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From Haiti to Ferguson Essay by Isabel Cristo
CONTRIBUTORS Nyantee Asherman is a senior. Nora Battelle is a sophomore from New York studying English literature and French. Anthony Chiarenza is a freshman from NYC studying chemistry and linguistics. Tom Corbani ’17 is a French and Francophone studies and gender and sexuality studies double major. He suitably spends his time bitching about men over coffee and a cigarette. Isabel Cristo is a freshman from Brooklyn studying political science and Black studies.
Letter policy Letters are welcome from all readers. We will not ever publish letters anonymously and we reserve the right to edit all letters for length and clarity without contacting the letter writer. Letters generally should run no longer than 1,000 words. They should be sent to agonzal4@swarthmore.edu.
Amy DiPierro is a senior from Park Ridge, New Jersey studying history and economics. She once got caught in a chicharrón only to realize it was a chaparrón. Aileen Eisenberg is a senior from New York studying English and French literature. She is over-caffeinated, under-slept, and has a penchant for cracking her back and dancing tango.
How to contribute
Colette Gerstmann ’18 is a probable English major from NYC who thinks that dolphins, Mary Oliver, and lazy Sundays are pretty great. Clara Habermeier is a (practicing) visual artist, and a student of economics, math and art history, from the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Ian Hoffman ’15 would like to hold your hand. Lindsay Holcomb is a junior. Ian Holloway is a sophomore linguistics major and Chinese minor with a passion for everything Icelandic. He is also from Brooklyn. Allison Hrabar is a junior from Tucson, Arizona studying political science and film & media studies. She has, with this essay, officially written for every campus publication. Kathy Kandrysawtz is a freshman from Canton, Connecticut studying modern languages and linguistics. When not speaking a foreign language, she can be found dancing, writing, or making pottery.
We solicit pieces from writers, though we will also accept submissions of long-form reporting, personal, argumentative and photo essays, book and movie reviews, short stories, poems, and anything else that seems suitable. Submissions will be considered from Swarthmore students, alumni, faculty, and staff, and will be considered anonymously, though we will not, except in rare cases, publish anonymously. Submissions should generally not go longer than 10,000 words. Contact: agonzal4@swarthmore.edu.
Madeleine King is a sophomore at Johns Hopkins University from New York, New York studying International and Near Eastern Studies. Deborah “Just Too Much” “Die Perfekte Frau” Krieger is a junior from Los Angeles, studying art history, film and media studies, and German. She loves art, Philly, Philly art, and once bought a hat from a now of out business Scandinavian souvenir shop. Xavier Lee is a sophomore from South Orange, New Jersey studying English literature and Black studies and enjoys watching educational television. Mike Lumetta is a senior from St. Louis, Missouri. He is the forwards captain of the men’s rugby team. Erik Myers ’15 is the name of a chemical process by which various places, people, and time were transferred through digital sensors, microprocessors, hard-drives, and servers, and alluded to and printed here in thirty-four words.
FICTION PATRICK ROSS
EDITOR IN CHIEF ANNA GONZALES
PHOTOGRAPHY NOAH MORRISON
MANAGING EDITOR LILIANA FRANKEL
POETRY MIKE LUMETTA Z.L. ZHOU
COPY PRIYA DIETERICH
Blake Oetting is a freshman from Iowa City, Iowa, potentially studying art history and math. Steve Sekula is a sophomore from Bucks County, PA, majoring in computer science and art.
MUSIC COLETTE GERSTMANN
Nadim Silverman is a freshman at Brown University. Emily Simon is a sophomore at Bowdoin College, where she studies English and visual arts. She would like to thank the Cloud for saving so many of her words, and the Swarthmore Review for accepting them. Natalia Sucher is a junior from Brooklyn, New York studying Greek, Latin, and the cosmos.
FOUNDER IZZY KORNBLATT
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ART NYANTEE ASHERMAN STEVE SEKULA
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS NORA BATTELLE TOM CORBANI ISABEL CRISTO LEO ELLIOT IAN HOLLOWAY XAVIER LEE
Noah Weinthal is a senior. Ariana Wertheimer (more frequently referred to as Aya, pronounced Eye-Uh) is a freshman at Haverford College. She enjoys tea, her 3-legged dog Tupac, and making famous Björk hairstyles into wearable, everyday looks. She’s also a big fan of Drake, even though he has yet to open any of her Instagram direct messages. He will one day. Rose Wunrow is a junior from Montpelier, Vermont studying English, history, and French. Z.L. Zhou ’16 is a linguistics major from Tucson, Arizona and Hangzhou, China. He has now been published in most publications on campus. He’s not sure how.
Founded 2012 | Vol. 3, No. 3
Published by the Swarthmore Phoenix swarthmorephoenix.com Design © 2015 the Swarthmore Phoenix. All content © 2015 by its listed author unless otherwise noted. The “R” logo is based on the font Layer Cake by Luzia Prado. The “Review” logo is based on the font Soraya by Pactrice Scott. Printed at Bartash Printing, Philadelphia, PA. Please recycle this magazine.
“I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely greater.” Hippolyte Taine
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Arts BOOKS
Writing controversy 21
On Michel Houellebecq’s ‘Soumission’ by Aileen Eisenberg
Testing democracy 23 Reading ‘Guantánamo Diary’ by Noah Weinthal
Fifty Shades of foul play 25 Why this critic won’t see the film adaptation of the book by Deborah Krieger
Back to Clarissa 29
ESSAYS
Notes on translation and homecoming Essays on Brooklyn and Cuba from Colette Gerstmann and Amy DiPierro
From Haiti to Ferguson 12
On Black Lives Matter, the slave uprising in Haiti, media, and a legacy of silencing
by Isabel Cristo
FICTION
PHOTO ESSAY
Value default-swap
When Pluto drops in by Rose Wunrow 14
Returning to Mrs. Dalloway, years later by Nora Battelle
Obituary 31
Remembering Assia Djebar by Tom Corbani
Pollyanna
by Emily Simon 15
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TELEVISION
Real friendship 32
On the new season of ‘Broad City’ by Maddie King
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Prism
by Erik Myers
by Xavier Lee 18
MUSIC
What to make of Drake by Ariana Wertheimer
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MOVIES
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Featuring pieces by
Art as work 33
Why ‘Better Call Saul’ is well worth watching by Mike Lumetta
POETRY: SEVEN WORKS Anthony Chiarenza Annie Zhao Kathy Kandryswatz Ian Hoffman Lindsay Holcomb Rose Wunrow Z.L. Zhou
Cheap shot 35
What we talk about when we talk about war by Allison Hrabar
ART
The beauty of chance 45 Cy Twombly’s sculptures by Natalia Sucher
Wandering Philly 46
New exhibits at the PMA and MCAD by Clara Habermeier
ALSO IN MUSIC
ILLUSTRATIONS
You don’t spell it A-Z-A-L-E-A 42 On Iggy Azalea and Azealia Banks by Blake Oetting
Beauty from the bleak 43 A review of Bjork’s latest album by Ian Holloway
Nadim Silverman Cover Nyantee Asherman 17 Steve Sekula 26-27
LETTERS OF REC Brief recommendations from our editors on books, music, and more
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FEATURE
From Haiti to Ferguson Media and a legacy of silencing
by Isabel Cristo
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t a town hall meeting organized by Black Lives Matter NYC in Brooklyn, a Ferguson activist in a grey Nets cap says, “What we’re doing in St. Louis is a revolution.” With the memory of hundreds marching through Philadelphia still fresh in my mind, I’m inclined to agree with him, but the scope of the Black Lives Matter movement is still in its nascent stages. Does it really constitute revolution? In his 2013 article, “The Practical Utopian’s Guide to Revolution,” David Graeber defines revolution as that which “transforms basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately about.” He argues that revolutionaries themselves may be unsuccessful in seizing power, but that “in the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate.” A definition like this one seems to position the Black Lives Matter movement squarely in the realm of revolution; what is remarkable about the movement is that it not only articulates the ways in which black lives are constantly devalued and black bodies are perceived as disposable (black intellectuals have been arguing this for decades), but also has managed to push those
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ideas into the American mainstream. 2014 saw Meghan Kelly arguing with Bill O’Reily about the existence of white privilege, and two of the most eminent public officials in this country, President Obama and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, spoke out about their own, highly personal experiences with racial profiling and legalized discrimination. Activists and protesters have cast suspicion on the entire apparatus of justice in this country, and as a result of their success, we are seeing a national conversation orienting itself around “fringe” ideas of institutional racism. However, just as these once “radical” ideas are pressing into the American mainstream, mainstream culture is pressing back; while the protests themselves might be revolutionary, the media responses to the protests are not. In fact, in its coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement, mainstream media is employing the exact same rhetorical mechanisms that slaveowners and historians once used to erase slave uprisings from memory in Haiti and the United States.
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n 1790, the most powerful slave insurrection in recorded history began to stir in San Domingue, and in 1804 Haiti became the first independent state to be founded by slave rebellion. But despite being one of the most important
moments in the history of black liberation, not to mention the broader history of colonialism and slavery, the Haitian Revolution remains largely overlooked in our historical canon (it’s French counterpart meanwhile, which took place around the same time, is a staple of history curriculums in the US). Haiti is often written off because of the violence and chaos of its revolution, but some argue that its erasure is also because of the slave status of the revolutionaries themselves. In his essay, “An Unthinkable History,” Michel-Rolf Trouillot speaks of the many ways in which the Haitian revolution was, and continues to be, marginalized in our collective memory. Specifically, he talks about a “formula of banalization” in which people “empty a number of singular events of their revolutionary content so that the entire string of facts, gnawed from all sides, becomes trivialized.” To depoliticize the revolutionary actions of Haitian slaves, he argues, is to delegitimize and reduce them to an ignorable form. He writes: Resistance did not exist as a global phenomenon. Rather, each case of unmistakable defiance, each possible instance of resistance was treated separately and drained of its political content. Slave A ran away because he was particularly mistreated by his master. Slave B was
missing because he was not properly fed... Trouillot’s analysis provides a compelling lens through which to observe the mainstream media’s framing of the murder of Mike Brown in particular. The news coverage of Brown’s shooting tends to depict it as an isolated incident, one with extenuating circumstances that justifies its removal from a context of systemic police violence against black people. On conservative-leaning networks, this framing of the incident is taken to extreme lengths, so much so that those who suggest that racial politics were involved in the shooting at all are accused of “race-baiting,” whatever that means. But even on supposedly liberal news networks, the shooting is fatally misrepresented. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC said in his segment “Morning Joe,” There are so many great people to embrace as heroes in the black community, that deciding you’re going to embrace a guy that knocked over a convenience store, and then, according to grand jury testimony, acting in ways that would get my children shot on Staten Island or in Queens or in Brooklyn, that’s your hero? Scarborough’s declaration that Brown’s behavior would “get my children shot on Staten Island or Queens” ignores the first rule of white privilege: no, his children probably do not have to fear for their lives in acting as Brown did. But more importantly, Scarborough’s depiction of Mike Brown’s case, as though it’s specific circumstances render it undeserving of becoming the rallying cry of a movement, serves to isolate it from a pattern of unarmed black men being shot by white police officers, thereby diverting the conversation from one of institutionalized and systemic injustice. Scarborough may not identify as a post-racial thinker, but his comments inadvertently serve a post-racial agenda, the same one that drove the recent ruling to strike down parts of the voting rights act. His fixation on the details of the case–had Brown stolen something from a convenience store? how much did Darren Wilson know about this robbery?–has been echoed across media outlets. But this fixation distracts us from seeing racialized violence as a “global phenomenon” and so strips the case of its political potency. Just because Brown didn’t fit Scarborough’s conception of a
perfect victim does not mean that he is unworthy of becoming a symbol of Black Lives Matter. These protests represent a tipping point in a long history of police violence, not a spontaneous backlash, and Scarborough’s statements (and the countless others like his) bear a disturbing resemblance to Trouillot’s descriptions of the ways in which slaveowners conceptualized revolutionary action: Brown’s death, just like the runaway Slave A or the missing Slave B, is not deserving of politicization, and so all that it stands for is “reduced to an ignorable form.” When Trouillot writes, “Slave A ran away because he was particularly mistreated by his master. Slave B was missing because he was not properly fed. Slave X killed herself in a fatal tantrum,” each of these motives for revolt is noticeably animalistic in nature— a pet will run away if mistreated or malnourished. And while slaves no doubt suffered these conditions–and while these conditions alone are legitimate cause for revolt–this line of reasoning is indicative of the slaveowner’s inability to consider slaves as being human and to view insurrections as an expression of a deeply felt need for justice. Slaveowners could not and did not, Trouillot argues, see patterns in slave’s acts of resistance, because “to acknowledge resistance as a mass phenomenon is to acknowledge the possibility that something is wrong with the system.” Better to conceptualize resistance as a crude urge than to confront the humanity of slaves and, in doing so, risk undermining the entire institution of slavery. A nearly identical reaction to the acts of resistance by protesters is taking place today. Directly following the grand jury verdict, St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley said, “No matter what is announced, people will be emotional. I want people to think with their heads and not with emotion.” Dooley–knowingly or not–delegitimizes the aims of the protestors by suggesting that their anger could not possibly come from an intellectual and logical place. He reduces their outrage and grief to a compulsive urge similar to the ones Trouillot describes, rather than a thoughtful response to a sociopolitical issue. While people such as Dooley continue to delegitimize the place of anger in the protests, the role of violence in the Black Lives Matter movement has been even more distorted by mainstream media outlets. At the University of Rochester in 1852,
Fredrick Douglass delivered a now-famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.” In it, he says “oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment...The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day, were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it.” Standing before an all-white audience, Douglass described the way in which white America felt entitled to, and now benefits from, radical action and vio-
Scarborough’s depiction of Mike Brown’s case serves to isolate it from a pattern of unarmed black men being shot by white police officers, diverting the conversation from one of institutionalized and systematic injustice. lence during the Revolutionary War. In doing so he points to the fact that black America continues to be denied this same entitlement. Violence in the Ferguson protests has been publicly denounced across the political spectrum, from Fox News’s Greg Gutfield’s declaration that the violence directly following the grand jury decision “wasn’t really about injustice” but that “racial conflict became an excuse for...a free-for-all of looting, vandalism, and fun” to President Obama’s plea for peace in Ferguson, to Jonathon Chait’s assertion in New York magazine that “Property damage and looting impede social progress.” Furthermore, the extent of the violence in Ferguson and across the country has been hugely misrepresented; In addition to countless headlines such as “Ferguson Protests Around US Clog Streets” and “Chaos, SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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erupts in Ferguson,” Bob Garfield of “On the Media” says of the imagery from Monday night’s unrest in Ferguson: “The night’s pictures might exaggerate the scale of civil disturbance...but that didn’t stop CNN or its competitors from showing us the same dozen burning buildings and dozen burning cars for hours and hours, leaving the impression of a whole town consumed in an orgy of arson. In fact the violence was isolated, not sweeping.” In exaggerating the scope of the violence, mainstream media paints protesters as being motivated by savagery (the racist implications of which are clear), and by condemning the violence committed by the predominantly black protestors point-blank, it is guilty of propagating white America’s monopoly on violence. In “The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution,” C.L.R James writes of the first uprisings in Haiti, The slaves destroyed tirelessly. Like the peasants in the Jaquerie or the Luddite wreckers, they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause for their sufferings: and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much...And yet they were surprisingly moderate, then and afterwards, far more humane than their masters had been or would ever be to them...The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. James points out that any comparison of the violence committed by white slaveholders and the violence committed by black slaves is necessarily false because of the power structures in place, which sanction and support white violence. Slaveholders had the endorsement of the entire political and economic apparatus of the United States when they brutalized their slaves, as did American frontiersmen when they annihilated indigenous peoples for their land, as do policemen in their use of “legitimate force.” Ta-Nehisi Coates of “The Atlantic” writes of this racial double-standard: “Taken together, property damage and looting have been the most effective tools of social progress for white people in America. They describe everything from enslavement to Jim Crow laws to lynching to red-lining.” To criticize black protestors’ use of “property damage and looting” is especially 6
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ironic and hypocritical, given the fact that, as Coates points out, “ ‘Property damage and looting’ is a fairly accurate description of the emancipation of black people in 1865, who only five years earlier constituted some $4 billion in property.” Finally, there is a striking similarity in the way that white slaveholders in Haiti attempted to fit black revolution and black power into their worldview and the way that political commentators have contextualized the Ferguson protests. As Trouillot explains, faced with the reality of slave revolution, slaveholders did their best to trace the revolution to a non-black source because the alternative meant acknowledging the humanity and power of black slaves. He writes, in the voice of a slaveholder: “[The revolution] did not aim at revolutionary change, given its
Insinuations on TV networks about the protests deny black protestors the right to bodily and intellectual agency, in the exact same manner as ideologues in 1700s Haiti. royalist influences. It was not supported by the majority of the slave population. It was due to outside agitators. It was the unforeseen consequence of various conspiracies connived by non-slaves.” Today, political commentators and pundits are espousing nearly identical ideas in regards to the Ferguson protests. There has been a slew of insinuations on popular TV networks that the protests are motivated by a liberal agenda, that outsiders are “fanning the flames of racial tensions,” with one pundit saying on air, “Racial arsonists have worked these people up so much with propaganda that facts don’t matter.” Statements like these strip protesters of their power and autonomy by suggesting that they are simply the pawns of more powerful (re:white) entities. They serve to disempower protesters by
reinforcing a top-down model of power wherein only a political elite has the power to affect change, and they deny black protesters the right to bodily and intellectual agency in the exact same manner as ideologues in 18th century Haiti did.
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hen asked how she thought Black Lives Matter differs from her own generation’s black power movements, activist and organizer Rosa Clemente said at an event at Swarthmore that she is proud of the inclusiveness of Black Lives Matter. This opinion was echoed by another guest lecturer, historian Martha Biondi, at a presentation in late February. Black Lives Matter, founded by three women of color, two of whom identify as queer, has managed– imperfectly to be sure–to exist at the intersection of many communities who have historically been silenced and absent from the public sphere: black and brown people, queer and trans people, women, incarcerated or formerly incarcerated people. Black Lives Matter can theoretically be a space of visibility and anger for all these groups. With this kind of enormous potential hanging in the balance, the reemergence of rhetorical tropes like the ones Trouillot and Douglass articulate is extremely alarming. Given the history of silencing in slave-owning countries like this one, we must constantly be critical of the ways in which the media and public figures trivialize, delegitimize, and marginalize black voices. The stark similarities between the tools of silencing being used now and those that were used in times of slavery tell us that simply acknowledging that we do not live in a post-racial society is not enough to explain the injustices faced by the black community today. We have not even begun as a country, to synthesize or recognize the extent that our history of slavery dictates our sociopolitical climate. As Jennifer Morgan, a scholar of slavery and a friend of mine, writes, “We are appalled by these deaths. But we are equally appalled by our ability to make sense of them. We live embedded in the afterlife of slavery. We are a nation that has failed to grapple with our past.” If we are to ever confront this past, we must activate our collective memory and expand our notion of violence. The brutality of a public shooting, like a public lynching or whipping, is stark and clear, but the system of oppression that enables that brutality is grounded in quiet acts of silencing. u
Value DefaultSwap Photo essay by Erik Myers
Photography is an esoteric stasis, increasingly electronic. A product of the industrial revolution in Europe, it’s an inherently unnatural consumption, a colonization in other words, of colors, contrast, humanities, and motion, not unlike time or a CDS. The shutter speed, the high-definition sensors, and the frame in which we recognize the character of photography, like the face of a brother or a lover, seduce us like any given pleasure or power, becoming a paintbrush of the ego, like a habit or a lens held over, and in which we recognize Civilization, Value, and Profit. The arrangement and force of the pixels, like the moments they represent, appear like an equation of permanence under the light of equatorial suns and the Internet. They immortalize the arrangement and structure of my own estranging, shamelessly exotifying, exploitative gaze—a gaze that’s presented in the panorama, like any red-dirt road in Iten, Kenya, or tram in Istanbul, or bridge in Cairo—as the technology or “swap” that preserves, supplies, connects, electrifies, sustains, and robs difference of its difference, before it has the chance to disappear.
