Issue 27

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On Pursuing Your Historia Personal Personal Essay by Diana MartĂ­nez-Montes

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From Hong Kong to Swarthmore Politics Gone Viral On the Problem of Sexual Violence in Art

Contributors Abby Diebold (she/her) is trying to go viral. Please endorse her on LinkedIn to show your support.

Amal Haddad (she/her) is an Enneagram 8 and in a committed throuple with Olivia Smith ‘21 and Emma Lee Miller.

Anatole Shukla is a sophomore from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who will physically implode if he doesn’t say “Go Hoosiers!” at least once a day. He recently started birdwatching and is disappointed that most birds are not as soft as they look.

Andie Tappenden (she/her) is a first-year from the midwest.

Atziri Marquez is a sophomore studying psychology and linguistics (though that can change depending on how she feels next week). She loves art, languages, and taking impromptu photoshoots with her friends. There’s a 90% chance she’s working on Japanese homework right now.

Citlali Pizarro (she/her) thinks being obsessed with Love Island is a personality trait.

Clio Hamilton likes fried eggs and little green things.

David Molina Cavazos (he/him) is a filmmaker and visual artist from Hanford, California. He got started making Minecraft videos and hopes to return to that glorious world someday.

Diana Martínez-Montes (she/her) was born in Mexico City and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She’s an immigrants’ rights and prison abolition advocate who loves urban photography, films, and food. She needs to escape the Swarthmore suburbs at least once a week or she loses her mind.

Elyse O’Bannon (she/her) is a scholar from Dallas, Texas. Her primary interests are death, food, and celebrities.

Jessica Hernandez (she/her) is a peace and conflict studies major, yakitori enthusiast, and lover of rhythmic sounds.

Libby Hoffenberg (she/her) eats fruit unwashed.

Reuben Gelley Newman (he/him) is, in addition to being an Arthur Russell and Nick Drake stan, basically a medieval monk.

Or a secular Jew who sings chants and studies English literature.

The devil’s in the details.

Sicheng Zhong (he/him) is a junior from China. He gave up coming up with a fun fact.

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 jkay2@swarthmore.edu.

How To Contribute Submissions of longform reporting, personal, argumentative and photo essays, book and media reviews, short stories, poems, and anything else that seems suitable can be e-mailed to Jonathan Kay, Editor-in Chief. 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: jkay2@swarthmore.edu

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Jonathan Kay MANAGING EDITOR Hope Darris LAYOUT EDITOR Eva Baron FEATURES Kat Capossela PERSONAL ESSAYS Shreya Chattopadhyay PHOTO ESSAYS Li Dong FICTION & POETRY Eva Baron BOOKS Daria Mateescu MOVIES & TV Hope Darris MUSIC Sage Rhys SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR Tyler White CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Lee Cohen Sofia Sears

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February 2020

Features From Hong Kong to Swarthmore: Why Overseas Chinese Students Are Not Standing with Democracy

Sicheng Zhong p. 4

Politics Gone Viral: Memes, Media, and a New Age of Politics

Abby Diebold p. 9

REVIEWS

Books Harry Potter and the Grand, Unified Theory of Intolerable Nostalgia

Amal Haddad p. 37

Personal Essays A Meditation On Pursuing Your Historia Personal

Diana Martínez-Montes p. 12

On the Problem of Sexual Violence in Art

Citlali Pizarro p. 14

Finding Our Inner Beauty

Anatole Shukla p. 17

Photo Essays

John Berger’s “Portraits” Anonymous p. 39

Music Best Read While Listening

Jessica Hernandez p. 41

Movies & TV

Jalisco, Te Amo y Más

Atziri Marquez p. 20

Kintsugi

Libby Hoffenberg p. 25

Thoughts On “Hip-Hop Showcase”

David Molina Cavazos and Elyse O’Bannon p. 46

Gerwig’s “Little Women”

Andie Tappenden p. 48

Fiction & Poetry Redwood City

Clio Hamilton p. 29

Collection of Poetry

Reuben Gelley Newman p. 33

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FEATURE

From Hong Kong to Swarthmore Why overseas Chinese students are not standing with democracy

by Sicheng Zhong

All names in this article are pseudonyms.

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“We Are Hunting Him Down” t was a cold November night when my phone started to buzz in the middle of a movie, and the messages that appeared on my phone screen put me into a state of paralysis. A friend told me that Chinese students at Oxford had reported me to the police bureau in Beijing. For those unfamiliar with how Chinese bureaucracy operates, this meant I would very likely be “invited for a cup of tea” with the Domestic Security agents once I return to China. I could even be detained.

What had I done that got me into trouble? In early October, I joined a 500-person group chat for Chinese students at Oxford because I was planning to study abroad there in the spring. At the time, the People’s Republic was celebrating its 70th birthday against the backdrop of thousands of protestors pouring into the streets in Hong Kong. From the group chat, I learned this occasion was celebrated thousands of miles away at Oxford, too. Patriotic students were eagerly discussing their plan to sing the Chinese National Anthem in the streets of England. Some group members noted, however, that “there were those losers from Hong Kong protesting at Oxford, too. We gotta show them who the real boss was.” Disturbed by the discriminatory language they used, I replied, “You should probably reconsider the use of the word ‘loser,’ as it would only intensify the misunderstanding between the two sides. Also, it is okay that people have different political opinions than yours.” It was this text that got me into trouble. Those group members, having figured out that I was on the pro-democracy side from my social media posts, started to post my school and home addresses in the group chat and verbally insult me. Following my friends’ advice, I left the group chat, thinking that this ugly act of 4

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cyberbullying would stop there.

Contrary to my wishful thinking, these students decided to hand me to the Chinese authorities a month later. The text they sent to my friend reads, “We already reported him to the authority in Beijing. We are hunting him down.”

A Protest That Divided Us In June 2019, nearly two million Hong Kong citizens took to the streets to protest against the anti-extradition bill proposed by the Hong Kong government. Protesters feared that the bill could undermine the judicial independence of Hong Kong by allowing the Central Government to arbitrarily detain and persecute Hong Kong citizens for political reasons.

The support and sympathy for the protest from Hong Kong citizens were overwhelming. Despite that, the Hong Kong government refused to amend the bill in the first couple of weeks and instead only cracked down on the demonstrations, which escalated the protest into mass strikes and violent clashes between protesters and the police. On the other side of the border between Hong Kong and mainland China, however, the political landscape was upside down: mainland Chinese citizens mostly held a negative view toward the movement, perceiving the protest as driven by separatists and foreign agents.

The oversea Chinese student community is no exception for this nationalistic view. My story is just one of many cases where pro-democracy Chinese students were bullied both online and in real life by their Chinese peers. Wei Ming, for example, a student I spoke to at a liberal arts college in Minnesota who works at a university in Boston, was spotted at a pro-democracy rally in late summer and was consequently banned from participating in the school’s Chinese comedy club. In another case, at a top Hong Kong university, a group of Chinese students took screenshots of Facebook

posts by a fellow student, Li Chen, and reported him to the Chinese authorities. In the following days, Domestic Security agents contacted his parents expressing concern about Chen’s non-conforming political ideology. Chen told me that he decided to stay abroad, fearing that he could be detained once he got back. Nationalistic oversea Chinese students also organized rallies and protests to harass activists and politicians giving speeches on campuses such as Yale, Columbia, and NYU. These stories are appalling and puzzling at the same time: from an outsider’s perspective, the fact that these international Chinese students at elite Western colleges choose to criticize and even bully protesters and their more liberal peers clearly contradicts the West’s expectation that Chinese students overseas would be educated to support freedom and democracy. Why would Chinese students at liberal colleges stand against the values they are supposed to believe in? Why are the majority of Chinese students not speaking out against authoritarianism and repression? What is the implication of this political atmosphere among Chinese international students for freedom of speech on foreign campuses?

The picture that emerged over the course of a series of interviews I conducted with Chinese Swarthmore students during the fall hardly provides straightforward answers.

“I Lost Contact with the World” Media and the internet seem to be key to understanding why some Chinese international students at universities like Swarthmore would still defend Beijing’s brutal crackdown.

For example, one student, Peter, was interning for a government agency in China when the protests broke out; due to

the Great Fire Wall—the Chinese government’s elaborate system for blocking citizens’ access to parts of the internet— it was hard for him to access foreign news sites, so he had to rely heavily on local news sources to learn about what was going on in Hong Kong. It was almost like he “lost contact with the world,” he said. Interestingly, he observed that for

Why would international Chinese students at liberal arts colleges stand against the values they are supposed to believe in? Why are they not speaking out against authoritarianism and repression? the first couple of weeks, there was no coverage about the protest at all on national television. It was not until several weeks into the protest that the Chinese broadcast network started to report the ongoing protest.

The Chinese internet and media are heavily censored and controlled by the state, and it is impossible for ordinary citizens to visit foreign sites such as The New York Times or even Google without special, and often illegal, software.

This Orwellian system of information control largely dictated how Chinese citizens perceived the protest: during the first two weeks of the protest, when protesters remained extremely peaceful and ordered, the state media hardly covered anything about one of the biggest protests in the post-Cold War world. However, when the protest gradually got more violent as the Hong Kong government refused

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to respond and protesters started to occupy the legislative building, the propaganda machine switched on. State media intentionally picked violent images and videos from the night when protesters broke into the legislative building and widely circulated them on the closely monitored Chinese internet, attempting to blame protesters, rather than the police who deployed tear gas and rubber bullets against ordinary citizens, for violence. Although the protest was among the most peaceful and orderly compared to political movements of similar size, Chinese state media quickly managed to label the protest as violent and damaging to the Hong Kong economy. When gang members sponsored by the Hong Kong police attacked peaceful protesters using baseball bats, Chinese state media also succeeded in portraying them as local heroes who were brave enough to defend their own communities. American and British flags often seen at rallies also did not help to clear the “separatist” image of protesters.

Once the Chinese propaganda machine started, all popular Chinese social media sites, including Weibo and WeChat, were filled with fake news produced by the mouthpieces of the Communist Party. For Chinese international students, although they might be physically abroad, their main sources of news still come from the comfort zone — these Chinese social media outlets, making the Party’s propaganda alive and well even on foreign soil. Kevin, a leader at a Chinese student club at Swarthmore, clearly felt the influence from his homeland. He started to pay attention to the protest from the very start, yet at times he “could not distinguish [between] what [were] facts and what [were] not.” What reporting he did see made it hard for him to understand basic information such as what the real demands of protesters

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were and how many protesters were actually present.

The Chinese state media also encouraged and intentionally fostered a culture of whistleblowing and reporting. Accounts on Weibo—a popular Chinese social media app— with millions of followers, such as the Global Times and the Communist Youth League, would often share screenshots of pro-democracy users’ posts and encourage their followers to dig up their personal information, leading some of them to be sacked by their employers. In mid-August, a well-known Chinese public intellectual Chen Chun was detained because an anonymous user took a screenshot of his private social media post featuring him at the protest and sent it to the authorities. Similar incidents happened to many of my friends who study in the U.S. Chinese state media successfully altered mainland citizens’ perception about the movement from a peaceful pro-democracy protest to a separatist project organized by foreign agents and fueled by violence from naive young protesters. Through this massive smear campaign, the public opinion in the mainland was effectively swayed: to many, the national pride, identity, and sovereignty were at stake. Truth no longer mattered to them at this point.

Western media coverage of Hong Kong also further alienated Chinese students abroad, according to some interviewees. Ashley, for example, who was in Hong Kong this past summer, She told me that aside from personal experience, her information mainly came from The New York Times and Facebook. However, she was “hesitant to buy into the NYT’s narrative” and was too “emotionally drained” to read the posts on Facebook. She was frustrated, she said, with Western media’s lack of understanding of the local situation

and their “colonialist narrative” of the protests.

Indeed, media coverage in the West often tends to oversimplify the ground situation in Hong Kong, portraying the movement as a one-dimensional quest for democracy and ignoring the complicated socioeconomic dynamics in Hong Kong. For example, often missing in Western media coverage are Hong Kong citizens’ xenophobic sentiments toward mainland Chinese and the complicated history of British colonialism that made mainland Chinese citizens particularly wary about foreign intervention. As a result, such coverage overlooks the nuance of different sides’ perceptions of the event and creates a simplistic dichotomy of the good pro-democracy Hong Kong protestors vs. the evil pro-dictatorship Chinese students. Understandably, it is hard for Chinese international students with very limited access to information about the situation to find their middle ground in this narrative, especially considering the disproportionate portrayal of Hong Kong citizens’ xenophobia by the Chinese social media.

This might explain, in part, another reason students gave for not reading Western news outlets: emotional exhaustion.

“Reading this news also made me kind of depressed, so I try to avoid them,” Emma told me.

“Fearful of the Consequences” What is perhaps more striking than zealous nationalists is the fact that the majority of Chinese international students choose not to speak out or express any opinion on Hong Kong at all. Peter, for example, called himself an avid supporter of human rights and freedom of speech, but whenever Hong Kong was mentioned, he would withdraw from the debate. Noting that his “upper-middle class young Chinese peers” were extremely polarized in terms of their ideology and often had strong emotional attachment to the issue, Peter was “fearful of the consequences of his words.” The fact that he interned at a government agency in mainland China when first protests broke out did not make it easier for him to speak his mind. Ashley had similar observations. She pointed out that Chinese students were generally “depoliticized,” as “civic engagement was never trained into us.” She added that political matters did not seem to be a priority for many, since “everyone just wants to make money.”

Why don’t Chinese students speak out even if they are in the U.S., a land that is supposed to be “free,” according to its constitution? I asked Ming, the student in Minnesota, who is a research assistant studying repression and authoritarian regimes. Last month, he conducted a survey among 661 Chinese students studying in the states regarding how their behavioral patterns would change under different social conditions. The survey looks at the effect of increasing the intensity of social sanctions on behaviors that correlate with more negative views of the Chinese government, such as dining at a Taiwanese restaurant, watching NBA games (the general manager of the Rockets publicly tweeted that he supported the movement in Hong Kong), or refusing to attend a welcome event for President Xi Jinping. The survey

finds that social sanctions, such as being unfriended by their peers, would effectively prohibit participants’ behaviors. To put it into the case of Hong Kong, the higher the social cost of showing support for the pro-democracy movement, the less likely students would show their real opinion in public.

