Domestic violence fractures the notion that marriage results in security. The injustice of indiscriminate harm breaks the trust set by cultural values as well as behaviors expected of individuals. Both abusers and people who have learned of the terror often refuse to acknowledge it by denying, trivializing, or blaming the sufferer. The rift between social norms and traumatic experiences isolates survivors, pushing them to withdraw and turn their anger, sadness, and horror inward, as Achilles does in the “Iliad.” The internalization of their emotions often manifests itself as depression, self-blame, guilt, flashbacks, emotional numbing, substance abuse, and mistrustfulness. In an effort to normalize their traumatic experiences, those suffering may recreate their experiences by harming others. After Agamemnon robs Achilles of Briseis, in front of the entire army, Achilles angrily tells Agamemnon that he will withdraw from the war and let his fellow soldiers die to make the com-
parent may beat their spouse as the child listens or make their spouse witness the rape of their child. The powerlessness to prevent a loved one’s injury can be an unbearable burden that lasts a lifetime, affecting character in profound ways. After Patroclus dies, Achilles’s emotions overpower him: A black cloud of grief came shrouding over Achilles. Both hands clawing the ground for soot and filth, he poured it over his head, fouled his handsome face and black ashes settled onto his fresh clean warshirt. Overpowered in all his power, sprawled in the dust, Achilles lay there, fallen… tearing his hair, defiling it with his own hands.
Achilles tends to Patroclus. Kylix by the Sosias Painter, c. 500 BC. Housed in Altes Museum, Berlin, Germany.
mander suffer for his betrayal: I swear a day will come when every Akhaian soldier will groan to have Akhilleus back. That day you shall no more prevail on me… though a thousand perish before the killer, Hektor. You will eat your heart out, raging with remorse for this dishonor done by you to the bravest of Akhaians.
Although it is Agamemnon who violates Achilles’s sense of “what’s right,” Achilles takes out his anger on the entire army, putting their lives in danger by not fighting amongst them. He wants Agamemnon to recognize the dishonor he has caused and feel the pain this dishonor has inflicted upon him. Those who have been hurt often desire revenge and acknowledgement of wrongs committed: some press charges in court and others confront or harm their abusers, but if they cannot express their anger to their abusers, they often either turn their rage inward or toward those closest to them. When those who have been abused internalize their anger, they may berate Photo courtesy of Altes Museum
themselves with names and descriptions their abusers have given them. For instance, a child who has been repeatedly taught that they are worthless by their parents may come to identify as such and view themselves with the same animosity felt towards them. Their anger, suppressed by fear of harm, may manifest as depression, guilt, and suicidality, as it does for Achilles when Hector murders Patroclus, his θεράπων (meaning closest friend, substitute, and companion). After Achilles learns of Patroclus’ death, he cries out in helpless desperation: May [death] come quickly. As things were, I could not help my friend in his extremity. Far from home he died; he needed me… Here I sat, my weight a useless burden to the earth.
The lasting guilt Achilles feels for his θεράπων expresses the common reaction of guilt felt by those who have been traumatized and could not save those they loved. A common tactic used by abusers is forcing their target to listen, watch, and partake in abusing others. A
Emotions take on a life of their own as Achilles’s grief symbolizes death, manifesting itself as a black cloud that envelops him, his own burial, and his collapse. Shay explains that the persistence of the traumatic event incapacitates the mind: “The everyday experience of authority over mental processes is denied to the survivor of severe combat trauma.” The helplessness felt from the inability to help themselves and their loved ones can haunt survivors, replaying in their minds in the form of flashbacks. Triggered by stress, an occurrence, or emotion, they may relive the horror they once felt in the form of images, sounds, and feelings. Achilles grieves Patroclus’ death in pangs of remembered loss: Now pierced by memory, he sighed and sighed again
Trauma often destabilizes one’s control over memory, resulting in amnesia, flashbacks, and emotionless factual recollection. The mind’s protective impulse prevents the survivor from recalling their experiences at will, forcing the memories into different avenues of expression. Triggered by stress, the survivor often relives the trauma as overwhelming fragments and collections of things felt, seen, smelt, and heard. Shay gives an example of “the sensation of suffocating in a Viet Cong tunnel or being tumbled over and over by a rushing river—but with no memory of either tunnel or river.” Terror, rage, and grief merge in the heart of the survivor and take control, reenacting the helplessness felt during the trauma. The flashbacks can elicit harsh reactions, such SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
13
as uncontrollable crying, horror, and inexplicable anger. Despite his impassioned infuriation, Achilles is self-aware enough to realize that the anger he harbors against Agamemnon for his betrayal is not productive to his current goal of avenging Patroclus’s death by killing Hector. Achilles exercises unexpected moderation when he sets his μῆνις aside, telling himself to: Let bygones be bygones. Done is done. Despite my anguish I will beat it down, the fury mounting inside me, down by force.
Although he only quiets the anger from his commander’s dishonor and not from the death of his θεράπων, Achilles demonstrates incredible strength of
The recognition and acceptance of resilience shaped by trauma gives survivors a unique confidence in their ability to handle hardship. character by doing so. The ability to calm oneself in the face of welling emotion is crucial to reintegrating into a society that is not receptive to those who have witnessed its insecurity. Achilles’s willingness to accept that the traumatic betrayal occurred in the past frees him to express himself through his undying yet bloodthirsty love for Patroclus by murdering Hector. Trauma often traps people in negative cycles of thought and action that prevents them from acknowledging the present as separate from the past. It takes an incredible amount of courage and persistence to fight against this cycle, but the daunting task of healing is made easier by becoming aware of and avoiding what brings about these intense and damaging reactions. Toward the end of the epic, Achilles successfully recognizes and averts a situation that could harm Hector’s father, Priam, who comes to Achilles to ask for his son’s corpse. As he goes to prepare Hector’s corpse, Achilles tells Priam not to look at Hector, fearing that Priam will attack him and subsequently die by 14
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
Achilles’s hand. Achilles’s forethought and avoidance of a situation that could lead to violence is a testament to the maturity, kindness, and growth survivors are capable of. Achilles and Priam’s meeting demonstrates the profound compassion they have developed through expressing their pain and strength. The two sufferers cry together, profoundly affirming each other’s trauma: And overpowered by memory both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely for man-killing Hector, throbbing, crouching before Achilles’ feet as Achilles wept himself, now for his father, now for Patroclus once again, and their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house.
Priam and Achilles share an intensely intimate moment of recognizing each other’s pain, strength, and beauty. Achilles acknowledges Priam’s pain as legitimate and considers Priam’s arrival to meet him—the murderer of his son—a strength of character. He then suggests that they lay their sorrows to rest: “Ah, sad and old! Trouble and pain you’ve borne, and bear, aplenty. Only a great will could have brought you here among the Akhaian ships, and here alone before the eyes of one who stripped your sons, your many sons, in battle. Iron must be the heart within you. Come, then, and sit down. We’ll probe our wounds no more but let them
rest, though grief lies heavy on us. Tears heal nothing, drying so stiff and cold.”
Achilles consoles Priam by praising his strong will in spite of his pain, a virtue that they share. The extraordinary strength and determination from the hardships those who have been abused and traumatized can develop is inspirational. The recognition and acceptance of resilience shaped by trauma gives survivors a unique confidence in their ability to handle hardship. The muse of the “Iliad” sings of μῆνις, the indignant wrath that first isolates Achilles, then transforms into violent grief, and finally is sublimated to strong compassion through self-awareness and restraint. Shay reads Achilles’s reaction to his commander’s betrayal and best friend’s death as an account of combat trauma for those who have served as soldiers in the Vietnam war. “Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character” provides the groundwork for studying how trauma not only undoes but builds identity. Achilles’s reconciliation with Priam shows how extraordinary empathy and strength can be developed from horrific experience, serving as a narrative for the profound effect post-traumatic stress disorder has on behavior both in and out of war. The “Iliad,” the founding story of Western tradition, places its audience as witness to the depths and heights of trauma’s destruction and creation. u
Canoe by Eva Winter Languidly leaning too far out, I hear sirens calling me: Guilty green opulence giving way to emerald darkness. Then; passing into a deepening azure as I glide in my canoe, Come join in the mystery of the lake. Is it alive? Can it feel the slight pressure of my paddle; Churning, slicing, creating a break in the relentlessness of water— Yet not so relentless. The water mark on volcanic rock has dropped.
Still, they call to me. Forsake the canoe and follow us. Ouch! A hornet, straying far from shore A wayward traveler pulling me Each time I lean out too far on Waldo.
ESSAY
The deep roots of stigma Six weeks of cultural immersion and mental health advocacy in Argentina
by Anya Bernhard Mental illness and the associated stigma is not just one group’s issue, but a human issue globally. Stigma is deeply rooted in the historical mistreatment of the mentally ill, varying from culture to culture, gender to gender, class to class. It is an umbrella issue to dissect a variety of systemic inequalities that pervade borders. Although the scope of my knowledge is limited to my experiences in the United States and my brief stint in Argentina, I can unreservedly say that the greatest disservice we do to others is to typecast them. When we encounter people in life, we are all at some unique in our own psychosocial development. None of us exists at a stationary point, yet we’re often trying to pin people and their identities down to a series of attributes;, trying to make sense of how and why and what and where this person came from. But identity cannot be distilled into the vacancy of labels. Identities are dynamic works in progress, ongoing, ever-changing, and paradoxical. In the world of mental health care, a false dichotomy arises between pharmacological approaches and therapeutic approaches to care. My experience working alongside mental health professionals for six weeks in Argentina demonstrated that in a quest to ame-
liorate stigma, the key ingredients are a marriage of the natural science and the humanities. Empiricism and humanism, in harmony, create the shared empathy necessary between care-taker and patient to break down the barriers of stigma. No matter how disparately cultures conceptualize mental illness, there is a common process of labeling that leads to prejudices that leads to discriminatory behavior. Stigma can arise both as self-stigma and public stigma. Each occurs in similar series of steps, perpetuating a cycle of stigmatizing thoughts, beliefs and actions. Public stigma begins with cues that mark a person as ‘Other’ --some mark or indicator of being mentally ill. Such a cue stirs up stigmatizing beliefs, and these beliefs become ingrained in our cultural narratives as stereotypes. Stereotypes are the foundation upon which prejudicial attitudes manifest as outright discrimination. With or without overt acts of discrimination, individuals suffering from a mental illness can internalize stigma, leading to self-discriminatory behaviors. For six weeks over the past summer, I worked intensely with questions of my own identity and the positioning of others through an internship I had working with a community of sufferers of mental illness in an organization called Proyecto Sumo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. As
an active participant in the workshops my patients participated in as rehabilitation, I was able to better understand my patients as people with distinct identities outside of their diagnosis. My days were spent engaged in a variety activities, including occupational therapy, music therapy, art therapy, movement therapy, expressive writing, and yoga. In these activities I made my largest contribution to the group of patients. As a member in their experience, their activities, my patients grew to know me on a deeper evel through self-expression in nonverbal ways. This disruption of any hierarchy between patient and character allowed us to learn about each other, forging open communication through fundamental human interactions. While my organization provided a space with a vast amount of support and resources for the patients, I couldn’t help but feel frustrated that the mutual empa-
Despite our efforts, the larger society labeled these individuals as ‘unintelligent,’ ‘violent,’ or ‘defective’ due to their diagnoses of mental illness. thy occurring between those walls could not be so effectively woven in the fabric of society outside. Despite our efforts, the larger society labeled these individuals as “unintelligent”, “violent”, or “defective” due to their diagnosis of mental illness. Could these patients progress in terms of their well-being, autonomy, occupational liberty, familial connections and friendships if the society at large refused to include them? Serious mental illness (SMI) requires serious caretaking and resources to manage. Most of the patients I encountered, though perhaps having unconventional personalities by societal standards, are so full of life, SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
15
creativity, and intelligence. But our approach to mental health in a global sense is such that no truly dignified, well-organized, well-funded space exists to for these merits to be appreciated.
Stigma itself feeds off of lack of information. Lack of understanding. Lack of empathy. Closed-mindedness that has the power to insert people into unfounded labels. I was encouraged to see in the work of my colleagues the beginnings of a space that honored each of these individual’s capacity for creativity and intelligence. Seeing my boss Raquel in action during admissions interviews for new patients was, for me, a cornerstone of understanding how patient and practitioner begin to forge a relationship of mutual understanding. Etched permanently in my memory is one interviewee, a young woman, close to my own age. She had attempted to end her life by overdosing on pills. In no way, shape, or form did Raquel push this young woman into divulging details about the underlying causes of her suffering. She tactfully pursed out the details of the young woman’s short and long term history--an estranged relationship with her father, taking care of her mother through a rough divorce, feelings of pressure and inadequacy about her appearance and professional life. Raquel, without a touch of haste, slowly, methodically, unraveled the complexities with no secret formula or tools, just the power of a nod, active listening, and a warm aura of safety. It was as if each patient is the chain of a necklace that had coiled endlessly in upon itself at the bottom of a jewelry box. Raquel’s expertise and training was, in essence, the culmination of disciplines, humanistic and scientific. Her professional but compassionate bedside manner and ability to immediately establish a report with the patients was clearly the product of years of interacting, her intelligence, and her expertise. Proficiency in interpersonal interac16
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
tions, like Raquel, is the best way to formulate methods of recovery that optimally engages the advantages of both psychopharmacology and psychotherapy. An alliance between the benefits of psychotherapy and psychopharmacology integrated multiple spheres of a person; the physiological selves and their notions of identity. But what does this idea have to do with stigma? Stigma itself feeds off of lack of information. Lack of understanding. Lack of empathy. Closed-mindedness that has the power to insert people into unfounded labels. Through six weeks of participation in the day hospital, I saw the compassion and care each professional at the organization took for each of their patients. A balance that had to be struck between connection to their patients, being a figure that could be confided in and empathetic without breaching patient/caretaker boundaries, something that is often times muddy or unavoidable with the kind of disorders patients suffered from. Herein lies the kind of work that amounts to a tangible shift in people’s lives, and subsequently in the campaign against stigma. Between both patient and practitioner, the daily practice of patience, empathy, and listening is what it takes. Since my return to Haverford’s campus this fall, I have more acutely
witnessed a similar internalization of emotion. Internalization of shame, fear, bearing the burden of anguish without an outlet. Our national and community culture is one that tells us to pick ourselves up by the bootstraps, to fix our problems by slapping a smile on our faces. We are taught from a young age to feign stoicism over vulnerability. I am struck how vastly people suffer from the constant sublimation of emotion, the constant battle against our fear of being stigmatized. Although not many of us find ourselves in the position of being an arbiter of change as a legislator in mental health policy or a psychologist, we can empower ourselves to shift our own paradigms away from such rigid interpretations of others. The power I witnessed in action, the power we each carry, is our capacity for the same things I saw my colleagues practice so readily: patience, empathy, and refraining from judgment. Truly examining the depths of my own prejudices in the company of my patients left me with an encouraging realization. There is still a space in the hustle and bustle of the modern working world, full of compartmentalized emotion, productivity, and ambition that honors the simplicity of face to face, human interaction. No cutting-edge technology is needed, just the frame of mind to listen and to be heard and to learn about each other.