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PERSONAL ESSAYS
Easter Sunday by Colette Gerstmann
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aster Sunday, Brooklyn, NY. On the big table covered in green fabric there’s a platter of ham, aluminum-foil trays of baked ziti, and bunches of struffoli–crunchy puffs of dough covered in honey and sprinkles–tied up with a wide pink ribbon. It’s one of the few annual moments when, gathered with my mother’s family, I feel Italian-American. But it isn’t just the scents and tastes that seize me with this aspect of my identity. It’s the voices in the room, their thickness and humor, their sweeps of generosity and hisses of malice, and the direct correlation between volume and alcohol. These voices are the voices of Brooklyn. Not the Brooklyn of my high school, where you can see the Manhattan skyline across the river and take your oil paints and four-dollar latte a couple stops on the train to someone’s high-rise apartment in SoHo. This is a different Brooklyn, also mine. One where summer means Italian Ices and winter means poinsettia flowers, where you shop in bulk at Costco, where you become a lawyer, banker, teacher, or stay-at-home mom, and never marry someone who isn’t Catholic (well, until my mom did). Both my parents, born and raised in Brooklyn, grew up in middle-class, blue-collar families. My mother comes from an Italian-American community, and my father’s father was a German-Jewish immigrant. Both of my parents grew up speaking with Brooklyn accents, my father’s less pronounced than my mother’s because he eventually went to a private middle and high school in an upper-middle class neighborhood. As I gradually learned, when my mother left her parochial high school to attend Bryn Mawr College, she began to hate her accent. She felt as if her peers saw her as lower-class or less intelligent because of her voice. She committed herself to losing the accent, fitting her language to the crisp tones of her peers, whose mouths fit just right around the words “engender” and “microcosm.” Now, her accent is barely noticeable, and peeks through only when she’s upset, the
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a’s and o’s in words like “water” or “chore” suddenly bursting into an “oaw” sound. But her voice is not completely the same as the voices of New Yorkers who grew up in upper-middle class neighborhoods, and so another thing I gradually learned was that my voice is, consequentially, slightly different than those of my peers—or was, before I, less consciously than my mother did, began to change it to match those around me in the private school I went to for my whole life. My mother’s voice contains a combination of the remnants of her Brooklyn accent and the means she used to change it to a New York upper-middle class accent, and this mixture has trickled into my way of speaking. Since I was six, friends and classmates have commented on my “different” way of pronouncing certain words, and I will automatically clip and adjust my vowels and consonants to better mimic theirs. I used to think that I half-consciously shifted this accent just to fit in. I now wonder whether it was tied to other ways I tried to make myself and my family seem more like my friends and their families, whose houses were in prettier neighborhoods, who went to second homes upstate on the weekends, and who ate on ceramic plates while my family ate on paper plates because our apartment building at the time had no dishwashers. Maybe my language shift was an attempt to seem more upper-class, although when I was a child I was not fully conscious of class, only of the visual and tactile differences between my households and those of my friend’s. When I was eleven my family moved to be closer to my K-12 school. This move away from multiethnic, blue-collar Bay Ridge, where my mom grew up and where my grandparents still live, landed us a very small apartment (complete with a dishwasher!) in white, old-money Brooklyn Heights. The new apartment was the third floor of a pretty townhouse on a tree-lined street, pocketed between chandeliered four-story houses where families owned grand pianos and probably a Pollock or two. The apartment served as an attachment to my life at school. My upper-class private school, two blocks away from where I now lived,
really became my home, the anchor of my identity as a preteen and teen, and the central element in how I classed myself. Eleven was the beginning of when I started to socialize alone after school, the age at which it started to matter that I could walk home from my friend’s house after dark without fear of getting mugged or sexually harassed or assaulted, a fear that would have existed in Bay Ridge. As I grew, living in Brooklyn Heights opened up new class markers for me. On the one hand, we were different from other families at my school: my family still usually passed on vacation; my sister and I still shared a room; and my mom, my sister, and I stuck to H&M and Forever21 instead of Dior and Free People. But my interactions with peers on a day-to-day basis tended to mask any economic difference between us. I was able to do what it took to successfully socialize: I ate seven-dollar sandwiches with groups of friends at lunch, could go out to parties because I could afford taxis back from Manhattan at 3 AM, and enjoyed the same liberal education, which included live nude models in the painting studios and my Ancient Greek teacher discussing his hangover experience on Thursday mornings. Most importantly, by this time, I spoke in almost the same way as my peers, with a few differences so scarcely detectable that people thought I was exactly like they were. I began to internalize this idea, to feel strangely guilty for an economic status I didn’t really have, while making half-hearted excuses for why I was skipping Governor’s Ball or a senior summer trip to Europe, or why I needed to earn money during vacation. My mom enjoyed window shopping at the overpriced beauty product store on our block, examining the perfumes and cards and jeweled hair clips, but never bought anything. I remember being outraged when she laughingly quipped that the cashier probably thought she was “a rich lady who looked at lotion all day.” I wanted to show the cashier into my humble house, peel away the illusion of my mom sitting at a grand piano in a spacious living room with a bowl of kale in her lap. I wished that Brooklyn accent would surface then and there, that she hadn’t crushed it to
match so perfectly with the cashier’s conception of her. Nowadays, my main exposure to my family’s Brooklyn accent is Easter Sunday at my maternal grandparents’ house, or Christmas, or somebody’s wedding, confirmation, or funeral. My mom’s accent is more present when she’s around her family, because she shares this common voice with them, and they create a space in which she doesn’t feel judged by those around her. My grandfather makes fun of me for saying the word “sure” with a low “u” sound in the front of my mouth, instead of pronouncing it like “shore” (in
my grandfather’s voice the r is dropped as well). Sometimes it seems like I’m an outsider in his home because I lack this accent, just as my mother felt like an outsider in college because she had it. Often I believe my relatives consider me fundamentally different from themselves, because of my upbringing and my voice, because I say “sure” with a low “u,” never watch basketball, and talk more about Virginia Woolf than the Pope. Hearing my relatives’s accent when I’m around them does remind me of that perceived difference between us (and on the flip side of things, separates me, in my mind,
from many of my classmates and peers whose main exposure to this accent and culture was “The Nanny” or the occasional deep-Brooklyn pizzeria). But it also reminds me of the sheer awesomeness of language and how much meaning it contains. My tug-of-war between two neighborhoods, my mom’s attempt to squeeze an accent out of her voice, and that image of her at some fictional grand piano eating kale have left a lasting effect on the way I speak, and, while frustrating and at times upsetting, have made my voice mine–a reflection of my own personal Brooklyn, right there on my tongue. u
Apertura by Amy DiPierro
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ne day this winter, I switched on my phone after an exam and walked outside. “U.S. to Restore Full Relations With Cuba,” said the first notification on my screen. I sat down on the curb and wept openly. “It’s good news,” I sputtered by way of explanation to the stranger who wrapped an arm over my shoulders. “It’s really good news.” And maybe it was. That headline meant apertura, open roads to Cuba. I cried, if only because I suddenly remembered how long they had been closed. My first call was to my mom. “Did you hear what happened?” I said between sobs, then realized how bad that sounded, then apologized, then finally told her the news. “I have some calls to make,” she said when she had recovered herself. I imagined the headline spreading like this, from one Cuban-American to the next, in an endless chain of phone calls -“Did you hear what happened?” My next call was to a friend with a good bottle of Caribbean rum. This was December 17th, 53 years to the day since my mom and her parents arrived in New York City from Cuba after a three and a half month stopover in Venezuela, and one day after a straw poll of my History seminar titled “Reform & Revolution in Latin America” found that zero out of six people thought Washington and Havana would reset ties any time soon. “Not until both Castros are dead,” one
of us said, the rest nodding along sagely. “And Cubans live forever.” Something left me smirking to hear my peers imply Cuban stubbornness and life expectancy could drive international politics, but I slid it under my notebook like a love note passed in class. Maybe the same something made me cry with joy when I read that headline later, only to blush when I saw my situational Cubanness showing. I half recall what Cuba meant to me before I became a student of my family’s history. My grandfather driving his turquoise Cadillac over U.S. Interstate 95 in the late 1970s. Two stowaways on a boat to Venezuela in 1961. Abuelita as a young woman strolling a circular plaza in Tuinucu, Cuba, smiling at suitors. These are stories from my mom, told and retold when I was a kid. But now I am a revisionist historian to my memories of her memories of her parents’ memories, calling my own bluff on the details I have misfilled for fear of blank space. Another phone call to my mom leaves me crossing out proper nouns and characterizations. The Cadillac turns out to be a Buick Electra 225. The stowaways are now a pair of cheap ticket-holders. The plaza migrates from small-town Tuinucu to the county seat in Sancti Spiritus. The truth is, I have inherited my family’s nostalgia for Cuba more than the memory of their having been there. My grandfather died at 38, dreaming he could make a new Cuba in the U.S., complete with the loved ones he convinced to emigrate and the staple foods he missed from home. He distributed fresh produce from Latin America and from Cuban ex-
pats in Florida. His Buick visited growers, and restaurants, and lunch counters. His legend stands 12 feet tall. My Abuelita lives, and at 82, her days are dreams in which Cuba is in the United States or perhaps the other way around. She might wake an old woman in New Jersey, but by midday, when the sun is still high, Abuelita is a teenager in Sancti Spiritus. Her parents are expecting her home, and it is getting darker. “Anin,” she says to my mom in Spanish, using a favorite pet name, “don’t you think it’s getting late? When are you going to take me home?” To distract her, my mom finds Beny More singing “Como Fue” on YouTube. Abuelita remembers every word. Her brain’s blood vessels are the New Jersey Turnpike at rush hour, highways with stop and go traffic. Abuelita has had two minor strokes in her frontal lobe and many passing ones since I was in high school. She has Alzheimer’s disease. One day she looked out her front window and instead saw an imagined geography carved by the bottlenecks in her mind. She could not be distracted. My mom walked her outside, and together, among Bergen County bi-levels and ranches, they searched for her parents’ townhouse in Sancti Spiritus. I want to see meaning in all of this. That apertura does not mean I-95 will one day extend from Miami to Cuba, but that my grandfather would forgive me for dreaming of him behind the wheel of a Cadillac on that great American highway. That Sancti Spiritus does not lie across my Abuelita’s front lawn, but that she knows it is getting closer. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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FICTION: Three short stories
When Pluto drops in by Rose Wunrow — for Jack Kerouac — s soon as you open your eyes, you know something’s up. Pluto, that renegade stripped of stellar status, hangs from a piece of dental floss over your bed. Sunk so low. You say, “Pluto, that’s no way to behave.” You try to think of the best way to cheer him up. You talk about the human condition. You talk about social constructs. “Being a planet is really a social construct anyway. Alienation is actually a reflection of the flaws of a society that alienates.” Pluto bobs up and down dejectedly. He tells you how hard it is to properly feel Loneliness and Despair when he’s stuck in a fixed trajectory, a rigid ellipse, an endless revolution. You cut Pluto down from the ceiling. “Let’s go for a walk,” you say. “You’re going to see things that the stars have never seen up close.” You stick Pluto on your shoulder. He squats there feebly, completely disinterested as you unlock the door. You jump onto the porch with a triumphant “ta-daaaa,” pointing up to that extraordinary blue blue sky. “What a color, eh, Pluto?” Pluto tells you he can’t see anything. It seems like some rules still apply during his visit. Any light from the earth will reach him in several thousand years. You try to think of all the ways to make him feel better. There’s exercise, for one, but you don’t know if you could stomach hitting Pluto with a tennis racket or rolling him down towards the pins in a bowling alley. You consider dipping him in peppermint tea and worry about setting off a horrible chemical reaction. You consider giving him a cigarette. He doesn’t seem to have a mouth and it seems like an impolite question to ask. You imagine Pluto becoming a chainsmoker and shriveling up like a blackened lung, and you let out a giggle.
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The universe is full of other people’s metaphors that are his reality. He says the universe is an idea of freedom. 14
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“What’s funny?” asks Pluto. “Nothing. Want to go to the movies?” The movie you pick is the latest Transformers film, because you figure there are enough explosions to keep Pluto entertained, even if he can’t see the screen. Pluto sits nestled in buttery popcorn while you eat around him. Sometimes there are long scenes without dialogue. You try to explain what’s happening. The woman in front of you whips around and says accusingly, “Do you mind?” and Pluto says, “No, thank you for asking,” and you snatch the popcorn bag with Pluto in it and dash out of the aisle before the woman can put two and two together and recognize Pluto from her old science textbook. “That was close!” you exclaim in the bathroom, putting Pluto in the sink and rinsing off the butter and salt. Pluto is fuming. Physically steaming. You stick him under the hand dryer until he stops. Outside of the cinema, the late afternoon gathers in the light with businesslike fingers, dusting the streets with cold shade. Pluto glows a dark dusky blue. Your shoulder begins to ache from carrying him, so you take Pluto into a diner and make him a nest of napkins where he can sit without rolling off of the table. The diner serves all-day breakfast. You buy a plate of bacon for Pluto because you think it is a universal truth that the smell of bacon uplifts low spirits. “Pluto, what’s it like out there in space?” He is silent for a minute. Then he starts to speak. He tells you about blindness. About smallness; about orbiting around something infinitely warm, and never feeling its heat. In the dark are comets shooting off, drunken newborns hell-bent on burning. He says, “I wish I could have been a skitterish passionate spark.” He says the universe is hyperawareness–wanting to seize everything. Then remembering that bodies of rock and ice don’t have hands. The universe is full of other people’s metaphors that are his reality. He says the universe is an idea of freedom. Then remembering that self-perception is about prescribed words: that is the ellipse; that is the revolution. He remembers he’s not alive at all. When he was diagnosed as a planet, he was the God of the Underworld. With a trimmed name, he is dwarfed. “Is that a planet?” goes the question. There is a checklist that needs to be filled out. “Do you self-identify as a planet? But are you really…? Are you really?” He talks about shame for being so small. He talks about wanting to be a comet. He dreamed about exploding, but he wasn’t quite sure how to do it right. That’s why he fell from the sky. You lean over Pluto where he wallows in a bed of damp diner napkins in front of the cold plate of
bacon. “Look, Pluto, what does the name matter anyway? You’re walking down the street and you see a kind of bird, and you don’t know what specific type of bird it is, so maybe you say ‘I don’t know what that is’ but you do, even without the word, because you saw it with your own eyes, so what does it matter if you don’t have the word? It’s still real, see?” Pluto is silent. It’s impossible to figure out what’s going on in his head. You’re wondering if you should have picked an example without streets and birds–maybe he didn’t understand. You’re wondering if your example makes sense in your own head. You give up on the example with a little too much eagerness. “Come on, let’s go home,” you say, lifting Pluto with both hands. You give him a sort of hug, bringing him to your chest. You don’t care how much he weighs. You’re glad Pluto is blind and can’t see that your eyes are tearing up and you’re getting emotional. You want to protect Pluto. You carry Pluto down the street towards your house. The autumn leaves, varnished gray by dusk, crunch and are dragged along with your scuffing feet. Because of the drifts of dead leaves, you misjudge the height of the next curb and trip magnificently. Your arms spread open in a shocked helpless gesture. Pluto falls to the asphalt. He tumbles into the scummy groove of the gutter. “Pluto!” you exclaim. Pluto didn’t come with brakes. He begins to roll along the gutter, faster and faster, gaining momentum as the road slants slowly downwards. What if Pluto rolls out and gets hit by a car? You begin to run. He is burning brighter. His path begins to bring sparks out of the pavement. “Hang on, Pluto, I’ll catch you!” you yell, drawing abreast of him, but Pluto seems content. He makes a noise that sounds like laughing, letting out wild guffaws of sparks, flying straight on in a dizzying wheeling blur. As he accelerates you know you can’t keep up with him anymore, and you’re angry with him for leaving you so abruptly. “Go on then! Just roll away!” you shout. You stop running, bent double, wheezing. Pluto yells goodbye. In the last moment before he shoots out of sight, he tells you he’ll come back. You go back to the house. Your heart gallops and your brain buzzes with energy from the mad chase. Glancing into the mirror in the hallway, you can see that Pluto’s given you dark circles under your eyes. “Pluto’s a crazy bastard,” you say to the leftover dental floss on the ceiling. You think about cutting it off, but Pluto said he’d be back. You let it dangle there over your bed. When you slip under the sheets and see the line of shadow drawn over the ceiling by the bit of string, you think of the gray gutter and broken ellipses. You try not to feel lonely when you turn the lights off. u
FICTION: Three short stories
Pollyanna by Emily Simon
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ollyanna likes Tinder. - She’s been using the app for a week now, and she’s starting to notice some patterns. The depicted figures aren’t people, exactly; they’re the decisions people make. Value judgments. Reasoning. - The guys pose with other girls, objectively attractive ones. They present their heartiest thumbs up. They point their fingers like guns or they raise their arms so their arms look like guns. They squint. They part their lips as if to breathe or say something enticing and meaningless, like breath. They all nod without moving. - Some of the guys look like girls. Some of them must be girls. - Some of the guys want you to see them doing different things. There’s a lot of doing—with different people, in different places. They play instruments, they wear scuba gear, they hold one red solo cup, they hold two, they wear hats and glasses, they dangle from mountain rock, they touch the sky. - A lot of them tell you exactly how tall they are. Pollyanna doesn’t think she should care. She’s not sure that she does. - Pollyanna is at a bar with an old friend tonight. They went together to meet some other old friends. Except the other old friends have never really been friends to them. They are the people Pollyanna and her old friend (her real one) went around with for a time. - Pollyanna doesn’t miss that time, and she had come to believe that her friend didn’t either. But at the bar with the people they went around with for a time, Pollyanna is concerned that she has been mistaken—that her old friend has decided, somewhere between that long-gone time and this present one, that these people have been something different all along. - Pollyanna’s old friend used to carry big red lollipops in her purse. She doesn’t anymore. At least, not until this night, when she pulled one out in the cab on the way to the bar. This was disorienting for Pollyanna. - Nothing made her old friend’s lips so red, so slick and blood-fresh, as the lollipops she carried in her purse. - Pollyanna asked her old friend for a lollipop and the one she gave her was green. - One of the boys is tall and one of them is not. Both of them should be harmless, but Pollyanna SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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knows that at least one of them was dangerous. This happens to be the tall one. - People grow up short or tall, quiet or loquacious, eager or reticent, reserved or animated. Some sit up straight and others slouch. Some people are energizing, others prefer to be energized, and others, Pollyanna believes, simply are however they are. - Some people offer to buy drinks for the girls they used to go around with—drinks for both girls, though the gesture is really for one of them. - Pollyanna is suspicious of this guy. - Pollyanna does not enjoy her suspicions. But she has them nonetheless, when provoked. - Pollyanna would kill for an even, easy temperament.
Everyone goes through Puberty. There’s a time in Life set aside for that very process. But Pollyanna isn’t sure that the Puberty feeling ever really goes away, after the growing stops. Tinder guys are the same: Puberty. - She would also kill for faith in a higher power—but no faith so strong as to condone violence. - She can’t remember ever having a decidedly positive experience at a bar. But has any experience ever been or felt decidedly so? - The tall person from another time—ages ago, when Pollyanna and her friend were different friends—is decidedly bad. Pollyanna knows this person from a time that was decidedly bad, worse for her old friend than for her. - Experiences add up and get generalized. This is how Pollyanna can tell the difference between that other time and this present one. - One hopes that the present time is better than the times before. Positivity is about comparisons: “good” is always relative to “bad.” - The tall one has always had a corrupted nose. Broken and purple in the middle. Pollyanna wonders if this is the root of the problem. - Pollyanna still believes that the most harmful people are also the most tender. The ones who smoke cigarettes are neither here nor there. - This bar smells like all the bars she’s ever visited: it’s one of them and all of them. - Her old friend hasn’t always been her friend. 16
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There were years of apartness, when other friends swelled up and tore between them, fast and enormous like ocean water, like high tide. Those other friends, the newer ones, they didn’t necessarily mean any harm by it. But there they were, where they hadn’t been before. - Tonight, Pollyanna and her old friend are doing something together, on their own. They went out to this bar. They sit next to each other now, on twin bar stools. They’ve always been roughly the same height. - They are still grateful to have had each other when everyone else was going through Puberty. It was like they counted as high as they could before they too started to change. - Everyone goes through Puberty. There’s a time in Life set aside for that very process. But Pollyanna isn’t sure that the Puberty feeling ever really goes away, after the growing stops. - Pollyanna has been watching the tall one since she and her friend sat down, and if she had to say something about him of which she was sure, it would be the one word: Puberty. - Tinder guys are the same: Puberty. Perhaps the girls too, but Pollyanna couldn’t say for sure. - Pollyanna wonders if boyfriends and girlfriends go to bars together, or if bars are just for girls and their old friends to meet people who, for whatever reason, are, disturbingly or intriguingly, pubescent. - In the case of this particular meeting, with the people Pollyanna and her old friend went around with for a time, the effect is perplexing, disappointing, and then, distressing. - Pollyanna taps the flame icon, the flat little sticker, and begins swiping through the lineup of eligible faces. No, no, no, no, and her thumb gets tired so she switches to the pinky finger of her other hand. - What kind of world is this where Pollyanna can flip through a city of men like a deck of cards? What kind of world makes room for this kind of city, and what kind of bar is so hospitable to antisocial behavior like Pollyanna’s? - Pollyanna turns her phone face down and the tall one is looking at her. - Pollyanna always expects to find herself in eye contact with another person when she quits doing something she shouldn’t. She isn’t surprised to find herself in this predicament now, with the tall person her old friend used to go with. Pollyanna stares back. - When Pollyanna stares, she stares harder than most people. - She wants to make this clear now: that staring is always a contest and that she is its undisputed winner. - Her old friend remembers. She was at the water park in the fourth grade when Pollyanna didn’t like the way the Splish Splash employee working the flume ride was helping the two of them into their plastic log.