Many Chinese students at Swarthmore or elsewhere fail to speak up for Hong Kong not because they don’t care, but rather because the social cost of showing such support is far too high — they could be dragged into pointless and lengthy online fights with strangers or friends, or they could be rejected by their close ones because this topic bears so much emotional weight. Or, in my case, they could be reported to the Chinese police by their peers.

The result of this survey corresponds perfectly with my findings. Many Chinese students at Swarthmore or elsewhere fail to speak up for Hong Kong not because they don’t care, but rather because the social cost of showing such support is far too high—they could be dragged into pointless and lengthy online fights with strangers or friends, or they could be rejected by their close ones because this topic bears so much emotional weight. Or, in my case, they could be reported to the Chinese police by their peers. “ We Don’t Dare Go Back” Many Western scholars and journalists believe that stateled repression was the main reason why Chinese students were so silent in confronting large scale human rights violations in China. They argue that authoritarian regimes have to resort to state-led repression, such as secret police and surveillance cameras, to crack down on political dissidents, and citizens conceal their political opinions in fear of retaliation from the state. However, the story of Hong Kong shows us that in addition to state-led repression, mobilizing pro-regime students abroad through misinformation can also silence critiques of the regime. Risks of cyberbullying, social ostracism, or even being reported to the authorities all prevent Chinese students from expressing their own political opinions or even attending low-risk academic events.

After hearing that I was reported to the police, some friends suggested that I not fly back during winter break. “The risk SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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is too high. We don’t even dare go back,” they said. I flew back in late December nonetheless. Despite being extremely nervous at customs, I did not get into any trouble with the Domestic Security Bureau, the police agency that deals with cases like mine. I was lucky: in mid-January, a Chinese student was sentenced to jail for 6 months for mocking Xi Jinping on Twitter. It was very likely that another Chinese student reported him.

Authoritarianism with Chinese characteristics seems to have evolved to a point where the government can simply deploy its supporters abroad as voluntary repressive agents.

Authoritarianism with Chinese characteristics seems to have evolved to a point where the government can simply deploy its supporters abroad as voluntary repressive agents.

The consequences are severe: a vocal minority of nationalists students have taken up the public space for political discussion, and those with different ideas are afraid to express their thoughts in fear of potential repression from the states or loss of social connections with their friends. It has also contributed to the popular belief that all Chinese students are brainwashed by the state, fueling rising Sinophobia in the US. This is thus not a simplistic story of why Chinese students are not standing with freedom and democracy, but rather a nuanced and multi-faceted story of how the Chinese pro-

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paganda machine has effectively fueled rising nationalism among certain sects of Chinese overseas students, who in turn socially sanction their peers not to express dissenting voice against a regime that is brutally repressing student protesters in Hong Kong and jailing millions of ethnic minorities back home. The repercussion: further demonization of Chinese students in the US against the backdrop of the ongoing trade war.

How should academic institutions like Swarthmore respond to the expansion of authoritarianism (on both the state and individual level) into our campuses? In a piece titled “Colleges Should All Stand Up to China” published in The Atlantic, Princeton political scientist Rory Truex argues that American universities should take the lead in preserving the freedom of speech and basic rights of Chinese students, rather than letting the Chinese government and a small faction of nationalist Chinese students threaten the values we treasure. Colleges “should routinely hold events on the fate of Taiwan, the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, the repression of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, and other topics known to be sensitive to the Chinese government,” he writes.

I can’t agree more. Holding this kind of events in a safe environment would not only give Chinese students the opportunity to discuss these salient issues and share different opinions, but also cultivate norms of critical citizenship.

Certainly, this kind of event would see fiery exchanges and finger-pointing between different sides, but in the long run, they would expose that small faction of nationalist students to ideas they have never pondered. What’s more, by giving the diverse Chinese student body an active voice on campus, we would also counter discrimination and racism toward Chinese students which are at historical heights. u

FEATURE

Politics Gone Viral

Memes, media, and a new age of Democratic politics

by Abby Diebold

D

uring the first debate of the 2020 Democratic primary, then-candidate Kamala Harris attacked Joe Biden’s policy on government-mandated bussing to end racial segregation. She told the story of “a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day.” At the end, she turned to Biden and uttered the line, “that little girl was me.”

The Harris campaign was quick to capitalize on the moment—so quick, in fact, that it became clear that the line had been planned in advance. But the move worked. The t-shirts the Harris campaign released, featuring a picture of Harris in pigtails and the line used against Biden, propelled the campaign to raise $2 million in 24 hours, her best fundraising day until that point.

She was not the only candidate hoping to profit off a viral moment. Tim Ryan (remember him?) sold stickers critical of the Sanders campaign with the words “you don’t have to yell.” Bernie Sanders offered stickers reading “I wrote the damn bill” (and, throwing it back to 2016, stickers commemorating his famous bird moment.) Elizabeth Warren offers planners reading “Warren has a plan for that.” Pete Buttigieg’s online store features t-shirts and yard signs reading “Boot Edge Edge,” indicating how to pronounce his name. In 2016, the Trump campaign spent $1 million more on MAGA hats than it did on polling and raised over $20 million between 2016 and 2018 on hats alone according to CNBC. Viral moments and one-liners allow campaigns to fundraise through merchandise. Further, for the 2020 Democratic primary candidates, merchandise sales count towards the all-important individual donor numbers required to qualify for the debate stage.

Virality, when done correctly, is a useful fundraising tool.

But these viral political moments are relevant to more than

just dollars and debates. The increased need for virality captures a growing trend and a new political reality: our national attention span has shortened. A 2015 study by Microsoft claimed that the average human attention span shortened from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds in 2013. (The “notoriously distractible goldfish,” for reference, has an attention span of nine seconds.) To be sure, the reduction in attention span is nothing new — according to The Atlantic, “an 1897 article in The American Electrician worried that a growing dependence on the telephone would turn us all into ‘transparent heaps of jelly.’” Regardless, this shortened attention span has changed the way we consume political content. In 1968, the Democratic National Convention was the second-most viewed television event of the year, behind only the Super Bowl. By contrast, in 2016, the Super Bowl garnered five times the viewers of the Democratic committee. Meanwhile, the percent of people who report getting their news from social media “often” rose 30 percent between 2018 and 2019, according to the Pew Research Center.

To gain traction in a crowded field, politicians have turned to viral moments: one-liners that grab audiences’ attention and can be made into sound bites, merchandise, or shareable social media content.

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than it has ever been, and even as television remains the primary news source for the majority of Americans, the bandwidth for politics seems shorter. The need to compete with President Trump’s Twitter (and seemingly constant string of scandals) only adds noise. To gain traction in a crowded field, politicians have turned instead to viral moments: one-liners that grab the attention and can be made into sound bites, merchandise, or shareable social media content.

These viral moments have been attacked as one of the central causes of polarization. The argument goes as follows: as our news environment becomes increasingly polarized— with liberal media outlets like Jacobin and The Intercept offering dramatically different coverage than conservative outlets like Breitbart and Fox News—and the pieces of news themselves become shorter (think about the NowThis videos, condensing a complicated, multi-faceted political issue into 90 seconds of coverage), we expose ourselves only to snippets of information aligned with this belief.

This story is easy. It’s also false. The rise of the internet has not been shown to have any impact on polarization. In fact, a study by the National Academy of Sciences on political polarization showed that exposure to opposing views on social media actually served to slightly increase polarization.

The oft-critiqued element of virality—that it dumbs down the population and increases social media echo chamber— proves not to hold water.

In fact, virality can actually serve as an incredibly democratizing force. Consider Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: her rise to stardom in the Democratic party and her eventual primary upset of Democratic party leader Joe Crowley was largely due to virality (it was also, of course, due to AOC’s prowess and energy as an organizer.) Ocasio-Cortez’s first campaign ad, shot entirely by herself and her campaign team, gained over 300,000 views in the first day alone. All of Ocasio-Cortez’s donations came from small dollar donors, many of them supporters her discovered her campaign through the viral video.

In these cases, the ability to go viral actually deepened the political discourse, allowing compelling candidates with otherwise non-traditional backgrounds to challenge incumbents or raise awareness for critical issues. The ability to go 10

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viral can serve to balance the dominance of the political establishment on both sides of the aisle. Modern grassroots organization thrives in a viral world, where Bernie Sanders can raise half a million dollars on Reddit and the Tea Party can unseat the House majority leader with a movement launched by a clip on CNBC. The ability to go viral, to share a personal story across the nation in an instant, serves as the most democratizing force in politics since the passage of the 17th Amendment.

Of course, virality is clearly not essential. The current (at the time of this writing) Democratic frontrunner, Joe Biden, lacks a propelling viral moment. So do the two Congressional leaders of the Democratic party, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. While Pelosi has been meme-ified—her clapping at President Trump prior to the 2019 State of the Union is legendary—she has not made a conscious effort to go viral in order to raise her profile (nor has she had to).

But these members of the political “old guard” are increasingly few and far between. The rising stars of the Democratic party are viewing their public personas differently. Beto O’Rourke Instagram livestreams his drives to Whataburgerand runs with constituents. Ocasio-Cortez films her skin care routine while answering questions about Congress.

While virality is not enough to make a star (one need look no further than O’Rourke), it seems to be a necessary precondition for the new class of Democratic stars. In the third quarter of 2019, Ocasio-Cortez outraised every Democratic House member, including Pelosi and impeachment leader Adam Schiff. $1.1 million of her $1.42 million total raised came from donations of less than $200.

While virality is not enough to make a star (one need look no further than Beto O’Rourke), it seems to be a necessary precondition for the new class of Democratic stars.

To be clear, virality does require the shortening of political discourse. Often, the result is simplicity, bringing politics to an understandable level. Other times, it’s confusion. Take Medicare for All, one of a new trend of “hashtag policies,” phrases espousing a policy prescription that are easily set up to go viral. The early Democratic debates exemplified the danger of reducing a policy as complicated as healthcare to just three words. In the earlier stages of the primary, candidates claiming to support “Medicare for All” often meant vastly different things: the elimination of private insurance, medicare as a public option, lowering the age of enrollment, and automatically enrolling children, to name a few.

The catchphrase became too broad, encompassing a highly varied range of policies and in fact further complicating the issue. But the reduction of something as complicated as

healthcare into a short, viral phrase also changed the discourse, bringing new issues to the table and raising the bar of what is possible in politics.

For me, the need to go viral is more than an intellectual concern—it’s personal. In 2018, I worked as the communications director for a state House campaign. And while I like to think my goal was to communicate with her future constituents, to highlight her history of service and compelling personal story, I also knew that the best thing I could do for the campaign would be to go viral. Our tweets were referenced in national articles, and the donations came pouring in—donations we then used to spread her real policy message. In many ways, virality became another tool in the fundraising toolkit.

What is essential to recognize about virality is that politicians are not going viral for the sake of going viral. The majority of politicians—particularly outside the context of a presidential race—are going viral as a method of raising awareness about an issue or raising the profile of a campaign to raise money for direct voter contact. We tried to go viral to pay for literature, mail pieces, and television ads, to fund a campaign operation that could spread our candidate’s story and message for change across the district. The virality of campaigns like Sanders’ and Ocasio-Cortez’s has moved the Overton window on Democratic political discourse farther to the left than any individual policy speech ever could.

Is the shift reflective of actually changes in the belief of the Democratic electorate? Ocasio-Cortez’ victory and Sanders’ climb in the polls would suggest yes.

But the real benefit of virality is the increase in accessibility. Long-form political discourse requires one of the most expensive luxuries: time. Virality dilutes politics into digestible soundbites. The sacrifice in complexity comes as a side

The virality of campaigns like Sanders’ and Ocasio-Cortez’s has moved the Overton window on Democratic political discourse farther to the left than any policy speech ever could. effect of an expanded electorate. Economic conditions have changed dramatically since 1968, when everyone engaged with the long political speeches presented at a convention.

Two parent households decreased from 85 percent in 1968 to 65 percent in 2018. Of those 65 percent, nearly two-thirds have two working parents, leaving less time to engage in political discourse. To engage this new, busier electorate, political discourse has shortened. To break through, candidates need to go viral.

Virality demands accountability and popular support.

Obama rose to prominence after his 2004 Democratic National Convention because his message went viral—which happened because he spoke to genuine concerns within the Democratic party. Virality can engage new swaths of voters, many of whom then go on to engage directly with policy themselves, by bringing politics to the people. The democratizing power of virality has permanently altered the state of political discourse. It is up to candidates to adapt. And while candidates like Harris, who forced virality, have left the national political stage, those like Ocasio-Cortez—who went viral because of her story, her beliefs, and her passion—are here to stay. u

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PERSONAL ESSAYS PERSONAL ESSAY

A Meditation on Pursuing Your Historia Personal

by Diana Martínez-Montes

I

write to ease the anxiety that touches most graduating seniors, like myself, who are piecing together a vision of their post-Swarthmore life. Excitement and uncertainty take up a lot of my headspace as I consider the paths that exist after May. Nonetheless, I mostly write to ground myself in the work that moves my heart and soul. I write to empower my heart to turn its whispers into bold unapologetic demands that guide my next step.

Paulo Coelho’s “El Alquimista” (The Alchemist) has found itself in my tote bag and on top of my desk these past couple of days. It came into my life by way of a good friend who was inspired by the tale that Coelho recounts. She invited me to share in the awakening she had by letting me forge my own relationship with the book. Like the novel’s subtitle states, the text is una fábula para seguir tus sueños—a fable about following your dreams. Coelho introduces the concept of the Historia Personal when the novel’s young protagonist meets the King of Salem. The old King explains that everyone holds cherished dreams at one point in their lives.

These dreams ignite one’s soul and catalyze a transcending energy that creates and inspires. However, one loses clarity of these desires as well as the hope of realizing them with age. The novel asks readers to take an active role in vocalizing and working towards achieving their Historia Personal.