Willing to stand by the snarky opinion you told your friends in Sharples? Write for the Review.
Contact: agonzal4@swarthmore.edu, nbattel1@swarthmore.edu, lfranke1@swarthmore.edu See page 2 for details.
Hold it down Photo essay by Max Hernandez
These are some film shots that I took over the course of the last five months of 2015 around campus and Philly. Black and white photography has a way of making the mundane seem a lot more pensive than it is. But with film, I like photographing things that look somewhat lonely in their environment, â&#x20AC;&#x2122;cause sometimes the lack of color makes that come through more.
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
17
18
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
19
20
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
21
22
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
PERSONAL & POLITICAL: Three essays on displacement
Undocumented, but not invisible by Maria Castaneda
P
eople often ask me why I share my story. They ask why I am open about my status as an undocumented immigrant, something that carries so much stigma in this country. I will explain with another story: When I was in high school, a woman came to speak as part of an event for Black History Month. She shared with us a particularly difficult experience with racism. She told us a story of how as a child, people openly told her she would not accomplish anything. As a Black woman in the 1960s South, she believed it—there were extremely limited opportunities for her. I remember that, for the first time, I felt like I was not alone in my experiences as an undocumented woman of color. I thanked her for sharing her story and in response she said, “I am glad to share my story. I need for people going through a rough time to know they are not alone.”
Upon hearing this, I started to reflect on my own story. I had battled an internal war, attempting to come to terms with what being undocumented meant for my identity and how being undocumented has affected my life in this country. Her story was the push I needed to speak out about my situation. I started to understand the importance of people knowing of the struggles undocumented people face. A few weeks later, I publicly came out as undocumented at immigration rally. It was the first time I shared my story with other people and owned it as part of my identity. It eventually led me to start organizing with the immigrant rights movement. Now I want to tell my story to the Swarthmore community. Sharing my story with this campus isn’t just for personal reasons. Sharing my story as an undocumented person takes on a political purpose for me. We are pushed into the shadows and often made to be silent. Sharing my story is a way of speak-
ing out, preventing this from happening here. How many people on this campus actually think about the undocumented students that are present here? When you talk about the trip you took abroad, how many of you actually think about how not everyone has privileges of migration and travel? I want to share my story so people can be conscious of the fact we are here.
W
hen I think about my history and background, I sometimes find it overwhelming to realize that I am at Swarthmore, an institution where the majority of students come from affluent backgrounds. I was born in a small, isolated pueblo in Michoacan, Mexico. My dad left for the United States before I was born because he knew he would not be able to provide for our new family if he stayed in Mexico. He planned on working for a few months and going back to Mexico just as he had been doing for years, but it became evident that with SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
23
a new family to care for, he would not be able to save enough money working a below minimum wage job to return home. One year turned into two, and then to three. As border security intensified, my mom realized that my dad could not come back to Mexico if he wanted to return to the United States to work. My mom decided that if he could not come to us, we would go to him. I was three years old when my mom decided to make the journey to the United States. All I remember of the night we left was my grandmother crying as she begged my mom to leave me with her because the trip would be too dangerous for me. My mom was determined to keep our family together and refused to leave me behind. I had no idea what was going on or what we were about to endure. We traveled with a group of people who lived close to our pueblo; one was a pregnant woman looking for a way to provide for her child and another an ex-circus clown seeking employment and a place to settle. Each person in our group had a different story, with their own reasons for leaving Mexico. Over the next few days, we would go through deserts under the cover of darkness, avoiding US Border Patrol. We were detained once during our journey and put into a detention center. Through my eyes, the place was just a jail and I did not know why we were there. We were released and dropped off on the Mexican side of the border. Having made it so close to the United States, my mom refused to turn back and we tried to cross again. This time we made it across and from that moment on, I was labeled illegal.
G
rowing up in the United States in a conservative town in North Carolina was anything but easy. It was 1999 and we were the first immigrant family to arrive in the town. People did not like to hear us speak Spanish, and they made us feel unwelcomed. I started school, but because of where I lived, I was the only non-white child there. It was a difficult experience, but in retrospect, I benefited in many ways. I had an ESL teacher all to myself because I was one of the few ESL students in the county, so I learned English quickly. My peers came from families whose parents went to college (my parents only finished the third grade), so I heard people speak about college at an early age. From the moment I heard about college, I knew that I wanted to go. I knew that kids who
24
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
went to college left home to live there. I was so unhappy in the town we lived in because of the racism and xenophobia and I saw college as my way of leaving the that place. As I grew older, I realized that getting a higher education meant much more, that it meant a chance at improving my entire family’s situation. I focused all of my energy on being the best student I could be because I understood there was a lot on the line. However, as I became conscious of the fact that I was undocumented, I started to realize that college was a nearly unattainable goal because I lacked a nine-digit number. Because I am undocumented, some colleges would not look at my application at all. A large majority of those that did considered me an international student. Being considered an international student, despite being in the US for most of life, meant that I would be considered for admission on a need-aware basis, meaning that if I could not afford to pay tuition, I would not be accepted. There was no way I would be able to afford tuition anywhere, considering that my dad was paid below minimum wage and I lived below the poverty line for most of my childhood. On top of that, the international acceptance rate was much lower. Imagine working for years, and putting all your energy and hope into achieving a way out of difficult life circumstances, only to have the door shut for something completely out of your control; you didn’t even get a chance. Psychologically, it took a toll on me. I had had this goal for so long and now it felt like it was gone. I had anxiety problems through much of high school because I knew there was a possibility that the efforts was putting into getting into college could ultimately be in vain. Luckily, I found a supportive group among other undocumented youth in the immigration activist community. They pushed me to keep fighting because I had a right to an education just like everyone else. When the time came to apply to college I focused on institutions considered to be more elite because they were the ones with enough funds to cover my financial need as an international applicant. I ended up applying early decision to Swarthmore with an essay about my immigration status and I was admitted. Swarthmore was my dream school—I wasn’t even sure if I would go to college at all, so to be be admitted to my top choice on a full ride was overwhelming. My story has a happier ending than most undocumented students’: according to
CollegeBoard, only 5–10 percent go on to college after high school and only 2.5 percent are at a 4 year college. The day I was accepted, a huge weight was lifted and it felt like I could breathe again; I want to acknowledge that I am one of the few that managed to navigate this system to make it here.
M
y last year at Swarthmore has been challenging. Academics are difficult, as many of us know, but my greatest struggle has been finding people that understand where I am coming from as an undocumented person. I saw college as a way out, and in many ways, being at Swarthmore has given me opportunities I would have never had otherwise. I am grateful for that, but this institution is far from perfect. Even though the number of undocumented students accepted in the class of 2019 increased from previous years, because of admissions policy changes, the institution still does not provide the services undocumented students need. We have our own unique needs in order to succeed at a place like Swarthmore, and the services are simply not there. I do not believe that this was done on purpose; the fact is, there are very few of us on campus and even fewer who are open about our status. By writing this piece I hope to increase transparency so the college knows what our needs are, and people can be more conscious with their discussions on immigration. Because of past policies, very few undocumented students were admitted to Swarthmore. While the college received anywhere between half a dozen to up to twenty or thirty applications per year, only a small number of undocumented students were admitted. As Jim Bock, Dean of Admissions, explains, “Prior to the recession, we had admitted undocumented students as “domestic internationals” as our aid budget allowed, and then we pulled back during the recession and read them solely in the need aware international pool.” Being in the international pool made it more difficult for undocumented students, many who had lived in the country for many years, to be admitted due to the highly competitive nature of the international pool. In the last year, Swarthmore’s policies have changed again, this time for the better. “To reach more qualified and deserving students from all backgrounds, we have begun to review undocumented students for the Class of 2019 in the domestic
pool.” This change is a huge step in the right direction in achieving greater college access for undocumented students. By reviewing undocumented students in the domestic pool, Swarthmore is now able to admit us on a need-blind basis and award aid according to family need. While these changes will allow for more undocumented students to come to Swarthmore, the school is not prepared to help undocumented students when they arrive on campus.
O
ver the last year I, along with other undocumented students on campus, have encountered obstacles that need to be addressed. Financial aid does not take into account the unique expenses that come with being an undocumented student or student on Deferred Action (DACA), a program that provides certain undocumented people with a 2-year work permit and protection from deportation. Applying for financial aid required some extra work because I do not have many of the required documents. The financial aid office was helpful, but it would be much easier and quicker if there were instructions online that we could all follow. While my financial aid was generous, it does not account for my $465 DACA fee to renew my work permit or the $360 Advance Parole fee to apply to travel abroad. Some of Swarthmore’s peer institutions help with these costs for their undocumented students. As a low-income student, these are expenses that are difficult to cover with my on-campus jobs in addition to covering textbooks and transportation back home. Additionally, those of us who have had to renew our DACA paperwork had to make the two hour trip to North Philadelphia, to spend ten minutes getting our fingerprint taken. We’ve had to miss classes for this and it would be helpful if the college provided transportation for us. Now that I have started to look into study abroad programs a year in advance to ensure my paperwork will go through, I am facing more challenges than I previously anticipated. The study abroad office has never had an undocumented try to apply to go abroad before, so much like the college application process, I’m navigating this on my own. So far in this process, I have emailed about 8 programs and 2 have gotten back to me to say that I can proceed with the application process. Navigating immigration forms is tricky. Applying for advance parole is a four
month long process, and I have to make sure I apply early enough to be approved in time to leave the US. I also have to ensure that none of my forms will expire, or be invalid before I try to re-enter the country otherwise I will be denied reentry into the United States. Even with advanced parole, there is a risk that I will not be allowed back into the country. If an immigration officer does not deem me re-admissible, I can be denied entry. There are obvious risks involved with going abroad, but I have found a pro bono lawyer, through connections in community organizing, to help with my questions. Peer institutions like Davidson College have helped undocumented students apply for advanced parole by providing them with lawyers to help them in the process. Other schools, such as UC Berkeley, have guides to help their undocumented students. If Swarthmore does not have something in place soon to help undocumented students with study abroad, I foresee that this will be a challenge for the classes after me. We are working to start a support group on campus for undocumented students where we can all come together as we navigate Swarthmore. The greatest support during my time at Swarthmore has been other undocumented students. The group will serve as a way for upperclassmen to make themselves available to incoming undocumented students and as a safe space where we can share our experiences.