Illustration by Nyantee Asherman
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- Pollyanna starts to tell this story now, breaks her stare and turns toward the attention of her old friend. But her old friend is looking elsewhere, and she’s sucking harder than ever on her red lollipop. - It’s just about 3 a.m., and shouldn’t bars close at 3 a.m.? Nothing good ever happens between the hours of 3 and 6 a.m. Pollyanna can’t think of one good thing. Time to go, she says. - On the street, Pollyanna bums a cigarette from the person who wasn’t tall then and might be even less tall now. He blows smoke in her hair
She’s afraid the people she and her old friend used to see often but, until now, have made a point not to see, will gather that she’s had a lot of sex, but only with one person. and she thinks about the clean cotton pillow on her bed at home. - Sometimes walking is intimate, and Pollyanna wants to fake her stride. She’s afraid the people she and her old friend used to see often but, until now, have made a point not to see, will gather that she’s had a lot of sex, but only with one person. - Between the time when she and her old friend used to go with them and now, Pollyanna has spent many free nights with that one person. - Tinder is fun, like solitaire. - The four of them pile into a cab going uptown and Pollyanna can tell that her old friend is drunk. As for herself, this fact is irrelevant. - Pollyanna, her old friend, and the tall person get out together. The other person continues on uptown. He’s the one that never unzipped his coat all those years before and who kept it zipped tonight, at the bar and in the passenger seat of the taxicab. - The tall one should go west, and Pollyanna would like to see him start out in that general direction, but she knows she won’t. She lingers on the corner with him and her old friend for a little while longer—she’d like to prove her point—until she’s satisfied with the silence she’s laid like a blueprint at their feet. - Turning to go is, and always has been, and always will be, the hardest thing to do. - But every time she musters it she feels a little taller. u 18
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FICTION: Three short stories
Prism by Xavier Lee
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y father died last night. When my mother called him for breakfast, he did not respond. She went back into her bedroom and found him lying there, looking as if he were asleep. She did not cry. She lit a cigarette and watched the body for thirty minutes, realizing that the moment she had been avoiding for years was now upon her. As I walked into the room, it was her I watched while my father’s body grew cold and the paramedics filtered in and out. Her eyes were river stones and the only movement that I could see from where I stood was the horizontal sway of her hand, her wrist bringing the cigarette to her lips where she pulled hard, aggressively so, and released a sole pillar. When the body was taken away, she put the cigarette out and did not smoke again.
I
prayed for the second time in years this morning. Seven hours without my father; I did not sleep very much last night. I watched darkness both within and without my eyelids—I felt suspended and I felt entrapped, more so than I did at that shitty school—I really should transfer, but I realize when the thought appears in my mind that it is futile. Where can I go? I am not one to readily accept change—I cling to stagnation. You know this very well. I’d rather suffer at Barrow, knowing my suffering may bring me some form of happiness, may replace further suffering at some later time, than leave, knowing that I will have to endure it nonetheless. It is ruining to think of God as the the hand who rations out misery but we all have our conceptions
of what He is or is not. Who are you to question mine? Perhaps I am simply mired in the glorification of my own distress. Whatever it is, it is too late to change. Human beings do not change and if they do, they do not move forward. God, you have taken my father from me. But I cannot say I was surprised. It was a matter of time, and I thank you for allowing me to be here for him when he passed. Hopefully he is with you.... I paused a while because I had started to cry. Give me a sign that he is with you.... give me a sign that I should continue trusting in you, that I should continue to believe in you, knowing you have done such terrible things to me, knowing that you have caused me to feel this way, to hate everyone, to feel hated by everyone. Give me a sign that I still need your guidance, that you still possess the power to lift me up and lead me on the path towards happiness. Give me something for all the things you have taken away. The only noise in the house was the sound of the waves washing against the shore. It was high tide and the water was halfway to the backsteps. I could see a crab inching its way towards the shore horizontally. Just as its feet touched the water’s edge, a gull swooped down and picked it up, in the yellow tumult severing its pincer.
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e did not have a funeral. My mother sent out a letter to our relatives, informing them of the inevitability to which they had all become aware. My father did not want a funeral and my mother listened to his requests, respecting her husband’s wishes in death as she did in life. We spread his ashes in the ocean, as he requested. It was a somber and rather numb ceremony. My mother did not speak to anyone or say any remarks in his memory. She simply walked inside after it was done, opened a bottle of wine and retired to the chemo room. I did not see her for the rest of the night.
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his morning I was packing my bags to go home when my mother walked into the room and stood behind me, watching me. She then spoke for the first time in
three days. You cannot leave me here. I had never heard my mother sound so vulnerable, but I had never seen her so drunk; so early in the morning, either. I have no one. I don’t want to be on this fucking island anymore. You must take me with you, you must. ~ There’s Smyrna. She’ll take care of you. If it’s any consolation I will visit you. Often, even. ~ I don’t give a fuck about Smyrna. She isn’t my blood, my kin. You are now my everything. ~ Please don’t suddenly pay attention to me now, after nineteen years of being picked up and put down. You can at least be respectful. ~ Do not tell me how to grieve! She slammed the glass on the dresser, creating a splash, getting liquor all over her hand. I noticed and handed her some tissues from the bedside, but she did not move her eyes from looking into mine. He was my father. It’s hard for me, too, I know but you’ll be okay. He didn’t want you to grieve his death. ~ The heart is rebellious. It does not listen to reason, is not controlled by the mind. It feels and it reacts and it yearns and it weeps. Your father was the love of my life and I told myself every day that my years were numbered and it still caught me off guard when it happened. I cannot live in this house alone. You have to take me with you. ~ Where will you stay? In my apartment? There’s not enough room and you’d never like it. ~ I’ll figure it out when I get home. Please, my child. Please. Help your mother. She was silent for a long time as she began to cry destructively, her entire body shuddering, heaving, doubled-over, screaming. I need you! I cannot stay here.
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I
went to the Prism group for our final meeting that Friday. Dr. Vaughn asked to see me in a private session and I told her everything, even the bit about my mother. She looked sympathetic and if she weren’t a paid professional, I probably would have believed that the feelings she projected so earnestly on her face, the pity and anguish which undulated along her brow, were genuine. I did not feel any form of catharsis from telling her my story and she sensed this from the rather blasé way I narrated it all, as if I were narrating the synopsis of some melodrama I had read on the plane to Newark. Perhaps this is my reaction to grief. The manifestation of my own narcissism, my fiendish pride. I find this lack of reaction, the span before exhalation, to be more disturbing than my father’s death. I am only moved by that which pertains to me directly, by the effects of my worldview, the bitter zeitgeist of my own timeline. O memory, O selfishness— You are the slavers who have opened my back!
I
spoke for the first time in the Prism group today. Well, I spoke genuinely for the first time. Usually I respond to questions I am asked in a half-ass manner, more deflective than descriptive. But today I spoke and the entire room listened with open ears and turning hearts. My father died four days ago and I’m still waiting for a reaction. I’m afraid that the waiting is my reaction. Before he died, my father told me that I had almost singlehandedly ruined his life. He and my mother were en route to be partners at their law firm when I was conceived. My mother was furious at herself and at my father and my father felt powerless, stunted, denied. He said he wanted to curse me, wanted me to go away so that they could reach their goal. But my parents were God-fearing Christians, or at least they pretended to be, and did not do what was always a possibility in their minds. I was born on Christmas Day and my father saw me and held me and told me that all the hate he had felt towards me, all the resentment and fury and bile he had harbored towards his unborn
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child dissolved into love and fear. Love for one’s child, fear for their future – He shook as he held me, and as my mother watched wearily—she would be suspicious of me until my first birthday—he started to cry, repeating over and over “God don’t do it! I take it back! I take it all back!” He did not look at me, but watched the moon reflected on the water’s surface, the city of Basseterre a pastel lull in our periphery. He then turned to me and said he’d always love me and that he knew from the moment he first held me that a father’s love is more powerful than anything a man can possess and more valuable than anything a figure can purchase. And he kissed me and he told me to find happiness in my life, for I was the one who brought it to him. After contemplating his words for a few hours, I decided that I was going to tell him why I had stayed away so long. I decided on doing it in the morning. I woke up rather early – breakfast had already been cooked and was waiting under the hood – and I knocked on my parents’ bedroom door to hear no reply. I knocked again and heard nothing. Then I pushed the door open and called my father, only to hear silence. I then saw him in his bed, on his side. My mother was sitting on a chaise on the opposite side of the wall, in the direct line of light of the bay window. She was smoking a cigarette and had no ashtray. She then turned to me and I knew he was gone. And I felt so empty. I did not feel anything but emptiness. As I called the hospital, I spoke with emptiness. As the men knocked at the door, I welcomed them to an empty house. As I watched the ambulance drive away, I felt empty. I don’t have anything more to say. My mother is living with me now. She does not like my apartment. I will be taking a leave of absence in the fall. I do not know if I’ll be back. Thus the last player in our troupe— the savage noble, the color blue—spoke as the final session whispered to a close. u
BOOKS Looking at Houellebecq beyond polemics
REVIEW
“Soumission,” the latest offering from highly contentious and wildly popular French writer Michel Houellebecq, questions what it means to submit to religion, politics, or another individual
Michel Houellebecq.
by Aileen Eisenberg
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n 2022, the Muslim Fraternity governs France. Women vanish from the professional realm. University professors have to convert to Islam in order to maintain their positions. Such is, at least, the reality to which Michel Houellebecq transports readers in his most recent book, “Soumission” (“Submission,” in English).
Photo courtesy of les4verites.com
Emerging onto the French literary scene in early January this year, the book joins Houellebecq’s long list of highly contentious, and very popular, works (including “Les particules élémentaires,” “Plateforme,” and “La carte et le territoire”). Although Houellebecq is one of France’s best-selling contemporary authors, one needs only a cursory glance at his books to see that he has a penchant for upsetting readers. For example, in “Plateforme,” which was published in
Soumission by Michel Houellebecq FRENCH AND EUROPEAN PUBLICATIONS INC 320 pages | $45
2001, the main character expresses a deep hatred for Islam, wishing that all Muslims would die. “Plateforme,” along with statements Houellebecq has made during interviews, continues to spark outrage SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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and debate today. From his condemnation of Islam to his crude sexual objectification of women, Houellebecq writes controversy. It is not surprising, then, that “Soumission” has reinforced the author’s notoriety. Set in a not-so-distant future Paris, the book details the life of François, a literature teacher at the Sorbonne. Alongside his musings on his intellectual life and his sexual relationships with female students are François’s observations on the political transformations that occur in France. For the presidential elections, two candidates emerge at the forefront: Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National, and Mohammed Ben Abbes, leader of the new Muslim Fraternity (a fictional party loosely based off of the Muslim Brotherhood). In an effort to prevent Le Pen from winning the election, the Socialist Party forms a coalition with the Muslim Fraternity. Thus, in what is a very unforeseen outcome, the Muslim Fraternity wins the presidency. What follows the elections is, in many ways, disorienting. Much of the political transition occurs while François fades in and out of Paris. In light of the violence that takes place in the capital, he escapes to the country and falls out of touch with the reality of the elections. Certain changes, though, are evident. Women in public are veiled and no longer wear the form-fitting clothing in which François had formerly delighted himself. Ben Abbes works to bring Turkey, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria into the European Union. French Universities adopt an Islamic curriculum. To be brief, French secularism, for better or worse, is dead. The political narrative of “Soumission” is provocative, particularly to readers that are familiar with Houellebecq’s writing. Houellebecq integrates actual political figures with an imagined political scenario. His intertwining of fiction and reality is typical of the way in which he criticizes contemporary French culture. More importantly, though, is the particular interest that he takes in Islam. Houellebecq’s disdain for the religion is hardly a secret. In a 2001 interview with L’Express, he stated that he found Islam to be the stupidest religion in the world. Much of the popular interest in “Soumission” stems from Houellebecq’s pre-established, polemical relationship with the religion. Paralleling his critique of Islam is his critique of French politics—in one interview, he fervently stated that he was not a citizen and he never had the desire to 22
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be one. Given Houellebecq’s unfavorable opinions on religion and politics, one would expect this book to offer a harsher depiction of France under the Muslim Fraternity than it actually does. Rather than a fatalistic, dystopic future, Houellebecq presents a France that flourishes under Ben Abbes. The text seems to admire the political, educational, and familial changes that occur with the Muslim Fraternity. Houellebecq’s reputation anticipates the debates surrounding this book. It is unsurprising that the mere act of writing a novel about an Islamic French government would generate so much discussion; controversy does, after all, sell. It is, however, important to recognize the tendency to reduce a literary work to a particular political argument. Many of the initial reactions to “Soumission” narrowly focused on the book’s discussion of Islam, overlooking more than half of the text. If Houellebecq is known for his ability to provoke controversy, he should equally be known for his sharp, understated prose and sardonic depictions of characters. In typical Houellebecqian fashion, “Soumission” takes an almost sociological approach to detailing, and thus critiquing, French daily life. Sex is discussed from an objective, somewhat indifferent point of view. French intellectualism becomes an object to be studied and catalogued. François seems inexplicably distant from it all, devoid of any strong feelings or opinions. Rather than being a mark of bad writing, Houellebecq’s flattened tone is intentional and serves to highlight the monotony of François’ life. François embodies the Houellebecqian hero. That is to say, he is an anti-hero. From his ritualistic consumption of microwavable Indian meals to his disinterested encounters with female escorts, François is hardly a likeable character. He lives alone. His parents have died. Myriam, his former girlfriend, leaves him to flee to Israel with other French Jews. And, François’s acerbic, sometimes vitriolic criticisms of those around him only serve to isolate him further. Having built himself off of his studies of J.K. Huysman, a 19th century French novelist, François can be defined by little more than his intellect. In fact, he seems to be most alive when he experiences life vicariously through the literary figure that he studies. This lack of redeeming qualities is important, particularly in light of Houellebecq’s other works. Houellebecq’s main characters, often named after
himself, tend to represent the very thing of which he is most critical. Herein lies the true target of the caustic writing in “Soumission”: the French academics. While readers may look to the French Muslim Fraternity to find controversial, unforgiving representations of Islam, it is the French academics that suffer at the hand of the author. These intellects are depicted as fickle and spineless, bending their interpretations of literature to the Islamic regime. The professors, François included, use their literary inspirations to justify their conversion when, in reality, they do so to benefit from the new high salaries and approved polygamy. In short, it is the French intellectuals, more than the members of the Muslim Fraternity, that Houellebecq attacks in “Soumission.” There is, of course, much more to “Soumission” than what can fit in a single book review. Beyond the political story are questions about modern day sex and intimacy, commodification, and the relationships we form with the powerful world of literature. One might even read this book and find a bit of humor in it— albeit a sort of dry, self-loathing humor: “I didn’t even want to fuck, well I wanted to fuck a little bit but I wanted to die at the same time.” Art is, by no means, neutral. While “Soumission” may not be the blatant, direct attack on Islam that it is anticipated to be, Houellebecq’s reputation, along with the recent Charlie Hebdo shooting, naturally renders the book a political subject. It would be foolish to disregard the implications that this book has for French Muslims. That said, there is value in looking at the book beyond polemics. In his criticism of the French intellectual man, and of the consumer-driven Western society, Houellebecq presents an interesting question: what does it mean to submit, be it to a religion, to politics, or to other individuals? That question is, of course, the book’s namesake. Houellebecq is renowned for being a satirist. No one is safe from his writing, not even himself. What is impressive about his writing, at the very least, is the way in which his fiction creates waves in our reality. “Soumission” ends on a decidedly final note; François, thinking of his upcoming conversion to Islam, remarks, “I would have nothing to regret.” The book, however, is far from finished. It will likely continue to top sales charts and inspire intense debate. As for Houellebecq, much like François, he has nothing to regret. u
A glimpse at humanity in Guantánamo ‘Guantánamo Diary’ forces the reader to confront the question of whether American democracy has passed the test to which it was subjected with the 2001 terrorist attacks
by Noah Weinthal
A
s a middle and high schooler, I was maybe just shy of addicted to Call of Duty. One of the curiosities of this game that consumed an embarrassing amount of my life was how, between violent virtual deaths, the gamemakers included quotes for the angsty teenager to ponder as their character reset. From the oft-repeated Edmund Burke’s “All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing,” to the insightful Abraham Lincoln’s “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power,” to the ironically included Dick Cheney’s “It is easy to take liberty for granted when you have never had it taken from you,” these quotes—when juxtaposed against the sometimes hyper-patriotic imagery of the modern war game—instilled a sense that, even in the chaos and crisis of war, our military and its leadership would conduct themselves with a sense of respect for the errors of the past and a determination to do better in the future. I have no doubt that with the passing of time, history’s judgment on the United States’s treatment of prisoners in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks will grow harsher. It may be hard for the coming generations to understand the raw, visceral horror of that day—I myself was only in the third grade—and I am sure that the majority of Americans would have readily compromised even the most deeply held of their beliefs in the name of security. I’m sure the calculus of terror immediately after the Pearl Harbor attacks led the public to acquiesce to, if not wholeheartedly support, the internment of Japanese Americans. But while those internment camps have grown to be seen as one of the greatest mistakes in the entirety of modern American history, the denial of fundamental liberties to persons deemed enemy combatants is still strikingly familiar in American popular culture. Cop dramas like NCIS and Blue Bloods comfortably throw around the name Guantánamo as a means of intimidating clueless suspects, and a poll from the left-leaning Huffington Post in
2013 found that around half of Americans still believe that everyone detained there is dangerous. Even after the revelations of the recently disclosed report revealing systematic torture of the prisoners detained at Guantánamo, the prison exists for most as a political talking point, an abstraction and metaphor for the immediate post-9/11 world. What is too often overlooked is that Guantánamo is currently the holding place for 122 people, 35 of whom are classified as being held “indefinitely.” Perhaps one reason for this is the veil of secrecy surrounding the Guantánamo inmates. For years they have been called everything from terrorists to torture victims, but the opportunities to hear from the detainees themselves have been few and far between. “Guantánamo Diary” is an engaging narrative of a well-educated man plucked from his comfortable life in Mauritania and sent on a journey from prison to prison before landing at Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp, termed GTMO throughout. What makes this narrative truly remarkable, though, is that it was hand-written by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who remains imprisoned at GTMO today. The editor, Larry Siems, describes how Slahi picked up the limited vocabulary of English found in the manuscript from his guards and from novels, and how his lawyers fought for more than six years to have the material published. The very fact of the book’s existence is an accomplishment of its own, but turning the pages forces the reader to confront a question Slahi himself poses near the end of the book: “Has the American democracy passed the test it was subjected to with the 2001 terrorist attacks?” The extensive introduction by Larry Siems efficiently outlines the facts and background surrounding Slahi’s arrest and detention. Siems doesn’t hesitate to outline the encounters, however brief, that Slahi had with known terrorists and his involvement in Al-Qaeda’s Jihad against Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, but he leaves the reader with little doubt as to Slahi’s credibility as a narrator and as a victim of circumstance more than anything else. In fact, the introduction was so thorough that
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Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY 432 pages | $22
as I began to read the first few pages of the actual account, I worried that it would be little more than a more drawn-out, personal account of the facts that I had just digested. I read quickly at first, until a few pages in I came upon a sentence that sent a chill through my spine and forced me to stop. “Wahrheit macht frei, the truth sets you free” I imagine that the exact point at which Slahi’s tale will grab you varies from person to person depending on the particular circumstances of your life, though I’d guess it would be within the first dozen pages or so. For me, the fact that an official voice at any level of the government of the nation I call home would allude—even if the intentionality is left unclear—to the slogan “Arbeit macht frei,” that adorned the gates to the concentration camps of Hitler’s Germany, very quickly made me realize that this was going to be much more than a simple recounting of a sordid point in American history. Slahi’s narrative voice remains calm as he recounts physical and verbal abuse, sexual assault, psychological trauma, and a variety of other tortures he had to endure while in the custody of the United States. His writing style varies: long stretches written with informal colloquialisms are punctuated by passages of exposition that read with a clarity and depth remarkable for someone writing in their fourth language. His occasional mistakes or peculiarities (‘Intels’ for intelligence, for example, and misuse of the adjective ‘dead’) enhance, rather than distract, from the narrative. The simplicity of his vocabulary makes his observations accessible and authentic—he does not hide behind metaphor or flowery language. He does not shy away from pointing out the obvious logical flaws and hypocrisies that permeate the United States’s policies, but his criticisms never sound desperate or fanatical. Before permitting its publication, the SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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The pages of “Guantánamo Diary.”
