Review in Review: Fall 2021

IN REVIEW IN REVIEW IN REVIEW

F E AT U R E S O N M E N TA L H E A L T H A N D H O M O P H O B I A CERAMICS, ARCHITECTURE, AND FICTION C R I T I C A L E S S AY S O N P O P C U LT U R E

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2020-21 IN REVIEW | SWARTHMORE REVIEW

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•Features• I s E v e ry t h i n g O k ay ?

By Eva Baron p. 4

• Personal Essays • Double Life

By Ella Harrigan p. 20

21 for ‘21

By Lorin Jackson p. 24

• Fiction & Poetry • you and your big red no-good bloody mouth

By Liya Chang p. 28

The Tale of the Red Cliff A Translation from Classical Chinese

Translated by Abhishek Bathina Original by Su Shi p. 29

Laughter Lines

By Devyani Mahajan p. 32

Plunderer of the Sun

By Ayla Schultz p. 37

H o m o p h o b ia

in

Korea

By Angie Kwon p. 12

• Arts • Carlotta Piantanida Table of Contents (left page), p. 19 Jacob Weitzner p. 23 Ark Lu p. 27

• Books • Bog Butter, Arson, an Old Woman, and a Kite

By Olivia Marotte p. 38

• Music • Nowhere to go but Down

By Alexander Del Greco p. 44

• Movies & TV • The Review’s Winter Break Checklist

By the Review Editorial Board p. 48

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I S EVERYTH I NG O K A Y ?

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• F E A TURE •

Features

Revisiting Mental Illness on Tumblr and TikTok

By Eva Baron

Originally published on Sept. 16, 2021.

This article has been shortened for brevity. The original version can be found on our website.

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hen it first aired in 2007, it immediately became clear that the British series Skins resisted a manicured glimpse into adolescence, one that often characterized TV shows in the early 2000s. Compared to the gaudy extravagance of Gossip Girl or the upper class melodrama of The O.C., Skins navigated both the mundane and the extreme with an agility that amounted to a more precise portrait of the teenage experience. Beyond the overdone tribulations surrounding high school infatuations and parties, the teenagers in Skins grappled with parental abuse and domestic instability, confronted and explored their sexualities, and frequented hospitals for eating disorders and overdoses. While traditionally sanitized in other forms of media, these narratives gained authenticity throughout Skins’s seven seasons, all of which unflinchingly revealed the inevitable “hangover,” as Rebecca Nicolson claims, following the “party.”

Fourteen years after the origi-

nal debut of Skins, sexuality, drug use, and mental health are all approached with an increased sense of transparency and nuance. Boasting tremendous popularity—accumulating over 2 billion total downloads from the App Store and about 1 billion active users monthly—TikTok has situated itself as the primary platform upon which our generation negotiates the shifting vocabulary, attitudes, and conversations relating to stigmatized subjects. In its capacity to meditate upon mental illness in particular, TikTok facilitates raw, candid, and humorous content that tonally mimics Skins, unearthing rather than subsuming personal accounts of hardship and vulnerability. Although generating possibilities for advocacy and community-building, TikTok’s mental health content nevertheless betrays a continued preoccupation with suffering as the metric not only for individuality but for authentic expressions of mental illness.

This may seem familiar. In a popular Tweet, Tumblr is compared to a whale carcass that, as it “drifts down to the bottom of the ocean,” provides essential sustenance to the inhabitants of the benthic zone despite “never [being] seen alive before.” Haunting the wider “Internet ecosystem” as a spectral corpse, Tumblr’s undeniable impact envelops TikTok, informing the platform’s understanding of mental illness. While largely challenging Tumblr’s infamous glamorization of mental illness, TikTok remains suspended upon a threshold, one that thinly separates productive honesty from competitive agony.

Many have already highlighted the similarities between Tumblr and TikTok, though mapping mental health and its trajectories on both platforms seems to deliver us at a moment in which recovery, from what I’ve encountered, contradicts a genuine claim upon mental illness. On TikTok, it seems that content destigmatizes mental illness

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On Tumblr, mental illness collapsed into uncensored yet artistic exhibitions of self-loathing under the “pretext that it is beautiful.” as much as it insists upon a proficiency in suffering. Now, nearly fifteen years after the debut of Skins, discussions surrounding mental health have undergone minimal transformations across Tumblr and TikTok, regardless of outward gestures toward awareness.

Tumblr and the Aesthetics of Mental Health Eyes sunken and smudged with mascara, Lana Del Rey emerged from a cloud of cigarette smoke in 2012 not as a feisty, energetic starlet but as a “sad girl.” Unlike other pop songs that flooded the radio at the time, Lana’s music resigned itself to droning narratives that were destined for tragedy. “Summertime Sadness,” included in her 2012 album Born to Die, epitomized the forlorn lyricism and muted, grainy imagery that tended to accompany Lana’s music videos. In GIF sets, image edits, and text posts touting her lyrics, Lana gracefully swept across Tumblr and, in the process, reimagined “sadness.”

Content that popularized mental illness overpopulated Tumblr long before Lana introduced an additional mode through which to express sadness on the blogging platform. Previously lacking chat features or post replies, users on Tumblr primarily proliferated content through reblogging, a form of “signal boost[ing]” that “make[s a] post appear on your blog” without mandating any direct user interaction. As an “asocial” platform governed by “content-based interaction,” Tumblr possesses a unique faculty for anonymity when compared to other popular websites such as Facebook or Instagram.

Relieved by this “asocial” anonym-

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ity, users candidly discuss mental illness and adversity through their own posts or by reblogging relatable content. Between 2011 and 2015, blogs dedicated to eating disorders, self-harm, and other mental illnesses maintained a significant presence throughout the platform, all of which provided communities in which to find support and peers undergoing similar experiences.

What is lost in this portrait of solidarity, however, is the content that not only packaged but fetishized pervasive turmoil and suicidality.

GIFs of teenagers self-harming overlayed with dismal musings (“so it’s okay for you to hurt me, but I can’t hurt myself?”), images of emaciated women above dietary laments, and mood boards featuring teary eyes not only prevailed but flourished on the blogging platform. Before Tumblr drastically curtailed this content in 2012 and again in 2015 with the Post It Forward initiative, graphic depictions of self-harm, eating disorders, and other symptoms of mental illness circulated with ease, as afforded by Tumblr’s reblogging system and its proclivity toward visual mediums such as GIFs. This online “cultivation of sadness,” as Anne-Sophie Bine describes in a 2013 Atlantic article, proved “easy to join,” where any user eager to “advertise their suffering” could “pair images with a quote about misunderstood turmoil...and be gratified.”

On Tumblr, mental illness collapsed into uncensored yet artistic exhibitions of “self-loathing under the pretext that it is beautiful, romantic, or deep.” While much of this content certainly conveyed immense interior and physical suffering, it embraced fetishistic articulations of

mental illness in which “evok[ing] negative emotions through art…put psychological torment and beauty on the same page.” Beyond these rawer expressions of “psychological torment,” GIF sets containing bleak scenes from, for example, Skins or Lana’s music videos similarly produced a slippage between clinical, ordinary, and artistic suffering, constructing what Dr. Mark Reinecke, chief psychologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, describes as “reverberating echo chambers...that potential negative feelings.”

Ricocheting against these digital “echo chambers,” content that idealized anorexia (pro-ana) and bulimia (pro-mia) ravaged Tumblr, overwhelming hashtags, user feeds, and blogs. #Thinspiration, or #thinspo for short, established itself as one of the most infamous avenues through which to access pro-ana and pro-mia content on Tumblr, publicizing unhealthy weight loss regiments and images of thin women. Unlike other platforms such as Instagram and Facebook that actively censored and subsequently “remove[d] relevant hashtags from its search results,” Tumblr assumed a “blogby-blog basis approach.” Tangled within this web of blogs, Tumblr primarily relied upon users or staff members to report blogs featuring harmful content. Confronted by individual blogs, graphic #thinspo images, and text posts outlining daily calories and diets, Tumblr remained “replete with triggering and graphic [content].”

In 2012, Tumblr began to modify its previously loose policies on “blogs that actively promote selfharm,” implementing PSA pop-up

windows on “search results for keywords” such as anorexia, bulimia, purging, and thinspo. Today, however, the “Everything okay?” PSA does not appear when searching #thinspo or #pro-ana. Instead, we are welcomed, yet again, by “image-rich graphic and triggering content around internalization of thin body ideals.” Despite various efforts to curb the “maintenance of anorexic lifestyles,” Tumblr users continually evade these policies through misspelled hashtags as well as through the blogging platform’s decentralized reporting system, one that emphasizes user accountability and initiative.

While regulated far more rigorously than pro-ana or promia, self-harm accrued a similar prominence on Tumblr before the platform’s 2012 policy modifications. Reduced to, as Bines writes, “practical bite-sized packages,” self-harm predominantly communicated through GIFs and images, all of which produced a disarming glimpse into fresh wounds, overlapping slashes, and, in “soundless, looped videos,” the act of self-harming itself. Though diluted through “artistic” or “beautiful” portrayals in some circumstances, self-harm largely retained its graphic contours, resisting the monochrome, angsty aesthetic that epitomized “sadness” culture on Tumblr. In many ways, these uncensored portraits owed their oversaturation to Tumblr’s asociality. In offering a rare sense of anonymity and solace from exterior judgement, Tumblr implicitly carved a digital environment in which to “perform non-normative subjectivities” such as self-harm, according to a 2016 study by the University of Guelph in Canada. Once considered a “personal, lived experience,” as the study continues, self-harm in particular is no longer contained to singular bodies. Instead, suffering and self-inflicted pain belong to a genre of “digital curation,” one that

Example of a “soft grunge” or “sad culture” post on Tumblr. encompasses self-harm as visual content that extends beyond its “immediate physical context.” In a word, self-harm became content, a tool to generate expressions of suffering in one raw snapshot that could be reblogged with ease.