W
hat has bothered me the most about my first year at Swarthmore is the lack of awareness about undocumented students on campus. When I hear people talk about immigration, they do it in a detached way that makes it seem as if the issue is not here. This happens with other issues as well, but it feels more pronounced with immigration status. It has to do with the stigma and fear around it. As undocumented people we are often told to be silent about our status because of the drastic consequences that can come with it. This silence around our status makes it easier for our struggles to be ignored, but we do not want that to happen here. There is a way to be respectful of those who choose not to speak about their status while also addressing the struggles that we face on this campus. For me, being at Swarthmore, while difficult at times, has been life changing. It has already opened many doors for me and I
want it to do the same for other undocumented students. But I do not want for us to be unhappy and for our needs to be ignored, and that is why I chose to share my story with Swarthmore now. I don’t mean to state the obvious, but being undocumented is complicated. There are times when I feel like I should be more grateful for all the opportunities and experiences I have had, but instead, I find myself feeling jaded. People try to make undocumented students buy into this idea that the US has given them all these opportunities for a higher education when in reality it has not. The opportunities were never given to us, they are there and we have to find them and then find ways to get access to them. We have to work for them harder, as many marginalized communities in the US have similarly experienced, because they will never be simply given to us. After finishing my first year of college and working at an immigrant rights organization in Philadelphia this summer, I found myself thinking even more about my immigration status now. I have focused this piece on the obstacles I have faced as a result of my immigration status, but I do not want to end this without mentioning the good that has come from this situation. Because of my immigration status, I learned what it means to be a luchadora, someone who is resilient and fights despite all the opposition. It helped shape me into someone who is committed to fighting for the rights of my community. I was able to dedicate myself to a movement that I believe in and through this movement, I met incredible people who have gotten me through the most difficult times. Through the actions of members of immigrant rights groups, I have seen resilience like no other. Despite everything we have overcome and everything we still have left to fight for, we found some beauty in all of this together. What we experience is not acceptable and we should not have to experience this at all, but we know that the strength that has gotten us this far will continue to keep us fighting in the struggle and that one day we will make the changes we want to see a reality. uuu Illustrations for this piece are by Steve Sekula. uuu
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
25
Getting the story by Liliana Frankel
T
he heat is suffocating, intolerable. Sweat half-prunes the pads of my fingers while I sleep. I wake into an awareness of my body as a landscape where water pools in every depression. I worry I’m molding. Layers of dead skin slick off in grayish crescents when I move to wipe the damp from my shoulder. Something has melted in my laptop, and I myself am burnt out. It’s the end of my interview project. Of this phase of my interview project, I should say—I have barely two weeks left in Mexico. The children are the only ones who seem undeterred by the weather. They run around shirtless and barefoot, growing tanner and skinnier and more calloused. Since giving up on the adults I’ve had more time for them. A new arrival, Luis, has latched onto me more firmly than anyone else I’ve met here. He’s six years old and bleeding words. Where are you going? There’s never any greeting when he sees me, just this question. It’s okay. Luis doesn’t care where I’m going in the cosmic sense, he just wants my company now. Ask your mother if you can walk with me. The set of questions they taught me to ask the migrants doesn’t include Where are you going. The answer is always north, and the specifics uncertain—leave the future be. It’s better to use questions to orient the migrants in their new surroundings. Not to Albergue Hermanos en el Camino itself, but rather to the quality of being a Central American migrant in a migrant shelter in southern Mexico. Help them remember why they are here. Where are you from? Down to the municipality. If it was a city, What did you do there? For the countryside, What kinds of crops grow there? About the journey, during which most people are assaulted, How long have you been traveling? Did you 26
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
take the train? From there, the stories begin to come out. If the migrant begins to cry, tell them to make their mouth in the shape of a Spanish “a”—ah. Agency over sound returns agency to the body. Or so the psychologist said—I haven’t tried it even once. Luis’s mom, who he sometimes claims (for reasons I can only guess at) isn’t his mom but rather an aunt or a grandmother, has big brown eyes and a tired body. The streets are safe in Ixtepec, I tell her, meaning the streets are safe for me. She reads my subtext and nods her assent. Luis runs off to grab his flip-flops. I walk slowly in my tennis shoes. The largest pair I could find in this Zapotec city still pinch my American feet. Even constricted, my strides are too long for Luis, who has to skip over ditches on the side of the road to keep up. Following my mother’s rule, I’ve had him walking on the inside, away from passing cars. But rules must change with context. Before I left for Mexico, an immigrant psychologist in Philadelphia told me that a good rule was to not ask migrants for a narrative of their experience. She anticipated, was correct to anticipate, that many of the people I’d meet would lack education. They would never have formally studied narrative or narrative forms. Circumstance, the psychologist believed, would also have forced them to normalize much of their trauma. I shouldn’t expect that the migrants would know how to tell their own stories. But to impose a narrative framework on their lives, she warned, would be a specific and terrible kind of power. Maybe back in Philadelphia this becomes true, but I can’t imagine how. Storytelling, after all, has a history longer than American schools. The air in Ixtepec
hangs heavy with stories, and empathy is an expectation. I had another nightmare, says Luis. Tell me, I say. Something happened to Luis. He thinks about it all the time, cross-examines the story in his dreams. He doesn’t like the train because of it. Most iterations of the story have the same elements: a train, a man with a gun, the conductor, running, the mountains. Sometimes the train is stopped when the man with the gun boards, other times it’s in motion. Was the man with the gun a migration official or a petty criminal? Luis isn’t sure. What did the man do with his gun? That’s where we get stuck. Some days the man kills the conductor. Others, he moves as if to shoot Luis and his family. After that, the story is consistent again. The family drops from the train and takes refuge in the nearby hills. They walk for days, following the sightline of the tracks from above, and finally arrive here, to us. “I’m thinking of recording one more interview,” I say to my boyfriend on the phone. “With my friend Luis. But I’m worried about the ethics of it.” “Why, because he’s six?” “Yeah, but I don’t want to write a report about him, you know? It’s more like, he’s really young, and I’m watching him remember and re-remember until he settles on an interpretation that he’ll keep. That will shape him! When I want to record him, I think of like, taking a snapshot. You know, something I could give to him, for him to have when he grows up.” Then again, it still isn’t clear what good having a physical record of trauma does for a traumatized person. As a child, my psychologist parents taught me to believe in writing, wordletting, as a release. The marks on the page weren’t a reflection of one’s inner state, but the stains left after an exorcism. I know now that trauma is
different. Trauma can’t simply move out of someone’s body through the voice. A record of it manifests only one iteration of the memory on repeat; there will be more. Not long after I arrived at Albergue Hermanos en el Camino, I met a man who’d been kidnapped, tortured and left for dead by Los Zetas. With the support of Father Solalinde, the shelter’s patron, he had decided to end his northward migration in Ixtepec. For the past year, he had been working as an activist, telling his story and mentoring other victims. He had a flash drive full of images from after the attack. Pictures of himself from where he was found on the rails, skin white as mine from the blood loss. Pictures from the police report of each his injuries. It was the machetazos in his skull that got me, his flesh peeking through and hair congealed into spikes as though he were nothing but a rambutan. He was showing me these images because that’s the only way he could feel known. He showed them to almost everyone he sought to befriend. He was also showing them to me in particular because I’d said that I wanted to be a writer. He showed them to almost all the journalists who visit the shelter. He was looking for justice, whatever that means. This is the only time I’ve written about him, and I doubt I’ll write about him again. My words won’t bring him justice. Justice wouldn’t bring him peace. In the end, I decide not to record Luis. Instead, I help the psychologist plan a series of workshops on gender. Every afternoon for three days, Luis asks me where I’m going, and we report together to the open-air cathedral. He hands the men pictures, paper and markers while we talk. One day, the men make posters. Another, they perform different experiences of gender-based violence. They tell their own stories. I’m not sure how much Luis understands till the scene of an assault on the railway. The skit’s antagonist has found an actual two-by-four somewhere in the cathedral. He topples the main character, a migrant, to the ground and sits on his chest, utter rage on his face. Laughter evaporates. The room is so tense that the silence sounds loud. The antagonist mimes a swing, and the moment is over. Both men scramble to their places for the next scene. Now, the attacker is playing the migrant’s wife, who’s just called him up to ask for money. The audience rolls with laughter as the actor cuts loose with a screechy, extemporaneous rant. What do
you mean, all your money was stolen? You must be lying. You’re probably already in the United States, parading around the streets with some worthless white girl… After dinner that night, another of the workshop organizers approaches me excitedly. While interviewing a man who’d attended the workshop that afternoon, he confessed to her that he’d been so affected by the skits that he’d actually cried afterwards. He told my friend that it was one of the first times he’d been given the space and the language to feel through what was happening to him. My friend thinks that this is Progress. Maybe trauma can move out of someone’s body through the voice. At least, maybe it can start to. I wake up early to leave Ixtepec. My only goodbyes are to my bunkmates and the kitchen staff. I don’t say goodbye to Luis. Later, I will write to my coordinators, asking them to send my love. I will figure out what I should have said from a distance. Before I left for Mexico, I asked my native Spanish-speaking friends if they could please explain to me the cultural modalities around wounds. Did the word which meant “wound” have the same sentimental resonances as “wound” in English? How, logistically, could you ask someone to describe the extent, location, sensation of their pain? (and I’d love some concrete vocabulary suggestions, if it’s not too much to ask). Would a wounded person normally downplay their hurt to preserve an appearance of strength? Or would they more likely exaggerate, playing for sympathy? I’d tricked myself into thinking that my discomfort with other people’s pain existed only as a problem of translation. More probably, this discomfort evinces my own cultural background, the comfort-based modalities of white U.S. suburbia, from which some part of me will never entirely escape. After leaving Mexico, I find out that Sonia Nazario, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose work I admire, and who has been directly responsible for making the grand narrative of Central American migration available to English speakers in the United States, is writing a piece on Albergue Hermanos en el Camino for the New York Times. She’s been in touch with me, in fact. At her request, I write her a strictly informational email about the effects of Plan Frontera Sur. A few days later, she sends a nice reply. There is so much more that I want to ask her, but
her tone of solidarity makes me worry that my Spanglish, my Spanish-sounding name, prompted her to read me as Latina. I don’t know how to clarify; I’m still not entirely sure how to justify my presence in Mexico. Out of some combination of shame and star-stroke, I never write her back. So I am taken by surprise when I open the New York Times homepage a few weeks later to a full-screen picture of Luis and his family. Sonia’s article is a profile of his mother. I stare at the picture. Luis is shirtless, and his mother and sister are framed by fans of baby hair. I can tell that the heat is suffocating, intolerable. I remember that Luis sweats with more elegance than I could ever manage. He doesn’t drip. The drops pool on the high points of his face in shapes like jaguar spots and hang there, suspended, until he thinks to wipe them away. The New York Times has what I assume will be remembered as the real story.
After walking 12 hours around a mountain, they waited, exhausted, for seven days until a freight train left. July hid in a cubbyhole at the end of a freight car with her children, but 15 minutes later some men stopped it and shot toward those aboard. “Sons of bitches, we are going to kill you!” they yelled at the migrants. Some migrants on the train threw rocks at them; in the chaos, July and her children were able to escape. By the time they arrived at the shelter, she had spent $3,000 sent by her grandparents and mother in the United States on bribes and wildly inflated prices charged by buses and taxis to reach the shelter on July 23. Two days later, she applied for a humanitarian visa to get through Mexico to reach her mother in Miami. She has been waiting two months. “I think Mexico is putting up as many obstacles as possible so you despair, give up, and leave,” she says.
The article is as close to perfect as anything I’ve ever read. The imagery is beautiful. Sonia acknowledges her own subjectivity, but her writing is so clear that its points feel self-evident. I consider writing Sonia again with my congratulations and all my questions on how to be a writer. Then, I consider writing her a different email, just asking for Luis’s family’s contact information. Journalist vs. friend of the family; the two lines of inquiry seem mutually exclusive. I never write at all. uuu Photos for this piece are by the author, and by Kate Orlinksy for the New York Times. uuu
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
27
The Language Burden by Rachel Yang
W
hen I was very young, my father assigned me the task of penning a García Márquez-style novel based on our family history. He described a protagonist based on himself: immigrated from China, living in the United States, married to an American woman, raising four daughters. He proposed the vaguely ominous backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, reconciliation with a troubled past, a thread of magical realism—ghosts, prophetic dreams, hidden treasure. It was more or less a joke at the time—I was nine years old—but the charge has stuck with me. My parents still mention this hypothetical novel with vague certainty that it will someday exist, and that I will have produced it. And it isn’t always a novel. Ever since I declared myself a writer as a kid, my parents have encouraged me to write
I never heard him tell these stories, and know them only in the broad terms of what they stand for: loss, destruction, decay, torture, tragedy, hope, the necessity of their preservation. poetry, journalistic exposés, biographies, personal histories, screenplays, radio dramas, and monologues based on this grand, hulking thing called family history. On an airbus home from our first and only visit to China together in 2012, my mom leaned over my sister, sleeping in the seat between us, and asked me, “Now that you’ve been there, do you feel like you can finally write some of Baba’s childhood stories?” My family had spent not even three weeks city-hopping the PRC. I’d met scores of relatives I hadn’t known to exist, pretended food wasn’t too spicy for my half-Scandinavian palate, let the intangibly familiar tones of a language I didn’t understand arc over my head. I know I haven’t seen the China of my dad’s boyhood. If I had, I’m not sure I’d know how to write his stories. I’m not even sure I know what it means to write them. I do feel pretty certain that, when my mom says “Baba’s childhood stories,” she isn’t suggesting that I transcribe the tales I begged my dad to tell and re-tell me when I was little. In one, he cuts school, pilfers unripe apples from a
28
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
farmer’s orchard, and later vomits from too much citric acid. In another, his dog runs away and miraculously reappears weeks later to keep my dad company while he is sick in bed. In one of my mom’s favorites, my three-year-old dad is roused from bed and brought to a relative’s house to urinate into a jar—a small child’s first pee of the morning a folk remedy for some ill. Those stories don’t seem so different to me from the ones my mom tells about her upbringing in South Minneapolis. Hers are about watching two pet hamsters spar in a shared cage, mispronouncing “gingham” while reciting a poem for her parents, drinking lukewarm milk during a visit to her uncle’s farm. Like my dad’s stories, hers are sweet and imperfect. But something about my dad’s childhood, when I someday write it all down, should point toward poverty, struggle, a nation in crisis. The apples will never ripen in their exhausted orchards; the dog is presumed stolen and stewed by another starving family; the urine cure—I’m not sure. Maybe simply an exotic gesture toward The Orient.
I
enrolled in four years of high school Chinese to fulfill a graduation requirement, but haven’t retained much more than the familiarity of its meter. My mom says it’s one of those use-it-or-lose-it things. She majored in Mandarin in college and was once fluent, but isn’t anymore. We didn’t speak Chinese at home when I was growing up. People always ask me if I regret that. “You could have been bilingual,” they lament, and I get the sense that they mean it would have been a neat addition to the “Skills and Languages” section of my résumé. When I was in eleventh grade, my Chinese teacher assigned us the same in-class essay every Friday: 你为什么 学习中文？Why do you study Chinese? It was a preparatory writing exercise for the final IB exam. Each week, as my vocabulary and grammar grew (supposedly) more sophisticated, my thesis calcified into a form response. I invariably included a body paragraph that began something like: 我学习中文因为我的祖父母不说英文。 我想跟 我的祖父母说中文。 I study Chinese because my grandparents do not speak English. I want to speak Chinese with my grandparents.