United States government redacted large swaths of the manuscript with black ink. Though completely unintentional as far as the author was concerned, these marks come to function as an interesting literary device. Siems faithfully reproduced these redactions in print, footnoting where he had an educated guess as to what might lie beneath the censor’s broad stroke. The actual content obliterated by these black bars ranges from the obvious—personally identifying details about government agents and foreign officials—to the inconsistent— some individual’s names seem from context to be redacted during the first few mentions only to be left unredacted later in the manuscript—to the downright bizarre— Slahi includes a poem he wrote, only to have everything but the introduction “One of my poems went” completely redacted. This latter form of censorship leads to an almost comically unintentional metaphor as the reader wanders through more than a page of blacked-out paragraphs. The effect, overall, is disorienting. The reader’s head swirls as new characters are introduced but remain faceless. Dialogue is difficult to track as the speaker’s names are obscured and entire passages end unconcluded for critical context’s censorship. Plot threads are derailed seemingly at random after pages of development and pages are fragmented by bits of information hidden in plain sight. It is perhaps the narrative’s greatest irony: in seeking to protect the information they deem sensitive, the United States government may inadvertently have given readers a window into the intense feelings of Kafka-esque absurdity, frustration, and arbitrariness that Slahi 24
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experienced. In general the book weaves a remarkably relatable story of a man going through unimaginable circumstances. Slahi’s intelligence is clear—he is well aware of what is going on and readily verbally spars with his captors using well-reasoned arguments. He provides context and commentary throughout, adding bits of history and philosophy where applicable. His remarkable compassion and level-headedness in the face of unimaginable hardship is beyond description. He is cynical and sarcastic at times, but never vengeful in his descriptions. He acknowledges the humanity of his guards and interrogators, and is respectful, and even gentle in his criticisms of their actions. He does not shy away from calling out his torturers, but he dedicates space to assuring the reader that few humans torture without remorse and he is quick to point out their relief when ordered to stop. In his restraint, he refutes one of the greatest arguments against the release of the remaining detainees: that they will be inspired by their mistreatment to pick up arms and rally against the United States. The arithmetic that leads to this presumption is tempting but, as Slahi reminds us, far too simplistic. Many of the people sitting in that purgatory of contradictions must know what many of us ought to as well—that the United States did terrible things in the face of a terrible day. We shouldn’t expect to be forgiven, but reasonable, unlucky people who have been stripped of almost fifteen years of their liberty are unlikely to risk surrendering it again out of some far-flung hope for vengeance.
So the question arises again, “Has the American democracy passed the test it was subjected to with the 2001 terrorist attacks?” As I have grown interested in the study of American civil rights law, I have followed along with the legal tale of Guantánamo. Regarding detention of enemy combatants at GTMO, the cases of Rasul, Hamdi, Hamdan, and Boumediene have reached the Supreme Court and in each case, the Court sided with the detainees. That said, though Slahi’s petition for Habeas Corpus was granted in federal court and his release ordered in 2009, he remains imprisoned as it winds its way through appeals. President Obama has backed down from his commitment to close the detention center, but under his administration there has been a more than six-fold reduction in the number of detainees held there. The “American democracy” seems to be slowly correcting course, and it may be left to history to judge whether the system failed, or was just very slow to pass. Yet the glaring fact remains that, as far as my research has shown, no U.S. official has ever been able to support with any concrete evidence the idea that the torture and indefinite detention of anyone at Guantánamo Bay has directly helped stop an attack against the United States. The costs of war are high and the clarity of hindsight undoubtedly makes it difficult to truly understand the motivation of those involved. There are many unresolved questions surrounding GTMO, but Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account in “Guantánamo Diary” is a valuable, rare glimpse at the humanity of those currently awaiting the answers. u
Photo courtesy of the New Yorker.
Fifty Shades of foul play Why this critic won’t see the film adaptation of the book, and why you shouldn’t either
by Deborah Krieger TRIGGER WARNING for mentions of rape, assault, stalking, and abusive relationships.
“H
ow did you find me?” “I tracked your cell phone, Anastasia.” I remember when I first read “Fifty Shades of Grey”; in fact, I bought it from the Swarthmore College Bookstore sometime around freshman orientation. I’d heard, of course, that it was apparently this incredibly sexy and risqué book. I’d seen people carrying it around, reading it in bookstores and airports, shoving it out of sight when they thought someone might be watching them read it. Naturally, my curiosity about “Fifty Shades of Grey” grew, because if there’s one thing that inspires curiosity about anything (at least in my mind), it’s being given the message that said thing is taboo. Alternate-universe versions of Edward Cullen and Bella Swan--with actual sex? I didn’t see any problem with that, and the idea that women seemed to be gravitating towards “Fifty Shades of Grey” in droves, that it was being classified as “mommy porn”, also interested me. As the budding feminist that I was back then, I was glad that a book that was centered on a woman’s sexual pleasure without apologizing for it had finally made it into the mainstream conversation. What could possibly be bad about that?
“N
o,” I protest, trying to kick him off. He stops. “If you struggle, I’ll tie your feet, too. If you make a noise, Anastasia, I will gag you.” When criticism of the book started gaining mainstream attention, my reaction, at first, was to defend it—it’s sexy! It’s BDSM, you prudes! It’s harmless fiction! It’s female empowerment! But the more I read and researched the opinions contrary to my own—looking at everything from personal accounts from people who had dated a “Christian Grey,” to information Photo courtesy of Metheun Publishing Ltd.
about domestic violence and abusive relationships, to studies and news stories that have linked consumption of the book to increased domestic violence against women—the more I realized that the narrative of “Fifty Shades of Grey” continually justifies and eroticizes Christian’s actions towards Ana, from the questionable to the disturbing. His actions are then wrapped up in clumsy, poorly edited prose and
Anastasia Steele is immature for her twenty-one years, and not in any state to engage in a Dominant/ Submissive relationship with Christian Grey. sold to consumers in the name of “sexy female empowerment” and “erotic kinky romance,” soon to be a blockbuster movie, arriving just in time for Valentine’s Day! Many, many people have said it better than I have, but the analysis of “Fifty Shades of Grey” that really hits home (and cites many other analyses in areas in which the author is less informed, such as how healthy BDSM relationships should be conducted) is Abbie Bee’s blog on the subject, entitled “50 Shades of Abuse.” A therapist and survivor of abusive relationships, Bee has painstakingly chronicled, nearly paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, all of the ways that “Fifty Shades of Grey” fails to live up to the hype—and, indeed, normalizes what is ultimately an extremely unhealthy relationship.
“Y
ou wanted to know why I felt confused after you – which euphemism should we apply –
ESSAY
spanked, punished, beat, assaulted me. Well, during the whole alarming process, I felt demeaned, debased, and abused.” Simply put, Anastasia Steele, as written by EL James, is emotionally and physically immature for her twenty-one years, and is certainly not in any state to engage in a Dominant/Submissive relationship with Christian Grey. While Ana does admit her attraction to the mysterious, older man, this attraction is couched with fear and intimidation from the very beginning; as she admitted to her roommate Kate, she found him “scary.” As her relationship with Christian progresses (she sees him everywhere, because he is stalking her), she ends up displaying incredibly worrying and unhealthy behavior, including crying uncontrollably in the fetal position after their first date, drinking to excess in order to be around him (and to have the courage to sign his non-disclosure form and partake in certain sexual acts with him), and repeatedly thinking of him in terms of fear and discomfort. Ana also demonstrates a total lack of knowledge about her own body. While there is nothing wrong with having never masturbated or being unable to refer to one’s genitalia by any other name than “down there,” these things ultimately mean that Ana is in no place, mentally or emotionally, to enter into Christian’s version of a Dominant/Submissive sexual relationship—a relationship she ultimately does not want, but will put up with in order to try and make Christian love her the way she thinks she loves him. Additionally, as Abbie Bee and others have rightfully pointed out, Ana demonstrates throughout the novel that she is not a Sub, nor is she comfortable in that role—she is notably frightened by the “Red Room of Pain,” likening Christian’s “playroom” to the “Spanish Inquisition,” and challenges, rather than salivates at, the prospect of being a Sub. She repeatedly demonstrates fear when any aspect of pain, such as caning or spanking, comes into play and realizes, upon seeing his playroom, that “[he] likes to hurt women. The thought depresses me.”
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Illustration by Steve Sekula
“D
id you undress me?” I whisper. “Yes.” He quirks an eyebrow at me as I blush furiously. “We didn’t -?” I whisper, my mouth drying in mortified horror as I can’t complete the question. I stare at my hands. “Anastasia, you were comatose. Necrophilia is not my thing. I like my women sentient and receptive,” he says dryly. Christian Grey is neither a “dark knight” nor a “classic romantic hero”. What he is, however, can be summarized in a few short descriptors. Christian Grey, as written by EL James, is a stalker, manipulator, and rapist, couched in Edward Cullen-esque terms, presented as tormented but sexy and ultimately worth seeking a relationship with.
Christian Grey’s actions are all presented as romantic and desirable by the narrative, but a closer reading reveals him to be abusive. In the beginning of the novel, he purposefully sends mixed signals to Anastasia, telling her to stay away, but also giving her gifts and following her. He also tracks her phone without her permission, shows up at her workplace to see/tease her without being told where she works, and undresses her and puts her to bed, in his bed, while she is unconscious (which is presented as chivalrous, as is the fact that he didn’t rape her in her sleep). He later ends up using the fact that she is sexually attracted to him to convince her to become his submissive, despite the fact that her temperament is not suitable for that arrangement. He insists that Ana, as his submissive, obey him “without hesitation or reservation and in an expeditious manner” and he showers her with inappropriately expensive gifts to win her favor (a $14,000 edition of “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” after one date!). He monitors her food intake and exercise regimen, demands she go on oral birth control 28
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without allowing her to have input, and, on one particularly memorable occasion, shows up at her house after she sends him a teasing “Dear John” email and rapes her. Christian Grey regularly fails to ask for permission or consent to engage in sexual activity, instead relying upon his own desire, the amount of alcohol he’s plied her with, and his reading of her body language as permission to go ahead and do what he likes. And yet Anastasia always manages to have an orgasm. That is, when Christian permits her to. His actions are all presented as romantic and desirable by the narrative, and Christian himself is portrayed as a troubled romantic hero, but a closer reading of the text and consideration of Christian’s actions outside of the lens of Ana (who, again, demonstrates clear discomfort with the relationship he wants them to have) reveal Christian to be a manipulative and abusive love interest who takes advantage of Ana’s inexperience and naiveté in order to make her his submissive.
“I
f you were mine, you wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week after that stunt you pulled yesterday. You didn’t eat, you got drunk, you put yourself at risk.” No discussion of the problems with “Fifty Shades of Grey” would be complete without an outlining of the various ways in which victim-blaming occurs within the context of sexual assault. We learn towards the middle of the novel that Christian was “seduced at […] a young age” by one of his mother’s friends, whom Ana refers to as “Mrs. Robinson.” The age? 15. For a grown woman to pursue sexual relations with a 15-year old is not seduction—it’s abuse, as a 15-year old cannot give consent to an adult. While I am not condemning the way Christian refers to the experience, since it is his life and decision to call it what he will, it’s clear Ana at times romanticizes what happened to him. While in several chapters Ana refers to him in her thoughts as “sexually abused,” she also considers him to have been “seduced,” rather than abused, conflating the two, and even displays jealousy towards Mrs. Robinson—Christian’s attacker—and resents their continuing friendship. In at least one scene, Christian ignores Ana’s verbal “no” (though she is referring to him taking off her shoes, he has no way of knowing that). Though the imbalance of power in their coercive relationship would make even a verbal “yes” question-
able in terms of consent, his blatant disregard for her “no” makes the fact that this is assault undeniable/even more obvious. Christian merely takes her signs of arousal as consent, which is a definite no-no. He later blames Ana for his actions, claiming that he cannot resist her when she bites her lip, because she knows what that does to him. Such behavior also constitutes abuse, since Christian is trying to excuse his own actions and lack of respect for Ana by disguising it as a lack of self-control around her, while also making her feel special in his eyes and pulling her in deeper. Additionally, in an early chapter, Ana’s friend José (also known as Jacob from “Twilight”), a rather offensively stereotyped Hispanic character, encourages her to drink one night and tries to kiss her twice, despite her repeatedly saying “no.” Christian, who has been tracking Ana’s whereabouts, shows up to rescue her, and promptly blames her for José’s actions by condemning how drunk she was. In these instances, EL James demonstrates that she does not understand how consent works. The inconsistent terminology surrounding Christian’s abuse at the hands of Mrs. Robinson creates a sense of ambiguity of what happened, an ambiguity which cannot and does not exist due to Christian’s age at the time. The scene between Ana and Christian to which I have repeatedly referred is in fact a rape, despite the fact that Ana is eventually aroused and achieves orgasm. And lastly, Christian blames Ana for what José attempted to do to her—and he is never contradicted by Ana or by the narrative, giving the impression that Ana was in the wrong by getting drunk around José.
“Y
ou’re mad and turned on because I said no?” I breathe, astonished. “And I’m mad because you closed your legs on me.” While you might be shaking your head at this essay, thinking, “gee, what a feminist killjoy,” let me state here that I’m totally okay with being a “feminist killjoy” who also thinks critically about the media she consumes. In my mind, it’s a much better and richer way of living in the world rather than taking in the messages we are flooded with by various forms of media on a daily basis unquestioningly. Ultimately, with “Fifty Shades of Grey,” many of the problems of the novel could have been mitigated had EL James and the narrative of the story condemned Christian Grey’s actions, setting him up as the
predator he is and making “Fifty Shades of Grey” a horror story rather than the sexy romance it is marketed as. Why write this essay now? Why am I now standing up (or, rather, sitting down) and shouting out my opinions on “Fifty Shades of Grey” to the heavens, rather than rolling my eyes and muttering about its issues under my breath? Because just in time for Valentine’s Day, fans of the original series were able to relive the “sexy” “kinky” “romance” in movie format, and people who maybe didn’t read the books will be pulled in—some by the advertising, some by an interest in the soundtrack, some by the appeal of making fun of the movie—and the film made over $500 million at the box office worldwide. What does that tell Hollywood? That people are interested in this
kind of film—a film where the need for consent is ignored, and where abuse is normalized and sexualized, disguised as a female empowerment fantasy, and what does Hollywood do but go where the money is? Depending on the success of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” we could see EL James’ sequels adapted into films of their own, and, perhaps, a whole host of new projects with similarly “dark” “sexy” “erotic” “romances.” And while we don’t often like to admit it, media matters. As society shapes media, media in turn shapes the world around us, creating a feedback loop. If there’s a demand for more films in the vein of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” there will be more movies like it, leading to more people consuming the media and taking it to heart—after all, it’s only ever been advertised as a kinky romance rather than
the chronicle of abuse and unhealthy relationship dynamics that it truly is. (More has already been written about how the novel is harmful to practitioners of BDSM and portrays such relationships inaccurately; I am not qualified to address those concerns.) Therefore I urge the readers of this piece to speak with their dollars. Don’t go see “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Send the message that we, as consumers, want and expect more from our media—that we want films with actual female empowerment and healthy relationships, not abuse dressed up as love and romance. It’s not subversive, it’s not empowering, it merely sugarcoats narratives of uneven power dynamics that already exist in abusive relationships, normalizing them and presenting them as desirable. u
Who’s re-reading Virginia Woolf?
ESSAY
Returning to ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ years later, this time alone
by Nora Battelle
I
read “Mrs. Dalloway” during my senior year of high school, in the midst of intense girls-school class bonding and college applications. The enormity of what had changed from the beginning of high school to its end was looming large, and the unknowable enormity of what was to come was looming larger. We were all struggling to understand how much we were confident we knew and how much we had to admit ignorance of. My English class was a microcosm of this parallel. Our teacher was charismatic, the center of a small but staunch cult among the girls. He wasn’t nice to us. But he was smart. He seemed the kind of cool that dominates an intellectual cocktail party: we looked up to him, and we took his snarky comments in the margins of our essays and on our report cards as the necessary counters to basking in his passion for and understanding of literature. That first experience of reading “Mrs. Dalloway,” with him and with all those girls around me, was ultimately not a very personal reading. He dictated so much of the way we understood the text. Looking back at the notes I made in the margins
of my book, I am struck by how sure of myself I seem: I can’t imagine feeling so sure of any driving point now. And it wasn’t really my surety then, either. It was a surety my teacher’s authority gave me, and I clung on to it excitedly, nervously. This surety, in his classroom, felt like the future. Sitting there reading “Mrs. Dalloway” with him, we were at the head of a trail of literature and, by extension, of understanding that we would follow into the unknown future. And though the future was unknown, we knew we would continue to learn and to understand and eventually we would always be sure–even if, like our teacher, we remained flawed, maybe mean, maybe insecure, maybe emotional. Intellectually we would be sure. We would read important texts and we would know what they meant. We also read the text so much together: analyzing it felt like an exercise in proving ourselves grown up and capable, an exercise in which we reveled together–talking about the book, talking about our amazement at dissecting its winding semi-colons and streams of sound and motion across sidewalks. We couldn’t have done this with any book. We did it with “Mrs. Dalloway” because “Mrs. Dalloway” felt like something import-
ant: it was achingly beautiful and wove a complicated web of memory that, as the memory of a middle aged woman, to us was the future. We, like Clarissa, were obsessively looking at our past while basking in a fragile ecstasy of the present that was intimately connected to its imminent crumbling. The imminent crumbling for us wasn’t Clarissa’s awareness of death. But it was awareness of the death of life as we knew it. “Mrs. Dalloway” gave us a taste of the future, and she let us linger with our past. But it is so much a feeling of “we” that I remember from that first reading–we as the girls united in solidarity against and in awe of our teacher, we as the girls afraid of leaving the friends and families and world we knew so well. Even smaller we’s, too. It was that year, reading Virginia Woolf, that one of my closest friendships was cemented through the processes of reading and writing, a friendship still filled with back-and-forth articles and book recommendations I always trust. We read Virginia Woolf together–me and her and our teacher and all our friends. This second time around, I’m still reading “Mrs. Dalloway” with a class. But this time, I don’t know the ins and outs my professor’s personal life or those of all my SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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Virginia Woolf, the author of “Mrs. Dalloway.”