As non-specific content that strained against singularity, these images certainly coincided with opportunities to forge communities. Despite offering “new [ways] of how to comprehend and represent self-injury,” this content nevertheless depended upon graphic depictions of wounds, cuts, and bruises in order to curate suffering.

After the implementation of Tumblr’s 2012 policies, users reckoned with the damage that circulating images and GIFs of self-harm could cause others, especially those in recovery. Rather than “direct depictions of self-injured bodies,” selfharm and its attendant suffering became rendered through “reappropriations of popular media content that figuratively represent[ed] emotional struggles,” with images

of self-inflicted wounds receiving 10 times less reblogs than images without wounds according to the University of Guelph study. In contrast to #pro-ana and #pro-mia on contemporary Tumblr, searching #self-harm now yields discussions of mental illnesses and accompanying hardship, comparatively muted memes or images in Tumblr’s notable “sadness” aesthetic, and, perhaps most significantly of all, hopeful posts encouraging recovery.

This is not to say, however, that Tumblr entirely succeeded in purging a culture rooted in romantic and expository suffering. The continued preoccupation with either humorously or graphically divulging self-hatred is a testament to this pervasive tendency, both on and beyond Tumblr. While “self-defeating” humor can “make you laugh in the short term,” it can nevertheless potentiate associated “negative thoughts…that then can perpetuate stress…even after the humor,” as Jena Lee, a psychiatrist at the David Geffen School of Medicine at

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perienced it recently, presents a far more relieving digital space in comparison to Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. While Tumblr enters a relatively subdued stage, its corpse, like that of a whale carcass, nevertheless continues to drift, providing sustenance to the wider “Internet ecosystem.” Enjoying over 48.8 million users that identify as Gen Z, TikTok has concretized itself as one of the most influential social media platforms through which our understanding of politics, humor, culture, and mental health is formed. For our generation in particular, it has become clear that TikTok has situated itself as the heir to the conversations initiated on Tumblr, conjuring an equally troubling yet altogether disparate vision of mental health.

Example of a video found in the #OCD tag on TikTok. Video courtesy of @angelaxrose on TikTok. UCLA, claims. Beyond this, Tumblr’s popularized understanding of “sadness” largely restricted itself to tragic yet glamorous white women, all of whom were thin and hollowed out by tears. If Tumblr’s idolization of Lana Del Rey did not clarify this phenomenon enough, its insistence upon portraying mental illness exclusively through these personae sustained the racism, classism, and exploitation that defines our psychiatric and psychological institutions. As healthcare continues to be inaccessible to many Americans, particularly in Black and other communities of color, the fascination with the “sad girl” as someone who is white, thin, and tragically beautiful erases narratives of mental illness in those who have been

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historically marginalized, exploited, and excluded by psychiatry.

Now, though, my Tumblr dashboard is largely unrecognizable from what once invaded the platform between 2012 and 2016. As users retreated from Tumblr in 2018 due to the “NSFW purge,” the blogging platform has since recovered some of the charm that once made it so alluring. With its shrunken user base and much of its most controversial discourse left behind, Tumblr provides, yet again, a covert environment in which to genuinely engage with content and one another without the burden of being recognized.

Though some pockets still devoutly practice Lana’s romantic “sadness” or participate in “tragedy olympics,” Tumblr, at least how I’ve ex-

TikTok and the Culture of Authentic Suffering In a kitchen, a man is cooking spaghetti bolognese, his young son giggling beside him. Within the first few seconds of the video, the man tosses a sliver of meat toward the camera and, later, crushes a tomato in his fist so its juice bursts across the wooden counter. Over the video by Glen Cooney, known as this. tourettes.guy on TikTok, is a set of bold yellow letters, “COOKING WITH TOURETTES AND ADHD: SPAGHETTI BOLOGNESE.” Today, as we navigate social media, it increasingly feels as though there are few platforms that arrive at authenticity. In contrast to the polished content that commands Instagram or Facebook, TikTok displays a rare capacity for unfiltered expression. Although formally recognized by TikTok as a “mental health warrior,” Glen Cooney’s content on his account this.tourettes.guy endures as a rule rather than as an exception on the platform. While scrolling the endless For You Page (FYP) or hashtags such as #mentalhealth, we witness a user’s daily experience with OCD, a comedic and candid portrayal of

taking medication, and a sincere account of recent hardships surrounding anxiety and panic attacks.

Distilled into intimate fragments, these various TikToks propel our contemporary discourse around mental health, with our generation largely guiding these conversations.

On its surface, the video-sharing platform, similar to Skins, actively interrogates mental health’s historical status as taboo. TikTok’s effort toward destigmatizing mental illness, however, is marked by inconsistencies, all of which are exacerbated by the app’s format. Accompanying the videos that promote mental health awareness is content that, as Morgan Sung writes in Mashable, risk paraphrasing “very real conditions” into “30-second video[s].” A brief examination of TikTok’s mental health subculture yields content that summarizes symptoms of a broad spectrum of disorders, ranging from “high-functioning” anxiety to ADHD. Though at times diagnostically accurate or rooted in personal experience, these videos nevertheless run the risk, as Sung continues, of “encouraging [others] to self-diagnose based on videos that often mislabel widely felt emotions.”

With captions limited to 100 characters, a lack of click-through links with the exception of creator bios, and videos themselves being restricted to only a minute, TikTok is unintentionally susceptible to misinformation or oversimplification by virtue of its structural constraints.

In its tendency to simplify symptoms, TikTok tonally resembles Tumblr, filtering mental illness through the prism of digestible,

To imagine an identity and a diagnosis as “static” often ignores fluctuations in symptoms, behaviors, or the self. humorous, or “informational” content. Of course, videos that mention “competitiveness,” “anger over small things,” and “outbursts” as potential symptoms of ADHD or “making things even” and “hand washing” as signs of OCD have the ability to encourage users to seek treatment, equipping people with the tools to critically reassess behavior that may border on clinical. “I think we can do a lot to… get people into mental health treatment,” says psychiatrist David J. Puder, the medical director of the MEND program at Loma Linda University in California, “Knowledge is empowering to people who might not otherwise have access.”

What is often overlooked in this equation, however, is how videos framed around lists of symptoms solicit identification with behaviors that, though associated with certain diagnoses, appear to be “relatable.” Unlike Tumblr’s infamous romanticization of mental illness, content on TikTok seems to permit an even greater level of relatability, with traits such as “hand washing” or “competitiveness” straddling the boundaries between generalized and pathologized sets of behavior. As Isabel Munson writes, “TikTok is a space designed to

On TikTok, traits such as “hand washing” or “competitiveness” straddle the boundaries between generalized and pathologized sets of behavior.

create confirmation bias.”

As a platform through which mental health resources and knowledge are both increasingly accessible, TikTok and its FYP not only facilitate but empower digital communities that offer support, solidarity, and awareness. Regardless of these productive aspects, the FYP still cultivates the dizzying sense that the videos we scroll past indexes or reflects our “true” character, offering a glimpse into labels we have yet to accumulate or recognize as our own. In contrast to Instagram and even Tumblr, both of which largely rely on direct self-curation, the FYP collapses active and passive identity exploration, inviting users to algorithmically arrive at content with which identification is most plausible. And, if a user’s FYP hardly deviates in the content it presents, the self and its presumed diagnoses are poised, as Munson writes, to be understood as “static and unchangeable.” Flattened into brief though compelling videos, the nuances of our identities seem to become stable, seem to be expressed through the markers with which the FYP provides us.

To imagine an identity and a diagnosis as “static” often ignores fluctuations in symptoms, behaviors, or the self. Most of these observations around content and identity curation, however, are made in retrospect and by engaging with the experiences of current users. Over a year ago, in July 2020, I deleted TikTok after nearly five years of using the app and its predecessor, Musical.ly. At the time, I recall that my FYP was flooded with content from TikTok’s mental health sub-

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culture despite never having interacted with any specific users, tags, or content. Though some remained purely informational or humorous, most videos assumed a confessional tenor, one that compelled creators to indulge in explicit accounts of their symptoms. That summer, the “rating things my mental illness has made me do” trend fostered the “exhibitionism of self-harm, suicide, depression, [and] self-loathing,” with videos often accompanied with graphic text about symptoms ranging from disordered eating to suicidal ideation. Constantly encountering this content on my FYP evoked a sense of competitive suffering, even as these videos claimed to overshare with the intention of combatting romanticization. While candid narratives did provide an intimate perspective into certain mental illnesses, this content invaded my FYP with an agility that overwhelmed me, that seemed to encourage manifesting the worst symptoms of a condition in order to “relate” to a video. Even content about conditions with which I had previously been diagnosed struck me as alienating, restricting, and accusatory, as if extending a claim upon a mental illness mandates constantly expressing as well as experiencing it in its extremities.

Though this impression may not be universal, the content I inadvertently consumed began to forge a gulf between authenticity and recovery, suggesting that agony is not only an “unchangeable” but essential facet of mental illness. Under this framework, joy or attempts at self-improvement appeared to be antithetical to genuine proclamations of mental illness. In one video, for example, the creator fidgets with an orange pill bottle, the text across the screen imitating quips that are popular among the mental health community, “they only have one pill bottle? Poser! I bet they’re not even mentally ill.” The creator then pans the camera over to an AC

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Video courtesy of @lamictalslut on TikTok. lined with multiple pill bottles, the text now reading, “Wow! So many pill bottles! They must be so fucked up. So quirky!” It should go without saying that “only having one pill bottle”—or having none at all—is not necessarily an accurate metric of the severity of someone’s mental illness. What this video accurately punctuates, however, are the fears associated with appearing as an “imposter,” particularly for those that are either in recovery, experience mild to moderate symptoms of their condition, or are only prescribed one or two medications rather than multiple. In certain pockets of TikTok, and certainly on my FYP last year, broad spectrums of symptoms are reduced to their highest octaves,

at times neglecting the significance of recovery or the disparate expressions mental illnesses may assume.