M
y dad’s parents emigrated to the U.S. from Zunyi when their children laid roots here with advanced degrees, weddings, and mortgages. They moved in with my dad’s sister and her family outside Boston, installed Chinese satellite television in the front living room, and didn’t learn much English. A childhood memory: answering the phone, hearing my grandfather’s voice on the other end, and panicking. Ah, Rachel? Yes, it’s me. Hello, nihao. Hearing a smile behind words I couldn’t make sense of, casting about flush-faced,
handing off the phone quickly to a chuckling parent. In Chinese, maternal grandparents are waipo and waigong. Paternal grandparents are nainai and yeye. During a rare visit to Massachusetts when I was eight, my cousins and sisters and I tripped over this incongruence. My cousins, Joy and Amy, grew up with Waipo and Waigong sleeping in the next room, fixing dinner, supervising homework, mandating the wearing of sweaters in winter. When my grandmother reprimanded us for sitting too close to the television one afternoon, Joy protested with a string of whiny Chinese. “She wants us to sit on the couch,” Joy translated for me. We stayed put. In our home in Minnesota, the same grandparents stood in a square frame on our mantelpiece. Nainai and Yeye: venerable, storied, enthralled with how much taller we stood, how much thicker the books we read, how much more Chinese vocabulary we’d gained since the last time they’d seen us. By the end of our visit, my cousins had taken to calling our grandparents nainai and yeye, too.
M
y grandfather died last July. When my dad phoned China with the news, my great-aunt told him she’d already lost her brother in April, with the stroke that left him unable to speak and understand what was spoken to him. In the space between Massachusetts and Sichuan, my grandfather existed to his sister as a tinny, carried-over-ocean voice issued from a telephone set. He’d already been gone, she said, for months. Someone took a picture of my cousins visiting our grandfather in the hospital. They lean toward him with cheerful open mouths, saying something he won’t absorb. He sits up in bed, grinning, reaching out to them. The posturing is familiar to me; I knew Yeye exclusively through moments like these, where something unspoken undercut the words curdling in the air between us.
My grandfather leaned across the table, lowered his voice, and divulged, no holds barred, the tragedies that had befallen his family during the Communist Revolution. The real stuff, not merely a nod toward poverty, struggle, a nation in crisis. “Even I hadn’t heard a lot of those things,” my dad confided to my mom later. “He broke down and had to leave the restaurant,” my mom remembers of my grandfather. “It was so sad. It was very raw. It felt like he was grieving for the first time.” I didn’t know Yeye this way. I never heard him tell these stories, and know them only in the broad terms of what they stand for: loss, destruction, decay, torture, tragedy, hope, the necessity of their preservation. The timeline jumbles in my mind; the scenes refuse to focus. Translated and re-translated, I’ve committed them to my memory bare of detail. I’m aware and wary of the heavy potential they hold for the storyteller I’ve been told I am. I’m not sure how to swing their weight.
W
e went out for dinner after my grandfather’s funeral. I sat across from my grandmother and watched her watching everyone else. She’s losing her hearing. Even if I could speak Chinese, I thought, she couldn’t hear me well enough to understand. There’s a sick sliver of relief lodged in that regret. My youngest sister, Grette, spun the lazy susan carelessly to snag another jiaozi from a platter. I noticed Nainai eyeing Grette’s water glass, dangerously close to the edge of the table. “Gret, keep an eye on your water, okay?” I moved it a few inches closer to the center. She nodded. Across the table, I saw my grandmother nod, too. u
T
he day before the funeral, my cousins and sisters and I sat around their kitchen table and absently folded dozens of jiaozi, chatting nervously about the dumplings as we pinched them together. It had been six years since I’d last seen my cousins; I didn’t know how to talk to Joy and Amy about anything, much less the loss of our grandfather. My sorrow for Yeye couldn’t match theirs for Waigong; I felt guilty for the suddenness and temporariness of its immediacy. My grief felt borrowed and symbolic, mourning—what, untold stories and language proficiency? We plastic-wrapped the dumplings raw on a plate, stuck them in the fridge, and forgot about them. My dad gave my grandfather’s eulogy in Chinese, a litany of poignant tales from Yeye’s life, many of which I’ve never heard in full. He promised to translate it all for my sisters and me. While writing this, I remembered he still hasn’t; I haven’t reminded him.
M
y grandparents lived with us for a few months when I was a toddler, before they moved in with my dad’s sister. My parents recall a late night they spent with my grandparents in a Chinese restaurant near the University of Minnesota, where my dad was finishing his PhD.
Photo courtesy of Rachel Yang
The author and her grandfather. SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
29
FICTION: Two short stories
Déjà vu by Xavier Lee
W
hen I was younger I enjoyed dreaming. It was the highlight of my day— got home from school, avoided my parents, ate dinner when I was called and never said anything. I sculpted busts of naked women in grains of rice while my father prattled about his boss and my mother prattled about my father when he’d leave the table to do this and that. Sometimes I’d fall asleep at the table, the fork in my hand, like I was lazily picking away at the steak on my plate or trying to figure out with apprehension whether or not the greens in front of me had been cooked properly—c’est-a-dire with meat—and sometimes I’d imagine that I’d fallen asleep and the imagined fantasy always was so convincing…I really must have been naïve. My mother was talking about her job one day. My father was not home. I did not care to ask where he was. She said something about her boss wanting her or wanting her to do something—I clearly wasn’t paying close attention, but then she touched me and I woke up from what appeared to have been a dream. Yet, when I looked at her, I didn’t know what was going on. It was an odd moment of déjà vu, for as I looked at the woman in front of me, I knew that she was my mother although she looked nothing like her. And although every aspect of her face looked unknown to me, I could not see that woman as anything other than my mother. But then I woke up from that dream to see my mother at the table, looking at me nervously. “Why do you fall asleep so often? Are you okay, Ohene?” I looked at my plate and what was in front of me looked almost plastic—which isn’t necessarily uncommon at my house. Yet, when I looked back up, my mother had changed again into the other woman and once again I looked across the table at a stranger. It did not register to me that this woman was not my own mother, my own flesh and blood. I woke up again to what I staunchly believed was reality, except it was not. Both my parents were at the dinner table, but neither of them were saying anything. I say it was not reality because on my father’s forehead was a black ladder design that crawled from the center of his eye into his receding hairline. I asked him about it and he did not respond. He did not look at me. He continued to eat his food—pork chops, which doesn’t make sense because we don’t eat pork—and did not respond to me or look at me. The food on his plate did not disappear. What he lifted to his
30
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
mouth did not seem to come from what was on the plate, as if everything I saw was an illusion— and it was. My mother was unresponsive too, out of touch. On her forehead was a red brand of two hearts—one upside-down and on top of the other. At one point she looked up at my father and the brand turned white as my father’s image
It did not register to me that this woman was not my own mother, my own flesh and blood. disappeared with a bloodcurdling shout. Sometimes I remember going to the courts, sometimes I don’t. My mother hasn’t taken to this very well at all. I haven’t been able to sleep well for seven months now and now my mother can’t sleep, either. Sometimes I walk into the living room and see her QVC in silence, her arm grasping the remote weakly, her eyes glazed over. Sometimes they move to meet me, sometimes they do not. Sometimes I can see the brand on her head, still, white and morbid against the darkness of her skin and the sadness of her eyes. Her image shifts sometimes, but this doesn’t happen for anyone else. But here’s the weird part. When my father moved into an apartment on the other side of town, his mistress, who he stupidly thought I had wanted to meet, was there to help him get settled. And as I shook her hand and introduced myself to her for what I believed was the first time, I recognized her and I did not. And the weirdness of it all knocked me out. u
Photo courtesy of normalcooking.com
Suggested by Leo Elliot and Colette Gerstmann
2:06 am
Really, said the government. Rock on. 2:27 am
I’m not worried bout nothin but a little bit of the home page
10:31 am
Sorry No matter what you do I get my money
2:33 am
I’m going to die for the follow button.
10:33 am
I’m not sure what to say I’m not sorry 10:39 am
but I can’t wait for this year to end. The first of the best of the most beautiful girl in the morning.
11:07 am
11:09 am
Like the way to the gym just as good as the new version of Google
No more than one million dollars for you 11:12 am
8:36 am
The first time since I’ve been waiting for you to be the first time since I’ve been trying to get it
9:37 am
I’m so tired but can’t be bothered with the best way of saying it was the best of the best I’m at work today and it will not become an international tribunal.
and I
11:11 am
Great way of saying that it was the first 12:26 pm Don’t worry about the future So much better now than ever before in my lifetime to forget the haters
1:02 pm
11:45 am
4:43 pm
I don’t drink
11:39pm
12:49 am
Bored as a result of the mertz language I have watched the movie and it was not immediately clear
will you ever get a job? I’m so over the past and I don’t have any regrets 1:15 pm
You know how I feel like I’m going to the gym with my mom? I’m not. 2:40 pm
Just a little bit too much for me
8:15 pm
Do you think I can get it? 1:12 am
I’m not sure if you want me to get it right now and the fact is that you can get it
10:04 pm
Great way of saying that it was the first 1:15 am You can say I love the way you are not a bad movie
11:11 pm
11:45 am
1:16 am
but it doesn’t matter if you don’t want to go back inside
5:07 pm
When blurred lines in friday night plans get ruined people will always love the rain Ok so I can call it quits but I can’t believe that this would be helpful to me
The voice is just so… “First day at the end of June, became the youngest player” in a statement issued by the Times. Goodnight my little man Justgirlythings is the only problem I had. 11:40 pm
Goodnight. and I hope I get to know how much you feel the same as I
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
31
10:01 am
How can we get to the gym today and it is not the same I’m not going anywhere else in the world A lot more fun if you have to go to the gym with my mom The only way to get to the gym and it is not the only way to get to the gym and the rest of the day I will not be able to do with the same time I try to get to the gym and the other day I have to go to the gym and it was the best of the best way of the day before I go to the gym and it was the best of luck to all my friends to play with my mom and dad and his wife and two other people who don’t know what I do not know how to get to the gym
12:22am
I can’t even 12:54am
How does that mean doc know? For example... I don’t know if you have no idea! 1:03 am
Really good and bad times in a row 1:47am
I’m not a fan of the weekend with my mom, dad and his colleagues 1:52am
I’m not sure what the heck is this picture of, but I think it’s time to go to sleep on the bright lights of good luck. 2:56am
I love the fact that you can be used for a while and then you can be found inside of me
12:08pm
9:39pm
Brooklyn is not an issue 12:19pm
I’m just going to be in brooklyn and I don’t care if you don’t like it 10:25pm
The first half of the day before I go to the gym was open to all the best looking person 10:04pm 1:46pm
I’m at work today and I’m still in bed
3:04pm
Ok so my phone is so cute and I have a lottery pick me up and get it together 3:23pm
For the next few years and the gym with my mom I have to be a little toolbar to their ownership 8:37pm
10:05pm
I’m not sure what I want a relationship with my mommy to be but there is nothing more to come back to
Isn’t that girl like me but all of them are? 10:12pm
Good luck with your right hand man who has the most beautiful face of all 10:17pm
Yeah man I’m about ready to fight for what I want which is a q&a 10:33pm June of last year just started Get used to it. 32
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
I’m feeling like a baby in the world Good night and the rest of the day I don’t know how to make it to the game with my mom You are not the only one
You can be a great way to get to the gym but I can’t believe that you have an iPhone! 10:06pm
I hate your jobless rate I don’t know if you have any morning runs and I don’t think you can believe in the worldwide 10:08pm
To all my heartbreakers the company said it was the only way 11:32pm
I’m sorry. I’m going to bed early tonight. 3:17am Quick question: what do you keep in your eyeshadow? 3:20am
Quick question: is it just makeup? 3:23am
Or is it me?
BOOKS I think, therefore I am unhappy
ESSAY
On the posthumous representation(s) of David Foster Wallace
by Philip Harris
I
n the age of the MFA-track, it’s comforting to think that the fiction writer’s craft is simply one frictionless mode of production among others. But this line of thinking is unsettled when the author’s fictions spill over into the life. David Foster Wallace enjoyed the fruits of climate-controlled modernity -- the relative fame and comfortable existence his work afforded him -- why couldn’t he leave the addiction of “Infinite Jest,” the self-castigating sexual politics of “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” and the morbid boredom of “The Pale King” in neat theoretical piles on his writing desk at the end of the day? Particularly when an author has a moral project, we feel somehow betrayed when it develops that, perhaps, we are supposed to heed him as we do the proverbial Catholic lecher: that is, we are meant to do as he says, not as he does. Absent the man, we are left with a number of representations, after-the-fact sketches that tend to fixate on a single quality. There’s the Wallace who delivered the call for radical empathy disguised as a college commencement speech called “This is Water”—a minor saint. Then there’s the Wallace who wrestled with drugs and alcohol, almost shot memoirist and fellow AA-er Mary Karr’s husband, and at times wondered if he had been put on this earth for the sole purpose of having sex with as many women as possible—clearly a troubled individual, we cluck knowingly. “The End of the Tour” presents the immediately-post-“Infinite Jest” author grappling with issues of fame and authenticity, and the film has already been written up and debated thoroughly. Segel’s turn as Wallace is as inspired as it is unexpected. The direction is, as a whole, uninspired. Jesse Eisenberg is more Jesse Eisenberg than David Lipsky. The Wallace estate is still unhappy, and it’s still unclear whether the man himself was correctly represented.
Photo courtesy of Marion Ettlinger
Writer David Foster Wallace, the subject of a recent drama/biography film, died in 2008 at age 40.