fellow students. We meet twice a week, and for a few weeks, this is what we’ll talk about: we’ll try to help one another understand what it means to end a book with death at a party, we’ll try to help one another understand what it means to have distance as a basic factor of human relationships and to still try to make something that can connect us–something as superficial and ephemeral as a party. This time, I’m reading the book alone. In class, as I hear the opinions of students whose personal contexts I am ignorant of, and as I try to piece together answers to my professor’s questions, I am working with their insights and their probings. Just as the “Mrs. Dalloway” of the novel’s first page becomes “Clarissa” by its last through a myriad of different lenses focused on her by other characters in the novel, for me the novel’s meaning has moved from solid and institutionally-attributed to personal and variable through the group effort of reading with a class. But no one in this new classroom supplies me all the answers, or even the promise that there are answers: we are helping one another to look and to think, but not necessarily to know. Like Claris30
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sa’s (and Woolf ’s) tense dialectic between the continual possibility of creation and connection and the inevitabile ephemerality and incompleteness of those things, our reading is a work of individual, unstable decisions about meaning. We are helping one another come to our own private conclusions but also our own private questions. The things in the novel I feel most compelled by this time are different, because I am different than I was three years ago, and because my world is different than it was three years ago. But more interestingly, the entire way in which I am reading is different. A second reading of a book might seem likely to yield clearer understanding; it’s not that it hasn’t, for me. It’s more that it has yielded an entirely different type of understanding, one predicated on the reality of my own limits and interests and sensitivities. Just like every character in “Mrs. Dalloway,” I have a limited but particular ability to understand and connect with those around me (real or fictional). A personal understanding can never be as sure as a shared one, I think. One of the surest, most sold things in “Mrs. Dal-
loway” is the regular chiming of Big Ben: the chiming of institution, of empire, of everything that states itself as unshakable and powerful and truthful. But “the leaden circles” of that chiming “dissolved in the air” all throughout the novel–ubiquitous, but insubstantial. Just behind them dissolved the British Empire and much of what Big Ben stood for at the time of the novel. Surety is never sure, Woolf tells us. So I’ll take a personal understanding tied to ambiguous anchors of the self, anchors that are never entirely clear or stable, when I read. They don’t make the same kind of promises as anchors built by authority-framed group-maintained sets of meanings. But they allow for the one thing I’m sure of coming out of Mrs. Dalloway: that everything, especially meaning, is unstable and relative. There are days at college where I feel disappointed and frustrated with myself for my inability to understand and perform according to sure understanding, but the days when I feel surer are ecstatic because my surety is tied to something I have watched and poked and felt tortured by and finally believe in (for now). It is strange to me that in that final year of high school I clung so tightly to an image of the future as marked by surety. At the time it seemed to be the only way to establish a confident present, precisely because the present was so entirely and terrifyingly unstable. And that is still the case, somewhat. It’s just that, now, instability seems more inevitable and less terrible. Arriving at college, that terrifying and mystifying unknown of senior year, that threat to my perfect present, has yielded not an answer to my confusion, but a new set of confusions. And, after all, it hasn’t been all bad. But I also cannot forget the intense, bright-awake joy I got out of reading “Mrs. Dalloway” the first time around. It meant an enormous amount to me consciously and an even more enormous amount in the ways it helped form me and the things I still believe in. I cannot, and don’t want to, discount or discredit that, and so I cannot totally dismiss the way I first read the novel. Perhaps this is all just to say that some books bear reading and rereading, in different places, at different times, and with different people (or maybe just alone). Each new reading will yield another set of meanings informed by and informing another self. So until next time, “Mrs. Dalloway.” For now, I’m happy with the question marks in my margins.u Photo courtesy of entertainmentrealm.com
Assia Djebar’s echoing voice
ESSAY
Now that she’s left us, to whom does Djebar’s legacy belong?
by Tom Corbani
“I
t’s been ten years or more: me whose writing beats foremost to the rhythm of the walking outside, searching for faces, clouds, doubts; in this I expelled myself. [...] [U]nder the veil of blessed illusion, longing for vivid fiction, incessant mobility: in short of the novel.” — “Ces voix qui m’assiègent,” Assia Djebar (“These Voices that Assail Me,” english title “Voices from the Gaps,” published 1999)
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ow does one remember she who spoke for so many? On February 7th, Assia Djebar passed away in Paris at the age of 78. The Algerian author, playwright, filmmaker, and thinker was perhaps the last remaining voice of a generation of francophone intellectuals who have shaped the nation’s literature. She wrote 15 books, made two movies, and was the first Algerian and fifth woman appointed to the Académie Française in 2005. Her work has been translated into 23 languages. Albeit impressive, these numbers do little to show the true breadth of her legacy: bastioned as a bridge between the Maghreb and France, her portrayal of Algeria, its women, and its memory has influenced generations of writers and scholars. Djebar was born in 1936 in Cherchell, a coastal town West of Algiers. The daughter of a teacher, she was educated in French and so didn’t learn standard (written) Arabic through high school. At 18, she moved to France to pursue her studies, and has since split her time between there, her home country, and the US. The story of how Djebar acquired her pen name has entered common lore, under various guises, and is representative of her position as a writer of colonial grief. She did so fearing her father’s disapproval as she published her first novel, “La soif,” in 1957. Rushing in a cab to meet her editor, she asked her first
husband to list the 99 names of Allah, and picked “djebbar,” meaning “intransigent” in koranic arabic. In writing the name, however, she mis-transcribed it (for she did not write arabic at the time) as “djebar,” which means “the healer.” The ambiguity, ruthless and caring, is not only telling of the kinds of views Djebar adopts in her work, which depicts Algeria in its complexity, but also of the tensions that stem from her position as a Western educated women dealing with topics relevant to her native country. The aforementioned first novel (titled “The Mischief ” in English) was a breakthrough hit. It drew numerous comparisons to Françoise Sagan’s novel “Bonjour Tristesse,” published only three years earlier in 1954, for their shared interest in women’s sexuality at a time where it was rarely discussed. The novel opened Djebar’s career in line with the Western modernist tradition that she had been exposed to in her education. She maintained this affiliation for the first portion of her career. Perhaps most notably, her third novel, “Les enfants du nouveau monde” (“Children of the New World,” in English), published near the close of the Algerian war of independence in 1962, tells the story of militants resisting French occupation in a one-day narrative: although she uses techniques of Western literature, she’s advocating the plight of her native country. One of Djebar’s foremost concerns in her writing is centering women’s voices and experiences. This focus ties into her own position, as a woman writing about Algeria, but spans the experiences of women in militancy and the struggles of femininity in Algerian society. It is probably best illustrated in her 1980 work “Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement” (“Women of Algiers in their Apartment”), a celebrated collection of short stories, the postscript of which theorizes the position of Algerian women through time in relation to the colonial and local male gaze. Notably, her second husband whom she was married to at the time, Malek Alloula, deals with similar issues in his canonical book “The Colonial Ha-
rem,” published only a year later in 1981. The couple’s supposed collaboration helps us inform both of their work, and Alloula was a key figure in Djebar’s life, as they remained close even after their divorce. Alloula died only 10 days after Djebar, on February 17th in Berlin; fantasy would say it was out of grief. Djebar is also recognised for the ethnographic quality of her work, novels which lie somewhere between fiction and testimony or even autobiography. In light of this, her more mature works often deal with the issue of memory and erasure in a post-colonial context. One of her last novels, “La femme sans sépulture” (“The woman without burial”), published in 2002, tells the story of a woman who tries to bring forth from the shadows a forgotten figure of the Algerian War. Zoulikha appears to us through the stories of her daughters, their painful recollections. Djebar’s memoir, quoted in the epigraph, draws on similar themes: what it means to write in French, as a woman, as an Algerian. Notably, her last novel, “Nowhere in the house of my father,” is the first to be written in arabic. Recognition came to Djebar in her lifetime from all sides. She has been the recipient of numerous prizes over the years, and was appointed a Silver Chair Professor of Francophone literature at NYU in 2003. She was knighted Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration. Her aforementioned appointment to a chair of the Académie Française marks a true achievement but raises the question: how will we remember this woman in all her complexity, beyond the veiling simplicity suggested by France’s open-armed welcome? Current President François Hollande referred to her as “a woman of conviction, whose multiple and fertile identities fed her work, between Algeria and France, between Berber, Arab and French.” The address was necessary, but Djebar is not his to remember: a voice through the gaps, she spoke of herself and of her people. I’d suggest her legacy belongs to those to whom she tried to bring recognition. Her voice echoes still. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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TELEVISION On ‘Broad City,’ real female friendship What exactly makes Comedy Central’s show unlike anything else on television?
REVIEW
‘Broad City’ stars Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer in a raunchy stoner comedy about irresponsible 20-something Brooklynites.
by Maddie King
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omedy Central’s “Broad City,” a raunchy stoner comedy about two irresponsible 20-somethings living in Brooklyn, kicked off its second season in January. The show treads familiar territory, drawing comparisons to “Girls,” another popular TV comedy about an “Odd Couple” assortment of young women in New York City backed by a comedy megastar (Judd Apatow to “Broad City’s” Amy Poehler). However, even with its recognizable premise, “Broad City” feels fresh and original. “Broad City” occupies a unique space on the cultural landscape. Despite the ever-growing presence of female characters on television, shows that depict genuine, unconditional female friendship remain rare. Most female driven comedies feature a single charming oddball amongst a predominantly male cast, like “30 Rock,” “New Girl,” “The Mindy Project,” “It’s
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Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” and even “Parks and Recreation” now that Ann has left the cast. The inherent alienation of being a female in a male space is a bountiful source of comedy that provides no dearth of awkward situations and miscommunications. When comedies do depict female friendships, comedy is derived from the differences between these friends and the tensions that arise as a result, as in “Girls” or “2 Broke Girls.” While these shows are able to generate ongoing comedy from these tensions, they fail to faithfully represent a true friendship. The characters regularly judge and undermine each other, and ultimately, after seasons of unkindness and betrayal, it becomes unclear to the viewer why these girls are friends in the first place. In “Broad City,” the relationship between the protagonists is rarely a source of examination or comedic tension. Instead, the two characters are a team, working together to find their way in a world that is confusing and strange. The show’s comedy
is derived from the absurd moments of everyday life—each episode feels like a story told by that friend with a tendency to exaggerate. The characters encounter situations that feel only just outside the realm of plausibility for my own life. They wear minimal, realistic makeup and dress appropriately for their characters, but also for the actual street and work world of young New York City women. Season one of “Broad City” depicted common, relatable experiences like bad roommates, lost phones, taxes, awkward sexual encounters, and dead end jobs (Abbi, the type A straight man to Ilana’s eccentricity, is a cleaner at a pseudo-spiritual gym called “Soulstice” and dreams of one day making it as a trainer, while Ilana does grunt work at a Groupon-style start-up). The show is at its best when it explores these familiar experiences with an exaggerated surrealism. In one of the standout scenes of season one, Abbi travels to a remote area of New York City to pick up a package after she misses the delivery Photo courtesy of thecannabist.co
window. On her way, Abbi encounters the creepy twins from The Shining and an old woman named Garol who sits alone in a seemingly abandoned warehouse, eating yogurt. This is “Broad City” at its best: zany, bizarre exaggerations of an idea that is rooted in an accessible reality (in this particular instance, the crazy-making irrationalities of government bureaucracies). Thankfully, the second season of “Broad City” has brought us more of this genius, but has also started tackling premises that are even bolder and more daring. Episodes thus far have featured unpaid interns singing slave spirituals, the seedy underbelly of the knockoff purse industry, and a “Snowpiercer”-style montage about navigating the inherent grossness of public transportation. It is this attention to detail and ability to disregard the boundaries of reality that transforms “Broad City” from a simple sitcom to a truly impactful and emotionally accessible comedy. That being said, I still feel that “Broad City” could do more. The shows with
which it shares the most commonality—“Louie” and “High Maintenance,” a wonderful web series on Vimeo about a Brooklyn pot dealer that will be brought to television within the next year—interrupt the absurd misadventures of their characters with quiet moments of subtle depth. That’s not really the style of “Broad City.” Even when tackling hot button issues like the complexity of consent, “Broad City” remains as zany and lighthearted as ever. Season two’s premiere revolved around Abbi’s quest to find an air conditioner for her apartment after she maybe rapes the guy she’s seeing (the well-named Male Stacey played by Seth Rogen) when he experiences a heat stroke mid-coitus. The star-studded episode (featuring cameos from Phil of “Phil of the Future” and the hysterical Kumail Nanjani of Silicon Valley) ends with Abbi making out with a high schooler and coming to the realization that she is now a repeat sex offender. The episode is very funny, and it’s hard not to admire the ballsiness of such an
unapologetic approach to a sensitive, and potentially outrage-inducing topic. However, to me, the episode rang a bit hollow. Illanna’s proclamation that Abbi “raped rape culture” felt non-committal and lacking in depth. “Broad City” is an appealing and consistently funny show, but it hasn’t quite worked out what it wants to say, or if it’s interested in saying anything at all. It’s possible that, due to the show’s newness, the writers of “Broad City” feel uncomfortable delving into complex social critique yet, and want to gain their footing as a show before writing anything truly thought-provoking. But it’s also possible that the writers are simply uninterested in engaging with their viewers at a deeper level. “Broad City” is a very smart sitcom with top-notch comedic timing, and it doesn’t have to be more than that to be a great show. Either way, “Broad City” is vibrant and smart and unlike anything on television right now. No matter what direction the writers choose to take the show in, I’m along for the ride. u
It’s never too late...for a spin-off
REVIEW
‘Better Call Saul’ will never surpass ‘Breaking Bad,’ but it’s still worth watching
by Mike Lumetta
D
o you feel doomed? Have opponents of freedom wrongly intimidated you? Maybe they’ve told you that you’re in serious trouble and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’m Saul Goodman, and I’m here to tell you they’re wrong. It’s never too late for justice! Better call –
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ere we find Saul Goodman, who isn’t Saul Goodman anymore. He’s the manager of a Cinnabon in snowy Omaha, Nebraska. He’s living out his best-case scenario after the collapse of Walter White’s meth empire, vacuumed away to safety—not dead or in jail as he should have been. It’s a remarkable ending for Saul. He hasn’t lost anything, except the sleazy, scheming persona who plays with patriotic rhetoric and brings the bad guys together—essentially his whole character in “Breaking Bad.” At night, after getting home from Cinnabon, Saul closes the blinds and watches an old VHS tape of his own advertisements, thinking back to the time when he was, as Jesse Pinkman said, not a criminal lawyer but a criminal lawyer.
“Better Call Saul” is an odd concept in a lot of ways. For one thing, few spin-offs have followed such a juggernaut. For another, this spin-off is set before the original show in time, so we all know where Saul ends up, and it’s not particularly pleasant. As “Breaking Bad” demonstrates, Saul isn’t the hero of his own life. By the beginning of that show, Saul is a little bit two-dimensional, set in the ways of his sleazy lawyer persona. The spin-off ’s job is to take Bob Odenkirk’s character from Jimmy McGill, a down-on-his-luck Irish-American lawyer from Illinois, to the Saul Goodman we know. Our job is to believe that the puttering in between means something, that Vince Gilligan & Co. aren’t taking us for a ride. It’s easy to be cynical about this kind of venture – to think that perhaps AMC wants to cash out some more on “Breaking Bad,” or that Vince Gilligan just wants to keep working with the same people in the same mystical Albuquerque setting. Three episodes in, I’m regretting ever doubting Vince Gilligan’s motives. While “Better Call Saul” will never surpass “Breaking Bad”—let’s lock that in right now—Gilligan has created a character
in Jimmy McGill who’s worth watching. Drawing on Saul’s assertion that “The Jew thing I just do for the homeboys; they all want a pipe-hitting member of the tribe, so to speak,” he’s placed him in a very different set of circumstances. Jimmy doesn’t have the same urgency and purpose that Walter White did, but that’s partly what makes him interesting: he has no idea what the hell he’s doing. I get the sense that his creators also don’t have a long-term gameplan, and that there’s some room to meander here. The show so far feels a little bit like art as work—that if you dig far enough back into Saul’s past in the right way, you’ll find something. Jimmy McGill is trying to make it as a lawyer, but he’s not very successful. His office is located in the back of a Vietnamese nail salon, which explains his later enthusiasm for such establishments. Mostly his work involves serving as a public defender for cases where the defendant is so obviously guilty that he has no room to do anything. Jimmy has a much older brother named Chuck, who used to be the third partner in a big law firm called Hamlin, Hamlin, & McGill. He doesn’t work there anySWARTHMORE REVIEW
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Bob Odenkirk stars in “Better Call Saul.”
more due to an unnamed affliction which everyone but him seems to know he won’t recover from. There’s reason to believe Chuck’s illness is mental; he appears fine physically, and he’s always insisting Jimmy “ground” himself by leaving electronics outside in the mailbox. Jimmy’s patience with Chuck is something you’d never expect from Saul, a man who never showed any kind of familial love. With his house and his money, Chuck is keeping Jimmy afloat financially, but it’s clear that caring for Chuck is difficult for Jimmy, so much so that he sometimes sleeps in his office. Despite all his failings, Jimmy is certainly talented. It’s the same kind of talent that Saul runs his games with, minus the willingness to engage in illicit activity. Jimmy used to run a scam where he’d slip on an icy sidewalk in winter for the payout, earning himself the moniker “Slipping Jimmy.” He employs the same sort of tactics to try to scam an embezzling county treasurer and his wife into giving him their business. Needless to say, they don’t go with the lawyer who works out of a nail salon. But his hijinks do cause him and two mop-headed idiots he convinces to work with him to run afoul of an old friend from “Breaking Bad,” whom Jimmy then convinces, basically, to not murder them in the New Mexico desert. Then he’s “the best lawyer ever,” in his own words. 34
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The problem is, Jimmy needs the right context to work his magic, and no one legit wants to give it to him. The most striking thing, though, is how earnest Jimmy is. In the shitty courthouse bathroom, he rehearses for court cases in the minutes before they begin, and he tosses around movie lines like candy. He goes to bat for Chuck with his former partners. Most importantly, though, he’s pretty intent on not becoming that criminal lawyer that Jesse wanted. In fact, it’s not even a question for him. Nacho, a confederate of Tuco Salamanca’s, solicits Jimmy’s help on a job, but Jimmy refuses. Nacho leaves a number for Jimmy anyway “for when you realize you’re in the game.” It’s an interesting proposal, and right to the point, because we know that sooner or later Jimmy is going to succumb to that proposal in order to be successful. In the meantime, though, he splits the difference by tipping off Nacho’s victims that they’re in danger—a move somewhat reminiscent of Walter White with a pros and cons list for killing Crazy 8. Of course, that mistake comes back to bite him. That’s most of the gist of my takeaway from Better Call Saul so far, but there’s plenty to ruminate on. For one thing, there’s the extent to which success depends on doing the wrong thing in Gilligan’s Albuquerque. Between bad
luck and bad decisions with Gray Matter, Walter White ended up with less than his considerable talents should have earned him. Only by resorting to illegal and violent measures did Walter White become Heisenberg, meth kingpin and millionaire. Jimmy isn’t Walt, but he, too, doesn’t have room to air his talents, nor does he make the kind of money that he could. When you’re out of other options, better become Saul. For another thing—and this will become, I believe, the heart of the show— we’re forced to consider who Saul Goodman is as a person, something his time on “Breaking Bad” never left room for. In one of the defining scenes of “Breaking Bad,” Walter White claims that he’s in neither the meth business nor the money business—he’s in the empire business. That is the opposite of Saul Goodman. Saul’s talents work best at the edges of empires. He makes connections, runs accounts, and fixes fuck-ups. He talks people into and out of problems with the right combination of lies, half-truths, whole truths, and performance. Saul Goodman, we know, isn’t the hero of his own story; Walter White is. Ultimately, Heisenberg’s story and his meteoric rise will eclipse Saul and ruin everything he built for himself. But there’s plenty of time until that happens. u Photo courtesy of NPR.org
MOVIES What we talk about when we talk about war The cost of fictionalizing very real, very complex violence
by Allison Hrabar
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made a resolution earlier this year to write things off less. I told myself that I would consciously avoid engaging exclusively with media that fit my (admittedly narrow and often intransigent) political views. Engaging with so-called “problematic” (a problematic label in itself) media can be rewarding when we ask ourselves why we find ourselves drawn to or repulsed by it. My resolution wasn’t challenged much—I continued to watch mildly questionable shows, and avoided “The Newsroom” like the plague—until “American Sniper” premiered this winter. While it was nominated for six Oscars (including Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Picture) reactions to the film have ranged from embracing to outrage. Critic Bilge Ebiri quipped that “maybe the reason the ‘American Sniper’ debate has gotten so heated is because it’s turning into the Iraq War debate that we never got to have.” He’s not wrong: it seems that you can accurately guess how someone reacts to the film based on their feelings towards the Iraq War, and vice versa. It’s become a litmus test in a way that “Apocalypse Now” or “Miss Saigon” never was. Understanding where I stand on “Sniper” requires some explanation of where I sit. I am a liberal and a pacifist, but I come from a family of relatively conservative Mexican and Irish Catholics. We are also a military family: my grandfathers served in World War II and Vietnam, and my mother programmed computers for the Air Force. My aunt served in Afghanistan with the Air Force. A close friend of mine from high school did a tour in both Iraq and Afghanistan before he passed away last September. (I was also born in Amarillo, TX, just a few hours north of Odessa, TX, the hometown of Chris Kyle, upon whose autobiography American Sniper was based.) So while my politics made me want to run away from any theater exhibiting “Sniper,” a part of me was curious to see how the reality of my
loved ones’ history in wars (some popular, some messy) would be put on screen. It’s important to begin with the fact that “American Sniper” is a genuinely well-crafted film. Clint Eastwood has a quiet confidence that comes with decades of experience, and the film features some wonderfully naturalistic work on the
When talking about the Iraqis, he growls, “They’re savages. They’re fucking savages.” part of Bradley Cooper as Kyle. For those who haven’t seen it (and on this campus I assume there are many) the premise is simple: Chris Kyle is a cowboy in Texas looking to do something more, so he enlists to become a Navy SEAL. After the Twin Towers fall, he’s shipped out to Iraq, working as a sniper. The film cuts between his tour overseas and his life at home, as he struggles to readjust to civilian life with his wife and new child. “Sniper” is more of a character study than a study of the Iraq War. There are no appearances of President Bush or Congress, and even Kyle’s commanding officers are only seen briefly or heard via radio. Eastwood seems uninterested in making a movie about larger systems, which may have been why the film doesn’t delve into Kyle’s unsavory real-life politics, or his murder at the hands of a fellow soldier. This myopic structure results in a film that does not lend itself to larger discussions about the Iraq War. Some portions of the film are nuanced—Kyle’s frustration at how the nation seems to have forgotten a war is being fought rings true—but for the most part, it’s a black hat/white hat conflict familiar to Eastwood fans. We see many
ESSAY
of Kyle’s kills in a row early on in the film, but they are all justifiable. He shoots men, women, and children, yes, but they are all carrying guns or grenades. Kyle balks when other soldiers gleefully react to his kills, but when talking to his wife about Iraqis, he still growls “They’re savages. They’re fucking savages.” Any potential opportunities to humanize the people of Iraq are thrown aside. Instead, they are faceless villains in one man’s struggle to protect his friends. “Sniper” demonstrates that it is inherently dishonest to center a war movie around one person. The wars of Iraq and Afghanistan were not about Kyle, because wars are not about individuals. It’s an understandable move to center the film on a single man rather than the mess of politicians and leaders who led the effort, but in his to make a “human movie, not a political one,” Eastwood ignores the fact that putting Kyle’s individual story on screen is inherently political. On the one hand, seeing Kyle say he is “haunted by all the guys [he] couldn’t save” is a deeply human portrayal of a flawed man. On the other, it implicitly denies the humanity of the guys whose lives he ended, and the more than 133,000 civilians who were killed during the war. The film’s pursuit of realism made me flash back to “Fury,” a World War II film released earlier this year. A grim, gory look at tank warfare, “Fury” acknowledges that even the “good guys” are forced to do bad things on the battlefield. Like “Sniper,” it doesn’t shy away from a visceral portrayal of violence, but it acknowledges the very real possibility that the violence is a war crime. But even “Fury” falls into the same traps as “Sniper”: in its attempt to be an entertaining film, it distances viewers from the very real, very complicated violence that inspired it. War is violent, and vicious, and complicated, but we do those brave enough to fight it no favors by portraying it simplistically. Frankly, I am not sure if it’s possible to capture it on film. But “Sniper” doesn’t even try. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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MUSIC If you’re reading this, it’s about Drake Who, exactly, is Drake? How does he fit into the current scheme of pop culture and theory? What, if anything, might all of that mean?