The Universe does not respond to passive dreams. Once the dreams are made to be known, the Universe aids one’s journey through signs that take the shape of coincidences and epiphanies. Cuando tú quieres una cosa, todo el Universo conspira para que realices tu deseo.

In spirit of the novel’s theme, I want to believe the Universe conspired to have this text reach me in this particular 12

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period of my life. Its message lingers over my head during a time when I have to actively think of my desires and hopes for the future. How do I reach my Historia Personal? I asked myself a similar question while I was studying at the University of Puerto Rico during the spring of my junior year. This was, of course, prior to reading Coelho’s novel. Up until that semester, I was confident that I would pursue law school and become a public defender or immigration lawyer back home in New York City. As a first-generation Latina from a Mexican immigrant family, social justice advocacy was organically ingrained into my career aspirations. I knew I wanted to work with immigrant communities and incarcerated folk.

My limited exposure to the professional world and my parent’s advice made law sound like the best fit for me. My parents encouraged me to pursue this profession because they deemed it as one that guarantees financial stability. Their suggestion reflected a lived-experience that understood the scars of hunger and the dreadful anxiety induced from living paycheck-to-paycheck. For them, to be successful means to have a secure source of income, and lawyers happen to fit

The Universe does not respond to passive dreams. Once the dreams are made to be known, the Universe aids one’s journey through signs that take the shape of coincidences and epiphanies.

that definition.

However, despite trying to convince myself for years that I was meant to litigate in court and regardless of all the legal advocacy experience I have gained in the past four years, my semester in Puerto Rico made me pivot in a different direction. It became apparent that the arts and culture fill me with an energy that makes my soul feel infinite. I found myself taking three art-related courses at the University of Puerto Rico and frequenting the University’s Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte at least once a week. The time I spent absorbing all the history and art that exists outside hegemonic narratives pushed me to listen to my heart’s whispers.

I thought about the time I begged my parents to take me to a museum in the Upper West Side, about an hour away from our Brooklyn apartment, for my sixth birthday. I reflected on the fact that the first internship I ever had was at the New York Historical Society when I was fifteen. I thought about my obsession with learning history because it was the only way to reconstruct my ancestor’s lives and understand my community’s history, one that was only made available to me once I took Latinx/Latin American Studies classes in college. Everything made a little more sense.

I have been more in tune with following my intuition since I got back from Puerto Rico. I realized that throughout my life, my heart had pointed me towards the work I love but I had been unable to decipher its coded language. Professions like museum curatorship are now potentially part of my fate.

And now Coelho’s book sits next to me as I stand at the end of a two-way street. One of the paths has been in the making for years. It is a product of my younger self ’s limited horizons. It is also demarcated by the expectations and pressures that have been projected onto me by people who I love. It

I am taking the active decision to say yes to my dreams and desires.

My journey down this path will require me to trust the unforeseen and my heart. appears to be relatively linear and clear. It is a path that resembles the other paths I have walked, so it induces feelings of comfort and safety. The second path, on the other hand, is a recent addition to my personal cartography. This alternate road reflects a reinterpretation of my life’s experiences and lessons learned. It is a healing path that nourishes my soul and heart in a way that makes me dream with few limits. It fills me with hope and fearlessness. Yet I cannot see far into this path because it is illuminated by strong bright lights that obscure its trajectory. It is a risky, uncertain, unconventional path. Nonetheless, my intuition tells me this is my Historia Personal.

I am taking the active decision to say yes to my dreams and desires. My journey down this path will require me to trust the unforeseen and my heart. There isn’t a clear destination because my career path is still uncertain. However, this is what the Historia Personal is about: it is taking a risk to follow unpredictable paths that push every muscle in your body to move forward. It is bathing in a level of uncertainty that no longer relies on what is capable of being seen. It is letting all your intuitive senses guide you because you trust that what is ahead is better than anything you have known before. u

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PERSONAL ESSAY

On the Problem of Sexual Violence in Art

by Lali Pizarro

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very senior theater major at Swarthmore, like myself, must participate in a senior comprehensive project called Senior Company. There is a long process of selecting plays, auditioning performers, rehearsing, and performing. I’m grateful to the theater department, but I have also found myself frustrated with its nearly all white faculty and courses in which content about systems of oppression and their transformation is merely an afterthought. Thus, it was important to me that the culmination of my theater education be a play that centered issues, experiences, styles, and voices that were pushed to the margins of my theater education. So, after spending a few months reading plays, I was thrilled that my peers and I decided on Suzan-Lori Parks’ Fucking A, a Brechtian dark-comedy-turned-greek-tragedy about an abortionist named Hester, whose son has been incarcerated since the age of five, that masterfully critiques capitalism, mass incarceration, and reproductive injustice. After a few more months of summer and internal and external auditions, I received my most challenging role to date: Hester.

To me, trauma porn is lazy art— it relies on drama rather than human stories, and it further dehumanizes marginalized people as well as victims and perpetrators of sexual violence.

The most difficult aspect of playing the role? Hester is a victim of sexual assault in the play, and Parks leaves little to no direction as to how to stage the scene in which it occurs. The production team and cast had many long conversations about content warnings, how to stage the scene intentionally, safely, 14

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and sensitively, and sometimes, whether to stage this part of the scene at all. While I was committed to honoring the words and images of a politically necessary narrative, I found myself questioning the value and purpose of depictions of sexual assault in performance in the first place.

As an emerging theater artist, a student of transformative and restorative justice, an advocate for sexual violence prevention, and a person who has experienced sexual trauma, I have often wondered if there is any real value in depicting instances of sexual violence in film or onstage. Who does it help and who does it harm? What does it do to the actors and audience members? To audience members who have experienced sexual harm? To audience members who have engaged in predatory sexual behaviors and desires? And, because I am a firm believer that objectivity and neutrality do not exist in art, what kind of political statement does it make? As a theater student, I have had to read and watch many more plays that contain graphic depictions of sexual assault than I have works that beautifully demonstrate consent, healing, or instances of mutual, pleasurable, radical intimacy. I have witnessed more performance art that publicizes sexually traumatic experiences than I have art that serves as comprehensive, trauma-informed sex education.

I am often troubled by the message this communicates: that the powers that be in the theater industry and artistic academy care more about selling trauma to young artists and audience members than they do about nurturing artists who might help heal the world’s wounds.

I often say that when a scene in a movie or play includes a graphic sexual assault, audience members either, to put it crassly, get off on it or get (re)traumatized by it. Neither of those, it seems to me, are worthwhile outcomes. By “getting off,” I mean to say that when the point of view character is the perpetrator (and sometimes even when it is not) the risk of a work of art becoming a sort of fucked up rape fantasy is incredibly grave.

Whether intentionally or not, nonconsensual sexual experienc-

es are often staged or filmed to feel at least somewhat sensual or romantic, and can even border on the pornographic, framing a traumatic experience as one from which viewers can derive pleasure or arousal. The point of entry for directors and audiences becomes sex rather than injustice, and certain audience members build a relationship with these scenes around pleasure and desire. This is incredibly dangerous, not only because it can put actors in compromising situations and traumatize audience members, but also because the sexual images we consume and the power hierarchies those images reflect have grave material and political consequences. It is irresponsible to depict sexual violence without a political analysis that focuses on dismantling the structures that create the conditions under which it occurs.

And this is all without even beginning to unpack the fraught power dynamics that come with money in the entertainment industry (who is making money off exploiting actors and audience members in this way? Who do production companies serve and protect? What kind of hierarchies are they invested in preserving?). Staging sexual assault can unearth and indulge some pretty fucked up sexual power dynamics, without responsibly analyzing, challenging, or processing them.

When the point of view character is a victim of a sexually violent experience, a work of art runs the risk of becoming trauma porn. Historically, audiences, producers, and/or directors in positions of power and privilege want to see or portray a marginalized person’s trauma rather than their humanity or their truth, whether it be for shock value, dramatic effect, ticket sales, the preservation of power structures from which people with money and power in the entertainment industry benefit, or all of the above. To me, trauma porn is lazy art—it relies on drama

rather than human stories, and it further dehumanizes marginalized people as well as victims and perpetrators of sexual violence instead of confronting the actual hierarchies, behaviors, and traumas that lead to sexual violence.

Further—and this is a huge hot take in the theater industry—I’m of the mind that if we need histories and legacies of violence to create art, our art has failed. Any art that exploits victims of violence and trauma rather than honoring and striving toward their healing and wholeness does more harm than good. And structurally, any art that buys and sells the trauma of marginalized people instead of making investments in dismantling the institutional violence that creates this trauma does not deserve an audience. Importantly, trauma porn can also have the effect of re-traumatizing or disturbing audience members who have experienced sexual violence, so they can no longer experience the work of art and are instead revisiting past violence, begging the question: who is art about sexual violence for, if not for survivors of sexual violence and the political project of ending sexual violence in all its forms?

Thus, I am a strong advocate for theater in service of healing.

Art that is indulgent in joy, love, sorrow, grief, and all of the complex experiences that make us human and have the power to liberate us—art that sees healing and radical love as political projects. This kind of art need not be absent of or censor trauma or violence, but it does not build a relationship with its audience on a foundation of trauma; it builds one on mutual investment in liberation and shared hope, healing, and love. At the same time, I know that experiences of sexual violence are often silenced, and that art is unjustly censored—especially art made by people belonging to marginalized groups, fighting for their own

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liberation and the dismantling of structures that oppress them.

I also understand the value of telling stories that make people (especially people in positions of power) uncomfortable; I recognize the need to make groups of people with power, privilege, and complicit roles in legacies of harm and violence uncomfortable. And, as someone who has confronted my own harmful actions and mindsets through art, I honor the need for people to consume art that causes them to question their own actions, motivations, desires, comforts, privileges, and behaviors, and act on these questions. Lastly, as someone who strives to make art in service of healing, I understand deeply that we must bear witness to and confront the harm that we have caused in order to help heal it. So how do we hold all of these things to be true at once?

From my experience working on Fucking A, I would say it begins with asking the right questions of ourselves and others, holding the knowledge that there is no neutrality in depicting trauma and violence onstage, and scrutinizing a work of art— and the choices of artists presenting the work—accordingly.

When I first read the script for Fucking A, I was very nervous about staging the scene in which the sexual assault occurs. By the end of our rehearsal process, I was grateful I had the experience, as it strengthened my highly critical view of and gave me the skills to rigorously interrogate scenes of this nature. Reconciling all of the complicated dynamics in scenes with sexual violence requires self-reflection and accountability. Now, when I see an instance of sexual violence depicted in art I ask myself: Who made this piece? Who directed it? Who wrote it? Who is acting in it? What dominant/privileged identities do they hold?

What marginalized identities do they hold? Who does it comfort? Who does it afflict? What gaze is being catered to? Who is the point of view character? Who is making money off of this project? What is the intention behind this depiction? What is its effect? (Shock value? To help people heal? To give voice to an experience that is silenced and erased? To empower? To tantalize?

To exploit? To prevent people from perpetrating similar acts?) If performed at all, plays about sexual violence must be done with the goal of sensitively and critically interrogating the structures that create it, which begins with a rigorous process that involves answering all of these questions.

It begins with asking the right questions of ourselves and others, holding the knowledge that there is no neutrality in depicting trauma and violence onstage.

One way to begin answering these questions is by hiring what is called an intimacy director or choreographer, which we did for Fucking A. Intimacy direction was formalized by the organization Intimacy Directors International (IDI), founded by survivors and allies “pioneering the best practices for theatrical intimacy, simulated sex, and performance nudity for theatre, TV, and film.” Basically, intimacy directors advocate for actors 16

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in sex scenes of any kind, and demonstrate and enact practices of informed, ongoing consent. Intimacy direction is just one small way to be accountable to answering the questions I’ve explored above.

If art with or about sexual trauma is to be created at all—and I’m stil not sure it should be­—I think its goal must be its eventual obsoletion in favor of the art of a world that is more just and whole.

The process of developing intimacy choreography was transformative for me; we discussed mental and emotional health and wellbeing, physical and emotional boundaries, and the social and political implications of the scene we were portraying, before ever setting a piece of choreography. I expressed my criticisms of trauma porn, stating that I did not want the scene to be sensual, romantic, or graphic in any way, and further, that staging the scene in this manner would be antithetical to Parks’ structural critique of the way the state perpetuates violence of this nature. Our intimacy director immediately agreed, deciding that we would stage a scene wherein assault was alluded to (for the purposes of honoring the events of Parks’ narrative), rather than actually embodied. This meant no nudity or removal of clothes, no lip to lip contact, and no body parts coming into contact with each other than hands, elbows, shoulders, and arms. Every piece of choreography was set with the consult of all actors involved, the director, and our intimacy director, honoring these boundaries, and serving the story we wanted to tell—a story that demonstrates that the criminal justice system perpetuates and sanctions sexual violence, seperation, and trauma, centering the humans that are affected by this dynamic, and resist and survive it in a multitude of ways.

We staged a scene of which all parties were proud, but I can imagine scenarios in which this is not the case. Intimacy direction can reduce harm, begin necessary conversations, and move an exploitative industry in a more just direction, but it cannot transform the power structures that create and normalize sexual violence, which are the very same ones that serve as the foundation upon which the entertainment industry was built.

Ultimately, if art with or about sexual trauma is to be created at all—and I’m still not sure it should be—I think its goal must be its eventual obsoletion in favor of the art of a world that is more just and whole. It mustn’t contain graphic depictions of violence but instead process and unpack a traumatic experience insofar as it might be necessary for healing. It must be made by and for people who are marginalized by the structures that create this violence rather than those that benefit from them. And it must be made with the political project of ending and preventing this violence. As an artist, my goal will always be to make work that does not rely on legacies of harm to exist, and that does not have to buy or sell trauma. u

PERSONAL ESSAY

Finding Our Inner Beauty

by Anatole Shukla

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hen Susan Potter passed away in 2015 at the age of 87, National Geographic released a documentary chronicling not only the story of her life, but more importantly, of her death. During her life, she wore several substantial hats—she was a World War II survivor, an activist for people with disabilities, and a mentor for students at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. She survived 26 surgeries, melanoma, breast cancer, and diabetes. But her most important hat was one that will render her immortal: her role in the Visible Human Project as a body donor.