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
33
Of course, a snapshot following the publication of “Infinite Jest” is as decontextualized and incomplete a representation as the rest of the Wallaces that bumble about the opinion pieces of friends, scholars, and fans. Incompleteness, however, is not necessarily a problem. After all, the conventional notion of “definitive”’ with all its attendant narrative tidiness, was rarely Wallace’s goal. His first novel “Broom of the System,” a fictional (and fun) response to the works of linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and post-structuralist Jacques Derrida, ends mid-sentence. “Infinite Jest” rather than resolving its many threads, lets them trail off toward an indeterminate something. “The Pale King,” left incomplete following Wallace’s death, was reconstructed posthumously as “unfinished”—not unlike Wittgenstein’s shoeboxes of cut-up notebook pages. It’s fitting, considering that Wallace’s fiction is often expressly concerned with the problem of “complete” representation. How do we communicate that inchoate sludge of emotions inside us to another when all we have is, as a certain Danish crown prince once said, words, words, words? Wallace spun this philosophical concern with postmodern stylistics in his early, polyphonic, Pynchon- and DeLillo-inflected fiction, and then spent much of his later career trying to solve the impasses of literary postmodernism through increasingly personal, often heavily monologic works—works which, in retrospect, have acquired a tragic biographical valence. Which is not to say that the “David Wallace” characters that pop up in the later fiction are David Foster Wallace himself, unmediated. Rather, they are more like the masks behind the mask. In postmodernity, a term we can all agree to disagree on, “authenticity” is always in big, existential scare-quotes. Postmodern fiction, or at least the roughshod definition Wallace made recourse to when interviewers inevitably asked, refers to a certain obtuse, often blackly comic kind of post-war fiction. But the fundamental lack—of structure, of language, of capital-m Meaning—that it anxiously circles goes back to the 19th century and the whole host of things that happened in the wake of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, perhaps the last big system-builder in philosophy—which is to say, the last big brain to wax on about a “spirit” that smells quite a bit like the Judeo-Christian God. Gradually, or not so gradually, constructive philosophy and all its humanist trappings fell out of favor. Anything vaguely transcendental was turned in for a refund. An industrial 34
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
age required industrial thinkers, and thus the space vacated by the metaphysicians was filled with prescriptive theorists like Freud, Darwin, and Marx. These men—all could lay claim to the title “scientist,” to a greater or lesser degree—collectively delineated a world that came to look more and more like an ant farm: a closed system full of human “actors” confined to their world-historical tunnels. Around this same time, a secular turn occurred. In the wake of the “death of God,” religion, having become roughly synonymous with the oppressive institution of the Church, came to seem a touch like hogwash—although it took the majority of the twentieth century for a good chunk of the American public to be able to say so without blushing. Church attendance ceased to be a mandate of the public sphere, and the rules for a moral life became more like, well, guidelines. “Love thy neighbor” slowly turned into “Tolerate those in your income bracket as best you can.” Broad strokes to be sure, but this is roughly what paved the way for the historical type embodied by the protagonist of Wallace’s story “Good Old Neon:” well-educated, securely secular, conscious of himself as a human actor whose behaviour conforms to demographic categories, vaguely distrustful of a childhood that vaguely dictates his current modes of being—and most importantly endowed with enough leisure time to recursively worry about a sense of metaphysical incompleteness while being mostly unwilling to conceive of the question as a metaphysical one. The first line of this story, which Wallace believed was the best entry-point to his fictional concerns, sets the tone: “My whole life I’ve been a fraud.” Authenticity is the name of the game, and the narrator’s project is to provide 40 pages of irrefutable proof that he lacks any semblance of it. What follows is a morbid but entertainingly elliptical self-analysis framed as a report of the events that led to the narrator’s eventual suicide. The story is staged as a soliloquy by someone who, if not actually Wallace, sounds, as characters in Wallace’s later fiction tend to, very much like him. All the verbal tics and mannerisms are there. Clichés—emotional, linguistic, or otherwise—are preemptively framed as such and employed with what Wallace makes sure you know is always-already bad faith. The bulk of the story involves the narrator’s relationship with his therapist, Dr. Gustafson. This relationship involves, like every other aspect of the narrator’s life, a trip down the rabbit hole of self-conscious-
ness. The narrator is seeking help for his fraudulence and thus provides a textbook spiel setting out how everything he does is calculated to elicit certain reactions from other people. Dr. Gustafson then gets to turn this confession around in a similarly textbook-like manner to the effect of: how could you be honest with me just now if you are structurally incapable of being honest? However, the fact of the matter is that, after a few self-conscious recursions, it becomes clear to the narrator himself that he is simply telling the therapist what he wants to hear—it’s no more than another fraudulently calculated move to demonstrate that he is “uniquely acute and self-aware.” This effectively undercuts the therapist’s initial diagnosis, but it in no way invalidates a more fundamental revelation, if “revelation” is the right word for something that catalyzes no real change in the narrator: “the ultimate and most deeply unspoken point of the analyst’s insight—namely that who and what I believed I was was not what I really was at all—which I thought was false, was in fact true, although not for the reason’s Dr. Gustafson [...] believed.” But then where does that leave us? Heads are probably spinning somewhere. Let’s step back. As a way to illustrate the genesis of his fraudulent condition the narrator provides a telling anecdote from his youth. As a boy of four he broke an expensive decorative bowl set out for display in his home. When his stepfather confronted him he had something of a pre-verbal epiphany: if he confessed to the deed in an unconvincing manner, his stepfather would believe he was only trying to protect his sister. Furthermore, through telling a lie, he would not only avoid punishment, he would also achieve the moral high ground. His lie would make him seem like a fouryear-old martyr. We do not always mean what we say. Often what our statements actually mean is less important than what we want them to do. When we approach another person whom we’re attracted to, do we ask how their day’s going because we’re primarily interested in the literal answer? Etcetera. The narrator’s confliction is to be at all times attuned to how the universe can seem to operate in this hollow structural way that he can manipulate at will. The price of this is that any sense of wholeness evades him. As an undergraduate in an intro logic course he even formulates something like his own logical conundrum, the “fraudulence paradox:” “The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attrac-
tive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside—you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn’t find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were.” The second-order paradox is that knowledge of said paradox doesn’t really help matters. These rock/hard place dilemmas abound in Wallace’s later fiction. Consider one such staging in “The Pale King:” a potential candidate for a position with the IRS sits in a conference room worrying about how much he sweats. Enslaved to the logic of his anxiety, he is caught in a feedback loop of self-consciousness and self-loathing. Before him stand three agents of the IRS, reciting in counterpoint the tenets of the Internal Revenue System, each sentence serving to reify the faceless—blameless— governmental entity. These two hermetically-sealed logics highlight one of the big double-binds of our age, one that no doubt enables the agonizing contortions of “Good Old Neon:” that contemporary man can tend to feel not only estranged from the impersonal institutions and bureaucracies that compose our modern society, but also at an uncomfortable remove from the biochemical economy of the brain that claims to dictate how he feels—and how much he sweats—seemingly without consulting him. At the very end of “Good Old Neon,” the camera pulls back dramatically, so to speak. The story becomes framed as a sort of radical hypothesis by a “David Wallace” character who is looking at a picture of the narrator in his high school yearbook, trying
to imagine how this individual, who to high school-aged David Wallace seemed breezy and unreflective, had come to the point where he felt compelled to violently end his own life. The story ends in something of a stalemate, consciousness bending back onto itself, fictional David Wallace’s belief that “you can never know what’s going on in someone else’s head” vying with another part of himself that knows that that kind of thinking, even if it’s accurate, only obstructs attempts to practice empathy, “the realer more enduring and sentimental part of him commanding that other part to be silent as if looking it levelly in the eye and saying, almost aloud, ‘Not another word.’” How many of us today are capable of this kind of ruthless transversal of our own minds? From the gnostic proclamation of a certain television detective that “consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution” to the preemptive policing of content with trigger warnings, the terms of which seem to conceptually frame consciousness as something like an IED that should be handled with care (if at all), our age seems to be one unsure about the integrity of the mind. Very real horrors abound: climate change, rampant—almost incomprehensible—gun violence, drone-perpetrated war crimes, gross income inequality. Yet the language games we play are full of unwieldy abstractions: what these things prompt in us, more often than moral outrage, are what we term feelings of “dissociation,” “anxiety,” and “depression.” We acknowledge these big problems, but we still rush about trying to palliatively address our capricious emotional states within the narrow halls of
the very framework that establishes these terms. As the narrator in “Good Old Neon” says of his wealthy friends’ attempts to find out why they’re unhappy through therapy: “It didn’t really work, although it did make everyone sound more aware of their own problems and added some useful vocabulary and concepts to the way we all had to talk to each other to fit in and sound a certain way.” Perhaps the authenticity we so desire is only demonstrated through our very being in the world—and perhaps the dogged suggestion that we are basically inauthentic will hound us even at our most genuine. At one point, the narrator of “Good Old Neon” recalls a dream he had, wherein he was sculpting a giant statue of himself, a monument which he then spent his days scrupulously keeping clean and free of vandalism: “I’m not saying it was subtle or hard to figure out.” Is this not to some extent what critics often do, carefully chiseling their own model of the man while forgetting that he was once in the thick of it like the rest of us? As for Wallace himself, one would like to think that the man—any man—was more in life than his posthumous modes of presentation. If we look at the works, they attest to a man who knew that the problem is not that we aren’t aware that the prevailing pseudo-reality is a big game that makes us unhappy—rather, the problem is we’re unsure how not to play. Wallace opted out entirely. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left to play on, with the handicap of one fewer intelligent voices of dissent. u
The presentation of gender in everyday life Blending memoir with critical theory, ‘The Argonauts’ asks what it means to commit to, or elide, gender
by Thomas Ruan
I
n Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel “The Marriage Plot,” an English major at Brown enters a romantic relationship with a guy from her semiotics seminar as they read Roland Barthes’s “A Lover’s Discourse” (yes, the book is set in the eighties). Eugenides has his protagonist enamoured with the book (“Here was a book addressed to lovers, a book about being in love that contained the word love in just about every sentence. And, oh, how she loved it!”), which soon comes to define her new relationship, with every moment of her blissful infatuation, even its sudden ending, having some correlation to some-
thing Barthes wrote three decades prior. However, “A Lover’s Discourse” is not a particularly romantic book. It casts a critical, intellectual eye on familiar phenomena related to love—all of this, of course, wrapped in an appropriately academic language (“I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness”). At the time, “A Lover’s Discourse” was, like much of Barthes’s work, an innovation—it showed that the then-popular tools of structuralist critique were powerful enough to analyse even everyday life itself. If someone were to write a novel like “The Marriage Plot” in thirty years (this hypothetical requires imagining nostalgia for right now, which is perhaps a bit too
REVIEW
implausible and frightening), they could instead name-drop Maggie Nelson’s latest book, “The Argonauts.” Like “A Lover’s Discourse,” “The Argonauts” is about, amongst many things, love, and applies concepts from critical theory to everyday life—references ranging from French postmodernist Irigaray to child psychologist Winnicott appear, in a Barthesian manner, in the margins. It is obvious from the first glance, however, that Nelson has created something entirely different. While Barthes uses a cold, analytic eye to examine the personal, Nelson samples from many voices—academic, poetic, confessional, critical, amorous. When she speaks about her partner, SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
35
the fluidly gendered visual artist Harry Dodge, she usually does so in the second person. The effect is one of extreme, almost uncomfortable, intimacy, and calls into question the ability of critical theory to do what it ostensibly should be doing: analysing everyday life. How could it, Nelson seems to be challenging us, when it shies away from its very subject, preferring instead to deal in abstract concepts and jargon? For example, in response to Susan Sontag’s plea to replace hermeneutics with “an erotics of art,” Nelson protests: “Even an erotics feels too heavy. I don’t want an eros, or a hermeneutics, of my baby. Neither is dirty, neither is mirthful, enough” (if that was too subtle for you, she also later writes: “I am not interested in […] a metaphorics of my anus. I am interested in ass-fucking”). This “dirtiness,” this “mirthfulness,” it becomes clear over the course of the book, is not antithetical to philosophical reflection at all—in fact, the two might be more intimate than it may seem. In a way, this seems like a logical extension of the radical self-examination that theorists like Barthes pioneered in the heyday of structuralism. But “The Argonauts” feels completely unique, without precedent. Perhaps this is because it is, well, literally unique—nobody but Nelson has written—can write—about Nelson’s life like that. Furthermore, even though Nelson examines hot button topics like feminism, motherhood, and queer politics, she also explicitly writes that, “I don’t want to represent anything,” instead aiming to enact “writing that dramatises the ways in which we are for another or by virtue of another, not in a single instance, but from the start and always.” Since we are, and become, who we are because of others, the only way to really get to know someone is to start with their influences, the worlds they are invested in. So, when Nelson writes about Wittgenstein, she is being no less personal than when she writes about being pregnant, and vice versa. “The Argonauts” blurs the barrier separating academic and personal worlds. Nelson also traces the ways in which this academic/personal dichotomy can be found in terms of an opposition between masculine and feminine—the male is allowed to take part in the academy’s public world of theory and discourse, while the female remains in the private world of babies and the kitchen. Though feminist scholarship has challenged this model, Nelson questions the cost of such progress. At one point, she describes a graduate seminar she took with the eminent 36
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