by Ariana Wertheimer
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s much as I love Drake, and, even more, talking about Drake, this has been a hard piece to write. I didn’t find it particularly challenging to explain Drake’s place in the broader scheme of popular culture, but figuring out what that meant to me has been a different ball game entirely. When Drake dropped his mixtape, “If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late,” unexpectedly on the night of February 13, I was actually inexplicably excited. I did not know to what I should attribute this excitement. In retrospect, I think I was excited to have something to talk about on twitter, reblog on Tumblr, and quote casually in conversation. With this, I kind of went whole-hog on the Drake wagon. Drake was incredibly topical to me when I agreed to write this. I didn’t know what I had to say, but I knew I wanted to say something. I even described my brain to a friend, shortly after the mixtape drop, as “a giant stage, with six separate Drake clones spinning around, singing different tracks off the new mixtape, all wearing different hats, and doing interpretive dances.” He infiltrated all of my thoughts, and essentially every single piece of writing I did for my classes that week made mention of Drake in some way. I worried my friends, peers, and family with my sudden obsession. Never before had I stanned so hard (“stanning,” by the way, is Internet speak for an “overzealous or maniacal super-fan”). I realized something in the midst of my Drake hysteria: there must be some real reason that I can’t stop thinking about this man. I put the pieces together and, as strange as it felt to admit it, Drake made me feel really safe. In his own bizarre way, he gave me something to lean on: a mixtape that was equal parts swag money and emotional slow-jam. It was a tangible reason to actually like him. It’s no big secret that Drake’s music is pretty polarizing. But at this point, people were paying attention for reasons beyond just wanting to hear the song behind the term “YOLO” or, in a weak moment, crying to the croonings of an ex. This phenomenon actually spawned the verb “Marvin’s Room,” meaning to call an ex while drunk and sob into the receiver, yearning for old times. His newest release was already different, because I believe that people weren’t just hearing Drake in dentist waiting rooms and dirty clubs. Since the release of “Nothing Was The Same,” people were actually listening to Drake, appreciating his artistry, critiquing it, and finding a real artist in it. Prior to this, even though Drake garnered attention, his approach to music was shrugged off by “real” music critics, he lacked the sophistication needed in order to be thought of as credible. “If You’re Reading This” challenged this at the outset. From the first track, “Legend,” where he claims that if he were to die right now, he’d be a legend, I immediately got the
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sense that Drake had come into his own and wasn’t here to be mocked or taken with a grain of salt. Drake confirms this later on the mixtape, on the track, “No Tellin,” where he warns: “Please don’t talk to me like I’m that Drake from four years ago / I’m at a higher place.” Like hell yeah, Drake! I loved this new B-Side, spontaneous, vulnerable but self-assured Drake. Even though I enjoyed “Nothing Was The Same,” I was still worried about voicing my approval of such a critically and commercially divisive musical figure, especially since I, admittedly, take a lot of pride in the “image” of my music taste. He still felt like too much of an indulgence to confess to, especially in the wake of the dopiest single to come off of hip hop album in years, “Hold On, We’re Going Home” (even though it’s a total banger and I’d jam to it any time, any day, any place). On “If You’re Reading This,” Drake took control of his identity, and that empowered me enough to finally take pride in bumping Drake. I really only half-ironically adore him. When I was asked to write a piece about Drake, my first instinct was to tweet in jest about the “legacy” I was leaving by writing about Drake. The subsequent thought was actually conducive to the piece I’m writing: I’m tweeting about Drake because what better audience than the internet for a guy that slings rhymes about Guy Fieri and on the same track covers an Erykah Badu chorus from a Roots song. He’s the perfect “duality of man” for the digital age, and I cannot help but buy into it SO hard. I started to make sense of my obsession with the help of a lot of strange conversations with friends, with the general consensus being that Drake is a subpar musician (a sentiment with which I disagree, for I feel like that’s an underdeveloped/un-researched opinion, but that’s a topic for a different article entirely), but after a bit more questioning, most people agreed that Drake was an interesting character. Although forming my case for Drake was unaided by these opinions, I still found it very telling that everyone had, at least, an opinion. It could be because he’s wildly famous, and has been for a while, but I like to think it’s because he’s a novelty. Beyond that, he’s kind of a mystery to me, and perhaps to many others. I’ve visited his Wikipedia page 55 times in the past 2 weeks alone (thanks Google for the handy, if not completely embarrassing stats), but I still have no clue who Drake really is. The dude doesn’t even have a “Personal Life” sub-wiki, like most famous people do. Finding things out about Drake was like staring a monolithically-intricate puzzle in the face, and cowering. So, I abandoned trying to figure out what was really going on, not because I’m lazy (would someone who visited Drake’s wiki page 55 times really merit the “lazy” label? actually maybe), but because I don’t think I really needed to. The important things about Drake are staring me in the face, just as much as the unknowns have their back to me. What follows is who I think he might be, how that fits in the current scheme of popular culture
and theory, and what all of that might mean.
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anadian rapper, Drake, born Aubrey Graham, was most noted in the first half of his life for his role on the teenage TV soap, “Degrassi: The Next Generation,” playing Jimmy Brooks, a teenager with a passion for rapping and basketball. His character is tragically shot by a peer, leaving him paralyzed. As Drake rose to prominence, in a predictably ableist turn of events, Drake’s physically disabled character became fodder for some less-than-savory jokes about disabilities, and about Drake himself, as if Drake had any control over his own character arc. Really, if I can interject here, Drake did a kick-ass job of portraying the struggles of Jimmy Brooks, something that I’ve always admired from the shadows, since I had watched “Degrassi” as a kid. I felt like I knew a secret about Drake that no one else did. Maybe that’s why I feel so connected to him. I secretly know he’s a kick-ass actor. Am I beaming? Ah, I digress. Drake left the show when Jimmy graduated, and never really looked back, save for a small nod to Jimmy on “Star67” off of “If You’re Reading This”: “I been having these visions of the life that I’m living since I was Jimmy.” Drake self-released a few EPs, but his real break came when the mixtape “So Far Gone” achieved massive critical success, particularly the track “Best I Ever Had,” arguably the first Drake banger. Due to his success prior to being signed to a label, Drake became a coveted asset amongst labels of varying calibers, but he eventually ended up signing to Lil Wayne’s Young Money Entertainment label. Since then, Drake has seen massive acclaim, despite a critical conception of his music as immature and technically underdeveloped. In an email interview I conducted, Anthony Fantano of the popular vlog the Needle Drop summed it up: “if we’re talking just artistic trajectory, I find his lyrics convey confidence, insecurity, and a strong–but sometimes immature–emotional sense.” Even in a slew of music of questionable quality, Drake has undeniable appeal, and his success speaks to
Photo courtesy of bleacherreport.com
that. Though important, Drake’s background is less important the person he is now, and the person he will continue to be. At once a player, a sensitive man, biracial, Jewish, and Canadian, Drake has essentially come to represent one of the most complex expressions of identities in recent popular culture. As I asked people what their opinions of Drake were, I found that simply asking, “What do you think about Drake?” was not enough. There are two spheres that Drake has created for himself: “Music Drake” and “Drake As A Cultural Phenomenon.” For this reason, I found myself frequently emending my previous question, and replacing it with a much more direct one, at least for my purposes: “What do you think of Drake as a cultural phenomenon?” “Ahhhhh, that’s a different story.” It really, really is. I found that reminding people of Drake memes seemed to jog their memories about Drake’s place in popular culture; there have been several popular memes that have circulated around the Internet, mostly mocking Drake’s perceived emotionalism. While it may have been helpful in getting people to respond to my pleas for opinions, boiling Drake down to the word “meme,” is a bit cold, unapologetic, and remiss, especially given the obviousness of making fun of his emotions, and the idea of Drake sitting in a wheelchair, pretending to be a teenage basketball star. In many ways, Drake represents a multitude of cultural phenomena that, as consumers of media, especially via the Internet, we have found ourselves revisiting constantly. Drake has about four different personas. There’s Meme Drake, the conception of him as molded by the Internet: a pathetically vulnerable teenager who cannot seem to get his emotions in check. There’s 305 to My City Drake: the hard, club-hanging, womanizing, and egotistical player that we all, to an extent, expect him to be. There’s Shot for Me/Marvin’s Room Drake: our vengeful, immature ex (we all have one) who calls us up after the eleventh shot of whiskey, begging for us to think about them. And finally, SNL Drake: the comedic relief in a slew of SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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We have Drake to thank for allowing us to be sappy, emotional, crying in a bathtub one minute, and exiting the bathtub the next, to primp so much that there’s no way we won’t stir the hearts of clubgoers in HoustAtlantaVegas. 38
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confusing, muddled personality; the guy who mocks his own bar mitzvah (Drake on “Worst Behavior,” off of “Nothing Was The Same”: “Bar Mitzvah money like my last name Mordecaiiiiii / Fuck you bitch, I’m more than high”), and shows up to a Raptors game wearing a tweed sweater and wire-rimmed glasses. This caricature of Drake, one that I think he capitalizes on (he really likes to laugh at himself), is pretty hilarious to me. Maybe it’s the “Fieri, I’m in the kitchen / I’m a magician” lyric that graces the 32nd second of “6 Man,” or maybe it was this headline, which made its way onto my Facebook feed a few days ago: Drake had little power over his own public image. He is a projection of the things we reject, but also the things we embrace. You know, like the person we dance to at a party, but laugh raucously at when he shows even a shred of humanity (for instance, missing an ex, or wanting desperately to make something work with someone you care about, like on “From Time” off of “Nothing Was The Same”). Or, the easy stab: Drake being Canadian. Ha, ha, Canada. I’d say the American public has just about exhausted the “Canada is inferior and here’s why” joke format. So, we reject certain things about them, but I get the impression that we laugh because we know he can take it, or because we know that our Canada/softie jokes are inconsequential to someone as ridiculously successful as Drake. What do we embrace more than the myth of celebrité? Not much. When I think of Drake, I still run into a mental block that, over time, has weakened, but has not completely dissipated. The mental block consists of the notion that it’s somehow embarrassing to be a Drake stan. I’m reminded of freshman year of high school. I was kind of a little shit. I loved Yeasayer and Band of Horses a little bit too much, and I, admittedly, was less wellversed in the world of music than I claimed to be. I scoffed at Drake, the ridiculous theatrics of Nicki Minaj, and the “simplistic crooning” of Flo Rida (actual quote found from my froshie tumblr…you can’t make this shit up). I found “beauty” and “uniqueness” in the equally nonsensical lyrics of Jeff Mangum and Neutral Milk Hotel. While my bland and angsty taste could be attributed to my art-school, suburban Phoenix upbringing, I could also attribute it to the very high-school-freshman inclination to fit in, but still “stand out,” in a very traditional sense of the word (not to mention years of social conditioning mechanisms that have their roots in classism and various racist systems that have spurned a rejection of “dirty” or “unrefined” music—something that I had to make a concerted effort to unlearn, since they were outside the frame of my privileged upbringing). I can now honestly say that I did not give Drake enough of a chance. Beyond the appeal of his music (particularly the music he’s made in the past few years), which is an incredibly narrow lens to look through, Drake is an aggregate of the internet-crazed, deeply emotional, swag-obsessed, 140-character-quip culture that, like it or not, we are all embedded in. He is a vehicle with which to make sense of the increasingly disparate personalities we are all expected to have, as a result of the current age of “sharing.” We have Drake to thank for allowing us to be sappy, emotional, crying in a bathtub one minute, and exiting the bathtub the next minute, to primp so much that there’s no way we won’t stir the hearts of club-goers in HoustAtlantaVegas. In order to give Drake the credit he deserves, I need to debunk some rumors. Although we have established that Drake represents various facets of the human emotional experience, Drake has made it clear on several occasions–including in an interview with World Star Hip Hop–that his music, though bastardized by Meme Drake, is not “lonely and emotional.” In fact, Photo courtesy of buzzfeed.com
he resents this conception, claiming that his music is “strictly for the purpose of driving at nighttime.” While Drake’s defense of his music is a fair tendency, questions arise: What the hell is Drake doing at nighttime? Why is Drake’s nighttime so much more emotional than my nighttime? There’s the obvious answer that Drake, like so many others, is trying to sell records, and one of the most efficient ways to do that is to operate from an unusual angle. But, there is an added dimension of unfettered emotionalism that, for deeply entrenched (homophobic, vaguely racist) reasons, Drake is mocked for. Drake is who we are behind closed doors. Even at his most ostentatious, confident, or inappropriate, he stands out because we tend to harbor each of these personas in various divots of our egos. It’s not that Drake is particularly more emotional than the rest of his peers, or even than his audience. I’d even venture to say that Drake experiences (or at least displays) emotion in a relatively sophomoric way, a sentiment that Anthony Fantano, shares with me. The prime example of this would be, of course, “Marvin’s Room,” the premise of which is a drunk call to an ex that could really have gone better. Yeah, he’s childish, and totally clichéd to make art about an ex, or worse, a failed encounter with an ex, but there is something humblingly universal about it. In this case, and arguably several others, particularly during more emotional moments of Drake’s music, Drake is doing a lot of what a popular culture icon should be doing: bringing comfort and a sense of unity to his audience, even if it is in the form of sulking in our mutual shame. TL;DR: Drake has an uncanny knack for making his audience feel just a little bit less atypical. Drake is no more emotional than you or I, he’s just our diary. Now, continuing on the topic of debunking the “soft” Drake conception: while Drake is one of the most notable contemporary hip-hop artists to use heartbreak as fodder for a significant portion of his tracks, he still plays into hip-hop culture in very traditional ways. The main example: beef. Drake has 4 main things: emotions, stacks, women, and beef. According to the Wikipedia article entitled “List of Drake Feuds” (yes, it exists), Drake has had a total of nine feuds with various rappers and musicians during his time in the mainstream. From an objective perspective, this is relatively unremarkable. Rappers have had beef since the inception of rap. Nas and Cormega, Tupac and Biggie (though it’s pretty clear that their beef was hyperbolized by the media), East Coast vs. West Coast, Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, the list goes on (particular highlight of the list: Tyler, the Creator and B.o.B. Ha, ha). Beef–essentially a type of violence with a funny, inconsequential label–can be traced back to a lot of theoretical ideas about violence that explain the fascination with Drake’s beef (an amount of fascination that somehow elicits an entire Wikipedia article specifically dedicated to elucidating it). Most of the disses that spurred Drake’s feuds were slung obscurely and indirectly in the middle of a verse, as is customary with rap beef. In the macro sense, Drake’s beef serves to normalize Drake in the social sphere in which he resides (that is, the sphere of hip-hop), and it inevitably gives him a bit of relevance. Why is Drake’s beef relevant to individuals when faced with the task of rationalizing Drake’s influence on culture, you ask? Drake’s beef does a lot of the same things his emotions do: it normalizes. It may be helpful at this point to get theoretical (ugh, I can’t help myself). Slavoj Žižek, in his book “SOS Violence,” claims that the most important type of violence, and, indeed the only one worth examining is something called “systemic violence.” Žižek brings light to the distinction between “systemic” and “subjective” violences (systems that breed vioPhoto courtesy of buzzfeed.com
Yeah, he’s childish, and totally clichéd to make art about an ex, or worse, a failed encounter with an ex, but there is something humblingly universal about it.