Perhaps TikTok’s tendency to overshare the grittiest aspects of a mental illness is similarly rooted in the desire for genuine entitlement or outward validation. One strategy for combating these anxieties, as Anna Gradin Franzén and Lucas Gottzén of Stockholm University found in a study on self-injurious behavior, is to “write detailed descriptions of [one’s] anxiety, diagnosis, therapy sessions, or time spent in treatment centers. This ‘proves’ [one’s] ‘actual’ mental disorder and their entitlement to [symptomatic] behavior.”

Perhaps, too, TikTok’s constant

Perhaps it’s adequate to acknowledge that our relationship with mental illness requires care and consideration of ourselves and others. categorization and curation of its FYP restrict the capacity to visualize much beyond what we encounter, including labels and diagnoses.

Driven by engagement and confirmation bias, TikTok relies upon content that summons relatability, that allows its users to attain a greater affiliation to the labels with which they gradually or already identify. When suffering and graphic oversharing determines this identification, it increasingly seems impossible to progress toward recovery, at least without sacrificing a critical dimension of our individuality: our symptoms.

Progressing Toward “Okay” Today, social media serves as one of the predominant modes of self-curation, granting us access to endless digital communities, subcultures, and users with whom we may share experiences. Through the digital content, connections, and environments we consume and actively produce, we continually play with various labels, tease out affiliations, layer our identities. On social media, especially those with extensive anonymity features, we are afforded the rare opportunity not only to curate but to discuss ourselves without ignoring stigmatized topics. In these ways, social media platforms such as Tumblr and TikTok are essential tools of connectivity, individuality, and expression.

As with nearly any cultural or digital phenomenon, though, Tumblr and TikTok are not without their contentious underbellies, both of which, at times, eclipse their productive attributes. Mostly originated on Tumblr, the preoccupation with authentic suffering has

ebbed and flowed in its popularity, though it hasn’t been entirely eradicated. Despite contending with these attitudes, TikTok is still conducive to glamorizing the “worst of us,” the “most painful of us.” Similar to Tumblr’s dashboard and tags in their earlier iterations, TikTok’s FYP can also easily slip into graphic depictions of mental illness, most of which insist upon suffering and substantial symptoms as genuine expressions of a diagnosis. And, while created in the effort to dispel misconceptions about mental illness, much of this content may trigger its viewers, especially on the FYP where curated videos are “almost impossible to avoid.”

This isn’t to say that candidly discussing symptoms of mental illness can’t be constructive, both for those sharing as well as for those reflecting. It is to say, however, that destigmatizing or challenging sanitized portrayals of mental illness shouldn’t necessarily depend upon competitive suffering, upon the sense that recovery is alienating.

While using TikTok last summer, I’d begun steps toward self-improvement following a long period of struggling with various symptoms. Rather than being met with content that discussed recovery or symptom management, I scrolled an unfathomable amount of videos that overshared symptoms and subsequently accused those unable to “relate” with fraudulent behavior that, in turn, romanticized mental illness. These videos didn’t prompt me to seek treatment; instead, I strived to be worse. I retreated into the “most painful” of myself, the “most painful” aspects of my diag-

noses in an effort to extend what I believed to be a genuine claim upon them. Suddenly, the videos on my FYP increasingly resonated with me, stamping me with labels that, at the time, felt so distinct and individual that I feared what would happen once I didn’t experience the same intensity in my symptoms.

In reflecting upon mental health subcultures on Tumblr and their later development on TikTok, I don’t seek or even hope to present a solution to what I’ve come to understand as an overidentification with suffering. Similar to symptoms, the solution is one that is deeply personal and unique to each person. What the trajectory of mental illness on Tumblr and TikTok does reveal, though, is the pervasive gulf between recovery and the self, and how suffering is expressed as content and as an extension of identity, whether this identity be deemed “cool” or abnormal. On Tumblr, this persona was imagined as glamorous, whereas on TikTok it is an emblem of genuine agony that distinguishes users from others.

Having used both platforms, I can’t determine which is more destructive. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps it’s adequate to acknowledge that our relationship with mental illness requires care and consideration both of ourselves and of others, particularly when symptoms or experiences do not neatly align.

As Tumblr and Tiktok, among other platforms, continue to refine their understanding of mental illness, it’s clear that a greater nuance is gradually being developed in pockets of mental health subcultures. Within these digital communities, we can admit that “everything’s good” while simultaneously maintaining our affiliations with our previous or current symptoms.

Both on the Internet and beyond it, we are able to express joy without abandoning the past, or the diagnoses, that are integral to who we were and who we have become. u

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• F E A TURE •

H O M O PH O B I A IN

By Angie Kwon

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I

hardly associate myself with the Lost Generation, military brats, or people pursuing foreign job positions, but I nevertheless belong to a community of expatriates— people who oscillate between various countries that they call home. I was born in Pontiac, Michigan and during the first six years of my life, I lived in Rochester Hills, Michigan: the archetype of a sleepy suburban town. The next eight years, though, I lived in Seoul, Korea, one of the busiest places on the planet, with 10 million people crammed on top of each other. My whole life, a sense of permanence seemed fleeting. Throughout high school especially, I was always moving from Seoul to Michigan and back again,

sliding between languages, cultures, homes. In many ways, I felt as though I was always away from my home country, displaced and constantly settling into a liminal place.

My early years in Michigan were defined by loneliness. Having only spoken Korean at home with my family, I was unable to communicate with my fellow peers beyond simple babbling. As soon as I had a grasp on the language, we moved to Seoul. My loneliness did not dissipate there—I couldn’t read or write in Korean, which meant that I spent every break time inside laboriously copying the shapes of my peers’ letters while teachers looked on coldly. The first few years adjusting to living in Korea was, in a word, turbulent. Though the details are hazy now, I do distinctly remember the feeling of these two languages slipping away from me despite my desperation to grab onto them.

While I’ve finally achieved a balance between English and Korean after nearly 6 years, the two cultures—East versus West—remain vastly different. The code-switching I conduct on a regular basis is beyond the usual acting-different-in-front-of-your-parents-andfriends. Instead, it completely consumes me. When I switch between these two countries, it’s as if the behaviors and actions I have in one country become completely useless in the other. Hundreds of miniscule, socially acceptable actions become completely redundant and unnecessary in one country or the other thanks to the enormous chasm that separates the norms of the East and the West. What use do I have for my knowledge of the routes and etiquettes of the subway system of Seoul in suburban Michigan? What of my obligatory neighborly cordiality that I use everyday in the States? The people in my Seoul apartment complex would look at me as if I’ve sprouted another head if I asked them how their day was going.

In the States, I find myself identifying more as a Korean. I’m always missing people who look like me, who speak my language and understand my culture. Many times in Korea, though, I think of myself as an American, surprised at the deep-seated sexism and homophobia that still persists. Because of the constant comparisons I make, I’ve also been keen on trying to stay unified wherever I was—trying to be Korean in Korea, American in the States. This has also led me to be blind to other issues while I’ve always assumed that I’ve been so perceptive. For a long time, I’ve ignored the microaggressions I’ve faced in the States for being Asian (always thinking, no, they’re just being friendly; they just don’t know any better). I’ve also ignored how conservative Korea is, grasping for justifications that the few people I’ve met don’t encompass the whole nation and that it’s getting so much better, thus allowing me to be surprised every time I’ve encountered a moment of sexism or homophobia. Funnily enough, both these illusions were broken in the past two years. The American illusion fractured slowly over the months of COVID when anti-Asian hate crimes spiked and I met people who denied the significance of it (and the deep-seated exoticism of Asian women that intertwines sexism and racism that I won’t get into here). The illusion I had of an increasingly liberal Korea came crashing down throughout the summer of 2021, too.

The social nuances between the U.S. and Korea are so different and have consistently reshaped the person I have to be in each country.

Korea, a Confucian society that values a culture of filial piety and homogenization, perpetuates the existence of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Though certain qualities of the social norms may complicate my relationship to Korea, I nevertheless am deeply proud of

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and love my heritage, celebrating our strides toward rebuilding our country following immense tragedy and loss. This love, however, does not make up for Korea’s backward attitudes with regards to basic human decency, and this I cannot and will not defend.

Like I said, the illusion I harbored of Korea and how liberal it is shattered over the span of a few months. Before this summer, I still had hope and attributed everything I saw that I disliked to be minor flukes. After this summer, I had made up my mind about one of my homelands.

I April 2021 My mother is a stay-at-home mom that married at 23 and had me, her first child, at 27, and my brother, David, at 28. Because my father often travelled for work throughout our childhood, my mother was left to care for my brother and me on her own. This closeness made her slightly overprotective and sometimes overly-involved in my personal life, as a mother does. Then, in 9th grade, I left for boarding school and I enjoyed the freedom from the constraints of home.

But last fall, at the start of my freshman year, I realized that I only had four years left with my parents.

I felt guilty for having left my mother so abruptly and early during high school, when her life had revolved around mine for so long. Just when my guilt threatened to remain a permanent fixture of my life, COVID presented an opportunity to me in the form of Zoom school.