scholars Jane Gallop and Rosalind Krauss. After Gallop gave a presentation on her most recent work, which focused on her experiences of being photographed with her child by her husband at home, Krauss scathingly responded: “It is so deeply disturbing to behold the mediocrity, naïveté, and soft-mindedness of the work Gallop has presented to us today.” Though Krauss gave theoretical reasons for her critique— she didn’t properly interpret Barthes, didn’t use certain aesthetic concepts carefully enough, and so on—Nelson senses that what Krauss was really taking issue with was that “Gallop’s maternity had rotted her mind—besotted it with the narcissism that makes one think that an utterly ordinary experience shared by countless others is somehow unique, or uniquely interesting.” This narcissism is seen as a distinctly feminine one, and complicates any simple call for gender equality in intellectual discourse—what kind of a victory for women can a seat at the seminar table be, if it requires them to act like men? “The Argonauts” is fascinated with identity, and the difficulty of maintaining some constant sense of self through change. Its title references Barthes’s comparison of the phrase “I love you” to “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.” The Argo’s parts are constantly being substituted out for new ones, but the overall ship they make up retains a constant identity—every time a lover says “I love you”, they must remake their meaning, their being in love, with new parts, new situations, new sensations. This paradox of identity—that something constant emerges out of ceaseless change—is brought to fore in some of the most well-written sections of the book, which set up a parallel between the transformations that Nelson and her lover Dodge experience as they grow pregnant and take testosterone injections, respectively. “On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more ‘male’, mine, more and more ‘female,’” she writes. “But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.” Nelson even goes as far as to wonder if there is “something inherently queer about pregnancy itself.” The comparison is strange, but makes sense—like being queer, pregnancy puts a person in a problematic, complex relationship with her body and social place in the world. Nelson wonders: “How could an
experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolise or enact the ultimate conformity?” Insights like this are frequent in the book, and remind us that one of the primary goals of critique should be to show how the familiar is in fact quite strange. In addition to identity, “The Argonauts” is also about being a mother (Nelson eloquently chronicles “The capaciousness of growing a baby. The way a baby literally makes space where there wasn’t space before”), psychoanalysis (“It astonishes and shames me to think that I spent year finding such questions not only comprehensible, but compelling”), and so much more: family, language, art. All these themes tie back to the central image of the Argo, the whole that emerges out of flux. In her 2011 book “The Art of Cruelty,” the image that Nelson focuses on is “the Neutral” (also from Barthes), a being that does not give into the pressure to take just one side, instead creating “novel responses: to flee, to escape, to demur, to shift or refuse terms.” Although in that book Nelson is drawn to the Neutral’s powerful ability to defy society’s overwhelming eagerness to categorise, “The Argonauts” is more skeptical of evasion for its own sake. It praises the Neutral, but also criticises its unwillingness to stand strongly for anything. Unwillingness entails missing out on “The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognising that one may have to undergo the same realisations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.” “The Argonauts” is rife with paradox and ambiguity (“There is much to be learned from wanting something both ways,” Nelson insists), but compellingly so. What does it mean to balance a need for stability and commitment, and a desire to always change and grow? What would it look like to emphasise both without denigrating either? Although we almost constantly talk about identity, on both personal and institutional levels, the debate seems too often to be framed as a superficial opposition between some kind of conservatism and some kind of progressivism. “The Argonauts” is by no means a manifesto; it raises far more questions than it could ever hope to answer, and
often avoids taking a definite stand. But the unwillingness to settle Nelson scrutinizes also applies to the modern urge to uncritically opt for difference—a stance that is for many reasons immensely appealing
for young people who find themselves at places like Swarthmore. Nelson challenges any easy identification with either “the same” or “the different;” she asks what it would mean to move from the Neutral to
the Argo, without compromising the validity of either approach. “The Argonauts” resonates far beyond its short length. It is earnest and complex, and the questions it explores demand our close attention. u
In search of better erotica ‘New Lovers’ series fails to deliver on artist-publisher Paul Chan’s promise
by Grace Baker
I
t’s not easy to write erotica. Have you ever come home the morning after a particularly successful Pub Nite and tried to write an account of all those steamy moments swimming around in your head? I have, and, I’m embarrassed to admit, not just once. It’s tricky to translate those moments of intense heat and passion into plain text, and what is often lost is the very thing we want to get out of erotica, which is to say that the stories are not sexy anymore. Instead, they are MAD CRINGEY. Maybe I just haven’t worked at it long enough, but honestly, in all of my incognito-window searching, I haven’t found a lot of good erotica written by experienced authors, either. Maybe it isn’t experience that makes someone good at writing erotically. Maybe communicating raw passion is best done on the fly, without laboring too long over the material before releasing it to the sticky-fingered masses. That’s one of the foundational ideals of the publisher Badlands Unlimited’s new series of erotic novels and novellas, New Lovers, which was released in spring of this year. They publish, in essentially raw form, works written by, for, and about women. New Lovers books are written exclusively by women, because, as Paul Chan, founder of Badlands Unlimited, said in his March 2015 interview with the Paris Review, “Women write better erotica.” Women writing erotica for other women isn’t so revolutionary, but elevating these stories by publishing and selling them is an important step toward feminist representation in this field. Badlands Unlimited primarily publishes art books, so why the leap to erotica? They view the stories they select for publication as art, making the distinction between erotica, which emphasizes other sources of pleasure than simply physical stimuli, and pornography. Besides, they hope that “New Lovers” will,
by virtue of its erotic nature, achieve enough sales to support their production of art books. When I started reading the New Lovers series, I really wanted to like it. Like, I really did. So I set myself up in bed with my vibrator within arm’s reach and a childlike hopeful demeanor. But the longer I read, the more disconnected from my sexuality I began to feel—eventually, I kicked the thing to the foot of the bed and resolved to just get through the text. First, though, the high points. The first trilogy of New Lovers stories, “How to Train Your Virgin,” “We Love Lucy,” and “God, I Don’t Even Know Your Name,” all incorporate queer subjects and queer sex. The sex scenes comprise much less of the text than in traditional erotica. The advent of dating apps is incorporated. The stories are grounded in contemporary life, which allows their authors to explore the issues and experiences sexually active people today are faced with. The authors juxtapose fantasy elements alongside realistic elements, which helps to make this content more relatable. As readers of erotica, we’re looking for some sense of realism that we can latch onto while recognizing that our whole purpose in reading erotica is to access fantasy scenarios that we’re not currently acting out. So why did I feel so uncomfortable with this material? Let’s talk about the first installment of this trilogy, “How to Train Your Virgin” by Wednesday Black. My initial response to this title was bland appreciation of its reference to some children’s media. It sounds playful and a little transgressive, which is all well and good for erotica. But the longer I read, the more sinister that title came to sound. The main characters, king and queen of a fantastical and hedonistic kingdom where all the creatures are engaged in near-constant sexual encounters, are both seriously misinformed about consent. The plotline of this story
is that the philandering king is hot for a young human man and woman who are twins AND virgins. The jealous queen chooses to get back at her husband for his adultery by destroying their innocence before the king can. While the king is portrayed as a lecherous old man whose actions cannot be condoned, it’s our protagonist, the queen, who inflicts most of the coercion seen in this story. She talks about the consent of “her” virgins, the twins, as if it’s a treasure to be won. She demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding that permeates our culture at this moment in history: that consent is static and that, once a “yes” is present, every preceding “no” doesn’t count. The worst part of this book is that it reads like a manual, which makes it even more of a hazard for its intended audience of lovers, both new and old. When you introduce a set of erotic novels and claim that they are made up of superior stuff to male-written erotica or an old era of erotica, etc., it’s counterintuitive to allow your first installment to espouse unhealthy sexual power dynamics and dangerous sexual practices. It’s irresponsible and unconscionable to produce and profit from this content when it can directly impact the sexual lives of readers who look to erotica to represent sex more authentically than traditional porn. Assault isn’t sexy. Packaging stories that feature sexual coercion and assault as groundbreaking because of their more romantic and sensual (as opposed to boorishly sexual) themes is disingenuous. How would I describe my overall outlook on these novels? In the words of comedian Louis C.K., “It doesn’t make me come.” Although a lot is right in these stories, their representation of consent is unforgivably bad, and because of that, I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending these books. There’s better erotica out there somewhere. I’m going to keep looking until I can find it or create my own. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
37
MOVIES Can nature handle Hollywood? On the PCT and AT, increased traffic threatens fragile ecosystems and ruins the wilderness experience. On Everest, further crowding means death.
by Philip Queen
O
ver the last year, Hollywood has managed to make film adaptations of thee of the classic outdoors-themed high school English class favorites. “Wild,” based on Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 book of the same name, came out in December 2014; “A Walk in the Woods,” based on the 1998 book by Bill Bryson, came out this September; and “Everest,” which follows the same events as Jon Krakauer’s 1997 book “Into Thin Air,” was also released this September. (The obvious outlier here is Krakauer’s 1996 book “Into the Wild,” which was already immortalized in film back in 2007.) These three books have a lot in common: each involves average people going out into nature to solve problems they have in civilization; each distills nature into a famous, neat, human-centered objective; and each took place in the mid nineties. The movies are similar too: each forces multi-month projects into the format of a standard, two-hour movie drama; each has a surprisingly small number of pure nature shots; and each was only partially filmed on location. Even though each of these movies had its faults, they together have the opportunity to inspire a generation to appreciate and actively participate in the outdoors. The problem is that each movie runs the risk of ruining the place it’s about. The increased foot traffic from public exposure presents difficult management problems, especially as the movies don’t depict proper Leave No Trace practices. On the Pacific Crest and Appalachian Trails, this increased traffic threatens fragile ecosystems and ruins the wilderness experience people hike the trails looking for. On Everest, further crowding means death.
“W
ild” follows a 26-year old Cheryl Strayed, played by Reese Witherspoon, as she walks from Mexico to Canada along the Pacific Crest Trail. She starts the trail with an overloaded pack, no knowledge of how to
38
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
work her stove or set up her tent, and with all the weight of a traumatic past. The death of her mother, her time as a heroin addict, and her recent divorce fill her mind as she walks, and we see these memories in the form of flashbacks that make up a majority of the movie. As Strayed figures out how to live independently on the course of her 2,600 mile journey, she comes to terms with her past and leaves the trail ready to restart her life in a new direction. However, the release of “Wild” was met with trepidation from the backpacking community who feared what they called the “‘Wild’ effect.” The “Wild” effect was the name for what exposure to the larger public would do to a previously lesser-known trail. The good side of this publicity is that many women found Strayed’s story empowering, and anecdotal reports claim gender diversity on the trail has gone up. The bad side is that any increased publicity for the trail leads to increased traffic, more stress on fragile backcountry environments and strained relationships with landowners whose property is crossed by the trail. The movie ended up causing a 30 percent increase in use on the PCT the season following its release. Furthermore, “Wild” can be seen as glorifying Strayed’s unpreparedness, making throwing your boots off a cliff, kicking your fuel canister into the brush, or pooping on the ground of your campsite seem like acceptable elements of the PCT experience. If every hiker treated the trail in this way, it would ruin the trail’s pristine environment and fragile ecosystems, making the PCT no longer wild. The “Wild” effect caught the attention of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which is bracing for similar effects from its own “Wild” for the 2016 season. The protagonists in “A Walk in the Woods” don’t have a troubled past like Strayed’s, but they don’t get her satisfying closure either. A retirement-aged and unprepared Bill Bryson, played by Robert Redford, wants to walk the Appalachian Trail, and settles for a partner on his
ESSAY
estranged friend Stephen Katz, played by Nick Nolte. Katz turns out to be overweight, alcoholic, and more excited about reuniting with his friend than walking from Georgia to Maine. The pair prove to be better at bickering and getting into antics like falling into streams or facing off with bears than they are at hiking, and they only make it as far as Virginia. Despite a star cast, the movie has little to offer aside from worn out gags and cliché observations about life. The humor consists in bunk beds collapsing and panty jokes that take over a minute of setup, interspersed with metaphors about how the AT is like life. Regardless of the critical reception of the movie, the ATC is concerned. The year after Bryson’s book was released, the trail saw a 45 percent increase in hikers. The ATC is worried this could happen again following the movie, except this time they don’t think the trail can handle it. The ATC has room for a large number of people at a time, as there’s still about a mile of trail for each thru hiker, or someone attempting the whole distance of the trail. But most of that traffic tends to be concentrated in certain places and times, leading to full shelters and crowded summits. Famous locations, like McAfee Knob in Virginia shown in the film, are already suffering ecological damage from overuse. It doesn’t help that “A Walk in the Woods” is even worse than “Wild” at glorifying unpreparedness. Bryson’s preparation is little more than spending an afternoon in an REI, and Katz is already wheezing 500 feet from the parking lot. Nor does it help that the AT is going through an identity crisis right now. Scott Jurek set the record this past year for running the trail, with outside support, in 46 days, but was congratulated with a fine from Baxter State Park. The park is home to Mt. Katahdin, the northern terminus of the trail, and officials wanted to make an example of Jurek for not following regulations. The park had record numbers of hikers last year, and feel they cannot handle anymore. They have threatened to force a
As hundreds of climbers try to summit Everest on the same fair-weather days, the multi-hour waits can create danger and death.