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lence, and actual perpetrators of violence, respectively). Drake’s outbursts of violence (whether verbal or physical) are subjective, of course, but it offers an examination of the system, as well. These feuds are a symptom of the systems of violence that give Drake, those he beefs with, and many of his peers, a lot of relevance. While Drake’s disses, and occasional physical altercations, are classic examples of subjective violence, his actions and the myth around them are products of the larger, systemic violence that surrounds the rap game, and our pop culture icons, generally. Drake and Chris Brown’s physical altercation at a Toronto club centered around Drake’s fling with Rihanna after her break-up with Chris Brown, who had physically abused her. Drake and Chris got into beef for honorable reasons, with Drake defend-
ed of being involved with Kylie Jenner, the 17-year-old princess of the Kardashian clan. On Drake’s track “6 PM in New York,” off of “If You’re Reading This,” he aptly spits “you need to act your age, not your girl’s age.” Although he isn’t taking a particular stance on the undoubtedly inappropriate nature of Tyga’s preying on Jenner, he did bring light to something that should have been brought into question long ago. Beef for a cause! I get that it’s kind of ambitious to pardon an entire system of violence simply because its “normal” or because of the “Drake can do it, so can I!” rationale. I really don’t want that to be the take-away. Instead, I want to make clear how truly universal the Drake message, in its various forms, really is. He’s just…so accessible. He is the system, a lot like you and me. You know that Joan Osborne song, “What If God Was One Of Us?” The one that goes
ing Rihanna’s honor tooth and nail. But, that’s really not worth paying any attention to, Žižek argues. How did they get here? What social mechanisms are at play that got Drake to this place, slinging shanked bottles at a domestic abuser, being so violent, even for an honorable cause? Žižek advocates for the scrutiny and analysis of this systemic violence (in this case, beef, and Drake’s in particular), in order to curb it. While this has its place, this is not exactly what I am advocating. Essentially, even though Drake’s beef can be understood as a plea for relevance in a system of violence, his beef also proves something very fundamental about the system itself: beef, and violence, are normal. They are an archetypal example of our new normal: subtweets, schoolyard fights captured on grainy film, even microagressions. He normalizes and confirms our system, a function of society that we fundamentally abide by. Even in the height of morality, violence inevitably emerges, and Drake’s violence is just a confirmation of this. Drake operates within a framework that is familiar to us, thus placing us on a plane similar to his own. Drake is fighting for a lot of things you or I might fight for. He’s familiar, and he’s honorable, even in a system that operates on mechanisms of oppression that breed “senseless” acts of violence, like domestic abuse. Take Drake’s newest beef: a criticism of Tyga, who is suspect-
“What if God was one of us? / just a slob like one of us? / just a stranger on the bus? / Trying to make his way home?” Yeah, that one. It’s like that. Drake is on my bus, and he’s on yours. He’s also God, kind of. The 6 God, that is. Or maybe 6 rabbi? He’s my therapist, my rabbi, my God, whatever. I don’t really worship Drake, but I tell him my secrets on the way home from work, taking a cue from even the slightest shadow of comfort. And I rely on him, to somehow give credibility to my issues, my stresses, and my irritation. I feel like, in his hands, there’s really no way I can fuck up too badly. He tempers my thoughts. I like that. Drake is catharsis. It has long been theorized that violence, whether it be dissing or shanking, is an outlet. Drake’s presence provides this outlet in a unique way that we have tended to appreciate. Beyond that, not only has his violence done this, but so have his emotions, and his yearning to be understood—a yearning that my high-school-freshman self knew well. In the track, “You & the 6,” off of “If You’re Reading This,” Drake pens an open letter to his mother, apologizing for his shortcomings (that is, for not going on a blind date set up by his mother) and vocalizing the stresses of the game. “This is a crazy life, but you and the 6 raised me right.” I don’t know if I’ve heard a more beautiful line in the past 5 years. Call me biased, call me soft,
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Photos courtesy of complex.com
but he’s honest. Of course, other rappers in the past have put aside their blunt-behind-the-ear personas to rap directly to their mothers (I’m thinking of Tupac in this particular instance), but Drake wasn’t just devoting a song to his mother. He’s apologizing. He’s recognizing that he hasn’t gone about all of this the right way. Surely, Tupac does some similar things in “Dear Mama,” but, based on “You & the 6,” Drake and his mom’s relationship could be my relationship with my own mother. He’s actually kind of bragging to her: “I pull the knife out my back, and cut they throats with it, mama / I’m Game of Thrones with it mama.” But, in the same breath, he’s also really struggling with his image, particularly nodding at the popular conception of him as an emotional softie: “I just-I-I can’t be out here being vulnerable, mama.” Dude is struggling with it so much that he can barely verbalize it, let alone admit it. I almost feel like I’m not supposed to be eavesdropping on this voicemail. But really, it’s kind of the sweetest, most honest love letter to a mother I’ve read or heard in a while. Despite Drake’s inner toiling, his love for his mother and for the places he grew up prevail. I love my mom, too, Aubrey. I think I’ll actually call her right now, maybe even spit a fire verse, thanking her for raising me. On the topic of self-love: rappers are, on the whole, pretty damn confident. They have their moments of absolute, annoying arrogance (Ab-Soul, I’m looking at you; “I’m a fucking GENIUS / gripping my fuckin’ PENIS”), and of course, they have their soft moments, where they admit to some level of vulnerability, begrudgingly. Drake’s moments of self-love feel a lot like those moments when we’re at our best: good hair day, Saturday, post-gym, perfect outfit selected. Recently, at least from what I have observed on Tumblr and Twitter, self-love has been the motto. I don’t think I can blame Drake for this entirely, but, especially among the communities of people of color that I occupy and converse with, Drake’s lyrics, his unique outfits, and unapologetic sense of self, have frequently been topics of discussion. His radical self-love is somehow unabrasive in a way that I find extremely appealing. Take this lyric in “Headlines”: “I might be strong out on compliments / overdose on confidence / Started not to give a fuck and stopped fearing the consequence.” That is no Ab-Soul line. The simple notion of abandoning giving a fuck (and the notion that, at one point, someone who is often expected to be confident with ease, did give a fuck) is encouraging. Easier said than done, sure, but when I’m feeling good, looking good, making funny jokes, or when I’m just kind of killing it, I’m reminded of “Headlines,” and Drake’s very grounded sense of confidence. Drake’s self-assuredness is so much more infectious than anything Ab-Soul or Big Sean could ever try to sell me. In a way, his sense of confidence feels totally achievable, and even as an extremely un-self-assured person, I’ve had moments where I identify with this lyric. I’m tempted to quote the entire song, since it could very easily be written by most of us on a good day. “I just take my time with all this shit / I still believe in that,” is a prime example of this notion. Getting to love yourself, and love your situation, is no walk in the park, and Drake wants to make that clear. It takes time, and it takes a lot of disregarding the thoughts and opinions of others, or of the system. Not only is this track hype as hell, I, along with a lot of others, can probably relate to it in a certain way. Perhaps that’s another reason I, along with a lot of my peers, friends, and acquaintances, find myself making Drake into a topic, and, further, a fairly good example. He’s unapologetic about his style, his behavior, his creative products, and his paths to getting there.
I don’t want to give him too much credit or play too much into the idolatry of a celebrity, but I do want to make the point that Drake sets some sort of precedent for loving oneself. He’s doing it in a unique way, in a way that’s familiar to me. I think I can attribute this to the nuances of his personality as a whole, the that he’s unafraid to show the less-than-perfect or broken down aspects of his image, thus making his self-love a brand that I can somehow get behind or relate to. It’s grounded self-love. Dare I say, “down to earth.” Drake’s various incarnations aren’t totally unusual in and of themselves. We all act differently depending on what environments we inhabit at any given moment. Drake does too, and, in the hip-hop game, in all its glory and diversity, this is somewhat atypical. That might be kind of a gross generalization, but I would like to emphasize the impact of Drake. That’s not to say that artists like Big K.R.I.T., Gambino, the Pharcyde, hell, even Jay-Z, haven’t attempted to examine the universal themes of heartbreak and paper. That would be just stupid. But as far as sheer impact goes, Drake was in the right place at the right time. The Internet fell right into his lap, the rap game came to him, and external factors did a lot of the work for him. But he ran with it, and he made a lot of it. Thank you, Drake. You make me feel safe in all my different habitats, ups and downs, crises and triumphs. But you also make me feel damn good when I roll into a party wearing a tight skirt and a mesh crop top that opens in the front with a zipper.
Baby you my everything, you all I ever wanted/ We could do it real big, bigger than you ever done it … I want this forever, I swear I could spend whatever on it -“Best I Ever Had”-2009, Drake I got one girl, and she my girl/ and nobody else can hit it/ She’ll admit it, she’ll admit it/ She ain’t fuckin’ with you ni**as/ And just like everything in my life, you can have her when I’m finished” -“6 God”-2015, Drake Special thanks to: Rap Genius, Anthony Fantano @theneedledrop, Daniela Wertheimer, Wikipedia, and the one, the only, Champagne Papi. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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You don’t spell it A-Z-A-L-E-A Why are Azealia Banks and her fellow black rappers being denied the notoriety they deserve, in favor of Iggy Azalea, rap’s proverbial Regina George?
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Azealia Banks, who released her debut album, “Broke With Expensive Taste,” in 2014.
by Blake Oetting
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veryone had an Azealia Banks in their high school. Maybe that was you, in which case all I can say is congrats and that I am yours for the taking. Really though, think back and I think you’ll remember the type. Azealia was the girl that didn’t show up to receive her prom queen crown. She was kind of weird but the type of weird that made her approachable. She had a Cady Heron type of influence but instead of army pants and flip-flops she had you wearing a poop emoji crop top and some Bart Simpson leggings. She was what I, as a boy born and raised in Iowa, imag-
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ine all city kids to be: way cooler than me and able to navigate public transport without asking people for directions. Her music, however, has really given her the spotlight as of late. Banks envelops her songs with a fresh and exciting ethos (and a hefty dose of controversy) inspired by her Harlem upbringing, resulting in upbeat, trendy, and innovative music that I, and many others, have had the pleasure of voraciously consuming for the past four years. If I extend the Mean Girl metaphor (the movie, duh) so that Azealia Banks is not only a “regulation hottie” or the “only, no parallel bitch” but also the bona fide foil to “plastic” rappers everywhere,
Iggy Azalea is the proverbial Regina George. Their similarities extend beyond the blonde hair. They both just kind of suck, for one. Maybe that is too harsh to dear Regina though. I mean she doesn’t consistently appropriate black culture, profit off her poor interpretation and then slap said culture in the face by calling herself a “runaway slave master.” She just wants to win spring fling queen. And hey, who wouldn’t want that? But Iggy Azalea wants something beyond those pancake house tickets: the Grammy for rap album of year and all the prestige that comes with it. But hello, hi, hey, America what are you thinking? Iggy Azalea is not “The New Classic,” unless Photo courtesy of Mix Magazine
she is referring to her role in—as Azealia Banks puts it—the perpetual “smudging” of black culture in the music industry, in which case, yes, she can call herself a classic all she wants but does she deserve recognition or encouragement for it? Should we allow rap music to be, as Forbes put it, “run by a white, blonde, Australian woman”? The reason I focus on her in comparison to Iggy Azalea is because of their superficial similarities. Both rappers have received a majority of their notoriety recently, both released their debut albums in 2014 and are, of course, women in a male dominated musical sphere. All things being equal, talent would win out and the better rapper (Azealia Banks) would be performing on SNL, at the BET Music Awards, and at the Grammys. Now, Azealia Banks missed the nomination cutoff, but go sit down and listen to “Broke With Expensive Taste,” compare it with “The New Classic,” and try to tell me Iggy Azalea made a better record. You can’t, and nobody else who reviews music is trying to do so. SPIN, Rolling Stone, Metacritic, Pitchfork, and many others have given Azealia Banks much higher marks. So, my question is: where is the disconnect? The recent decisions involving rap album of the year, as Azealia Banks stated in a recent Hot 97 FM interview, tell white kids: “you’re great. You’re amazing. You can do whatever you put your mind to.” But to their black peers, it is becoming an annual reminder that “you don’t
have shit. You don’t own shit, not even the shit you created yourself.” This is partly because those winning and getting nominated for the awards are white, but also because the white rappers are clearly less deserving of the award then their
The recent decisions involving rap album of the year tell white kids, ‘You can do whatever you put your mind to.’ But to their black peers, it is becoming an annual reminder that ‘You don’t own shit, not even the shit you created yourself.’ black colleagues who weren’t awarded or recognized. Look back to this time last year. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s “The Heist,” with its songs about shopping at thrift stores and buying cadillacs, did not deserve the Grammy over Kendrick Lamar, who produced one of the
most self-investigative and thoughtful rap albums of the past decade, let alone of 2014. We are seeing the same thing happen in 2015 with Iggy Azalea being nominated over The Roots, IamSu!, YG and NehruvianDOOM: artists who pushed the limits of rap in 2014, not settling for vapid Top 40 tracks or adding to the cornucopia of songs addressing antiquated motifs. Azealia Banks pushed these same limits with her debut album “Broke With Expensive Taste.” I believe it to be yet another thinly guised racial issue and that honestly shouldn’t take a lot of convincing. In a world where there the white policeman who, on video, strangled Eric Garner to death can avoid indictment it is actually quite logical to assume that Azealia Banks and her fellow black rappers will be denied the notoriety they deserve to make room for a blonde, white girl. This is catalyzing a devolution of our race politics and practices as black children see their culture being taken over and see themselves as even further entrenched in the shadows of White America. The arts world and specifically the Grammys should be combatting and avoiding such a downward spiral, not contributing to it. They need to give credit where credit is due. Maybe that credit should go to a white rapper (Eminem was certainly a viable candidate for the rap album of the year), maybe it goes to an Asian rapper, maybe a black rapper, but definitely, without a doubt, not to Iggy Azalea. u
Beauty from the bleak on ‘Vulnicura’ Björk’s new album exposes raw emotion and humanity, yet remains beautiful
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tender android in her music video for “All Is Full of Love,” to the swan of her now infamous Oscars dress back in 2001. By taking on all of these artificial roles for herself, she has managed to cultivate one of the most distinctive presences in pop music, and this persona often precedes her. What makes her new album, “Vulnicura,” so arresting and intriguing, then, is the undeniable humanness of its emotions. “Vulnicura” is a chronicle of the emotional trajectory of the day she broke up with her boyfriend of 10 years, Matthew Barney. She lays out everything
she feels in this brief period so plainly and nakedly and the result is devastatingly beautiful music that strips away her alien mystique to reveal a vulnerable human soul. This is not to say that her album, which was unexpectedly released in January, six months ahead of schedule, does not possess the same idiosyncrasies that contribute to this iconic mystique. Björk has always towed the line of avant-garde through her eclectic and innovative production style. When it was announced that her new album would be
by Ian Holloway
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n a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Icelandic music icon Björk stated that she felt like a “space alien” during the making of her ninth studio album. She described how the heartbreak that propelled her songwriting left her feeling “possessed.” For Björk, this kind of depersonalization is nothing new. Over the course of her now decades-long solo career, she has taken on various non-human embodiments, from the
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Björk, whose 22-year-long career is marked by eclectic albums, has constructed a single emotional narrative in “Vulnicura.”
co-produced by Venezuelan beatmaker Arca last October, any doubts of her cutting-edge sensibilities wearing off were loudly dismissed. At 24, Arca has brought his distinctive brand of sputtering and voltaic beats to high profile collaborations with Kanye West and FKA twigs, as well as to his studio debut, “Xen,” which came out in November. In producing “Vulnicura,” Björk enlists Arca’s talents to revive the organic/inorganic dynamic of her groundbreaking 1997 album, “Homogenic.” Songs like “Atom Dance” couple orchestral strings with booming and fragmented synths to produce a surprisingly cohesive and wholly original soundscape. The album also receives contributions from producer The Haxan Cloak, whose background in dark ambient music further lends itself to the unique sonic experience on her new album. Since Björk’s career is marked by albums of great eclecticism, “Vulnicura” stands out in that it contains a single emotional narrative, namely that of the swift dissolution of her decade-long relationship. On “Stonemilker,” the sensational opening track, she declares: “Moments of clarity are so rare / I better document this,” framing the rest of the album as a frantic and necessary testimony of her heartbreak. “Stonemilker” is the album’s most straightforward pop 44
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moment, its main hook churning forward like some kind of machine, showcasing her virtuosic ability to construct melodies that linger in the mind long after a song has ended. After the rush of “Stonemilker,” the rest of the album proceeds to uncover successive layers of the pain and heartbreak. The keystone to the album is the ten minute long “Black Lake,” where Björk’s voice inches chillingly over a grim string backdrop, reaching an emotional climax with the simple and devastating question: “Did I love you too much?” The album can be uncompromisingly bleak with such direct emoting, but it never feels unbearable. This is because of the elegantly beautiful way these dark emotions are represented; to listen to the album is to simultaneously participate in her catharsis and her pain. As much as “Vulnicura” is about love and heartbreak, it is about Björk constructing a deeply personal image of herself seldom seen in her previous work. On songs like “Family” and “Quicksand” she is particularly interested in defining herself in terms of her womanhood and motherhood, both of which are complicated by the loss of her partner. In “Family,” she ponders: “Is there a place / Where I can pay respects / For the death of my family?” The self-image she constructs post-breakup is not meant to
represent a clean slate, but is rather more realistically defined by the damaged incurred, in this case the loss of the sacred triad between her partner, her daughter, and herself. As expressive as her lyrics can be, it is the voice that delivers them that deserves the most praise in conveying emotion and a sense of self. Björk has always had a Billie Holiday-like way of packing so much emotional information into a wail or a belt, and she uses this throughout the album, to great effect. Although her voice lacks the vigor of the “It’s Oh So Quiet” era, the noticeable strains and breaks can be quite arresting, and further cultivate the mature vulnerability of her image. It has been 22 years since her “Debut,” and in that time Björk has innovated constantly, leaving her distinctive imprint on music through each successive album. “Vulnicura” makes it almost hard to grasp how her creative genius has remained this elastic for so long. In the aforementioned interview with “Rolling Stone,” Björk described her writing of “Vulnicura” as being a “survival mechanism.” It makes sense to envision the album this way, as some kind of instinctual, unfiltered by-product of the danger surrounding her. Through all of the raw emotion and exposed humanity, Björk survives, and we are left with beautiful music. u Photo courtesy of noisey.vice.com
ART The beauty of chance
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Sculptures by Cy Twombly at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
by Natalia Sucher
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lank, washed in white, and covered in almost meaningful scrawls, the canvas sits above a label that reads: “The Italians (Roma, 1961) by Cy Twombly.” The only parts of the artwork that seem to relate to the label are the handwritten scrawls “Italians,” “Roma,” “1961,” and “Cy Twombly.” The words, without accompanying visual representation, evoke the viewer’s own ideas of what each one means. The empty spaces between scribbles, smudges, and erase marks emphasize the role of the canvas as background in the artwork. The painting seems sparse: all the indecipherable symbols are spread out as if to express the difficulty of grasping a coherent unity. The apparent meaninglessness of the oil, pencil, and crayon–which linger rather than depict an image–deviates from traditional conceptions of art, wherein substances are meant to represent rather than allowed to exist in themselves. Twombly continues to draw attention to the viewer’s search for meaning in his subsequent sculptures, which will be exhibited until May in the Skylit Atrium at the Perelman Building of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. American painter Cy Twombly was born in Virginia in 1928 and died in Rome in 2011. He rose to fame during the Abstract Expressionist era of the 1950s. Known for his non-literal and abstract expression, Twombly worked in a variety of media, including collage, paint, pencil, and sculpture. Twombly’s works, simultaneously childlike in appearance and incredibly complex in meaning, are notoriously difficult to understand because they do not represent a specific event, but rather reveal abstract themes, gists, and feelings. Aside from “The Italians,” the Philadelphia Museum houses the significant Twombly series “Fifty Days at Iliam,” a painting in ten parts inspired by Alexander Pope’s liberal and passionate 1710 translation of and preface to Homer’s “Iliad” (an ancient Greek epic poem
detailing the clash of two armies). The paintings are unconventional, non-literal, and thought-provoking abstractions of the epic. The PMA’s exhibit of Twombly’s sculpture consists of five pieces chosen by the artist as companions to this series. Made of weathered and whitewashed bronze, these sculptures continue several threads of abstract thought that Twombly demonstrates in “The Italians” and “Fifty Days at Iliam,” such as how meaning is constructed, the viewer’s role in artwork, and the shift of
Twombly’s genius resides in his ability to make every seemingly meaningless shape, size, and color a reason to pause and marvel at the beauty of chance. background to foreground. In an interview, Twombly emphasized the unity of abstraction in his artwork: “Bronze unifies the thing. It abstracts the forms from the material. People want to know about what the material constituents are; it helps them identify the work with something. But I want each sculpture to be seen as a whole, as a sculpture.” Within the exhibited sculptures, this unity expresses itself both in the effaced bronze material and in the viewer’s multiple but coherent vantage points as they walk around the artwork. The first sculpture is a cascade of worn bronze semicircles entitled “Rotalla,” an irreverent spelling of the Italian “rotella,” meaning little wheel. Viewed from its side, the sculpture looks like a
series of one dimensional lines broken into different obtuse and right angles. Viewed head-on, it seems like two-dimensional superimposed circles. Looked at from any other perspective, the ideal simplicity of the lines and circles fragments into a dynamic third dimension. A vivacious, complex unity emerges from the many different vantage points the viewer may take, as well as from its title, “Rotalla,” which adds kinetic force to an otherwise static object. Further expanding the theme of a sculpture as a multidimensional object shaped by the viewer’s perspective, “Victory” starkly stretches from the floor to the sky at the end of the atrium in a succession of slanted, curved, and precarious shapes. The sculpture diverges from others in the exhibit; it is the largest, the most dramatically placed, and the only floor sculpture. Its name also evokes a grandeur and heavy significance: “Victory” is a physical manifestation of an abstract concept burdened with social meaning. The weight of the sculpture is placed vertically, with a thick rectangular base and air-thin peak. Its foundation seems to extend beyond its base to the floor and above its peak to the surrounding air. Just as Twombly explored how the viewer can become aware of the background through the exposed canvas of “The Italians” and through the abstracting bronze of his sculptures, with “Victory” he blurs the distinction between background and foreground through its indefinite physical boundaries. The theme of blurred distinction recurs in all the exhibit’s sculptures through the manipulation of the bronze material. In every sculpture, the bronze is heavily worn, emphasizing how environment and object interact. While the weathering of the material shows the inherent and fated effacement of all things, the fact that the sculpture still stands and has not yet been completely destroyed demonstrates the precarious position of its existence, constantly on the brink of non-existence by succumbing to its environment. The sculptures visualize this erasure of bronze SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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Photos by the author of the Twombly exhibit at the PMA.
material with patination, white paint, and distress marks. Beyond the surface, however, the sculptures exist through casting bronze atop clay, wood, and metal. The effects of making clay into a bronze cast
amplify the malleability of the sculpture’s material. “Untitled” (1980) and “Untitled” (1997) both play with the idea of precarious existence and clear demarcations between object and environment by memorializing
in bronze the fleeting, creative indents left on clay. Twombly’s genius resides in his ability to make every seemingly meaningless shape, size, and color a reason to pause and marvel at the beauty of chance. u
Wandering Philadelphia’s museums ‘Represent: 200 Years of African American Art,’ at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and exhibits at Moore College of Art and Design intrigue, challenger, and frighten viewers
by Clara Habermeier This is a pencil sketch of the art I saw as I wandered through the Galleries at Moore College, and, just a few blocks away, the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I hope that you, too, have the chance to explore and enjoy them. Represent: 200 Years of African American Art will be on display at the Philadelphia Museum until April 5, 2015, and the exhibitions at Moore were on display until March 14, 2015.