During the spring 2021 semester, I decided to take my classes remotely from our family home that we kept in Michigan when we moved to Korea. My mother also came from Korea to spend time with me and my brother, who was in boarding school thirty minutes away from us. This meant that I was spending an unprecedented amount of time

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Before this summer, I still had hope and attributed everything that I disliked to minor flukes. After this summer, I had made up my mind about one of my homelands. with my mother. Even in middle school, I was gone for most of the day, and was only home for the evenings. Now, I ate all three meals at home with my mother, every day, for three months.

I thought I already knew my mother pretty well, but over the course of these months I got to know her better than before. I realized she saw the world differently in a manner that was subtle, yet crucial, in making her views unlike mine. This Goodall-like period of observation was insightful, and it allowed me to make comparisons between me and my mother. I’m adaptive and mentally sturdier, but flakier and perhaps too stubborn in my ideas. My mother is gentler and more determined, but, at times, more impatient and cruel in the unique way a mother can be. Unwittingly, I began gathering these comparisons in a dusty filing cabinet in the corner of my mind, and so when I heard my mother’s remark one day, I found myself totally unsurprised.

“I don’t understand why we have to include those gays more and more in these TV shows.”

She said this in a mild, offhand manner while sharing an orange with my father, who was watching a new K-Drama. My father remarked in assent and I looked up from the book I was reading to sneak a glance at my brother, who was already there to meet my eyes.

The “more and more” that my mother referred to was the increasingly inclusive nature of K-Dramas.

Though nowhere near American

standards, we were starting to incorporate LGBTQ stories—or, at least, trying to.

The norm in Korea has always been heterosexual. Confucianism left very little room for those who were outside of that norm, with their emphasized importance of continuing the family name and the reinforcement of gender norms and obligations. These attitudes persist today. When we do have Pride marches, we also have anit-LGBTQ marches to battle them. In 2018, 120,000 people gathered for the largest ever Seoul’s Queer Culture Festival. What should have been a huge step forward resulted in 200,000 people signing a petition to the Blue House (the White House of Korea) to cancel the event. Later on in the year, when 300 participants gathered for the Queer Culture Festival in Incheon, they were met with 1,000 anti-LGBTQ protesters. Even in moments of progress, the resistance was bigger: most of the anti-LGBTQ groups are spearheaded by various protestant churches, all arguing that homosexuality is a sin and that they will be sent to hell. On my Korean Instagram feed alone, it’s not uncommon to see casual anti-LGBTQ comments, with other users adding notes of agreement. I always click on their profiles to see what kind of lives these hateful people are leading, and it’s always so...normal. They have kids, or dogs, some of them are students, or employed, old and young, some accounts are filled with food pics while some have photos with just a few too many filters.

In a broader point of view, Korea

Anti-gay activists protesting outside the Korea Queer Culture Festival in Seoul (2019). Image courtesy of Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images. is not the minority when it comes to anti-LGBTQ sentiments. In East Asia, gay marriage is only legal in Taiwan. Western societies are almost the only societies where LGBTQ communities are accepted and even that acceptance is conditional and hanging on by a thread.

I’ve thought long and hard on how to write this essay without making my parents seem like monsters. And, while needing criticism, it’s become clear to me that my parents, too, are a victim of the social norms enforced in the country in which they grew up. In Korea, homosexuality just doesn’t happen: many of those who identify as LGBTQ hide it and lead a seemingly “normal” life in order to avoid scrutiny and discrimination that would follow them around their whole lives; similarly, many are part of heteronormative families with children to hide this part of their identity. Though, on paper, discrimination based on gender

and sexual orientation is banned, both prevail in all facets of Korean society. It is possible to be fired, disowned, evicted, and assaulted due to one’s sexual orientation, thus forcing so many people to conceal it, to bury it. Being gay in Korea could ruin your life and, because of this, it is never talked about.

In many ways, there wasn’t and isn’t a chance for exposure to the LGBTQ community in Korea. I first learned that gay people existed when I was 13. A favorite series of mine then featured a gay couple, and I remember thinking how unnatural and strange that was. Curious, I did my research and slowly gained more exposure to the LGBTQ community.

I’m thankful that I was afforded the opportunity to be exposed to this community through a slightly more impartial lens. In the rare instances where homosexuality is talked about in Korea, the context is almost always negative, which would have greatly skewed my views to be dis-

tasteful towards the LGBTQ community. We aren’t born with hate, but rather we learn it.

In Asian societies, homophobia doesn’t equate to a horrible character flaw in the ways it does in the U.S., a quality that I’ve gradually come to realize. Given the inherent lack of exposure to the LGBTQ community as well as the widespread rejection of what little they do know, people in and from Korea find it impossible to understand much less accept it. Despite their inability to understand the LGBTQ community, I find it impossible to think less of them for it.

I don’t blame my parents for what they couldn’t learn and, to me, they’re just my parents. They like to golf, my father likes to cook pasta and watch TV, my mom likes to collect wine and attempts to read books while secretly playing games on her phone when she thinks no one’s looking. My mother taught me that I should never marry into

15 •

Participants in a pride parade in Seoul, Korea (2019). Image courtesy of Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images. a family where in-laws demand too much from their daughter-in-laws, to be financially independent, and that marriage is something for later on while my career is now. My father taught me my love for books and movies, took me on walks where he thought I might find the landscape pretty, is the best person to cheer me up when I’m upset, and actively fought for gender equality in his workplace starting from the day I was born.

Even now, though they think it’s unnatural, my parents are learning from me and my brother that the LGBTQ community is not a fluke or a freak of nature. Maybe they won’t be able to truly accept them in their hearts. But they’re learning to respect and acknowledge them, bit by bit, slow and steady. I was still hopeful. If I was able to nudge my parents’ minds just a little bit, surely this meant that it would be easier to change younger minds—if they weren’t already in the fight themselves.

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II June 2021 “Do you support LGBTQ?” I peered up from Excel to look at my student, and attempted to unfurrow my brows that had scrunched together in disdain for my abysmal spreadsheet abilities.

“Yes, of course.”

I turned back to figuring out how to hide rows without deleting them, when I heard him retort, “What?

Why? Damn.”

The cells and rows and conditional formatting flew out of my head as I blankly stared at this frustrated kid. But he went on chattering to his friend, my gaze ignored. Thinking I had misheard, I tuned into their conversation. They were having a debate about LGBTQ rights (whether they should even be acknowledged or not), the girl for and the boy against. The boy was losing, which he couldn’t accept and had asked me in hopes of backing his point.

The two kids were both my students at the cram school (hagwon) in Seoul where I was working as a math TA over the summer. This particular cram school mostly catered to students who study in the US and Seoul international school students. Most of them were in high school studying ahead for their AP classes and the SATs. I was flabbergasted at my student’s reaction to my support. And, listening to his vehement opposition to gay rights, I intervened: “How could you not support gay rights?”

As the boy froze mid-gesture, I closed my laptop and mapped the historical trajectory of LGBTQ communities in ancient civilizations (just look at the Greeks alone: socially acceptable pederastery in Athens, the Sacred Band of Thebes), the perpetual presence of non-binary expression in non-western societies (Hijras in Hindu society, third genders and homosexuality in pre-colonial African societies, and even eunuchs in East Asia), and how our present understanding of heteronormativity had stemmed from Victorian England’s rigid moral ideals. Our “modern” ideas were, in reality, quite stiff compared to older cultures.

I was quite pleased with myself, thinking that maybe this would change his mind—though what a childish hope that was, people don’t change what they believe in that easily—when he launched into a tirade of his own. He accused me of being brainwashed by liberals and cited the Bible as his source: “God created man and woman,” he sneered.

It was ridiculous how my long hours of research and respectful behavior were both reduced to a mere laughable tantrum in this boy’s mind. He genuinely believed the Bible to be a legitimate justification for homophobia, refusing to even acknowledge what I said as historical truth. I was especially surprised by his attitude, given that he had previously studied in the US. Did simple exposure not work for everyone as it had worked for me?

Whenever this boy traveled to the States (though I had an “ah-ha” moment when I realized he went to a Catholic school in Georgia) and encountered members and allies of the LGBTQ community, all he must’ve thought about was how disgusting and unnatural it seemed. Before this moment, I realized retrospectively, I offered my students the benefit of the doubt, believing that they would distance themselves from rather than share the views of Korea’s general public.

I had assumed that, although they were raised by Korean (and most likely conservative) parents, they would be open-minded and accepting of the LGBTQ community through sheer exposure and time away from Korea, as I had.

Not pleased with the lack of support for his own views, the boy turned to another student in the room, asking him as well: “Do you support LGBTQ?” This student answered promptly.

“No.” I was dumbfounded that there could be another person who could agree with this boy, but that wasn’t the end nor the worst of it. When a new student walked in, the boy asked him the same question. He confidently answered no without hesitation. To make matters worse, the boy also asked the primary teacher who had just walked in, who also answered no. I very nearly dropped the stack of marked papers I was bringing over to the teacher for him to look over.

Even now, I can only describe this experience as horrifying. What was so celebratory about hating others? Why and how did my students promptly answer ‘no’? In the States, to say ‘no’ would, in most contexts, be deemed shameful, and many who oppose LGBTQ rights would hesitate in providing their answer knowing that it would be met with considerable resistance. But, while studying in this classroom in Korea, these boys found camaraderie and a safe space for their mutual hatred.

It was this sense of bonding that truly disarmed me. I stared at them mutely as they used this hatred as a jumping off point to talk about other mundane things, as if what they had just agreed upon was as trivial as disliking a hardass teacher or mutually adoring a favorite rapper.

For the rest of the day, I replayed that conversation in my head, and I felt true betrayal because these students were representative of a group with which I had associated.