re-route of the AT, and while that is unlikely to happen, it does show that a rapid increase in hikers could mean big changes for the AT. “Everest” follows a different format than “Walk” or “Wild.” It tells the story of the 1996 attempt on Everest by the Adventure Consultants guiding service. The group consisted of eight paying clients (including Jon Krakauer, played by Michael Kelly), lead guide Rob Hall (played by Jason Clarke), two other guides, and a group of eight sherpas, of whom only a couple were shown in the film. Most of the clients made it to the top, but a blizzard struck on the descent. Eight people died over two days, and with four other deaths that season made 1996 the deadliest year on Everest at the time. Despite how powerful the true story of the disaster is, “Everest” unfortunately misrepresents parts of the story for dramatic effect. Beck Weathers’ teetering on a ladder bridge is turned into a dramatic fall and daring rescue by Hall, and in the blizzard a group of clients is shown falling and tumbling down the mountain when they really sat down from exhaustion. “Everest” also grossly underestimated the important role Sherpas play on Everest, portraying them as maybe one in ten climbers instead of a more accurate one in two. That being said, it gives a convincing and engrossing show of the chaos and struggle of high altitude climbing, and is the only movie of the three that is worth watching. “Everest” came out at a sensitive time Photo courtesy of Ralf Dujmovits
though. On April 18, 2014, a 15,000-ton serac, or block of ice, broke off from the west shoulder of Everest. It fell onto the Khumbu Icefall, the most dangerous part of the climb, where a group of 25 sherpas was being held up by a problem with a ladder bridge. 16 of them died, doubling the number of deaths from the 1996 disaster and making 2014 the deadliest year on Everest. The southern, Nepali side of the mountain, which is the more popular face to climb, was closed for the season, and a crew filming background shots for “Everest” was forced to leave. Many of the paying clients who didn’t have a chance to climb in 2014 returned in 2015, exacerbating a long-time problem with overcrowding. Over 1,000 people were staying in Base Camp in the lead-up to climbing season. But then on April 25, 2015, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Nepal 50 miles outside of the capital Kathmandu. It killed nearly 9,000 people and injured over 20,000. On Everest, it released a 1.4 million ton serac that fell 2,500 feet to the valley floor and released the energy of 2,000 tons of TNT. An avalanche and shockwave hit Base Camp, killing 19 people (mainly Nepali and Americans), injuring another 61, and destroying most of the tents. 200 people were stranded at the higher camps, and after three sherpas died trying to re-establish the route to Base Camp, the guides decided to wait for a helicopter rescue. A total of 22 died in the events, which is five more than died in all of 2014 and nearly three times as many as
died in the 1996, making 2015 the deadliest year on Everest ever. This could have the most salient year for “Everest.” Maybe, if it had told the story of the sherpas, working one of the world’s most dangerous jobs and fighting for better working conditions while their western counterparts are making more money doing safer work. If it had pursued the problem of littering more, showing the effects of abandoned oxygen tanks and corpses (150 currently lie on the mountain), instead of simply showing Hall pick up a lone candy bar wrapper at Base Camp. If it had followed Krakauer’s book in critiquing high-altitude guiding, or had questioned whether we need 300 people to climb the world’s tallest mountain every year. Maybe it could have been the best time for “Everest,” if “Everest” had been a different movie. But it wasn’t that movie, and we’re left with a movie that glorifies under-experienced climbers paying $70,000 to be dragged up Everest along fixed ropes, with only passing mention of the deep and unresolved issues the mountain has been facing for 20 years. “Wild” has already changed the PCT. It inspired many women to pursue hard outdoor goals, while at the same time bringing growing crowds to a previously wild countryside. “A Walk in the Woods” could bring the AT past capacity, which in turn could require a whole new management structure and identity for America’s classic long distance trail. If “Everest” brings significant increases in climbers, however, the results SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
39
could be disastrous. Everest already has multi-hour waits as hundreds of climbers all try to summit on the same fair weather days. Waits at the top of the world mean spent oxygen, increased exhausted, rescues, and, for an unfortunate but inevitable
few, death. Everest is already overfilled, and until the number of people climbing it drops, we will continue to see record setting deaths on it. For the Pacific Crest and Appalachian Trails, the problem can be solved by spacing out hikers’ starting
dates and increasing awareness about Leave No Trace principles. For Everest, the only surefire solution seems to be to shutting the mountain down until people forget the concept that they can pay their way to the top of the world. u
In latest Pixar offering, a full range of feeling ‘Inside Out’ shows that all emotions are delicate, confusing, sometimes off-balance, but never weak
by Anna Weber
E
arlier this year, Pixar did it once again: crafted a beautiful film that tears at the strings of your heart and provides you with a bonus existential crisis. “Inside Out” is about a young girl named Riley who experiences a difficult move from Minnesota to California. The catch here is that the film is narrated not by Riley, but by her emotions. We literally get inside Riley’s head to follow these characters—Anger, Joy, Disgust, Fear, and Sadness—in order to understand Riley from a new perspective: her very own mind. In a mix of humor, sorrow, and all the feelings that occur when a change happens, Riley’s emotional complexity develops just as she does. Furthermore, the animation is phenomenally executed; the filmmakers make you realize when you are inside Riley’s head and out of it through camera lens choices. It’s not just a pretty representation either; it introduces biological facts such as the reality that memories do go to long-term storage during REM sleep. It reflects on brain chemistry as well as psychological development. Overall, “Inside Out” literally reaches to the inside of your mind in terms of emotions, animation, and biological accuracy. The film’s dual setting, cut between Riley’s mind and the outside world, presents a dual approach to understanding people: what is presented outwardly versus what happens inwardly. Riley deals with anxiety during her hockey tryout, she faces explosive anger during a frustrating dinner with her parents, and eventually she feels nothing. This is how we come to understand Riley, through her internal emotional stages. Riley’s parents, who do see Riley’s external appearance, fail to notice that these stages have occurred until after Riley has attempted to run away. Being inside Riley’s mind allows us to see the complex portrayal of what she shows and, perhaps more importantly, what she hides. I found myself in the place of Riley’s
40
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
parents when I found out that a family member had emotional and mental health problems: I responded with shock. This person, someone who has been my best friend since I was born, suffered internally each and every day. And I had not noticed a thing. “Inside Out” challenges the assumption that I made for years: when people say they are “fine,” they really are. Our society makes it socially polite to ask how another person is doing, but to also respond with a fervent “I’m good” or “fine,” regardless of whether or not that’s actually true. The inside and outside paradox, found in the title of the film itself, voices a truth in people: we are not always fine and that is okay. It is not something to hide within the shadows of our inner thoughts, rather something we should acknowledge more. At the end of “Inside Out,” Riley and her parents admit that they feel sadness. This is the first step: recognition. Once Riley is honest with her feelings, she can gain support from her family for every one of those feelings. The support system that Riley builds with her parents is a key creation for a person’s mental and emotional health. It not only allows Riley to see health from another person’s point of view, but also provides an outlet for her to talk about it. She sees that her parents are sad too and then the three communicate about their emotions. The family tells each other what they each miss about Minnesota. To understand how to deal with emotions, Riley has to converse with her parents rather than be their “happy girl.” She has to vent about how she is feeling and let out the raw truth. This can be a difficult thing to do when society tells us that not being happy is a bad thing. Even here at Swarthmore we like to “appear fine,” acting like we can always handle our intense workloads, midterms, jobs, clubs, and personal relationships. But when you are really stressed, hiding it does not make the stress disappear, and that is what Riley experiences in “Inside Out.” Utilizing a
REVIEW
support system of friends, family, professors, deans, stress-relieving activities, and acknowledging your stress is what can help Swarthmore students. A support system allows us to listen to others, share our own stories, and ultimately understand the entirety of health. Joy is not the sole right emotion in “Inside Out”—all the emotion characters are good and right. It is not bad to be sad; it is how we process and maintain awareness of emotions like sadness that can be difficult. “Inside Out” starts to break down the misconception that only a few of us are dealing with emotions we cannot understand. No, not every person deals with the same struggle. No, not every person has the same magnitude of internal pain. But, when we break down the notion that communicating emotions and mental health is a sign of weaknesses or a “soft” spot in a person, we can realize that emotions are universally hard. Facing my freshman year of college, I dealt with a deep sadness when I left home for school. I cried in my front yard as I sat in a circle of my friends and said goodbye. I felt angry at myself for choosing a college nearly 2,000 miles away from my home. When I encountered these things, I did not acknowledge them as good and right. “Inside Out” functions as a call-out of sorts, a shout to tell you that not understanding emotions is okay and that asking for help is good. In a turn of events, the assumed hero, Joy, and antagonist, Sadness, come to respect each other’s work. They find a balance. I guess that’s what we’re supposed to do in our lives when transitioning to new places or moving out of our comfort zones. In the words of President Val Smith during Swarthmore’s first-year orientation, “Let yourself feel everything. The joy and the terror.” “Inside Out” shows that emotions are delicate, confusing, and sometimes off-balance, but never are they weak. It is a basic concept for kids and adults alike: all emotions are worth feeling. u
TELEVISION Schumer and Simone
Exploring Amy Schumer’s satirical capturing of women’s lived experiences via ‘The Second Sex’
by Eden Barnett
“E
nough ink has flowed over the quarrel about feminism; it is now almost over: let’s not talk about it anymore.Yet it is still being talked about. And the volumes of idiocies churned out over the past century do not seem to have clarified the problem,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir in 1949. “The Second Sex,” Beauvoir’s 700+ page work on womanhood in Western civilization, remains shockingly relevant today. In it, Beauvoir tackles the impossible and conflicting ideals of femininity, and how these lead to women being discriminated against for their inherent inferiority. She was one of the first to outline the concept of women as the “Other,” as the opposite of men, who serve as the implicit default in our society. Almost 70 years later, feminist thought has become more and more influential within mainstream culture. Last year there was a Beyonce song that included a portion of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk on gender inequality. From the summer of 2014 on there were ubiquitous commercials for tampons that tackled gendered insults (#likeagirl) and the way confidence plummets for girls after puberty. From this, there has been more public debate over what feminism looks like and which women can be classified as feminists. For every show with a female character, there are at least three thought pieces on the internet arguing over whether the work is “feminist” or not. Did “Mad Max” break down patriarchal ideas of women as weak and passive or did it merely sensationalize violence with sexualized female protagonists? Is Liz Lemon a refreshingly unsympathetic female lead, bringing relatable flaws to the small screen, or is her brand of frumpy feminism self-serving and narrow-minded? Amongst all of the scrutiny over what feminism should look like and what counts as feminist, Amy Schumer has
recently risen to prominence. Originally known as a stand-up comedian famous for delivering morbid jokes in a sweet, deadpan manner, Schumer has grown increasingly notorious after getting her own show on Comedy Central. Her TV show, “Inside Amy Schumer,” manages to capture the conflicting ideals of femininity, drawing humor from the way the unreasonable expectations of womanhood are placed upon Schumer and how she fails to meet them. Many of the sketches on “Inside Amy Schumer” illustrate Beauvoir’s claim that women are uniquely aware of their differences from men and are confined by the conflicting and impossible expectations placed upon them, and reiterate that women still face the same problems Beauvoir outlined 65 years ago. In “The Second Sex,” Beauvoir was the first to analyze gender through a phenomenological perspective, focusing on the way female lived experiences differed from those of men, and how these differences affect women’s social standing. An important component of Beauvoir’s project was to recognize the differences between the experiences of men and women while also arguing that women deserve to be treated as equal beings. The acknowledgement of these differences, and the subsequent promotion of femininity, is ubiquitous in mainstream feminism today, especially in Schumer’s work. In particular, Beauvoir tackles the way women are established as the Other. In the introduction of her book, she writes, “It is often said that [woman] thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it.” Women are thus aware of their gender in a way that men aren’t, and are bur-
ESSAY
dened with the idea that their perspective on the world is less objective. Schumer’s show is distinctively female, a rare feat for Comedy Central, and most of the sketches follow the perspectives of women like her. In a season three sketch of “Inside Amy Schumer,” there’s an ad for an Amy Schumer doll. In it, two young girls lovingly nurse their blonde doll through her hangover, pour her cranberry juice for her UTI, and dress her for court. When they press her hand, she says colorful phrases like “Why is it so bright in here?” and “Not guilty!” Many of the sketches focus on the bad behavior of women. Schumer often plays characters that are cartoonishly selfish and narcissistic. Throughout the show she sets herself up as an anti-role model, failing to succeed at any of the expectations placed on women in our society. In her show, she’s generally a boozy promiscuous mess, who is never good-looking or sweet enough. Schumer’s sloppy behavior lies in stark contrast to antiquated models of femininity, of adhering to rigid rules of conduct. The restrictive nature of womanhood facilitates male domination of women. In her section on Myths in “The Second Sex,” Beauvoir writes, “And therein lies the wondrous hope that man has put in woman: he hopes to fulfill himself as a being by carnally possessing a being, but at the same time confirming his sense of freedom through the docility of a free person.” This means that much of what constitutes femininity and women’s status is dictated by an inherently unequal world, emerging out of male supremacy. “But the very fact that woman is the Other tends to cast suspicion upon all the justifications that men have ever been able to provide for it. These have all too evidently been dictated by men’s interest,” Beauvoir writes. Thus, Schumer’s resistance and mockery of the expectations placed upon women highlight the ways in which women are denied full personhood by these conflicting, exacting demands. SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
41
The show often zeroes in on the stringent beauty standards of today, and how women are treated under them. Many of the sketches focus on bizarre diets—in one, Schumer meets with a nutritionist played by Janeane Garofalo who promotes diets like “The Instagram Diet” (ordering food, photographing it, then throwing it away) and “The Tapeworm Experience.” Throughout IAS, Schumer’s body is often the object for both intense negative scrutiny and objectification. One season two sketch featured an all male focus group watching “Inside Amy Schumer” and giving their input. “I liked the skits better when you saw sideboob, but not the close-ups of the face,” says one dude, when asked about the balance between the skits and Schumer’s stand up. “Is this something you could see yourself
DVRing?” asks the Comedy Central representative. “I would probably bang her, if that’s what you mean,” is the response given. In her section on the stages in a woman’s life, Beauvoir wrote about the transition girls make after puberty. According to Beauvoir, women slowly lose their sense of themselves as autonomous beings, and instead begin to view themselves through the expectations of men. “She will gain value in the eyes of males not by increasing her human worth but by modeling herself on their dreams [...] In one complex step, she aims for her body’s glorification through the homage of men for whom this body is intended [...] In the solitude of her room, in salons where she tries to attract the gaze of others, she does not separate man’s desire from the love
of her own self.” Schumer’s show demonstrates the ways in which women are still defined by the impossible expectations of a male-centric society, and how women subsequently measure their worth. Schumer manages to capture the ways in which women are still subject to sexism, especially in the fashion Beauvoir outlined in 1949. Women are still primarily defined in relation to men, and beliefs about the inferiority of femininity continue to permeate throughout our culture. Schumer takes an unflinching look at modern femininity and its stringent demands, from impossible, conflicting standards of beauty to the way in which women feel pressured to mold themselves according to the expectations of a patriarchal society. u
MUSIC Lonely Beaches, California Lana Del Rey’s personal ‘Honeymoon’
by Alex Jimenez
“I
t’s hard for me sometimes to think about going on when I know we’re going to die. Something happened in the last three years, with my panic…” trails off a “gregarious” Lana Del Rey in a recent interview with Billboard magazine, following the September release of her third studio album, “Honeymoon.” Listening for Del Rey’s “panic” is no arduous task. Her title track “Honeymoon” begins with a cinematic fusion of cellos and violins, providing an already despondent ambience for another of her doomed-love variations in which “We both know / that it’s not fashionable to love me / but you don’t go / ’cause truly there’s nobody for you but me.” Unsurprisingly, Del Rey’s album begins with a deeply ironic venture into the inevitability of ephemeral love dissolving into the pain of self-destructiveness and eventual ruin. Amanda Petrusich of the New Yorker mordantly dismisses Del Rey’s blues-pop, trip-hop mélange, sharply noting that, “Much of ‘Honeymoon’ is deliberately cinematic. Imagine long, sustained shots of a
42
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
beautiful woman drinking dry champagne and sobbing in a beachfront mansion.” Petrusich derides Del Rey’s appropriation of Southern California—Del Rey grew up in Lake Placid, New York—as a means of enacting a spiritual change, though it might be Del Rey’s desperate desire to placate her “panic,” to curb what seems to be blatant depression and anxiety. Del Rey’s critics consistently refer to her supposed constructedness, both in terms of the nostalgia-Americana image that is Lana Del Rey, and her rumored store-bought lips and nose. It is worth conceding that “Honeymoon” is “deliberately cinematic” at times, particularly with her la-di-da ballad “Salvatore.” Del Rey debuted “Salvatore” on Huw Stephens’s BBC Radio 1 show, in which Stephens pointed to the “cinematic” feel of the song. The song is cinematic. Having recorded critically-acclaimed songs for films like “The Great Gatsby” and “Big Eyes,” it hardly seems surprising that Del Rey would incorporate her penchant for cinema in her music’s composition. Del Rey concerns herself with methodically painting the smoky locales that provide the
REVIEW backdrop for her narratives and, with this keen attention to setting, one song encapsulates the history and future of an entire Italian love-affair. Quoting Jonathan Berger, Spencer Kornhaber of the Atlantic writes, “Music embodies…a separate, quasi-independent concept of time, able to distort or negate ‘clock-time.’ This other time creates a parallel temporal world in which we are prone to lose ourselves, or at least to lose all semblance of objective time. Perhaps Lana Del Rey read the essay. She certainly understands the concept.” In addition to “Dying at the hand / Of a foreign man / Happily” (a Shakespearian euphemism, no doubt), Del Rey’s priorities seem to have changed since her desperate dependence in “Ultraviolence,” sweetly singing that “Salvatore can wait / Now it’s time to eat / Soft ice-cream.” “Salvatore” surficially communicates Del Rey’s blasé ennui; however, below the ballroom violins and the narrative itself, “Honeymoon”’s overarching themes of infatuation’s inevitable end echo in between her lamenting melody-motif and the prophetic line, “ciao amore.” The Lana Del Rey incarnation that we know and maybe love today had her
Lana Del Rey, who, in her newest album, revisits the same few, familiar subjects, but offers new ways of looking at these.