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assie Louise Lightfoot, the eightyear-old fictional narrator of Faith Ringgold’s book “Tar Beach,” flew above New York City one summer night.
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Turn right as soon as you walk into the exhibit “200 Years of African-American Art,” and you will see Ringgold’s quilt, “Tar Beach 2,” which you might remember from the children’s book. Set on the rooftops of the city, Cassie’s story is illuminated by the chaotic patchwork of city buildings, and Ringgold’s rich patterns and expressive drawing style. The story itself is written in tiny paragraphs in the sky, and explores the way we find pathways to hope despite hardship. The last, somewhat bittersweet words will be our guide as we move through the exhibit: “anyone can fly. All you need is somewhere to go that you can’t get to any other way. The next thing you know, you’re flying among the stars.”
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Walk a little farther and you will encounter Kara Walker’s “no world,” part of “An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters,” a series of etchings on paper. Walker is famous for her more conceptual sculptures (one of her recent works, “A Subtlety,” a white sugar Sphynx at the Domino Sugar Factory in New York City, aims to provoke discussion and self-questioning). “no world,” like the other prints in the series, showcases Walker’s versatility as an artist, her ability to make drawings that are, visually, just as captivating as her social critique often is. In “no world,” a scene from the transatlantic slave trade, a fragile ship is lifted out of the ocean by two black hands (the scale of the drawing means they are
around as large as the viewer’s own hands). The composition unsettles: a feeling of seasickness arises from the slant of the lines of the ocean, which evoke the tilting, dipping motion of a vessel at sea. Two silhouettes, large enough to sink the ship, stand to the west on a ghostly, flat patch of water. The silhouettes, caricatures that evoke the racialized visual language of the antebellum South, reference the other shadowy forms in Walker’s oeuvre, with their implicit gore. A woman’s silhouette, one subtle shade darker than the color of the water, swims under the waves. Walker’s delicate, sensual line work contrasts with the richness of light and shadow, making this exploration of the ideological landscape of slavery as visually intriguing as much of the iconography is sickening. The exhibit is organized chronologically; move farther back into the past, and Elizabeth Catlett’s earlier sculpture “Mother and Child” catches your eye. The sculpture, a small carving of a mother holding a baby on her lap, is a masterpiece of minimalist sculptural unity. The baby’s legs kick out at angles, framed by the soft rectangularity of the mother’s body. This expression of motherly love holds its own next to larger works by Henry Ossawa Tanner and Jacob Lawrence. Tanner’s work itself is a tender exploration of fabric and light, with moments of both precision and softness; nearby, the pastel pops of color in Moe Brooker’s “Present Futures” are melodically arranged across the abstract framework of the canvas. Each of these pieces holds its own in an eclectic gathering of artworks from different times and different schools of thought. By juxtaposing works that are visually and philosophically similar, Represent misses out on its full potential for a cross-cultural dialogue between artworks from different times in American history. Still, the craft and virtuosity of many of the works, taken individually, makes the show worth a visit, and Kara Walker’s work alone would probably draw an audience.
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our Life is Happening Now,” a series of ink-on-paper drawings by Philadelphia artist Sarah Gamble, on display at Moore College, reads as an attempt by the artist to intimately explore the landscape of her own mind. In her drawings, Gamble retreats into an inner world: half-remembered faces and flights of the imagination share space in the exhibition with quick, emotive studies of the animals and people around her. One drawing shows a black cat, a cozy silhouette lounging in a warm rectangle of paper: the negative space Photo courtesy of moma.org
Kara Walker’s “no world.”
fits into the positive space like a glove. The medium and the subject matter of this drawing are equally immersive. We see many different sides of this very specific cat throughout the exhibit: playful, grumpy,
‘The Sky’s Gone Out’ is a Freudian house of horrors, often unknowably morbid, often unshakably absurd. contemplative. Many of the drawings, though beautifully composed, seem too deliberately spontaneous, and some of Gamble’s faces read as flat caricatures and cartoonish exaggerations. Others, like some of the drawings of centaurs, are richly three-dimensional, using subtle shading to convey volume and depth. Gamble’s enjoyment of the ink-on-paper medium is a delight to see, and shines through the most when she combines her introspection with a keen eye for the world around her. Gamble’s work is shrewd, captivating and certainly worth the trip.
Also at Moore College, a few doors over from Gamble’s work, the new exhibit “The Sky’s Gone Out” explores Freudian themes of the uncanny. The windowless gallery seems to purr. Lo-fi shrieks are muffled by unlabeled curtains. On the walls, video stills from Gabriela Fridriksdottir’s “Inside the Core” show humanlike figures covered in fabric, hair, and other natural materials. The video itself follows the journey of a baker-and-writer through a world that intends to horrify. Nuns cackle and kidnap. A woman’s eyes peek at the viewer from a nest of papier mache, and the narrator’s self-control succumbs to pseudo-savagery. “Inside the Core” is, superficially, a caricature of the Freudian sense of the uncanny, rather than an exploration of it, but the work has latent depths. Unraveled, Fridriksdottir’s symbolic language of textures and landscapes rewards the viewer with clever variations on the Freudian theme. Each character suffers a loss of sight, either physical or spiritual, recreating a Freudian idea of the horrific as a universal disease that strikes differently each time. Other works unsettle through gruesomeness, like Chloe Pine Blackwood’s screeching “House of Horrors.” The gallery nevertheless provides an almost quiet space for meditation and reflection upon the contradictions of fear. “The Sky’s Gone Out” is a Freudian house of horrors, often unknowably morbid, often unshakably absurd. u SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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POETRY: SEVEN WORKS
Why We Harmonize by Anthony Chiarenza
Alaska by Z.L. Zhou
Ah I remember my pausing hesitance before your vibrant eyes lucid sign like the Yukon’s soul you handled gold for a nominal sum life of fortune love of stories beyond niceties you had stolen from the Bering Sea dangerous hobby you loved the alluvial plains that I had come from I desired you admired your sheen for myself for your smoothing on my lips pursued the placers your resilience in light of the dream found you in Nome the bitter sun glittered on your knuckles that kept the north how you sold admiration of each river the draw of exploring each wind-hewn coast a perfect lode notwithstanding endurance I could scarcely return home
Lulu danced in quantized swings. Her hair never faltered to a split end. The dancer fell into the night. Luis followed a certain beat. His feet clamored with the same clangs. His rhythm fell into the night. I saw Lulu and Luis cross paths, Of form to rhythm intersect. A break in meter, a delayed stare. A rundown of ideas flow. Pitter patter, slam pound. Cling Clang, tap slide. Lulu’s hands flew through the air blurring into a spinning sphere of blue. Luis’ feet resumed a regular beat as if to predict the orbit of her sphere. And somehow in the moonlight, they appeared to blur into one as energy surrounding a soul, surging and spinning. The surrounding world loses color. and Lulu’s blue spins gain a neon glow, and Luis frays the ground, as each tap and slam sparks red. Lulu and Luis catch each other’s glares, and they slow to a swish and a tap. A gentle wind blows, and two strangers part eternally. Luis spent each day strolling, whistling a jolly tune as each step had a jump and made a Cling Clang. Lulu often looked to the sky spinning and dreaming to a telepathic jolly tune, and spun to a Cling Clang.
untitled by Lindsay Holcomb
every evening entering at eleven PM, evincing endurance even if exhausting employment evokes no empathy; her vocation the vacuuming of vacated, vanilla vacinities she scrapes, scrubs, and scours; scrutinized or scarcely seen by the students whose scraps and stains solicit her services.
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Beyond the Breakers by Kathy Kandrysawtz
Hands
Jerusalem, Rhode Island
by Ian Hoffman
For Dad Daybreak – rosy rays filter through dense oak leaves in the courtyard – and I see the same fiery, coral glow illuminating a glass ocean at dawn, mid-August mornings – nothing but you, me, sun, sky, sea – nothing but rhythmic rocking of the boat, shifting shade, sun climbing higher and higher, tide sweeping us out – nothing but days where the only thought on our mind was the big one – the one that flashed and flickered – silvery scales in all of her majesty. I recall how you spent last summer plotting to seize a striper – we’ll get ‘em this time – 5 am in the harbor of refuge, the south rip, tipping rods, and false nibbles. There were good days: ten flapping flounder, one tiny cooler – and there were bad: returning to the harbor with empty nets, dried squid between fingernails. And somewhere in between flood tide and ebb tide, I learned simplicity: one day at a time, we can all find a little peace. Miles off the coast, words sparse, thoughts simple, minds open to wander… I always return to sultry summer days: you, me, sun, sky, sea – the memory of it all squirming and slipping through our hands – scales and all – back into the swells of the sea.
Memory always sudden
In 40,000 years I expect we humans will evolve to the point of not needing bodies, just hands to type, type, type and those with the strongest— fastest— hands evolutionarily positioned to reproduce, the ‘popular’ kids. People will go 100 years without moving from their chairs, food and water piped in from the sky while robots mine nebulae for comestibles. It will be in all things an improvement, and it is for this reason that I always take your hands, feeling them as one might the future.
by Rose Wunrow
It’s the roaring twenties and it seems like it seems like most of your friends are getting married or getting kicked by the bucket, or doing the kicking themselves — and you have to remind yourself this: it’s not most of them, only a handful, they’re the loose change you find again, by accident, on alarming days to remind you of the dates — minted, as it were, in 2011. You can’t spend away that kind of dead time, can’t gamble or do your laundry with it — it’s currency valid for the late nights spent without bearings or magnets, nothing that could stick or pull away from grief. Your grandmother said life goes on like a newspaper: you start off doing the crosswords: you read the marriage columns: the births: then you read the obituaries and look for the names of your friends. Wouldn’t it be something to read or write someone alive? In a newspaper, it could go like this: “Rebirth: on this day, February 3, 2015, boy, brown hair, fifteen, found in the room of his boarding school, doing nothing, nothing significant save for looking out the window, or writing a Christmas card to his friend miles and miles away, who never responds in due time but still loves and misses him when he decides to go away.”
blue screens, red rings by Annie Zhao
so i’m an adventurer, a heroine of a story that doesn’t include you. it’s two quarters, one life: just a game we all can play; two quarters, one life: until they pull the plug. all’s well that ends. do I Continue? (insert coin)
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LETTERS OF REC Brief recommendations of books, music, movies, and more from our editors
Ben Sinclair plays a weed dealer to upper-middle-class Brooklynites on the web series “High Maintenance.”
Album: ‘Goodbye’ by Goodbye Wonderland Magazine has called Goodbye an “underground online postpop band,” a label that seems fair to me. But Goodbye isn’t underground or “post” pop because it doesn’t 100% embrace the tropes and hooks and glitter of pop – it does embrace them, recklessly and joyfully. It’s post pop because it makes explicit the implicit questions of pop music: social anxiety, desire, and the layers of artifice that make up the “real.” In his review of the album for Tiny Mix Tapes, Will Neibergall notes, “to ask precisely which elements are and are not genuine is to miss the point.” I think more precisely, “Goodbye” makes us confront how constructed our ideas and enactments of “genuine” actually are. I’m recommending the album for these themes that seem so relevant as I click play on “Image of Ur Choice” at a party, but also because it sometimes makes me wanna dance and sometimes validates my wallowing. “Goodbye” is music for sitting alone in your room refusing to text your crush or read your ethnography, but it’s also music for throwing a pregame for 50
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said crush/all your fave friends. Enjoy <3 —Nora Battelle, Contributing Editor Book: ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ by Jhumpa Lahiri “Interpreter of Maladies” sweeps from Boston to Calcutta to explore the lives of people who are, or feel, far away from home. A white American boy with a distant mother befriends an Indian woman immersed in homesick loneliness; a Bengali man travels to America, eating cereal for every meal and waiting for the arrival of his wife, who is a stranger to him; an Indian-American girl is told by her teacher that learning about the politics of the country her family came from isn’t something she should be doing in school. Tied up in all these narratives are questions of race, identity, and belonging, how it feels to have your skin stared at or your voice made fun of or your history erased. Lahiri weaves together plotlines and characters with details so sharp, smart, and touching that it seems she has a stethoscope to the hearts of her characters. Her sensitivity to
the inner workings of human emotion is what makes this book so gorgeous, empathetic, and, in all its tales of detachment and isolation, hopeful and complete. —Colette Gerstmann, Music Editor Web series: ‘High Maintenance’ In a time when stories about upper middle class Brooklynites seem to be dominating on television, Vimeo web series “High Maintenance” remains, for me at least, the most watchable, most enjoyable, and most interesting of its genre. With each episode only between six and twenty minutes long, “High Maintenance” is a dreamy anthology of highly condensed character studies, focusing on 20-something New Yorkers who only have one thing in common–their dealer. This dealer, referred to only as “The Guy” and played by the creator of the show Ben Sinclair, is the only constant among the storylines. He is a highly lovable but anonymous character who rides around Brooklyn on his bicycle delivering weed to his clients. Despite being a series about weed, however, “High Maintenance” isn’t Photo courtesy of splitsider.com
a stoner comedy; as James Poniewozik of TIME says, the show is about the reasons a character might smoke pot. Accordingly, the tone of the episodes range from hilarious (in “Olivia,” The Guy delivers to clients listed in his phone as “assholes” and they fit the bill completely) to contemplative (in “Rachel,” a cross-dressing father struggles with writer’s block) to sweet (in “Brad Pitts,” a woman is ill and needs pot to feel better) to downright sad (in “Jonathon,” a stand-up comedian is shot onstage and must cope with that trauma). This unpredictability works in the show’s favor, and “High Maintenance” strikes a satisfying emotional balance: it is not as stylized as “Broad City,” not as annoying as “Girls,” not as ironic as “Portlandia,” and not as depressing as “Louie.” Instead, it is confident and, in my opinion, extremely successful. So grab some Doritos from Essie’s, light one up, and enjoy an episode or two or twelve of “High Maintenance.” —Isabel Cristo, Contributing Editor Book: ‘Capital in the Twenty First Century’ by Thomas Piketty “Capital in The Twenty First Century” by French economist Thomas Piketty rose to the top of the bestsellers’ list mere weeks after it was published in English last spring. The appeal that the book has produced for scholars and laypeople rests in the quality and accessibility of Piketty’s writing and the timeliness of the book’s focus. Piketty only uses economic concepts that he can explain alongside his argument, but leverages those concepts to great effect. Building from Piketty’s studies of wealth and income inequality in France, “Capital” sets forth a general framework for understanding how the experience of inequality in advanced economies will change in the coming decades. Inequality, Piketty argues, automatically grows if the rate of return on capital is greater than the overall rate of economic growth. As the growth rates of post-industrial economies slow, this scenario will become increasingly common among developed economies. This climbing inequality, he concludes, should be rectified through a variety of policy interventions, including a global tax on capital. As he builds this argument, Piketty launches a wider criticism at mainstream economics for neglecting history and politics. Piketty argues that economics must move away from the notion of ahistorical forces and return the focus of economic analysis to
inequality, which he calls the “distributional question.” In a field as orthodox as economics, Piketty’s criticisms should be more than welcome. Whether you have had this book on your to-do list or had never heard of it until now, “Capital” is well worth some exploration. Written in a way that accommodates a wide readership, this book is an engaging and important resource for any citizen of the 21st century. —Leo Elliot, Contributing Editor Book: ‘The View from Castle Rock’ by Alice Munro “The View From Castle Rock” achieves what only exquisite short story collections can: the creation of a world that feels real enough to walk in, one that is pulsing with flawed characters who live out precious moments suspended in imperfect times and places. The realness of this world is due both to Munro’s mastery of the form (this is her 12th short story collection, published over 40 years after her first) and the raw closeness of her subject matter. In the foreword, Munro explains emphatically that “these are stories.” They are absolutely fictional, though perhaps not strictly so. After years of research on her own ancestry, she wrote the stories that comprise the first half of this collection based on the information she had gathered–from record books and from the mouths of her parents and relatives–but she promises no historical accuracy. She builds vignettes around snippets of passed-on memory or pages of old books. We follow great great grand uncles, cousins of somebody’s grandfather, this-far- and that-far-removed relatives, until we meet Munro’s parents and, finally, Munro herself. Really she has been in the story all along, and the transition is seamless. There’s a kind of magic in the way Munro navigates the progression from ancestral history into childhood memory. It seems that her daily walk from her farmhouse to the grade school in town is the logical conclusion of a long hike her great grandfather’s took up a cliff on the coast of Scotland, in order to gain a vantage point from which to eye the ocean that separated him from American land. The story of the family’s immigrants, grumbling and stepping on each other’s toes throughout the long sea voyage to Canadian shores, hangs perfectly in between. By loosely basing these stories on her own family history, Munro deftly depicts the way that we all know our family histories:
somehow both roughly and exactly, with details that are both convincingly and unbelievably specific, dealing alternately in vividness and haze. Munro as a writer is a character throughout the book, whether she is walking through what remains of her ancestral Scottish hometown or reflecting on the lives of her childhood neighbors with the emotional distance of old age. But even this narrating character version of Munro is not necessarily “real” in the strictest sense of the word. The best evidence of Munro’s literary talent in this work is that as a reader, you do not care whether she is telling the capital-t Truth. You are not caught up in the critical dissection that sometimes follows a “Based on a real story” film drama, because these stories refuse to picked apart that way. The beauty of her writing combined with her straight forward assertion of both its fictional quality and its ties to reality reminds the reader, when they have stepped out of Castle Rock’s immersive world, that in truth, all fiction is as real or as fake as we need it to be. —Priya Dieterich, Copy Editor Album: ‘Rebel Heart’ by Madonna We all agree that Madonna has done it all. Unsurprisingly, she’s done it again, with her new album “Rebel Heart,” an eclectic manifesto from a tiring icon. As one of her more collaborative works, some of it songs were produced by amongst others titan Kanye West, famed DJ Diplo or my personal favorite, PC music icon Sophie. Similarly, some songs feature artists like Nicki Minaj or Chance the Rapper. Is this album all over the place? Yes, it most definitely is. It draws from diverse genres, sometimes within the same song, and it can be difficult to parse out the vision that went into the album. Despite this, it is tied together thematically by a continued self-reverence, with songs “Bitch I’m Madonna” and “Iconic” reminding us that Madonna’s number one fan is Madonna herself, and by a continued irreverence of all forms of establishment under the guise of “Devil’s Prey” or “Illuminati.” Why should you listen to it? Because “Rebel Heart” is a product of our time in all its facets: its icons, its sounds. Although we sometimes lose sight of Madonna’s guiding light, her continued attempt at relevance reveals much about the state of contemporary aspirations and ideals. —Tom Corbani, Contributing Editor SWARTHMORE REVIEW
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