At that moment, I had never felt so alone. Until then, I had believed that my students were just like me, torn between two cultures, at odds with one or the other. I never imagined that so many of them would align themselves with ideas that I considered unthinkable. I had assumed that if I couldn’t find someone with my beliefs in my home country (whichever one of mine), I would find them in this community of people who were always one foot in and one foot out of both cultures.

I had assumed that, although they were raised by Korean parents, they would be open-minded and accepting of the LGBTQ community through sheer exposure and time away from Korea.

I felt true betrayal because these students were representative of a group with which I had associated.

At that moment, I had never felt so alone.

Listening to their casual hate, my friend from high school flashed before my eyes. He’s transgender, and I remember thinking of him as shy and diminutive before his transition. Once he transitioned, though, I was struck by how he seemed. I had never seen him so happy, so comfortable, so vibrant. How could anyone in that state be abominable?

I thought of a family member who confessed to me in a warbling voice that he was bisexual, scared because he knew what our family would think. Our family still doesn’t know. I thought of one of my students in Korea whose pronouns were “they/them,” but couldn’t find a box indicating gender to tick on their student contact slip. They wrote their pronouns next to their name on each quiz, a quiet defiance against a heteronormative system. How could we hate anyone who was just trying to figure out who they were? Shouldn’t it be celebrated that they could find who they were so early on, when many people still struggle?

Previously, I was in denial of how conservative Korea truly was. This summer was eye-opening for me, revealing not just the ugly, sexist underbelly of Korean society, but the deeply entrenched hate toward the seemingly unnatural. I ended my summer with less hope than I started out with. I saw firsthand the

17 •

Despite my desire to keep both lives with me, it’s also become increasingly obvious that this is something I can’t do indefinitely. revival of “feminists” vs “anti-feminists” online wars, the truths of sexism within my own family, and how this hatred runs amok in our society.

Are we really that hopeless of a case? I truly hope not.

III August 2021 It would be nice if I could end this story with some kind of redemption arc, an encounter in which I meet someone whose prejudices I’m able to persuade into changing—a neat chapter with which to conclude my story. But, unfortunately, real life doesn’t align with plot formulas.

My students still ask each other if they’re gay as a joke, and take genuine offense to such accusations.

Once, a student of mine called another gay as a joke. When he hastily answered no, the other boy egged him on about it until he jumped up, toppling his chair. The argument brewed until I was forced to intervene before it turned physical.

A high school friend, who had gone to school with me in Michigan, claimed he supported LGBTQ, but insisted that the community keep it private. When asked why, he replied that their public relationships were an inconvenience and jokingly elaborated that their PDA caused his eyes to rot.

A close Korean friend from an international summer camp a few years ago expressed his concern about his new gay roommate. This friend had gone to middle and high school in the US. I steered the conversation away from the topic by joking that the roommate wouldn’t come onto him even if he were the last man alive, while feeling my stomach sink.

All of these interactions this past

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summer has led me to conclude, finally, that I would most likely end up living in the States after college.

The past few years, I’ve pondered on where I would end up after college: in the U.S. where I laid down my own connections and roots, or in Korea, my homeland, where all my family and history reside? I had always been adamant in maintaining a balance between my life in the States and in Korea, a battle that has been waged since I was very young, starting with my determination to keep a solid hold on both my languages.

Despite my desire to keep both lives with me, it’s also become increasingly obvious that this is something I can’t do indefinitely. This is my sixth year of living away from my family in Korea, and I’d be lying if I said that getting on that plane was just as easy as it was a few years ago.

I found myself dreading every time I had to take the plane to fly to either the States or Korea. Not only was it the prospect of a 13-hour flight and adjusting to a new time zone that seemed taxing, but I was more exhausted about constantly having to leave half my life behind.

The biggest drawback of living in Korea, for me, was how ridiculously old-fashioned everything seemed, especially when compared to the different social nuances of the West. I despised the blatant sexism that was still so prominently present in Korean society, which I also observed first hand in my extended family. I disliked the concept of seniority in everything, how it was implied that I would have to grovel to my elders. For a moment, it was easier to ignore all this. As Korea saw multiple successes in their entry into mainstream media (BTS,

Parasite, Squid Games, to name a few), I was, for a moment, blinded by pride. I assumed that this integration of Korean culture into Western culture would be a twoway street, and that some aspects of Western beliefs would bleed into Korea. I think I also hoped for this, knowing that we were probably strong enough to be able to integrate some key ideas without undergoing erasure of our own culture. But evolution never unfolds the way we intend it to.

Despite the surge in popularity—and, on the other hand, romanticism—of Korean culture, I was still faced with the truth: that certain aspects I could never stand were nowhere near dissipating.

Korea has improved—that is true and undeniable. I will also forever be proud of my homeland, and will always trace my roots back to this country, and I want it to be clearly known that I do not mean for this piece to be slander in any way. But it also seems to be glaringly true that I will never be completely at peace in Korea. Perhaps my inability to accept my home is in and of itself a sign that I don’t fit in, and is a fact that I’ve been avoiding for a very long time. Perhaps it’s also cowardly and selfish for me to run away, to take the easy way out by simply choosing one of my homes instead of deciding to stay and fight for what I believe in, to steer the country toward my envisioned future. Of course, this could change one day, and I could decide to move to Korea. Except, for now, though it may not bode well with anyone— because I’m only nineteen, and very slightly a coward—let me be selfish, let me choose the easier path. u

C A R L O TTA P I A NTA N I D A C A R L O TTA P I A NTA N I D A

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PERSONAL ESSAYS

D ouble L ife ouble ife D ouble L ife

By Ella Harrigan

Originally published on Nov. 4, 2021.

... to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it… the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us farther away.

From “Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs” S. Maan (2015)

W

hen I was five, I met my doppleganger. She had my name, my blond hair, and my tumbling way of speaking. We had birthdays two weeks apart and celebrated them half-together for ten years, until, between her fifteenth birthday and mine, she told me she never wanted to talk to me again.

Every year, her party was the same except for the candles on the cake and the color of our hair, which faded darker. We ate potato chips slick with grease and missed every shot we tried to make through the basketball hoop in her backyard. We pretended we were fairies, or, when we grew too old for that, we wore bubblegum lip gloss

• 20

while trading truths and dares. the track. I dragged her here to We tested how curse words tasted practice for the Tuesday meet. curled on the edges of our tongues. She watches as my left foot catches and I slam my knee into the One of my first memories: we concrete, watches as I cradle the are sitting on a porch, dangling raw red bulb of my scraped knee. our legs off. It’s a soft, velvet Fuck, I scream. My mouth is gapnight, and we’re nursing identical ing and hers is closed in a small, sunburns. I call her my best friend flat line. Fuck, fuck, fuck. for the first time.

Another: we’re sitting in the field, When I was eight or nine, I tearing grass with our fingers. It’s went to camp and wouldn’t stop gym class and we’re supposed to talking about Ella. Telling all my be running around the track. We’re new friends how much I loved her. talking about shaving our legs. The What she liked and didn’t. What fascinating conversation topics of she thought about the world. middle school girls.

It was a week and a half beOr this one: we’re older now, and fore I realized they thought I had in running shorts. She’s watch- been talking about myself the ing me jump over hurdles on whole time.

I dream about her often. It was one of those dreams, actually, that made me start writing about her again. I’d given up after failed attempt after failed attempt. But I couldn’t—I can’t—get this dream out of my head. In it, she wasn’t herself. She was taller; her teeth were whiter. Her dress was blue, the same color of the shampoo bottles in her upstairs bathroom. There were people all around her, and she beckoned me toward them, smiling at me. We were shrouded by light.

As Ella and I grew up, we developed personalities like we were picking from the same pool of traits, and there was only one copy of each. She got to be kind, quiet, and afraid of the dark. I was funny, loud, and could only sleep when she turned off her nightlight. We decided sometime along the way that I was the pretty one. It wasn’t about our faces, exactly, or our bodies. It had to do with the way we walked in and out of rooms (me: quickly, her: slowly), who was better at piano (always her), and how our voices moved through sentences, whether they went up or down.

By the time we got to high school, our identities had solidified and split, each carefully molded against the other.

Our freshman year, I bleached my hair until it broke halfway to the root and finally learned how to swear. Among juniors and seniors with kool-aid colored bangs, I hinted at having done drugs I’d only read about. In the bathroom next to the cafeteria, I kissed girls I didn’t like. In the library, I had panic attacks and didn’t care who saw.

I wore red lipstick everyday and sometimes it traveled onto the tip of my chin or got stuck in the jagged edge of my front tooth. When the other Ella threatened to betray our cover, I rolled my eyes. We’re

Image courtesy of Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” (1966).

cool now, I said. No one needs to it. See, the girlfriend, whose name know the nerds we used to be. was Sarah, had given me this idea that I could be loved. I turned the Our freshman year, she had a idea over and over in my mouth girlfriend she met through me. like a hard candy.1 When the cherry She met most people through me. candy melted into a tiny nub on my As the year got colder, I grew clos- tongue, I convinced myself I loved er with the girlfriend than Ella, Sarah. It was April, and warmer though this arguably had more than it had been. to do with the complicated and One day, I walked with the girlvaguely mythological dissolution of friend and her best friend through our doubles-tie than with anything town. There were cherry blossoms interesting about the girlfriend. everywhere, pink and white like The girlfriend told me about the an eye’s burst vein. We took hunbreakup before it happened. I nod- dreds of pictures of each other, and ded along, and swore myself to se- I looked ugly in all of them. My crecy. A few days after they broke hair was bright yellow and greasy, up, the girlfriend took me outside. revealing my guilt.