The ongoing Visible Human Project consists of compiling thousands of photographs of human body cross sections to create highly detailed virtual cadavers. The bodies are frozen, cut into four sections, and then “sliced” into thousands of paper-thin slivers by continually grinding away miniscule layers. They are digitally photographed between every “slice.” After their compilation, the mammoth data sets become available for medical students and researchers.

When the project began, it maintained an exclusive focus on healthy, abled bodies. The first two “Visible Humans” were an unidentified 59-year-old woman and Joseph Paul Jernigan, a death row inmate whose body was donated after he was executed by lethal injection. Potter’s involvement in the Visible Human Project meant an important development for the initiative—the first “Visible Human” with disabilities and major health complications.

Susan Potter gave the ultimate gift to medical research: her body. People have long dreamed of becoming immortal; ironically, Potter, in an undeniably morbid sense, achieved exactly that. She knew the value and beauty of her body and that modern medicine can transform death into a beginning rather than an end.

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t acutely aware of the power of medicine and of the human body. Both of my parents are physicians, and the healthcare industry’s presence has always served as an undercurrent in my life. There are photos of me as an infant playing with my parents’ old

stethoscopes, and I grew up sharing the backseat of my parents’ cars with heavy medical textbooks. Kidney disease and blood types are normal dinner time conversations for our family. Because of my parents’ professions, I’ve never been particularly squeamish about flesh and blood. Once I overcame my instinctive disgust towards disease and the human body, I became engrossed by life’s anatomical complexities.

The diversity and resilience of human bodies began to mesmerize me.

Being in proximity to death gives us no choice but to think about bodies instead of just living with them. We must think about decomposition, cadavers, autopsies, and countless other unpleasantries.

At the same time that I became interested in the mechanics of how our bodies live, I also grew fascinated with the mechanics of how our bodies die. We may casually joke about death and dying, but serious discussion of the topics oftentimes remains an elephant in the room. Beyond the pain of grief itself, this is partially because while the human body is magnificently sophisticated, it is also disgusting. After all, it is a sentient skin bag made of gloppy muscle and crunchy bone. We all mind our business every day in these fleshy vessels with guts full of vomit, rot, piss, and shit. Death often exacerbates the vileness of our living bodies because it forces us to confront the idea that once we die, we are nothing but drooping skin sacks. Even if we are comfortable with our own bodies’ grossness, death forces us to deal with someone else’s. Being in proximity to death gives us no choice but to think about bodies instead of just living with them. We must SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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think about decomposition, cadavers, autopsies, and countless other unpleasantries.

Aside from the aspect of death that requires actually dying, I find immense beauty and humanity in the way that communities react to death—especially in autopsies. Autopsies uncover information that is only visible in death. They are literally looking into another person’s body and seeing parts of them that they would never have been able to see themselves. That sense of intimacy is so much more salient than a mere artificial link between two people, one of whom happens to be dead. It’s one of the rare physical connections that living people have to dead, inanimate bodies.

When I was fifteen, my mom brought me into her pathology lab to show me a dissection of a human heart. She took it out from a white plastic container filled with some sort of preserving fluid. In a permanent marker on the top and side of the container, someone had written the patient’s age on the container. They had been seventeen years old.

There’s something very powerful about seeing the human heart removed from the chest cavity. I knew that the heart is only the size of a fist, and I knew what a fist looked like, but the heart was still smaller than I imagined it would be.

After being drained of blood and sitting in the preserving fluid for some time, it became grey and pale, even slightly yellowish. It wasn’t sexy or visually appealing—after all, hearts didn’t evolve for their attractiveness. They’re a piece of muscle meant to stay inside the body, and by design, they should never reach the light of day.

At the same time, however, seeing the heart made me feel

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small. Mere days ago, it had kept someone alive, pumping blood through their body every second. Their heart, preserved in a dark tub of fluid, wasn’t just a piece of flesh. It represented an individual human life that had been equally valuable and unique to mine. I, of course, had no idea who that life had belonged to. Before their death, they could have been a star athlete, an avid reader, or a regular high schooler who enjoyed going home after school and playing video games. Maybe they were all three. Now, there would be no way of knowing.

In an alternate universe, maybe I could have been friends with that person. In another alternate universe, maybe that was my heart being sliced apart in someone else’s hands.

But I wanted to imagine that person’s thoughts and dreams. That person had a name, friends and relatives who missed them, a favorite color, and a favorite TV show. They probably liked long car rides and watching fireworks on the fourth of July. They died less than a year before achieving adulthood.

And as I stood in that pathology lab, I watched my mom take a scalpel and slice this representation of their very being into ribbons. I remember that once during the dissection, she turned to me, holding the heart in her latex-gloved hands.

She said, “This came from someone around your age.”

In an alternate universe, maybe I could have been friends with that person. In another alternate universe, maybe that was my heart being sliced apart in someone else’s hands.

Two years ago, I watched an English documentary in which two medical professionals took the viewers through the autopsy of a woman who had died due to heart disease.

A cloth covered her face throughout the program to obscure her identity, but it was possible to glean some information about who she had been. According to the documentary, she had been in her early sixties at the time of her death, and had opted for her body to be donated to science. She lived in California, and before the autopsy, half of her left arm had been amputated to be cremated and returned to her family.

She had freckles on her neck and pink nail polish on her toes.

Maybe pink was her favorite color. When the camera panned onto her painted toes, I could imagine her asking her friends and family to make sure that her nails were painted pink when she died. It would let her retain some sense of individuality as researchers sliced her body open.

Her body, with the nail polish, now lay on an operating table in a morgue in London. I wondered if she had ever had the opportunity to travel to England when she was alive.

One of the pathology technologists for the autopsy, Carla Valentine, was a younger woman with a shock of vermillion hair and a silver nose ring that glinted during her talking head interviews. Throughout the entire autopsy—slicing the body open from neck to groin, manually cutting the ribs one by one, removing the organs—she maintained an attitude of almost contextually inappropriate optimism.

During a talking head in which she explained her attraction to medicine and pathology specifically, she said that despite the morbidity of autopsies, she found them perversely satisfying. She saw the human body as a machine, a jigsaw puzzle where everything will somehow find a way to fit together. She explained that a physical cadaver is more complicated than anything that textbooks or virtual media can portray. As the autopsy went on, this became clear—even for her, an experienced pathology technologist, she found it challenging to locate and remove some of the organs.

What I saw in that video, personally, wasn’t a cold, rigid cadaver sitting on an isolated operating room table. I didn’t see the woman’s body as a machine that had ceased to operate as per its intention. I paid attention to the scarlet of blood and the salmon pink of the patient’s liver. I noted the rich yellow of the fat in her body, the surprisingly bright jade of her gallbladder, and her dark plum-colored lungs filled with deoxygenated blood. Her white bones. Her ivory skin with freckles and fluid-filled fuchsia blisters from the beginning of decomposition.

The rainbow I saw in her body reminded me of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish,” in which Bishop writes about catching an old, jaded fish and the vivid colors in her disgusting little sailboat. She describes the filmy rainbow of spilled oil, the dark orange of rust, and the peony-like pink of the fish’s swim bladder. Despite the scene’s intrinsic filth, everything, in her perspective, becomes, “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” before she lets the fish go.

Bishop’s sudden realization of the beauty within her superficially ugly surroundings was the way I felt watching the autopsy video, and the way I felt paging through my parents’ old medical textbooks, and the way I felt whenever my mom let me sneak a peek at her slides of blood samples. We often imagine our own corpses as pale and cold, with blood pooling at the bottom without anything to pump it through our capillaries. But death, like life, isn’t entirely bleak. Even in death, our bodies remain full of discoveries.

Bodies, fundamentally, are objects. They are, moreover, special objects. Both literally and figuratively, they have value. There is no way to obtain organs or tissue other than from human bodies, and even a pint of blood sells for over $100. In a more figurative sense, living in a body and dying in a body are perhaps the only two experiences that all humans share, and although cadavers are devoid of consciousness, we as humans still treat them with dignity.

Bodies, furthermore, don’t just symbolize the beings who have inhabited them. Lifeless bodies, even those belonging to others, serve as representations of ourselves, our communities, and our shared memories. Dead human hearts and

organs contain no memories or sentimentality other than that which the living project onto them. As living humans, we invent stories and lives for the bodies to comfort ourselves with the concept of death.

We often imagine our own corpses as pale and cold, with blood pooling at the bottom, but death, like life, isn’t entirely bleak. Even in death, our bodies remain full of discoveries.

Frankly, I am comfortable with the concept of death and how it affects our bodies. I don’t fear it. To me, there is no other way to live than with an understanding that everyone dies, and when we die, we leave our bodies on this earth. So many patterns and rituals of grief revolve around reflecting on the connection between the possession of humanity, life, and corporeal existence. In life, the three can only coexist.

In death, the uncomfortable truths emerge that an absence of life does not extinguish an individual’s humanity or their corporeal existence.

Historically, cadavers have served as little more than physical memories of once-living people that most cultures have honored through ceremonies and rites, ranging from the typical American three-part visitation-funeral-burial services to the Angu people’s mummifying their dead through smoking the cadavers. It lets us feel as if we are a part of something so much larger than ourselves, as if every person’s existence follows some definitive progression of life starting with conception and ending with death. Many funeral rites, such as wakes and open-casket funerals, observe the deceased only as a beautified reflection of who they were in life. Funeral directors apply makeup onto the deceased’s faces to make them appear less dead, place spiky contact-lens-like caps on their eyes to make sure that they stay closed, and inject their arteries with an embalming fluid containing formaldehyde.

In our contemporary United States, we honor our dead not only through traditional funerary ceremonies, but also through modern alternatives that defy the idea that death is exclusively an end. Instead of having their cadavers cremated or buried, people can instead opt to donate their bodies to medical research, people in need of organ transplants, body farms, and a slew of educational causes. These modern alternatives admittedly are less pleasant to observe than elegant funeral services. Giving new purpose to bodies does force us to confront the gritty finiteness of death with no frills attached. At the same time, medicine as a whole has advanced to the point that we know how to cheat death, and that life can truly become a cycle rather than a linear progression. The cycle only depends on our ability to understand our inner beauty. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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The style of homes in San Juan de Los Lagos

Jalisco, te amo y mas Photo Essay by Atziri Marquez

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ost of my mother’s side of the family still lives in Mexico. As a child, we would make the trip every summer to go visit them. I was always reluctant to go, preferring the bustling Los Angeles cityscape to the small-town ambiance of San Juan de Los Lagos, Jalis20

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co, the town where my mother grew up. Eventually though, those trips became every other year, then every three years, then around high school, when my older sister started college, we decided we just couldn’t make the trip together anymore.

The hanging decorations inside a Mexican restaurant in Aguascalientes, Jalisco

My dad looking out into the rustic expanse from my grandfather’s ranch

This year, however, when my grandmother was turning the ripe old age of 90 (and she’s still movin’ and groovin’ mind you), I knew I couldn’t miss it. And happily, her birthday landed right in the middle of Fall Break. So, after about four years or so, I was back in San Juan. Like every year I stayed at my grandmother’s house, alive with my parents, aunts, uncles and distant relatives. Curiously, I found myself

a tourist in a town that seemed familiar to me as a child.

Maybe it was because of all the time that had passed since the last time I was here. Maybe it was because naturally I just hadn’t truly appreciated the landscape around me when I was younger. Maybe this time around, older and somewhat wiser and having experienced living in the East Coast for a while, I approached Jalisco with new eyes.

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A glimpse inside a Zapateria in Aguascalientes, Jalisco.

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Las Juanas, a local restaurant that serves killer piña coladas

Whatever it might’ve been, my surroundings captured my attention at every place we strolled through, and I captured it in return—from the beautiful architecture of the houses, to the local zapateria (shoe shop), to the various

shops and carts with vendors outside selling toys, accessories, clothes, candy, and aguas frescas. For the week that I was there, all my senses felt heightened.

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A stroll through the plaza

The colors around me were more vivid, the music was louder, the smells that lingered were stronger. And the tastes—I think it’s safe to say that I may have eaten double my weight in quesadillas and tortas ahogadas. I even found myself more expressive, retreating back to Spanish, the language I speak at home with my family, and my cousins cer-

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tainly did not hold back in reminding me of how much of a pocha I sounded. Maybe all those piña coladas I was drinking increased my sentimentality. Or maybe it was simply the nature of the place, a place I now love and look forward to return to. u

Kintsugi Photo Essay by Libby Hoffenberg

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A

friend once told me that scars are stories. This struck me as an incredibly tender way to look at what I considered to be unfortunate imperfections. It seemed to me to be a profound sensitivity to the way that our present selves are made up of countless accumulated moments, some of which caused us pain.

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Our skin—the permeable boundary between the inner and outer worlds—bears the physical marks of both our hurt and our healing. This photo essay is an attempt to look with tenderness toward the unfortunate, funny, painful, sad, irresponsible moments that mark themselves on our bodies.

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These photos are inspired by the Japanese pottery technique known as Kintsugi (“golden joinery”) or Kintsukuroi (“golden repair”). According to this practice, broken pottery is mended by applying lacquer mixed with powdered gold to the areas of breakage. This results in an evidently scarred

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or cracked vessel. The breakages are emphasized rather than hidden. As a philosophy, Kintsugi treats breakage and repair—hurt and healing—as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. u

FICTION&POETRY FICTION

Redwood City

by Clio Hamilton

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n my head, the truest version of the story goes something like this: an up-and-coming chef and a park ranger meet at a bar in Northern California and fall in love.

They find a donor, they have a kid, the kid’s a boy and they’re okay with that. They move from Arcata across the country to Boston so Mama can take a job at that fusion restaurant, Tabemono To The MAX, and snipe at the owners for their dumb choice of name while quietly redoing the entire menu.