beginnings in Brooklyn cafés, before they were cool and frequented, perhaps. In 2010, she released her EP, “Lizzy Grant aka Lana Del Ray,” where she conflated her real experiences helping to renovate and paint homes on Indian reservations, and her doe-eyed infatuation with Prince Charmings, cars and silver-screen icons. The EP disappeared only two months following its release, and Lizzy Grant evaporated from the limelight until her reemergence in 2012 as Lana Del Rey. While “Video Games” became an unforgettable success, Del Rey’s introduction was unfortunately prefaced with a lamentable performance on SNL and a series of scathing reviews: Jon Caramanic of the New York Times wrote, “The only real option is to wash off that face paint, muss up that hair and try again in a few years.” That was three years ago, two days before “Born to Die” debuted at number 2 on the Billboard 200. “Once a careful invention, she is now glassy-eyed and glassy-voiced, too cool to care,” wrote Caramanic recently (with a slight change in opinion perhaps), undoubtedly referencing the album’s trip-hop staple “High By the Beach,” in which a fed-up Del Rey leaves her ball-and-chain boyfriend for a personal day on the sunny shores of Malibu, California. “High By The Beach” is the strongest return to the triphip-hoppy notes of her debut album, the song opening with organ instrumentation and with what sounds like the Ventura-line Photo courtesy of Under the Gun Review
Amtrak working its way up the California coast. “Honeymoon”’s Del Rey appears more interested in soft ice cream and THC than the men that always end up disappointing. Del Rey has been accused of being repetitive, of romanticizing damaged men, drugs, money and destructive dejection. The idealized romance in “Born to Die” is fatalistically and persistently interrupted by outside forces; the aged lover in “Ultraviolence”’s “Shades of Blue,” with obscured, prioritized addictions and bouts of intense depression, reflects the lack in Del Rey herself; then, there’s “Honeymoon”’s “Religion.” Here, Del Rey insists that they “Leave it all behind / Let the ocean wash away.” Whether or not she’s consciously referencing her current flame, Francesco Carrozzini, Del Rey certainly washes away the memory of that distant “Shades of Blue” paramour with the insistent repetition that, “for you there’s only love.” Yes, Lana Del Rey revisits the same few subjects, but she also offers varying ways of appreciating and depreciating them. While Del Rey has said that “Salvatore” is the most differing song on the album, “Art Deco” is probably the most unsettling. The speaker wryly criticizes its central subject—“the club queen on the downtown scene”—a figure that Del Rey has privileged throughout her work, more dominantly with “Born to Die”’s Nabokovian women. Her disdain is thinly veiled with the trip-
hop-synth drenched chorus, “You’re so Art Deco / Out on the floor … / Baby you’re so ghetto / You’re looking to score / And they all say hello / You try to ignore them / ’Cause you want more (Why?).” In the case of this song, the homogenizing you feels profoundly accusatory. In “The Blackest Day,” Del Rey’s crooning contralto poignantly touches on her depression following a recent break-up: “Because I’m going deeper and deeper / Harder and harder / Getting darker and darker / Looking for love / In all the wrong places / Oh my God.” In almost direct connection to “Art Deco,” Del Rey holds herself accountable for the blackest day, admitting that she had been looking for love in all the wrong places—these places elaborately mapped out in “Born to Die,” “Paradise,” and “Ultraviolence.” While the Del Rey of the last three years found herself constantly jostled by the melodrama of “all the wrong places,” “Honeymoon”’s Del Rey offers a refreshing retrospection on her own culpability within these “places.” “Honeymoon” steers away from complete vulnerability by allowing Del Rey to admit to her obsessive fascination with rock bottom, a contemplation that feels perfectly cathartic. The “pain” that Del Rey feels, this pervasive depression, dominates “Honeymoon”’s atmosphere as it did in “Ultraviolence,” and yet Del Rey finally provides herself with the ability to say, “All I wanna do is get high by the beach.”u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
43
THEATER Finding real grief in ‘Hamilton’ Who tells your story?
by Allison Hrabar
I
n the two years since my father died, I’ve been seeking out stories about loss. To borrow a phrase coined by William Hughes at the A.V. Club, I’ve become a death elitist: I pick apart these narratives, trying to see if their rendering of grief bears any resemblance to the real thing. The answer was always no, but I kept going, essentially putting myself through exposure therapy. Whereas I had initially avoided any reminder of my father, spending days in bed mindlessly watching comedies, I slowly built up the emotional stamina to watch “How to Train Your Dragon 2,” “Buffy: The Vampire Slayer,” “Trainwreck.” While at “Crimson Peak” last month, I watched as the young female protagonist was asked to identify her father’s corpse and felt nothing at all. My initial anger with lazy portrayals of grief faded into frustration, which faded into a dull, bearable pain. I will always be grieving for my father, but I can now handle confronting his counterpart in fiction (this is lucky, as dead dads are the backbone of fiction). My emotional stamina has grown, but I am also able to cope because the grief I see on screen never feels genuine. The loss never looks like my loss. And while I’m thankful I can keep fictional grief at arm’s length, a part of me still wishes I could find myself in it. I kept seeking out these stories despite my anger because I *wanted* to see myself there, to recognize the loss I’d felt and have it mean something for more than a few minutes or a few episodes. When I saw “Hamilton” in September, I had that moment of recognition. The musical is a biography of founding father Alexander Hamilton, detailing his Caribbean origins, his rise to power, and his infamous duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. Every piece of “Hamilton” is astounding, but my biggest emotional response came during a duet sung by Hamilton and Burr called “Dear Theodosia.” It’s a compara-
44
NOVEMBER 2015
SWARTHMORE REVIEW
tively quiet song (it follows the bombastic “Yorktown,” which depicts the end of the Revolutionary War) where Burr and Hamilton sit on an empty stage and read the letters they’ve written to their newborn children: My father wasn’t around I swear that I’ll be around for you I’ll do whatever it takes I’ll make a million mistakes I’ll make the world safe and sound for you
When I first heard this song, it knocked me out. It was such an earnest expression of joy, but the grief beneath that happiness was unmistakable. The more I listen to “Hamilton,” the more I see the sense of loss that runs underneath the show’s kinetic energy. It’s not that the show’s happy moments are intercut with tragedy: that sadness is always there, influencing and shaping them. My father’s father, the Michael Hrabar I never knew, died before I was born. I never knew the specifics, as his absence was never commented on. While teaching me to drive at 15, my father mentioned him for the first time. I was insisting that I didn’t need to take the driving test, that friends could drive me around until I moved to a city with decent public transport. He countered that I couldn’t know when I might need to drive, that it was an important skill to have on file. He took the driver’s test the day he turned 16, he said, three days after his father died. I asked why he hadn’t waited. His only response: “I needed to get my license.” My father never spoke about grief. As a teenager, I wondered why he had never mentioned his father, or the younger brother who died a few years before he did. The few things I did know about his life before I was born—that our family emigrated from Russia sometime around the Revolution, that his father was a soldier in World War II, that his mother was raised by an aunt and uncle during the Great Depression—were gleaned from questions I
ESSAY
had to ask for school reports, not anything that had been volunteered. I wrote off his reluctance to open up as a combination of masculinity and Russian stoicism, never thinking it was a conscious choice. Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the show and stars as Hamilton, describes him as a man with a “crack in the foundation really early in his life.” For Miranda’s Hamilton, grief is foundational, something that enters your bones early on. It infects every facet of Hamilton’s life: he tries to connect with Aaron Burr over their shared orphanhood, marries into the sort of large family he never had, rejects George Washington’s attempts to be his father figure. When you experience grief so early, it’s difficult to describe how it influences you. At first, the show’s explanation of Hamilton’s drive is straightforward: his deprivation early in life grew into an endless hunger for success. But Hamilton’s self-reliance curdles into an inability to accept help and as his career advances, his political conflicts grow. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Hamilton insists that he will “write [his] way out,” as he always has: And when my prayers to God were met with indifference I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance
My father had an intense need to take care of both our family and other people. Kindness would be the wrong word to describe this tendency: he insulted other parents who forgot to pack extra water bottles for volleyball tournaments, but brought along a case to make sure everyone had one anyway. He waited in the car for hours as my friends and I roamed the mall so everyone could have a ride home. When I mentioned I liked Honey Bunches of Oats, he found a sale and bought 20 boxes so I wouldn’t run out. He took care of us in a way he was not taken care of for most of his life, but he was also preparing us. He insisted that we become independent early on, that we learned to cook, to fix a sink, to drive a car. He wanted to be a dad we
Center: Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote “Hamilton” and stars as the titular character in the show.
loved, and a dad we could survive losing. Aaron Burr was orphaned at two years old. After losing his parents, he moved in with his grandparents, who passed away just a year later. His reaction to grief is wildly different from Hamilton’s. Whereas death is in itself an instruction to Hamilton, a call to do something great, the death of Burr’s family paralyzes him: My mother was a genius My father commanded respect When they died they left no instructions Just a legacy to protect [...] And if there’s a reason I’m still alive While everyone who loves me has died I’m willing to wait for it
In the weeks after my father died, things kept falling apart and I kept forgetting why. I ran out of quarters for laundry, since there was no one constantly mailing me extras before I needed them. The pound of chocolate he snuck into my suitcase at the start of every semester, the chocolate that piled up because no human could finish it quickly enough, dwindled until it finally disappeared. The reminders to watch out for communists in the Russian Photo courtesy of Gothamist
Department no longer popped up on my phone during class. My father was watching television and recycling soda cans and texting me about Sharples lunch, and then he wasn’t. The 19 years I had with my father are all I will ever get. He won’t see me graduate from college, or meet the person I marry. He won’t be there to micromanage as I look for my first apartment. He will never finish teaching me how to drive. For all the self-sufficiency my father drilled into me, there was no way he could prepare me for everything. Burr’s early tragedy becomes a burden for the rest of his life: terrified of damaging his family legacy, he refuses to do anything that builds on it. The only time Burr uses grief as a reason to act rather than wait is in the moment he shoots Hamilton: I had only one thought before the slaughter: This man will not make an orphan of my daughter
“Hamilton,” though, does not end with Hamilton’s death. Its finale returns the narrative to Elizabeth Schuyler, his widow. While Hamilton fought and worked and travelled throughout their marriage, Eliza’s constant refrain was that their family
“would be enough.” But after her husband dies, Eliza steps towards center stage, and sings: I stop wasting time on tears I live another 50 years It’s not enough
Eliza’s grief became work: she interviewed Hamilton’s fellow Revolutionary War soldiers, raised funds for the Washington Monument in D.C., spoke out against slavery, and opened New York City’s first private orphanage. She spent her life devoted to doing not just what Hamilton would have wanted, but service that helped her survive. She is never sure that what she has done is enough, but she did something good. Whenever I would dwell on my guilt over not spending enough time with my father in the last months of his life, my best friend would remind me that spending every day at his bedside would not have softened the blow of his death. Spending every second of 19 years with him wouldn’t have helped. The time we have is never enough. Hearing Eliza sing those words was the recognition I have been looking for—the words I have needed to hear—for the last two years. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
NOVEMBER 2015
45