She told me she was in love with That night, the girlfriend and I me. We were sitting on a bench. It went to my basement and lit many was March, and the wind still felt candles. We watched The Virgin Suilike winter. Cold sweat collected cides. We sat so close to one another under my arms, as I told the girl- and said stupid things like “I think friend I could not talk about this we should try it. But we shouldn’t tell with her. She should not be saying Ella until we know we have somesuch things to me. She must be thing.” We kissed over and over confused which Ella was which. while Kirsten Dunst and her sisters withered away. Our braces touched.

Because I was 14, or because I 1 Specifically, like the cherry candies Ella had was cruel, or because the bleach given me a season prior. They’re what I always in my hair had traveled up into imagine when I write that simile in first draft my brain and poisoned all of the after first draft. They were a gift she’d gotten me on a trip down South. We got each other brain cells responsible for com- gifts each time we traveled. Little tokens of mon sense, that wasn’t the end of remembering.

21 •

Her nose turns into my nose, her eyes blink and change color. We blend in and out of each other, one Ella starting wherever the other ends.

Like many poets, I take bits of scientific information that interest me and ignore the rest. This was something that always annoyed Ella. In this case, what interests me is entropy. Or, as Yeats put it, the idea that, despite our best efforts, things fall apart.

I had texted Ella about Sarah a week before our fifteenth birthdays, confessing everything. I don’t remember what I said. It was something dramatic about true love and friendship and how I was finally, finally happy. Which I wasn’t. Not that I was lying; I stopped being able to tell the difference between good and bad feelings that year, so numb and violently optimistic, having panic attacks in the car on the way to class, and losing ten pounds from stress. During midterms my bleached hair began to shed. I lost friends like dead skin.

Ella texted me back a few hours later. She was fine with it, she said. I could do what I wanted.

I know the whole story is embarrassing. It places us in time and age, like carbon-dating something to measure the decay.

A page of papyrus, maybe. Or a note passed in class, a lipgloss, the roach of a poorly rolled joint. We weren’t mystical doubles, we were just fifteen.

Or maybe we were both. In my dreams about Ella, her face ripples as if reflected in running water. Her nose turns into my nose, her eyes blink and change color. We blend in and out of each other, one Ella starting wherever the other ends.

The summer after we stopped being friends, I texted her. I wrote this long, half-bullshit message.2 It said something like “I hope you don’t hate me,” and she responded with something like “Well, I do.” After reading it, I threw up in my mouth.

A month later, I moved continents.3 For the last month of summer, I was alone in our new apartment. This is what I remember. I read Roland Barthes’ FragI remember math class—a cher- ments d’un Discours Amoureux ry necklace around my neck, given and cried through it.4 I wanted to me by the girlfriend. Ella asked 2 I typed it out lying on the stairs of my where I got it and I told her. I pre- house. Ella and I used to hang out on them, tended innocence as she went qui- sprawling ourselves out like cats. It’s where et; I pretended innocence as she ran we went to play “imagination,” where we’d tell stories for hours, weaving our sentences to the bathroom to hyperventilate, in and out of each others’. but a familiar tightness filled my 3 We moved back a year later. When I came back, I started over as if freshman year had chest, a phantom ache.

The day after that she texted me never happened. I had a new language fresh on my tongue, a chain smoking habit I had and said she changed her mind. She recently quit, and new friends I’d had to wanted me to break it off with Sar- move away from. When I saw Ella in the ah, so I did. But whatever had been halls, we didn’t meet each others’ eyes. ruined already was. I had merged 4 A book about love, told in fragments. A quote: je t’adore parce que tu es adorable, us too far into each other, and had je t’aime parce que je t’aime. I wanted to be taken too much of her for myself. loved like that.

• 22

to tell her about it, but I told my mom instead.

We didn’t have air conditioning, and I was dizzy all the time.

The dog was homesick and whined if we left without her, and we had to retrain her in the horrible heat while our landlord left threats about noise complaints. I choked on water in our new shower, gasping I’m sorry, water going up my nose and into my throat.

I read “The Second Coming” for the first time that summer, and it stuck in my head all the way until September. Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Far away, Ella stopped responding to my texts.

John Herwitz, professor of neuroscience, who teaches Introduction to Brain and Behavior on Tuesdays and Thursdays, is still friendly with Joseph White, professor of neuroscience, who teaches Introduction to the Brain and Behavior on Mondays and Wednesdays. John and Joe talk sometimes about their daughters, Ella and Ella, strange smart girls, who had a falling out neither man likes to reference much. Sometimes, John Herwitz goes home and tells his Ella news about Joe’s Ella. She holds it to her like a scrap of sand she can turn into a pearl.

The latest piece of news: Joe’s Ella wants to go to college in Canada.

I don’t know what to do with this information. I look up universities in the various provinces and try to figure out which ones she’s interested in. It turns out Canada has a lot of universities.

I imagine her trudging through the snow. A sweet little scowl on her face.

In my dream about Ella, I don’t know what I looked like. It didn’t matter, see. It was all her: white teeth, light draped over her like a wedding shroud. I barely had a body at all. u

Jacob Weitzner

P e r s o n al E s s a y

By Lorin Jackson

Originally published on Sept. 8, 2021.

L

orin Jackson (she/they) started working in the Swarthmore College Libraries as a Research & Instruction Resident Librarian in the fall of 2018. Over time, they earned the title of the campus Black Studies Librarian and, in January 2021, Lorin was promoted to the Interim Head of Access & User Services in the Circulation department at McCabe. Later this month, Lorin will become the Executive Director at the Medical University of South Carolina. At MUSC, she will support the expansion of health information literacy in an outlined region of the U.S. south. Lorin’s favorite aspect of working at Swarthmore College was the relationships she cultivated with community members: from supporting classes

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as an embedded librarian to serving as a thesis advisor to a group of seniors.

When the Review’s Editor-At-Large, Chase Smith, was hired for a position at McCabe, they discussed with Lorin how it could be a thoughtful gesture for her to contribute a writing project she started last year to the Review. Their writing offers students pertinent wisdoms to consider during the overwhelming and ongoing pandemic. Here are 21 golden nuggets of truth for 2021 from Lorin to you... ____

should be in alignment with your values. Neural pathways like consistent routines and patterns. By practicing, you develop these skills more seamlessly—they become natural, easy, automated.

Perhaps giving (or receiving!) constructive feedback is a tenuous practice for you. Practice giving constructive feedback using the best practices (see what I did there?) that you’ve seen people you respect use. Follow their examples.

Reflect and write about your experiences. Rinse and repeat.

2. It’s ok not to be right all the 1. Practice. Practice. Practice. time and not to know everything.

Anything you commit yourself Think for a moment about any to and deem worthwhile, be sure to time you’ve witnessed someone practice. Moreover, your practices you admire admitting they were

Headshot of Lorin Jackson. Image courtesy of the author. wrong or or did not know something. How refreshing, humbling, and lovely is it when someone does this?! While college, and even your first job out of college or graduate school, can feel intimidating, it is okay to acknowledge and apologize for your mistakes. Mistakes are truly how we learn. That’s why they are called experiments in your classes—you are trying and the attempt is a worthwhile endeavor.

You can normalize changing your opinion or perspective when presented with new information.

You’ll notice that when you do this, you model this behavior for others, and give permission to your peers or even loved ones to do the same.

Also, remember to think before you speak. Take a beat and a breath before you say what you need to say. Are you sure it’s what you want to say? How would it

come across to you if someone lectually stimulating. None of these said it to you? need to take very long, but this routine sets me up to have a better day.

3. Represent yourself well.

This also goes along with using and If someone is exploiting you, how applying a project management syscan you enact boundaries? We have tem and integrating it on the daily, more power over situations than we especially when life gets rough or often think we do. you are hit with a curveball.

When it comes to your professional identity, invest in profes5. Read the room. sional headshots and take your time with your resume or CV. A 6. Thank people and give compliwell-crafted cover letter, resume, or ments intentionally.

CV can open many doors. A proMake it a point to genuinely tip is to go to an interview in your thank anyone who helps you—esfavorite professional outfit with pecially the people who are rarely your favorite socks in your favorite recognized. Be the one who does shoes, or even your favorite undies. when no one else will or does. This It’s like a secret power. Trust me. is especially impactful as you grow into leadership positions and your 4. Nourish yourself constantly. words carry increased weight.

Every morning I like to clean/ When people neglect to thank you tidy something, meditate, hydrate, or acknowledge you, make sure you eat, move, and do something intel- thank yourself and receive praise from

Make it a point to genuinely thank anyone who helps you—especially the people who are rarely recognized. Be the one who does when no one else will or does.

25 •

You can surprise yourself by how much you’ve grown and how you can figure something out that you thought you couldn’t (at first). your support network or chosen family. and explore safely. This is Also, remember to use the “pos- natural medicine. itivity sandwich,” i.e., when you need to talk about something diffi14. Go to therapy. cult: compliment, hard thing, compliment.

15. Friends come and go, but make sure you’re friends with 7. Embrace and apply at least yourself first. Investigate codepensome concepts of minimalism. dency, your attachment style & your love language.

8. Challenge capitalistic concepBonuses to investigate about tions of work and individualism. yourself: enneagrams, MyIt won’t change unless you work to ers-Briggs type, astrology signs, change it. tarot cards…

9. Think about and find ways to 16. Take social media & digital give back or volunteer every year. breaks often. The world will be fine Invest time, energy, money, or re- while you disconnect for a minute. sources to at least one cause you care about wholeheartedly.

17. Find a task management system that works for you and apply 10. When creating something, vigorously. I mentioned this before, ask: is it accessible? How can I make but it can’t be overstated. You know it more accessible if no one else has, the power of a good to-do list. Keep even if those needs aren’t my spe- using it. I like Todoist.com myself, cific needs? Who is not being in- but use one that works for you. cluded or represented that I should think about? Could my language be 18. Check in with yourself and more inclusive or positively framed ask yourself: what do I need to get or constructed? through this day, month, year?