They decide that Mom should take a break from work for a bit to stay home and be with baby me. I learn to read early but stay in diapers longer than I should. Mom takes me on walks in the park near our moldy apartment and teaches me how to identify different trees. Mama comes home smelling of fish skin and smoke; she makes us big breakfasts, rice and miso soup and tamagoyaki so I learn to like my eggs sweet, or blueberry compote and whipped cream and waffles that go doughy in the middle because she gets impatient and opens the waffle maker too soon. I grow up with a rotating cast of babysitters from the colleges nearby, learn to take the T by myself, forget the bits of Japanese I heard around the house before Mama started working nights. I get taller than both of them and Mom jokes that my donor was actually Bigfoot. Mama keeps adding on hours at the restaurant and we don’t have big breakfasts anymore; Mom trains for a triathlon and then an Iron Man and I have a minor crisis when I realize she has better abs than I do. Mama gets promoted to head chef and Mom slams her into a hug and both of them cry. I start staying out late to walk around downtown with Lizzie, who’s my lab partner in Bio and an insomniac; we write a column for the school paper that’s just a list of places where we’ve fallen asleep in public. I start to make a lot of lists. I think I’m falling in love with Lizzie but am mostly in love with the city at night; with the coffee shop whose

dark windows are lined with plants in tomato cans; with the people walking dogs down wet sidewalks; with the tops of buildings lit up and crowned with fog like blue smoke. Mom doesn’t give me a curfew, she is asleep before I come back to the apartment. I don’t see Mama much. One day I don’t get back until three in the morning and she’s on the couch in the living room, passed out in her white pants and jacket. I go to bed. I’m used to waking up to the sound of Mom’s blender making those smoothies that’re more kale than anything else, but instead I wake to silence and cold air. When I come into the kitchen, they’re both sitting at the table and look up at me. Mama’s face is tight.

After they finish telling me I go back to my room.

After they finish telling me I lie down. One of my legs is shaking, making little noises in the sheets.

After they finish telling me I get on my phone, google the restaurant—the pictures show bright white walls, tables near the water, a waiter smiling through the California sun. The first result is an article announcing the hiring of acclaimed chef Suzie Mayama to head the culinary staff. It was published at the end of August. Almost a month ago.

W

e packed the car on the first day of November, the morning after the first frost. Mom had showed me the ice crystals threading up our windows and said “look, Ben, look at that.” I nodded, but looked instead at the room around us—the bookshelves were still full, the red couch still sat and sagged to one side. It didn’t look like we were leaving. I guess Mama hadn’t needed to take much. I went back to my room and grabbed a sweater from my suitcase, put it on, and fingered the blue SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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cuffs of my shirt peeking out at the wrists. The walls in here were bare, and there were drifts of dust on the floor from when I moved my bed to get at the bunch of summer clothes—shorts, tank tops, a pair of old sandals worn from black to brown—I’d shoved under there when the air outside had started to bite at my arms and legs. I had started sneezing nonstop under the bed after breathing in a lungful of dust, and banged the back of my skull after the biggest sneeze snapped my head back and sent snot spraying onto my shirt. I looked at the now-empty space under the bed and my head and neck ached as I left the room.

Driving from Boston to San Francisco as a soon-to-be divorced and chronically sleep-deprived woman with a teenage son who wouldn’t speak to her had been Mama’s idea, not mine, and I took a kind of vicious joy in seeing the tension collect in her shoulders and hands as the week went on. I-90 blurred together outside the car windows, and a growing pile of candy wrappers crinkled in the middle of the backseat, where I’d insisted on sitting despite my legs being about six inches too long to be comfortable. I didn’t want to be next to her. I answered her questions in monosyllables or grunts, if I did at all, and by the time we got to California I was jittery with the effects of gas station Snickers bars and all the words I wasn’t saying, feeling like I’d been trapped in a clown car.

Just after we crossed state lines we passed a billboard with Smokey Bear on it, saying only we can prevent forest fires, and I would’ve made some comment to Mom about buying a bear suit and applying for the job; instead I sat there in the backseat and stared out the window. The sky was stupid-

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ly pretty, a greyish-blue shaded towards pink from the sun setting. I watched as we passed signs for gas, lodging, attractions, food, and kept working on the list of reasons which I’d started a month ago: They divorced because Mom was a closet Republican. They divorced because Mama had to reveal her true identity as a Russian spy and Mom couldn’t believe that all the pastry classes were a front for election interference. They divorced because they weren’t having sex.

They divorced because they were having too much sex. They divorced because Mama was having an affair with a restaurant critic who’d called her hand-pounded mochi “simple, yet titillating.” They divorced because all their attempts to be the gay moms who raised a mature, feminist son couldn’t keep me from laughing at the word titillating. All they’d said was “we’ll be happier this way,” and neither of them had been crying. They’d already started talking to lawyers. Mama must have been applying to jobs for ages before she found one, and now we were leaving the only place I’d ever remembered living, and I hadn’t noticed that anything was even wrong.

It’d been just after noon on the second day when she’d tried to break the silence. I was halfway through a bag of Doritos, crunching each neon orange triangle as loudly as I could between my teeth and wiping the cheese-dust on the carseat and being an absolute pain in the ass, and she turned back to look at me. I could see the crinkles around her eyes when she squinted.

“Where do you want to go to lunch?” Each word was measured, blank, and she might as well have asked me where

I wanted to spend the millions of dollars she was about to pull out of a bag next to her and dump onto my head. Mama never let me pick where we were going to eat. Most of the time, we weren’t going anywhere. Every road trip of my childhood had been in Mom’s camper van, a massive VW bus from the 90’s that was painted a mossy color and called the Jolly Green Giant. It had a fridge, a sink, and a stove; before a trip Mama would pack the fridge and cupboards full of ingredients, apples and sharp cheeses and fresh loaves of focaccia staining their cloth wrappings with oil, and we’d make sandwiches and eat chocolate whenever we got hungry. When we stopped for the night, she’d plug in the Giant’s electricity and start making salmon curry, pink chunks of fish mixing with soft cubes of orange sweet potato and studded with bright green peas. Or bacon, burrata, and nutella grilled cheeses that dripped a mixture of cream and fat. Or a massive salad topped with sliced peaches from a fruit stand we’d passed on the way.

Two orders of chicken fingers sat in my stomach next to the image of Mama biting into a Whopper. The bun deflated, grease from the patty on her chin.

She was still looking back at me and I wanted to tell her to turn back around, to watch where she was going. Mama always drove too fast. She needed to look at the road.

“Burger King,” I said. She blinked, and sucked in a breath.

“Sure.”

After lunch we got back into the car, silent. Two orders of chicken fingers—stale and tasteless even when I’d smothered them in the brown puddle of barbeque sauce I’d glooped out onto the paper bag they came in—sat in my stomach next to the image of Mama biting into a Whopper. The bun deflated, grease from the patty on her chin. The red vinyl booths had been sweaty against both of our backs. I’d sucked the last bits of Mountain Dew out of my cup with a rattling slurp, licked the barbeque sauce off of my fingers, and said, “Thank you, Mama. That was delicious.” She nodded, and looked away.

We kept driving. She faced forward after that, and it was safer.

By the time we pulled into the park, the sun had gone down. I’d asked to see the redwoods before we went southward, remembering the few camping trips we’d gone on when I was in elementary school—the ones where Mama would sit quietly in the tent and read, or mess with the fire without ever getting ash on her clothes, while Mom and I went on hours-long hikes through the woods and come back stinking, burrs stuck to our ankles and mud everywhere. I wanted to make her sleep under the trees that had been Mom’s entire life before they met, to go back to the park where they’d brought me right after I’d learned to walk.

Less grandly, I wanted to delay our arrival in San Francisco any way I could. And after insisting that we stay in a cabin instead of a tent Mama had said sure, why not. So there we were in the little car, newly dubbed the Resentment-Mobile, driving silently in the dark and into the trees.

Our cabin was just off and to the left of the main road in the campground, a single lane of dirt that had turned almost entirely to mud. I felt it squelch wetly under my new sneakers as I left the car; the next morning, I’d go to put them on and find them covered in black dirt that sparkled with bits of mica. The cabin was made of light wood and smelled like gasoline. We brought some bags in, and Mama said it was time to sleep. Something thready in her voice. “I’m going out,” I said.

“Where?” She looked right at me. I’d forgotten how sharp her eyes could get.

“To walk around.”

“It’s dark. It’s not safe.”

“I don’t care. Mom would’ve let me—” “No. We need to get some rest.”

“I don’t care.”

“Ben. Look at me. You need to sleep.”

Mama was so much smaller than me, but right then she looked like she wanted to pick me up and throw me over her shoulder. I remembered that newspaper cutout that used to be on our fridge, the one of her lifting a pot of noodles as big as her torso. That “no” had been the loudest thing she’d said to me in weeks.

“I’ll be back, go to bed,” and I left before I could see the look on her face.

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The park map had shown a trail running right from behind our site and into the woods and so I went towards a break in the trees, walking blindly and quick. The woods were younger here, new growth from after they’d first made the campground, and they blurred into thin lines in my vision as I fell into a run, my breath coming in sharp gasps and heavy in my mouth as if the air in the forest was something tangible because I could taste it, resin and dirt and salt and my eyes felt hot; I ran until I couldn’t feel my feet and the trees broke through the dark again and again, great pillars going up, up, up; I ran with their trunks around me and the dirt and mud under me until my foot hit something and I fell—hard. A root. A root thicker than my chest. I shifted, following the root with my eyes as it fattened and ran into its tree like a pipe bulging with water. Like a big snake. It stretched right across the middle of the path, and I hadn’t seen it. Idiot, asshat, boy, I thought. Pine needles whispered against each other and poked through my shirt as I turned over onto my back. I looked up, blinking something out of my eyes.

I thought about finding a door in one of the trunks, climbing inside the skin of a tree and disappearing.

The redwoods were massive. I had run farther, I think, than I’d meant to, and the woods around me were nothing like I’d ever seen—no underbrush, no saplings poking their small heads up, no young things. Just roots and then the trees, stretching into the sky. Their trunks were thicker than a car and grew straight up in rows and rows. These trees were ancient and weird, their woods an alien landscape.

But I looked up at the lines of their bodies and saw fog settled at their tops and felt settled, suddenly. I listened to the hundreds of little noises the forest was making, the cracks and rustling and clicks. Everything that lived in these trees.

That lived under them, above them. I looked up into the sky grey-green with the tops of redwoods, the moon backlighting them in silver, and my breath settled into my stomach. I don’t know why, but it did. Like some bit of me had looked around and said oh, we’re home.

I thought about finding a door in one of the trunks, climbing inside the skin of a tree and disappearing. I thought about Mom and Mama and me in this park years ago, about the picture of baby Ben, his hands curled into little fists and standing under a redwood braced by a mom on each side.

I thought about how I didn’t remember that picture being taken, about how small I was then and how small I still was now. I thought about our tiny apartment with the black mold and the bathroom door that never fully shut, and about the bright red house I’d only seen pictures of. I thought about how I didn’t notice that anything was wrong and they didn’t tell me. How I didn’t have a reason. I thought about how Mama never taught me how to make anything more complicated than oatmeal. How she said she wanted me to do 32

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something with my brain, not my hands. I thought about all these things together and about the redwoods, so massive I couldn’t make sense of them, their trunks too wide to stretch my arms around. About feeling the bark rough and insistent against my hands. Even if Mom was here instead of back in Boston and we all held hands and wrapped our bodies tight to a tree, we still wouldn’t be able to hold it.

The cabin smelled like pine when I went back. Mama was asleep in one bed with a pink crocheted blanket curled around her, and I took the other bed, got in without washing the dirt off my face and closed my eyes. I fell asleep and dreamed, and in my dream it was dark and quiet and I was with Mom and Mama both, I was a tree in their arms, a redwood growing so fast and so thick that I put the whole country in between them. My trunk like a skyscraper’s, glass windows shining through the bark. My branches, stretching and trying to pull them back.

T

he next morning I woke to the sound of something sizzling. I went to the bathroom, wiped off the mud that had dried to my cheek, put a bandaid on the cut I hadn’t noticed over my eyebrow. I went back into the bedroom; Mama’s bed was empty, so I took the pink blanket and wrapped it across my shoulders like a cape.

I went into the kitchen and her back was to me, hair curled into a bun as she chopped some onions. She was humming, a bit, some song we’d heard on the radio yesterday. I walked up to stand next to her and looked—there was a pot of rice on the stove letting out little puffs of steam, and a bowl viscous and bright yellow with the egg mixture dripping off of a whisk. She’d brought the little rectangular pan and had it heating on the burner closest to me. The whole kitchen smelled just like she always did, starchy and a little bit like fish.

Mama looked over and smiled at me, slowly. “Sleep alright?”

“Yeah, actually.” I smiled back, and she turned back to the eggs with a little sigh, started pouring out the first layer of the omelet. “Mama, Japantown’s right near our house.”

“Mmm. Lots of competition for the new place.” She rolled up the cooked eggs and poured out more, the thin sheet of it bubbling in the pan.

“Think I’ll have to learn Japanese again?” She kept prodding the eggs and said to them, “It might be good for you to get it back. I haven’t. Been around enough to speak it with you, I guess.”

“Yeah.”

I watched her press the soft layers of egg around each other and cradle them in the spatula, flip the omelet out onto a plate. I took the plate in my hands and it was warm and I wanted to say something, I don’t know what. Something like thank you. I looked at the plate and nodded, quiet, and said ta-ma-go-ya-ki. Felt each syllable in the hollow of my mouth. u

POETRY

Collection of Poetry

by Reuben Gelley Newman

World of Echo after Eduardo C. Corral / for Arthur Russell All that glitters, a melody leaping from your brain, nested in mine, a hare whose ears answer to the strain of your cello.

Baby lion goes where the islands go, you tell me, and I want to go, too, to that island of records, disc upon disc of sound. u

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To Nick Drake

darling boy,

figuring life out on frets.

I could make a pun, say

you know that I love you, you know I don’t care, you know that I see you, you’re reading this poem, . .

. you’re fretting over your sexuality, but you’re not necessarily gay,

shining somewhere—sad poems aren’t always set

at night, the moon’s an afternoon crescent now, if it matters, matters at all, look—the musical grammar, hanging like a bass clef in the sky— . . ....... . and, reader, the sun’s shining, . ...... . triplets and pedal tones tremble my brain, stark pieces

and I’m lonely, too— . with only a whisper of accompaniment— u

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Wink after Nick Drake Maybe it’s time Reuben stopped acting so mysteriously and started getting something organized.