(Bonus points if you know this 11. Keep reading and learning for reference.) life. You are a student of life, after Changes happen and our needs all. change along with them. Sometimes emergencies will arise and your needs 12. Remember your inner child will change. This can happen with and get to know them. Doing your health or those of your loved so will heal a lot of complicated ones, your job, your family. Before you things you may have encountered panic, make it a point to check in with during your childhood. I certain- yourself and ask first for what you ly did, and learning from who I need. Get some clarity and it will go a was as a little one helped me re- long way to addressing any conflict or member that I always wanted to challenging situation you find yourself be a librarian. in. You can surprise yourself by how much you’ve grown and how you can 13. Engage with the ele- figure something out that you thought ments and nature. Get outside you couldn’t (at first).

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19. Ask for support when you need it and be understanding if someone can’t provide it.

Sometimes, they aren’t in the right place or don’t have the capacity. Don’t take it personally. They may be going through their own personal storm, but you can always reconnect with them later when their storm has passed.

20. Also, ask someone before you vent if it’s okay to share. People appreciate this.

21. Remember your unique gifts and contributions, but not at the expense of anyone else’s—embrace both/and. Both/and is a principle of Black feminism (scholar Patricia Hill Collins talks extensively about this and I recommend you read more about the concept). Everyone has a light. They can be great and you can be great. I’m confident that you are great already and always have been, so there is no need to compare yourself to others. Your goal should be to embrace your own strengths and encourage others to embrace theirs. ____ These are musings and thoughts that I wish someone had shared with me as a new graduate or even as a first-year college student. I feel that these points of clarity have helped me be a better person, a better leader, a better friend. I hope you, too, find some of these golden nuggets useful. Thanks for reading through and indulging me in my effort to leave a gift in closing to you, dear Swatties. u

ARK LU ARK LU ARK LU

ARK LU

CIRCLE

CIRCLE

CIRCLE

CIRCLE

CUBE

CUBE

CUBE

CUBE

27 •

y o u and your

big red n o - g ood

By Liya Chang Originally published on Oct. 7, 2021.

i

was so mad i wanted to write a poem about you but i couldn’t write a poem about you because all the poems i write about you keep turning into love poems and i’m tired of being wrung out, caved in, crushed like a fistful of ice, so instead i went to sleep. they say the poet controls the floor but the only thing i control is the first four knuckles of each hand. the last knuckle is yours. it’s fine for me to say that. you won’t do anything with them anyway. when i woke up my hands were numb and stinging with sharpness. at lunch today i forgot i was supposed to be sad because the room was too cold. it was the least sad thirty-five minutes of my life. i don’t remember how a single moment of it felt. i only know that i didn’t want to write any poems while i cut my tomatoes into pieces and now i do, and the sun is orange, and the moon is gold, and every shard of rain against

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the window sounds like your name. [you have the sweetest laugh in the recorded history of sound. did you know that? you smile at everything that i say, even the things that don’t mean anything.] i don’t know if you know that but i think you should. i think you should stop. i think love is the cruelest thing you can do to someone who’s never held the other half of the question, who only knows what the first smear of light in the sky looks like, not the miracle that unfurls in its wake. don’t be nice to me. i said don’t be nice to me. don’t graze the side of my arm like i’m not covered in nails. what do i believe in? i believe in the invisibility of things. how we never have the full picture. i believe all the people in the world deserve to be happy at least once. i wish someone believed in me. i think that would make things easier. i wish i had softer skin. when your hands are numb you

have to shake them until the blood starts flowing, but my hands won’t stop screaming no matter how hard i shake them. i think your laugh has dislocated my wrists. i think every good part of me has been broken at least once. i want you to be the happiest person in the world. our world’s shaped like a sieve, through which things pass and are lost, and the fact of the matter is this: everything i own is too small to stay. everything. the largest object i own is a button, pearly-gray, the sweater it once belonged to trampled under a car tire and the thread worn so thin, it looks like a strand of hair. the smallest object i own is hope. the first thing i ever owned was wonder, tied with a red string to the pockmarked sky, but it’s all gone now. i gave it to you, after all. which is fine; i wanted to do that. i just forgot how lonely it is. being so goddamn angry. sitting by myself in the dark. u

FICTION & POETRY T r a n s la t io n

The Tale of the Red Cliff A Translation from Classical Chinese

赤壁賦 Translated by Abhishek Bathina Original by Su Shi Originally published on Nov. 9, 2021.

S

Introduction

u Shi (1037-1101) lived during the Song dynasty (960 –1279) and is viewed as a Renaissance man of sorts, given his interest in literature, politics, painting, pharmacology, and gastronomy. “The Tale of the Red Cliff ” was written during his twenty-year-long political exile and it is quite evident how this comes through in the story. _____ 壬戌之秋，七月既望，蘇子與 客泛舟遊於赤壁之下。清風徐 來，水波不興。舉酒屬客，誦明 月之詩，歌窈窕之章。少焉， 月出於東山之上，徘徊於斗牛之 間。白露橫江，水光接天。縱一 葦之所如，凌萬頃之茫然。浩 浩乎如馮虛御風，而不知其所 止；飄飄乎如遺世獨立,羽化而

登仙。 It was fall in the year Renxu (1082), the seventh month, a day after the full moon. I (Mr. Su) and my guests had gone boating to the foot of Red Cliff. A cool breeze gently came upon us but the water did not ripple. I brought out the wine and gathered the guests as we recited poetry about the dazzling moon and sang songs of intelligent and graceful women. Soon rose the moon over East Mountain, hovering between The Dipper and The Bull. White dew over the river, the water shone, joining the sky. We released our reed of a boat to do as it liked as we approached the bewilderment of a vast instant. Boundless, I traveled the void and rode the wind, not knowing where I would stop. Floating, like I have left the

world to stand alone. Levitating, I became an Immortal. 於是飲酒樂甚，扣舷而歌之。 歌曰：“桂棹兮蘭槳，擊空明兮 溯流光。渺渺兮予懷，望美人 兮天一方。”客有吹洞簫者，倚 歌而和之。其聲嗚嗚然，如怨如 慕，如泣如訴；餘音嫋嫋，不絕 如縷。舞幽壑之潛蛟，泣孤舟之 嫠婦。 The joy of drinking wine came on strong. I kept time against the side of the boat and sang about it.

“Cassia oar ho, Magnolia rudder.

Strike the empty brilliance ho, Follow the flowing light to its source.

Blundering and blustering ho, My heart.

I see a beauty ho, On this side of the sky”

29 •

the music lingered, uncut like silk threads. The water dragons in the deep and secluded valley danced and a widow in a lonely boat cried.

Portrait of Su Shi by Zhao Mengfu.

Among the guests, there was one who played the flute. He leaned into the song and joined in. His voice was a string of wuwu’s (perhaps you have had the chance before to hear a bamboo flute) as if he was accusing, as if admiring, as if he was sobbing, as if complaining. Delicately

• 30

mayflies we live in the world, a grain in the vast cold ocean. I pity the transience of my life. I envy the inexhaustibility of the long river.

I wish to cling to an Immortal to roam, to catch the brilliant moon 蘇子愀然，正襟危坐，而問客 and live forever. I know this can曰：“何爲其然也？”客曰：“‘月 not be and so I entrust this fading 明星稀，烏鵲南飛。’此非曹孟 echo to the sorrowful wind. 德之詩乎？西望夏口，東望武 昌，山川相繆，鬱乎蒼蒼，此非 蘇子曰：“客亦知夫水與月 孟德之困於周郎者乎？方其破荊 乎？逝者如斯，而未嘗往也；盈 州，下江陵，順流而東也，舳艫 虛者如彼，而卒莫消長也。蓋將 千里，旌旗蔽空，釃酒臨江，橫 自其變者而觀之，則天地曾不能 槊賦詩，固一世之雄也，而今安 以一瞬；自其不變者而觀之，則 在哉？況吾與子漁樵於江渚之 物與我皆無盡也，而又何羨乎！ 上，侶魚蝦而友麋鹿，駕一葉之 且夫天地之間，物各有主，苟非 扁舟，舉匏樽以相屬。寄蜉蝣於天 吾之所有，雖一毫而莫取。惟江 地，渺滄海之一粟。哀吾生之須 上之清風，與山間之明月，耳得 臾，羨長 江之無窮。挾飛仙以 之而爲聲，目遇之而成色，取之 遨遊，抱明月而長終。知不可乎 無禁，用之不竭。是造物者之無 驟得，託遺響於悲風。” 盡藏也，而吾與子之所共適。” I (Mr. Su) became sad all of a I (Mr. Su) said, “Do you know sudden. I sat up right and proper the water and the moon? It passand asked him, “Why is it that you es like thisss, but never leavesss. play this way?”

It fills like thattt but never SudThe guest said, denly! shrinks or grows. If one looks to soon change themselves, “The moon is bright and the stars the earth and the sky will last few. but an instant. If one looks at the The crows and magpies fly south” unchanging self, the world and I are forever unfinished. Now how “Is that not a poem by Cao Cao?” can I be envious? Moreover in In the west I saw Summerton between heaven and earth, each and in the east I saw Portchester. and everything has a rightful The mountains and the river inter- master. If it is not what is mine, twined, the woods dense and deep. even a hair of it I will not take.