Maybe it’s time he ran in the cold December air; maybe then his limbs would align like the third of a chord.

Maybe if the car horn didn’t blare at a seventh above the root his music wouldn’t be so dissonant. But that’s music, with its dissonance. On the album cover, the pink moon winks at him, though everyone says it’s bleak, and there is a certain sadness, a white boy indie sadness that Reuben finds quite attractive, Reuben who speaks of himself in the third person, who listens to the song on repeat, who dares to eat the peach on the album cover, the peach that’s also the moon, resplendent with a clown’s face, rocket stamp and teacup and—a shoe?

Or a shadow? Who cares?

The peach drips with his sadness.

He’s awash in its sad juice, the happiest poet alive. u

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The Platform on the Ocean / Answers Me / Related to AIDS Corral / Russell 1 All that glitters, sick, unanswerable, the virus a melody leaping into your body. 2 Answer me, Arthur.

Did you go where the islands go?

Did you go into a sea of serum? 3 Can you see the fish?

Do they glimmer like the music must? u

1.

2.

3.

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Arthur who died Bodily in 1992 Of complications

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BOOKS REVIEW

Harry Potter and the Grand, Unified Theory of Intolerable Nostalgia

HA R RY P O T T E R A N D T H E S O R C E R E R’ S S T O N E

by J. K. Rowling Scholastic Corporation 309 pages |$11.99 (hardcover)

by Amal Haddad

T

he first time my family made the drive from New York City to Silver Spring, Maryland was on the day we moved. It took ten hours—it’s supposed to take four. It’s never been that long since.

My aunt gave me the first “Harry Potter” book in July of 2007, a few weeks before the release of “Deathly Hallows” and, a day later on August 1st, when we would make that first ten hour drive away from my mother’s whole family to a state where we knew no one.

It was a couple of years before a link established itself here. The sordid and banal dramas of our nuclear family, for the most part, diffused themselves in the space of our home, sometimes bursting in small pockets. But drives between Yonkers and Silver Spring, of which there were about twelve a year, acted as a sort of botched sparking crockpot that those of us who have shamefully watched “This Is Us” will be familiar with.

After a litany of incidents—rest stop dinner flung out the window on the highway, a Nathan’s hotdog and fries cast in brief, doomed flight; broken rearview mirror; sobbing fights in gas stations off the I-95—my mother took my sister and I to the Silver Spring library, before the shining new development, when it was just a single story building with a playground out back that all the kids called “Splinter Park” because, for some reason, it was made totally of wood. Her solution: audiobooks. “The 39 Clues,” then “Artemis Fowl,” then, finally, “Harry Potter,” pacified our family road trips

which had previously been little more than an interstate misery march.

In eulogizing “Harry Potter”, people around our age scramble to personalize, to explain why the books locked into our cultural consciousness are significant— uniquely, specially—to them.

The childhood discovery and obsession with “Harry Potter” is a story you’ve all heard and likely lived before, so I won’t subject you again to its oft-nostalgized details—the reading under the covers, the Halloween costumes, the recess games, the waiting for a Hogwarts letter. In eulogizing “Harry Potter,” people around our age or often a bit older scramble to personalize, to explain why the books locked into our cultural consciousness are significant—uniquely, specially—to them.

If there’s anything unique in my mature returns to “Harry Potter,” it’s their total incongruence with my personality. I have a deeply held embarrassment complex, and indulging in any form of earnestness runs the risk of making me sick with humiliation. I hate-read #StillWithHer Twitters who SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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debate which Hogwarts house Elizabeth Warren would be in. I generally believe JK Rowling should be locked in a dark room (a cupboard, maybe) for her vile political influence (including but not limited to being a raging transmisogynist and almost literally single handedly preventing Scottish independence). In short, I’m a hater.

There was, when I finished, the overwhelming feeling that nothig would move me as much as “Harry Potter” had moved me when I was younger, that I would never care about something that mch again, be so wholly devoted and enamored.

And yet in my junior year of high school, in the month and a half period when I rarely went to a full day of classes, I had a secret routine. Go to first and second period, then sneak out the back entrance, take the Q4 bus to Forest Glen, walk the remaining mile to my house, run a hot bath, and sit in the water for upwards of three hours listening to “Harry Potter” on audiobook.

I’ve never seen It, and in fact you could probably classify it as something else I’m a hater about, but a little while ago there was an out of context quote from an interview circling Twitter: “I need you to realize you cannot go back to childhood. And then I need you to cry like you’ve never cried.”

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What a stupid fact of life that these words were spoken to Bill Hader by the director of “It: Chapter Two.” But soewhere in there is what brought me back to “Harry Potter” my junior year of high school, and again last semester, when I found myself in another period of dragging, listless depression. At 16, it was something of a self-torturous exercise. There was, when I finished, the overwhelming feeling that nothing would move me as “Harry Potter” had moved me when I was younger, that I would never care about something that much again, be so wholly devoted and enamored. There is a totalizing innocence and wonder in childhood obsessions, I think, that has lent “Harry Potter” to cultural iconography and its persistent social media nostalgia that is truly annoying. It’s wonderful to love something that much.

Three years after I almost lost credit for half of my 11th grade classes due to excessive absences, my latest return to “Harry Potter” has served as an exercise in the sincerity I had rejected. There is no way to engage with something I loved that much and pass it off as just irony. My new audiobook habit is a running gag with my friends by now, but a tender one.

This is maybe humiliating to write and publish, but I’ve been live-tweeting “Harry Potter” intermittently for months now, so what respect do I have to lose? In closing: making Lupin and Tonks get married was an anti-gay hate crime, and I would 100% recommend listening to Jim Dale read “Harry Potter” if you’re in a persistent state of abject misery. You might still be miserable by the end, granted—you cannot go back to childhood—but you can remember what it was like to truly love a piece of art for the first time, and that’s worth a little self-debasement.

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REVIEW

John Berger’s “Portraits” The Artist’s Motivation

by Anonymous

“Portraits: John Berger on Artists” is, more than anything, a meditation on the metaphysics and epistemology of art: what it is, what we can know about it, and how history has impacted it. Berger, whose insertion of his name into the title owes itself to either arrogance or self-assurance, was one of the greatest English art critics and winner of the 1972 Booker Prize. Until his death in 2017, his fame and reputation for disemboweling artists’ projects at will made him the internalized critic of any self-respecting art student.

PORTRAIT S: JOHN BERGER ON ARTIST S

by John berger Verso Books 544 pages | $17.54 (paperback)

In “Portraits,” Berger does not attempt to use art criticism as a half-baked vehicle for art history, a medium where relationships between time and influence are causal, rational, and easy to trace. Nor does he attempt to assign any kind of value judgement to the work of an artist—the voice of someone like Clement Greenberg, floating back through the years to accuse Chagal of being provincial, is entirely absent.

Instead, he tries to tell a story of art through his own subjectivity, something far more ambitious and entertaining, albeit

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more arbitrary, than criticism revolving around quality assessments or history situating works within a linear march of artistic time.

Berger seems to be trying to, in a very earnest way, put forward a theory of motivation for various artists, attempting to access some kind of essential, unconscious leading desire. What can we tell about why this artist chose to create art, not from historical facts about their psychology but from the artwork itself? This works not just as a kind of convoluted kind of human interest story, but more importantly as the only possible way to synthesize from years of artistic work anything which can come close to a unifying theory of creation. This holistic and global approach to art-making facilitates a far richer experience for the reader than the typically abstract, pseudo-objective, historically linear style now commonplace in the field.

Berger argues, for example, that the primary motivation of Pieter Breugel, one of the most significant players in Dutch renaissance paintings, is an awareness of indifference—indifference without direction, without anyone to blame, a question with no answer, a prosecution which can never take place. Whether or not this is an assessment with which you agree as a reader, it is impossible to get around the fact that this kind of reduction to a single guiding principle is the only way to talk about Breugel within the approximate three to ten page format that Berger assigns to each artist. To maintain this format and still try to address influence, formal elements, issues of technique, and medium specificity would be a lost cause.

Meanwhile, Berger defines Mark Rothko, the Lithuanian-American abstract expressionist (this category by external attribution—he never personally aligned with any movement), as a painter with no relationship to lived visual experience as we typically know it. Instead, Berger describes him as a painter of pre-visuality—an artist who looks forward, “into” the past, to a place where light and color are waiting patiently for the creation of a recognizable visual world. Rothko is a painter of premonitions which have already happened, one of the only painters to ever create without using symbolic visuality as, at the very least, a point of departure.

Berger’s quality assessments are hidden within the significance of the artist’s motivation rather than the execution of that motivation.

Unlike his foil of choice, Clement Greenberg—the American essayist, formalist aesthete, and art critic who tries in one representative essay to trace the relationship between Byzantine painting and flatness in a dense two and a half pages—Berger attempts to describe nothing beyond that of an artist’s primary desire. He seeks out some piece of an artist’s essence which, under close examination, speaks more to the total value of the work than any accumulation of isolated 40

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critiques or imposed systematizations.

Berger’s quality assessments are hidden within the significance of the motivation rather than the execution of that motivation—an analysis not of which painters are masters of their crafts but instead which painters possess some kind of vital psychology, where their irrepressible interest in creation is the most powerful unit of their creative presentation.

Through this kind of commentary, Berger is able to name certain artists as unbelievable talents, unprecedented turning points in the march of artistic creation, without, even for the briefest moment, passing a quality judgement on skill and technique. He is thus able to implicitly convey the greatness of art by virtue of what it metaphysically is, not merely some criteria for its craftsmanship. Berger’s hand is in this way gentler than that of any other art critic I have ever read, without explicitly disavowing the idea of quality or importance as a metric.

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MUSIC REVIEW

Best Read While Listening

by Jessica Hernandez

I

like rapping to myself and seeing what lyrics I still remember after three years. I like drumming with my fingers inside my coat pocket, and I like patting my hand on my thigh. I like switching from a rhythmic head bob to a whole shoulder sway and then merging the two. I like seeing people on public transit sing along to their music unapologetically. I like the idea of no one knowing what I’m listening to, but if they walk by me close enough, they might hear a bar or two.

I love setting my computer on my desk, plugging in my speakers, and hitting “play.” I love looking at my playlists, their titles capitalized with two forward slashes at the beginning and end. I love noticing when a particular acapella has been sampled by different artists. I love looping a song’s vocal in my head and matching it with the moment it comes into the piece. I love posting screenshots of what I’m listening to on social media (yes, I’m that bitch and always will be). I love sending songs to people because I think they might like it and I love when they do the same for me. And I desperately fantasize about mixing, blending, layering, and amplifying the music I love best.

In short, I love the process of listening, interacting with, and sharing music – all the duties of a DJ. But to be clear, I’m not a DJ yet. I have some software, a couple of controllers, and a radio show but still…I don’t yet have the range! If I did have the credentials, this is what I’d say about developing my taste, producing a mix, and curating a listening experience.

It Has to Go Hard.

I like a lot of things: rap, house, punk, dancehall, hip hop, techno, cold wave, R&B, folk. Though my tastes are varied, all the music I enjoy goes hard. For me this means lyrics that are menacing and reckless, words that make you want

to act up in the best way possible. Songs that embody what is audacious, bold, and sure of itself. Beats constructed in the spaces and time measures of unpredictability and experimentation. If this is the criteria I’m using, electronic dance music goes hard as fuck. And there are so many subgenres that have their own appeal, whether it be UK garage, industrial, intelligent dance music, jungle, electronic body music, and grime among others. I’m still trying to decipher what I’m into, but generally, I lean toward percussive (though not exactly electronic), techno, experimental, and house music.

I present to you: sound that goes hard.

https://spoti.fi/2H02BWu “Salt and Pepper” and “M11” by DJ Plead Genre: Percussive DJ Plead is rhythmic and he’s reliable. With what seems like a handful of sounds, often including vocal elements, he creates percussive combinations that heighten movement, awareness, and interest. Even in collaboration with other artists like Cop Envy and TSVI, he maintains his aesthetic which is heavily influenced by his Lebanese background. In “Salt and Pepper,” DJ Plead gradually builds an intensity and velocity with every beat and sound. The percussive hits, the fleeting wind instruments, the brilliant manipulation of acapella echoes. DJ Plead’s combinations lunge at you and grab SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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you quickly, demanding your attention and focus.

Although an older song, “M11” is a stand out track for me. Taking things a little slower but still staying true to the strength of his production, “M11” is what I really look for in percussive music. It’s minimal, simplistic, and enough. It opens immediately with a vocal and a hand clap, followed by a tempting bass line, kept interesting by a periodic key change. But you cannot come any closer to this song than in 1:25. That isolation – it’s visceral. It’s physical. It’s seduction by music. That is hard. That feeling is what I’m looking for in every song, regardless of genre. Can you imagine putting that 15 seconds leading up to that on a loop and sharing in that feeling with a crowd, over, and over, and over? Until it’s amplified to the highest degree and we’re all marinating in it? A good set transports you somewhere and in that moment, we’re inside that loop and we’re in it indefinitely. The raw and minimal simplicity of percussive music is what I love and the transport is what I want to recreate in a set.

“Sylph” by Coucou Chloe, KABLAM “Hidden Teeth” by Osheyack Genre: Techno I like things that are all over the place. Songs ripping at 150 beats per minute or higher. Sounds stuttering, delaying, echoing. Hypnotic phrases that make you mumble a subconscious verbal ritual. And underscoring the tempo and minimalist lyrics, 1/16 closed hi-hats hitting on every count; rapid wub-wub-wubs of an obscenely deep and grimy bass line; sporadic and calculated snare drums and industrial mallets. Basically, I really like the makings of techno music.

Alongside rRoxymore and Aisha Devi, Coucou Chloe is one of my top experimental artists. When I saw she collaborated with Shygirl, who I’d argue is the epitome of tough, I knew she would bring the pressure. Coucou Chloe is fearless and limitless. She can do no wrong in the realm of the auditory and the curatorial. “Sylph” keeps her consistent with the unpredictability I look for both in her music and in other artists’, but her collaboration with Swedish DJ KABLAM lends itself toward hard rhythms and techno. In line with the menace and the radical activity I enjoy, “Sylph” opens with haunting lyricism—a melodic melancholy that’s ephemeral but permanent. A voice allegorical to the Sirens of Greek Mythology, but are better described by an actual sylph (an “imaginary spirit of the air”). Signaled by a robotic-like growl at :40, Coucou’s vocals become tighter, emphasized by a scrubby bass iconic to the genre of techno. I think this is one of the more stripped down, laid-back techno tracks I’ve heard and I really enjoy it. And while I did say I love high BPM, sometimes it does get too intense for me like the subgenre of hardcore! At 1:40, all the elements of the song come to full capacity. The rest of the track is highly dynamic, with the layering of the different parts of the acapella, supported by synths saturating and satiating the background.

This is where their experimentation is really visible. Coucou Chloe and KABLAM ate this shit up and I bet they know it 42

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too. To add so many new sonic elements in the last minute and abruptly end it with one last vocal… they did what they came to do and dipped immediately. The sporadic, methodical, and confident assuredness I find in techno is the energy I want my sets to embody.

“Hidden Teeth” by Osheyack bangs. This shit is hard, no discussion. I really fucking love this track. I love its intro and how it loops for a bit, the up and down beat bass introduced shortly after and the kind of swooping release and exhale in the background. Whatever drum comes in at :38… wow; and when it comes it for a second time… brilliant!! I also love the repetition of the vocal and the way it extends around the 2-minute mark. Aside from the objective opinion that this song goes in, I love the world this track creates.

It’s like you’re on a bullet-shaped high speed rail train. One car, eight seats, four on each side, all in a row. No seat belts and no conductor. A train built purely for speed and aesthetics, not functionality. That’s the dimension we’re in with this track. I would build a whole set around this one song just so I could mix into this industrial junkyard heat wave.

If I could execute it, I’d want my sets to muddle minds, melt brains, and build worlds – exactly like this track.

“Soundboy Don’t Push Your Luck” by Sully Genres: Drums and Bass, Breakbeats, Jungle Thank God for London DJ Sherelle because that girl can play – and she plays heat, exclusively. Her Boiler Room set in London this past year was a touchstone for a lot of the artists and music I’m into now. She’s a master of decks, truly.

This track by Sully comes in toward the end of her set and really changed the game for me. It opens with sirens which is entirely accurate representation of how beat you’re going to feel after almost five minutes of constant jungle and juke.

Nothing I can say will do this track justice, you really just have to listen. Sully’s position in electronic music as a whole is made so clear by this track. The energy, the literal chemical eruption that is “Soundboy Don’t Push Your Luck” by Sully is genuine passion represented by song.

“Big Fun – Original 12” Mix” by Inner City “ Truth – Main Street Mix” by Earth Trax, Newborn Jr. “Quoi! - Original Mix” by Avalon Emerson Genre: House House music and all of its subgenres are really the only kinds of feel good music I allow. Mainstream pop is cool and I get the appeal, but house music is a different kind of joy. Maybe it’s the instrumental focus and minimal lyricism of acid house, or the rolling wave and trance of deep house, the percussive blend of Afro house. Or maybe it’s the experience and enjoyment of house, point blank. Whether you’re playing progressive or big, you can’t listen to house and be in a bad mood; it’s practically impossible.

“Big Fun – Original 12” Mix” is so groovy. You sway, you

sing, you smile, there’s not much to explain! If I wanted the lyrics to ring true, I could easily see this being the first, second or third track in my set, especially if I let the first 25 seconds play for a minute or so. After setting the tone, I’d let the song ride because it so powerful on its own and I want to keep the integrity of the song and Inner City! I don’t want to do much to it, but amplify my favorite parts or using sections to transition to the next track.

If there was one song I had to play during every set, it would be “Truth – Main Street Mix.” I could transition from a queer Ballroom song like “D.A.R.L.I.N.G” by MikeQ and DJ Diz to this song for sure. I could also find some nice sounds to layer on top because it’s minimal and strong.

When that soft mallet type sound comes in, I feel cared for.

I feel light, comfortable, and content. This track is pure bliss and it’s everything I want in house.

Finally, “Quoi! – Original Mix” by Avalon Emerson, who’s one of my favorite DJs right now. The French sample is absolutely brilliant. The way she manipulates it is so supreme.

I appreciate the way it changes slightly to accommodate the key changes in the main synth that comes in at :50. This track has the bounce and groove of house with the focus on synthetic production that might categorize it as acid. Another element that makes me go absolutely wild is hearing “you’re listening to Avalon.” Like yes, girl! Don’t let us forget it!! A great set is when it’s clear the DJ is proud of what they’re playing; they’re jumping around, hugging the homies who came to support them and haven’t stopped dancing behind the booth. I love when DJs are noticeably pleased after a technique evokes deep roars and dropped jaws from the crowd. I love the hand motions, the scrunched-up faces and furrowed brows, the drying of forehead sweat, the lighting of a cigarette mid-mix, or the sip of a now-luke warm beer in between tracks. And I love how they immediately put on their headphones and get back to work, so they might recreate that jaw-dropping feeling for themselves and the people who came out to hear them. It can be painful, but applauding the things you put out is so necessary! So yes, I am listening to Avalon and I’m going to need that reminder every time.

Finding my Sounds

When I look for music, I’m looking for music. It’s not some quick 30-minute endeavor, it’s not something I’m doing on my phone during a commute. When I decide today is the day to look for music, I’m prepared to stare at my computer screen for no less than two hours.

There are a few methods I use to find new music. While I sometimes look for particular genres, most of the time I’m not looking for anything in specific. My starting points for finding music might be particular but where I end up could be a completely different aesthetic and style. I might be hoping to find more percussive artists like NKC, Yak, or Zaliva-D but I can’t be sure that I will—I just know I’ll find something I enjoy!

The first way I find new tunes is looking at artists I already follow. Even though I’m down to spend my whole day sifting through my digital library, I don’t exactly want to. From there, I become more intentional of who I want to start out with, sticking to alphabetical order so there’s at least some sense of direction!

For example, I know I’ll definitely want to check out AceMo because I love the griminess, bounce, and chop of “2017 Dance Track” on Black Populous. I’m also looking at artists affiliated with the ones I know. So, if I’m looking at AceMo, I’m also checking out MoMa Ready and the deep house he puts out like “Shade.” And this means I’ll have to see if they’ve released anything together as AceMoMA. I’ll then look at artists they’re associated with who I haven’t heard yet. I’ll check out the most popular songs because it shows me what listeners are resonating with or the tracks that have started to amass a following. Top tracks are helpful in this way, but I try to go through a few songs on each project to get a sense of the artist. Are they pretty consistent in their style and genre, even when there are three or four years separating each project? Or are they evolving with each one?

Not only getting better production-wise, but maybe experimenting with new aesthetics. And sometimes the best tracks are the ones with the least plays. A techno artist from Denmark, Anastasia Kristensen’s “Go Getter” is my favorite, but isn’t as popular. This could be because of how it was released or how new it is, but if you went purely by number of plays it’s possible you might have missed it.

I love the world this track creates.

It’s like you’re on a bullet-shaped high speed rail train. One car, eight seats, four on each side, all in a row. No seat belts and no conductor.

I’ll also look to see if my favorite artists are on any playlists because they might be mentioned alongside similar artists and styles. This is dope way to see what other people are listening to and how they organize it in their music.

My top way to find music, though, is by listening to sets because I’m also learning more about production while finding new stuff. For sets, I’ll check out DJs I like – Honey Dijon, Octo Octa, Fauzia, Carol Mattos, and GiGi FM. And a lot of queer, trans, non-binary people of color because let’s be real, our taste is impeccable and rarely disappoints! And if I’m looking to watch a set on Boiler Room, I’ll listen to whatever is on the homepage. But if I want a specific genre, I’ll pick anyone that pops up, provided they aren’t a cis-gendered white man. I’m also checking out Rinse FM, Resident Advisor, and FACT Magazine for any articles on new artists or releases. Since the New Year started, there have been great pieces on 2019’s best tracks or mixes, so I’ll be going to go SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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through that for a while.

When I’m listening to a mix, I feel like I’m Shazaming every 45 seconds, which is probably too much but I don’t want to miss anything, even if I end up ID’ing the same song four times! Sometimes, Shazam won’t even be able to find a song even after multiple attempts, or I’ll look up the song afterwards and it won’t sound anything like it did in the mix.

A DJ’s ability to completely transform a track to the point where it is unrecognizable or their track now is something I’d be lucky enough to learn how to do. So after a mix, I’ll add the songs I like and look into the artists individually to hear their other stuff, look at artists that are similar to them – the same process I mentioned before.

I also take seriously the recommendations of my friends.

On Twitter, I really am searching up the screenshots people post. If it’s someone I know who has similar tastes, listens to a wide variety of sounds, or knows their shit about music – yes, I’m searching!

What is a DJ Set?

I have a radio show on campus called yum, and I use djay Pro 2 on my computer for it. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s really intuitive and makes it easy to start out DJing. Pro 2 has some nice effects like echo, which does what you think it might. I use it if I’m playing something where there isn’t too much going on or if I think it’ll add something some spice – like 5:00 on my mix ISOTOPE. “ISOTOPE” by NO BREAKFAST (soundcloud) When the engine sounds really high at 6:49 that’s a High Pass filter. I just learned that Low Pass (LP) and High Pass (HP) keep what’s low like bass or what’s high like vocals, respectively! I like to use those filters to amplify dramatic

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changes in a track.

I loop things a lot because I like to hear my favorite parts over and over like 9:42–10:00 on ISOTOPE. I really impressed myself with that part! There’s another effect that I use during that part, a phaser type noise. But recently, I’ve been reading effects are weak so now I’m thinking, “oh shit, I’m not trying to be corny!” To make this mix happen, I used my MIDI Keyboard but I just got a Numark Controller that I’m still trying to figure out how to use.

The Numark is closer to a common set up, so now I really have to figure out how to DJ! One of the really helpful things with Pro 2 and MIDI was transitioning between songs. Pro 2 automatically syncs the BPM of two tracks so you could play two radically different genres and not have it sound a complete mess. When transitioning with a button on my MIDI, not only do I move from Track A to B pretty nicely, but the software also corrects B’s BPM so once I transition to it, it plays at its normal tempo. But according to my research, real DJs know how to beatmatch by ear. No sync, no fraud behavior. So, when I read this I thought, “Damn, dude. How the fuck am I going to match percussive music and ballroom? Techno and house? With only my ear?!” So, now I’m feeling vulnerable and afraid I will never truly learn how to DJ! Even more terrified than before. And although I’ve heard there’s nothing bad about syncing and using the features of new tech, I don’t want to be a fake! But whatever, if you see me syncing in public…mind your business.

These are some of the tools, filters, and feature I use on Pro 2 which you can hear on my mix ISOTOPE. But obviously to hear real DJing, I recommend listening to Clement’s “Colette Summer Breeze 2017” (Soundcloud) and Honey Dijon’s set on Boiler Room for Sugar Mountain 2018 (YouTube).

“Colette Summer Breeze 2017” by Clement (Soundcloud) Honey Dijon’s Boiler Room Set for Sugar Mountain 2018 (YouTube) If there is one thing you listen to from this article, please let it be this mix by Clement. Like for real, for real. I tear up when I listen to this mix. It’s so well done. It’s poolside disco.

It’s French wave. It’s euphoric and it’s effortless. If you don’t pay attention, you’ll miss every seamless transition, not knowing how you moved from one track to the next. And by the time you notice, Clement is already working on the next song. He gives us exceptional tracks, one after the other spanning so many different genres. He gives us dancehall and he gives us Yaeji. He gives us folk and he gives us Oby Onyioha, he gives us funk and he gives us Depeche Mode.

Clement provides you with just enough of each track and he offers you the absolute best parts of them. He leaves you satisfied and wanting at the very same time.

Another set I would recommend not just listening to, but watching on YouTube is Honey Dijon’s set on Boiler Room for Sugar Mountain 2018. She opens with a verse sampled from Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish.” His a capella flows beautifully into the intro of “Bang – Harry & Erick Bang in Your Face Mix” by Erick Morillo and Harry Romero. Honey Dijon comes out the gate absolutely swinging with this peak time track. She didn’t come here to waste time, she came here to bring the energy. Like Clement, she’s playing some big electronic tracks, merging them with other genres like ballroom and disco and including different vocal layers. And she’s capitalizing on dramatic bass drops and transitions within each track. She’s not letting any production techniques fall through the cracks or go to waste. And most importantly, I can tell she’s enjoying what she’s doing too! She’s mouthing the lyrics, she’s bumping, she’s really feeling what she’s playing. That adds to the many elements that make this set good.

The music, the energy, the soul. Honey fucking Dijon!

These are only two of my favorite DJs but there are so

many that deserve to be mentioned. Peggy Gou, Shanti Celeste, JASSS, anz, Craig Richards, Juliana Huxtable, Ciel, Mall Grab, Volvox, re:ni, and so many others. I fuck with them all whether it be their style of mixing or the kinds of artists they lift up. But each of these DJs have such an appreciation for the craft that I want to strive for and emulate.

Wants, Needs, and Demands

Since I’m not really a DJ, I don’t know what kind I want to be yet! My experience only extends to my radio show where there are no crowds. It’s just me, maybe a friend or two, and the air waves of Swarthmore. But if I did have the knowledgebase and the resources to curate an experience, I have some wants, needs, and demands.

I want a small venue, like a basement or DIY art space.

I need a maximum of 22 people (because I get nervous).

I demand the function be really queer, safe, and secure. I demand a space that centers Black, brown and indigenous folks. I demand a space that centers femmes, studs, trans folks. I demand a space that puts people of color at the front.

I demand a space that centers non-binary folks. I demand a space that provides different ways to interact with the music whether it’s listening, watching, moving, feeling, or having space to be in your head. I demand a space that’s going to look out for you so you don’t have to be on ten all the time.

I demand a space that adheres to what you need, not the other way around. And of course, I demand a sound system that bumps!

I want to construct sets on the principles I look for in my music. I want my sets to have the musical intimacy of DJ Plead’s “M11.” I want to have genre experimentation and bold hypnotism of Coucou Chloe with the absolute bullet intensity of “Hidden Teeth.” I want my songs to have the human feel of Sully’s iconic jungle track and I want the breath-taking sensation of breaks, rolls, and beats. I want the set and the space to cultivate the joy and uplift of house and all of its subgenres. And I want to have the confidence of letting you know “you’re listening to…” over and over and over again. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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MOVIES & TV REVIEW

Thoughts on Hip Hop Showcase

by David Molina Cavazos & Elyse O’Bannon

Elyse: So, can you, can you finishDavid: [aggressively drinks hot chocolate] Elyse: [laughs] Can you introduce yourself?

David: Uhhh, hi. To you or to the camera? I guess it’s our combined show, I don’t know. Um, hello, my name is David Molina Cavazos. I am a filmmaker and visual artist from Hanford, California.

Elyse: Um, how long have you been doing film?

David: Oh god. Umm, Elyse: That’s a big question, I’m so sorry [Combined laughter] David: Ummmm, I would say that I’ve been doing film for about…five/six years? But I’ve been doing video produc-

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tion for closer to eight.

Elyse: Um, were you always serious about film and film production?

David: God no. So when I, uh, when I got star, well- I got interested in video production by having this crazy dream.

I spent all of my time watching these dudes on the internet play video games.

Elyse: A crazy dream indeed.

David: And they made money; and I’m like, yo, I want to make money— Elyse: [laughs] David: … playing video games like the Achievement Hunter/Rooster Teeth guys, they don’t do any work and

Eventually, I figured out I enjoyed making the videos more than I liked playing the games, and now I’m here. make all of this money and I want some of that. And in order to get to that dream I had to learn how to make videos.

So I loaded up my trial version of Bandicam and my crappy version of Windows Movie Maker and my Turtle Beaches and off I went. Eventually, I figured out I enjoyed making the videos more than I liked playing the games, and now I’m here.

Elyse: So when did you first get the idea for Hip Hop Showcase?

David: I shot Hip Hop Showcase fall semester my junior year. I actually got the idea for it all the way back during the previous summer, because I worked at McCabe and I was just shelvin’ books. So I had a lot of time to just mentally wander around and think about whatever I wanted to. Initially, my concept was that I really wanted to do a technical exploration of the use of Logic Pro X at Swarthmore. Like I really wanted to talk to Brandon [Ekweonu] about making beats [and make a video] oriented towards people who have an interest in making music. So it’s like people who make music talking about how they make use for other who want to make music.

Elyse: What happened?

David: That was the initial idea, and then I got to class, and then I’m like, oh I guess a part of the project can also be like them telling their stories. And then I got to class, and I looked at all of these people, and I looked at Rodney [Evans, a Swarthmore film professor,] and I’m like, no one is going to care about this.

[Combined laughter] Elyse: So, what are the main themes?

David: So, I mean, Hip Hop Showcase has three acts.

Three individual acts— Elyse: It is a three act structure— David: Three act structure, each act has a label. The first one is like identity. Thinking about music as a way of both creating and expressing your identity, identity through music. Two is like, how does that identity become transformed by performance? What does it mean to be expressing your identity through a live performance to other people? And then the final part of Hip Hop Showcase interacts those performances with the racial dynamics at Swarthmore College.

Elyse: How did your identity as a person of color impact the way you approached the stories of the subjects of our film who are also people of color who have had different experiences and have been read in the world in different ways than you?

David: [stammers, laughs] Um, that made me unbelievably anxious.

Elyse: Why did it make you—

David: Because, it’s like, okay... I come from this really small hometown, and it is basically predominately white people and Hispanic people and that’s it. In my very bubble-y hometown there is not a lot of reasons [and opportunities] to talk about race because you are either white or Hispanic and that’s it, that’s the way life is.

I as a young froshling who came to Swat [was surprised by the concept of] POC spaces. Where, y’know, people of color can talk about themselves and their lives to other people of color who will understand it, and they won’t have to defend their identities, too… and I was really anxious. I guess I was mostly anxious about making people feel uncomfortable and [unknowingly] become a part of the problem instead of the solution, so to speak.

Elyse: So what did this mean for the film?

David: I was really anxious [about trying to] portray the lives and artistries of like Harsha [Sen], Tiyé [Pulley], and Brandon [Ekweonu]. I was worried my film wouldn’t necessarily represent them because we were seeing them through my eyes and my own racial perspective on things, [rather] than like themselves.

Elyse: And also of course, like seeing them through the construction of the film through its editing— David: Yeah, yeah. So that’s actually, um, I feel that a core part of Hip Hop Showcase are these secondary angles in the interviews where like you see the interview [setup].

So there’s the main [angle] where it’s like Brandon who is talking to me, and it’s the traditional talking head set-up, and there’s the second one where we see the whole room: we see the lights, we see myself—we see you in the corner, because you were actually the camera operator in that interview. I think that was my way to identify myself to the audience and have them thinking that like yeah, this is, like, the journey and stories of these characters—I keep on saying characters because— Elyse: Subjects— David: Yeah, but it’s— Elyse: These people, our friends— David: Yes, but no, because it’s impossible for a film, for any piece of media, film in particular, to fully represent [any] of these people.

Elyse: Fair.

David: You’re only seeing a silver of their life which turns them not into people but like characters.

Elyse: We get it—you’re an FMST student.

[Combined laughter] David: But, yeah, I feel like that became one of the strengths of the film. Subjectivity turned into one of, like, the formal [elements] of the film. That question is part of

It’s impossible for a film, for any piece of media, film in particular, to fully represent [any] of these people.

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the project itself and it’s one that I raised multiple times as I created Hip Hop Showcase.

Elyse: So, can you tell me a little bit about Blackstar?

David: Whoooo, [chuckles], ummm… yeah, Blackstar was crazy.

Elyse: What is it?

David: Blackstar is the largest [Black and POC] oriented film festival in the country. I remember that Rodney once described it as being the ‘black Sundance.’ It was really weird having my film being a part of the same program that Rodney’s film was in. He also had like an actual, feature length documentary, “Vision Portraits”… and in the program that has Rodney’s film, in the back, in the corner is also mine which is just crazy, that’s just nuts.

Elyse: Especially considering your background, I’m sure it was an amazing experience having your work featured at such a level.

David: Yeah, I feel like I’m very prone to minimize the value of my work. Y’know, I started off making Minecraft videos, so how much do I really know about film? And I guess it was nice having a thing that I can point [out] to myself and say, well, okay, you do know a couple of things. [chuckles] You can stop being so mean to yourself.

Elyse: Can you talk more about the actual experience of

attendance?

David: Yeah so, Blackstar was both fantastic and terrifying. Fantastic, because it was filled with great movies and films, and it was cool being exposed to so many different kinds of like films and filmmakers in one place. Terrifying, because I felt pressure to treat this as a networking event. I always hear about how essential knowing people is for working in the film industry and now here I was, steps away from a room filled with people who made these crazy movies with all this funding and I didn’t even know how to say hello.

Elyse: What was your favorite part?

David: My favorite part was right after the college program screening. All 12 filmmakers who were there just stood in a big circle and got to know each other. We passed around our phones and complimented each other’s films and got each others’ Instas, and everyone was so welcoming and was super cool about how nervous I was. It felt really good to be in a group of complete strangers and just feel how supportive everyone was.

In compliance with film festival policies, Hip Hop Showcase is currently not publicly available. It will be released around April, follow @davedragonface on Instagram for updates. u

REVIEW

Gerwig’s “Little Women” and a Reimagined Web of Belonging

by Andie Tappenden

I

n “Little Women,” the fourth movie adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel, director Greta Gerwig takes apart a well-loved narrative and stitches it back together again. She creates a quilt of a story that radiates with the glow of lives intertwined and, as Jo (Saoirse Ronan) believes (“Who would read a story about us?”), unremarkable.

An early scene in which neighbor Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) glimpses into the bustling March household is itself a microcosm for the experience of watching “Little Women.” Laurie gives Meg (Emma Watson) and Jo a carriage ride 48

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home after Meg sprains her ankle dancing, and at once all the sisters come together into the living room, talking all at the same time, limbs draped on top of each other and sentences dripping one into the other. The sisters are complete and unique when separate, but together they are a mosaic— Meg, the oldest, who is maternal and playful; Beth (Eliza Scanlon), a pianist, who is the most caring of the sisters; and Amy (Florence Pugh), the youngest, a painter, who is ambitious and unafraid, or at least strives to be. In some ways, Laurie acts as a more-intimate audience member. While his narrative is almost always reliant on his relations with the

March’s, it’s never in question whether the sisters live full lives without him present—a relationship not too unlike that of a reader falling deep into a book.

Director Greta Gerwig takes apart a well-loved narrative and stitches it back together again. She creates a quilt of a story that radiates with the glow of lives intertwined and unremarkable.

We watch as the sisters grow up and try to decide who they want to be while simultaneously helping one another navigate a world they still don’t entirely understand. (For example, while walking together into a dance, Meg advises Jo how she should act in the foreign space: “don’t say Christopher Columbus; don’t say capital.” It is a worn type of love, and it is advice Jo doesn’t follow.)

The chronology of the film is jumbled and yet maintains a certain flow, the past and present mixed together in a way that can feel like alphabet soup. This sporadic timeline, however, resembles collective memory, where each new scene— and time period—can arrive unexpectedly and from anything: at first without context, a scene shows Jo pull out a key

tied with red ribbon, and the following scene unlocks the moment she got it; later, Jo falls asleep on a train at one age and in the next shot awakens to a morning many years earlier. The timeline is intentionally confusing, forcing the viewer to lean in closer to every detail and scene, weaving together the many folds and crevices that create any relationship—the moments that are worth sinking back into and those that are not.

Multiple storylines weave throughout the back-and-forth timeline; many scenes, however, seem to hold an importance that is not dependent on any particular plot. “Little Women” is a story half as much as it is a mediation on sisterhood, girlhood, and the simultaneous durability and fragility of meaningful relationships. At the same time, it maintains an entertaining and engaging plot; it is a story that is, perhaps, unremarkable—which (through the care the sisters have for one another; through the passion characters carry even as they believe they are failing) becomes great. “Just because your dreams are different than mine, doesn’t make them any less important,” Meg says to Jo in one scene, inviting the audience to confront the many ways importance can manifest.

It is a story that is neither universally relatable nor miraculously individual; “Little Women” seems like its own special experience, like coming across an old diary of an articulate stranger: intimate and overwhelming.

I can’t write about Gerwig’s adaptation of “Little Women” without mentioning the character Marmee, played by Lau-

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ra Dern. Marmee, the mother of the March sisters, contains a depth that is unparalleled in earlier film adaptations of “Little Women.” Gerwig included one line from the original book which specifically stands out, especially after being dropped from every adaptation other than a mini TV series.

Jo talks to Marmee about her own temper, and marvels at how Marmee seems to never be angry, to which Marmee responds: “I’m angry nearly every day of my life.” This line captures a different side of the woman who seems to bring only compassion, love, and justice to the film, allowing for a more complex character.

This scene also guides the audience into seeing clearer the anger steeped within many scenes, as characters grapple with the lenses—such as gender, class, time period, and health— through which they see the world. In one scene, Amy tells Laurie that she is abandoning her art because she has talent but not genius. “What women are allowed into the club of geniuses anyway?” responds Laurie—a question that is bit-

Underlying the film there is an urgency and rawness—a type of love, sewn into every pocket and seam of the film.

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FEBRUARY 2020 SWARTHMORE REVIEW

ingly relevant in the wake of the 2020 Oscar nominations, where Gerwig received no nomination for Best Director despite having created a film that New Yorker critic Anthony Lane wrote in his review “may just be the best film yet made by an American woman.”

The acting in “Little Women” is outstanding, which allows for a multi-dimensional story and characters. Underlying the film there is an urgency and rawness—a type of love, sewn into every pocket and seam of the film, that made me want to cry. Scenes are layered with nuanced emotions that mimic the ambiguity of real life, allowing for the many degrees of importance that a single moment can hold. Meg’s wedding is a potent example: at once an obviously happy moment—the whole family gathered in the backyard dancing to music, the sisters having flowers braided into their hair, and Meg, elated to be with her new husband—as well as one of the saddest in the film, as beforehand Jo pleads with Meg to not get married, to not leave her behind.

Gerwig reimagines the ending Alcott wrote, allowing Jo to maintain her passion for writing and ultimately publish a book about her and her sisters. The final scene is a debate: whether by writing their story Jo is simply reflecting the importance that their lives already held (as Jo believes) or if writing makes their story important (as Amy thinks), and they don’t agree on any certain conclusion. Maybe the truth is a combination of both. u

Image Credits

FEATURES p. 5 – Image courtesy of CNN. p. 6 – Image courtesy of Associated Press. p. 8 – Image courtesy of George Fischer/DPA via ZUMA Press. p. 10 – Image courtesy of Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images. p. 11 – Image courtesy of The New York Times.

PERSONAL ESSAYS p. 13 – Image courtesy of Diana Martínez-Montes. p. 15 – Image courtesy of Dorcas Tang. p. 18 – Image courtesy of ClipArt Library.

FICTION & POETRY p. 30 – Image courtesy of Visit California. p. 30 – Image courtesy of Sean Bagshaw of Outdoor Exposure Photography, LLC. pp. 33-36 – Images courtesy of Reuben Gelley Newman.

BOOKS p. 38 – Image courtesy of Barker Animation. p. 39 – Pieter Bruegel the Elder. “Dulle Griet.” Image courtesy of Museum Mayer Van Den Bergh. p. 40 – Mark Rothko. “No. 10.” Image courtesy of Caves Collect.

MUSIC p. 44 – Image courtesy of Jessica Hernandez.

MOVIES & TV p. 46 – Image courtesy of David Molina Cavazos. p. 49 – Image courtesy of Vanity Fair. p. 50 – Image courtesy of The Nation.

COVER “JR: Chronicles Exhibit at Brooklyn Museum.” Courtesy of Diana Martínez-Montes, SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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