Is this where Cao was besieged The coool river breezzze and the

by Zhou Lang? Having captured mooon that glows between the Chaste Tree, he descended upon mountains, only when you lisRiver Hill. Following the flow of the ten to it does it become sound, river, he went east, his fleet extend- only when you see it does it take ing for a thousand miles, their flags on color. These I take without concealing the sky. Cao himself restraint and use without end. poured wine out, looked upon the Thisss is the scriptural reservoir river and composed poems as his of the molder of things and what lance lay horizontal. Undoubtedly you and I have in common is in he was the hero of a generation, accord with it.” but where is he now? Much less, me and you, fishing and collecting 客喜而笑，洗盞更酌。餚核既 firewood on the river’s isles, com- 盡，杯盤狼籍。相與枕藉乎舟 panioned by prawn and fish and 中，不知東方之既白。 befriended by elk. We ride a small The guests were amused and boat, like a leaf. We raise our gourd they laughed. We washed our goblets and toast each other. Like cups and poured more wine. Our

I wish to cling to an Immortal to roam, to catch the brilliant moon and live forever. I know this cannot be and so I entrust this fading echo to the sorrowful wind. viands, upon examination, had been finished and the cups and plates were scattered about. We became each others pillows and mattresses inside the boat, not knowing that in the East it was already light. … 是歳十月之望，歩自雪堂，將歸 于臨皐，二客從予過黄泥之坂。 霜露既降,木葉盡脱，人影在地， 仰見明月，顧而樂之，行歌相 答，已而歎曰: [有客無酒，有 酒無肴，月白風淸，如此良夜 何?] 客曰: [今者薄暮擧網得 魚，巨口細鱗，状如松江之鱸， 顧安所得酒乎?]

That same year, on the tenth month, the day of the full moon, I walked from Snow Hall to River Watch. Two guests accompanied me in crossing the slopes of Yellow Marsh. Frost and dew had descended upon us and the tree leaves had finished falling.

On the ground fell our shadows and looking up we saw the bright moon. We took it all in for we were very much enjoying ourselves. We carried a tune, one answering the others’ call.

After a while, I stopped and sighed, “We have guests but no wine. If we had wine, we’d have no viands. Yet, the moon is bright and the air is clear. Like this, how can we deem it a worthy night? ” A guest said, “Today at dusk I held up the net and found a fish! It had a huge mouth and delicate scales, shaped like Lull River Perch. Have you considered how we might get some wine?” 歸而謀諸婦,

酒，藏之久矣，以待子不時之 需] 於是攜酒與魚，復遊於赤壁 之下。 We returned home and sought my wife and she said, “There is a bottle of wine that I hid away a long time ago precisely to receive you in a time of need.” Then we carried the wine and the fish and roamed again to the foot of Red Cliff.

keep myself from shivering. 反而登舟,放乎中流,聽其所止 而休焉.時夜將半,四顧寂寥,適有 孤鶴横江東來,翅如車輪,玄裳縞 衣,戛然長鳴,掠予舟而西也。 I turned back around and we rowed the boat to the middle of the river. We allowed it to stop where it would and rested a while there. It was almost midnight. In all four directions it was still and empty. Just then a lone crane came across the river from the east. Its wings were as large as chariot wheels, a deep black skirt, an undyed silk gown. It tapped me as it called loudly, flying past my boat.

It flew West.

江流有聲，斷岸千尺，山高月 小，水落石出，曾日月之幾何而 江山不可復識矣!

The flow of the river had a voice, the river bank not less than a thousand feet high. The mountains were tall and the moon small. The water fell as it spilled out. How many moons and suns has it been and yet I cannot ever 須臾客去，予亦就睡，夢二道 know them. 士，羽衣翩躚，過臨皐之下，揖 予而言曰：[赤壁之遊樂乎?] 問 予乃攝衣而上，履巉巖，披蒙 其姓名,俛而不答。[嗚呼噫嘻， 茸，踞虎豹，登虬龍，攀棲鶻之 我知之矣！疇昔之夜飛鳴而過我 危巣，俯馮夷之幽宮，蓋二客之 者,非子也邪?] 道士顧笑。 不能從焉 Soon, the guests had gone. I 劃然長嘯，草木震動，山鳴谷 then decided to sleep and when 應，風起水涌，予亦悄然而悲， I did I dreamed of two Daoist 肅然而恐，凜乎其不可留也。 priests in feathered robes who I then covered myself in skins danced around elegantly. They and climbed. I walked over jag- were passing by River Watch ged precipices. I split the covering when they bowed to me and said, undergrowth. I sat on tigers and “Was your outing to Red Cliff leopards. I rode the Azure Dragon. enjoyable?” I asked their names.

I climbed a perching falcon’s high They looked up at me but did nest. I looked down upon the dark not reply. “Ooh aah eeh mhh, I’ve palace of Feng Yi, the river god. My got it! Last night, flying and calltwo guests however could not fol- ing, something passed me. It was low me there. you two, was it not?” The Daoists I sighed and let out a long looked back, laughing. howl. The grass and trees began to tremble; The mountains 予亦驚悟，開戸視之，不見其 cried and the valleys called; 處。 The wind awoke and the water And then suddenly I awoke. I surged; I was silently sorrowful, opened the door, looking for them. 婦曰：[我有斗 reverently fearful. I couldn’t But they were not to be found. u

31 •

Short Story

By Devyani Mahajan

Originally published on Oct. 5, 2021.

A

fter parking her Porsche Cayenne in the bowels of the mall, Mrs. Gupta journeys upward in a cold, marble-paneled elevator. A mirror confronts her as she enters, and she regards her reflection, washed out under the electric lights, with the sharp pang of disappointment she has become accustomed to. With a practiced eye she traces the crow’s feet arching up toward her eyebrows, and the firm lines at the corner of her mouth. She is lucky, she knows, that her forehead remains smooth—but it’s only a matter of time. She is as certain of this as she is of the fact that her husband has been cheating on her for the past four months.

She turns away to face the sliding doors of the elevator and presses the button for the fifth floor. Last night, she looked up the address to calculate her route and travel time and committed it to memory. Mrs.

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Gupta loathes Google Maps, just as she loathes laziness in domestic help and long wait times at walkin restaurants. When she drives, her mind’s eye soars above her, the roads of the city laid out like tangled circles of unspooled thread— her mental maps have not once misled her. Mrs. Gupta has never been lost before, and today is no exception. She reached the mall in seventeen minutes, just as she had calculated, took precisely two-anda-half minutes to park, and spent just under one minute searching for the elevator in the lobby. She stares at the closed elevator doors for the remaining nine seconds of her journey. There’s a vague outline of herself in brown-and-white on the silvery surface of the doors, amorphous and unrecognizable but for the slight halo of frizz at her crown, a constant reminder of her losing battle against Singapore’s crippling

humidity percentage. She blinks at it once before the doors slide open.

Her formless self is replaced by a corridor. Mrs. Gupta hoists her handbag—understated Louis Vuitton—over her shoulder and steps out of the elevator. She doesn’t notice that the floor is carpeted until the heel of her shoe sinks into its plush shag, muffling the crisp click she so adores. Still, the corridor is so empty and silent that she is almost grateful for the carpeting. It seems like a good day to be inconspicuous, though Mrs. Gupta is proud of her shoes. They’re mid-heeled Ferragamos, strappy and tasteful, and though their deep blue coloring is a statement, it is one she is willing to make. Today she has worn them with wide-legged white linen pants and a billowy blouse. Her hair bobs in rhythm with her stride, jet-black strands rustling against one another, stiff with dye and soft with

product. She thinks back to the glimpse of her reflection in the elevator—had her roots been showing? Is she due for a touch-up? Too late: she’s at the glass door, reading the gold-lettered name of the clinic engraved in pristine copperplate.

The door swings open at Mrs. Gupta’s delicate touch. She flicks her watch out from beneath the sleeve of her blouse as she does so, letting the diamond-studded dial catch the light as she hears a shrill, cloying jingle. She glances upwards—wind chimes. How tacky. There is nothing Mrs. Gupta hates more than wind chimes at an entryway. The ones poised above this door are pale orange, dented and curiously out of place in the white waiting room. She tears her eyes away from them and walks up to the receptionist with a practiced smile. Not too big—she doesn’t want the receptionist to get too comfortable, after all. The receptionist shoots a wide smile back at her as she finishes scribbling down appointment details, a telephone wedged between her shoulder and her ear. A second passes, and then another, and Mrs. Gupta is just beginning to get impatient when the receptionist puts her phone down and scribbles the last of her note.

“Hi, I have an appointment at four,” Mrs. Gupta says without preamble.

“Under the name of Sandeepa Gupta.”

The receptionist glances up, wide-eyed for a moment before regaining her composure, and placing her pencil down neatly beside the sheet of paper. “Under which name?” she asks. She has a broad, eyebrowless face still untouched by cynicism and age. Once, Mrs. Gupta’s skin had been even smoother, free of wrinkles and even the slight pockmarks that dot the receptionist’s cheeks. The retroactive victory is not sweet. Mrs. Gupta places the receptionist at twenty-three years of age; exactly half of her own. The receptionist’s name tag reads Noor.

Mr. Gupta’s assistant is also named

When she drives, her mind’s eye soars above her, the roads of the city laid out like tangled circles of unspooled thread.

Noor, Mrs. Gupta recalls. In fact, she believes the two women look quite similar—unless she is generalizing, again. Lately, her sons have been badgering her about this. Her eldest, especially, has taken to being something of an activist online. Mrs. Gupta was fine with it, supportive even, until he turned his gaze inward and started policing dinner-table talk. Why, last night alone... The memory of it sours her mood.

“Gupta,” repeats Mrs. Gupta, irritated.

The receptionist nods, one hand adjusting the edge of her yellow hijab nervously, the other tapping through the patient log on her computer. “Of course! The doctor will be ready for you in a moment.

Take a seat.”

Mrs. Gupta retreats to the row of four seats in front of the receptionist’s counter. She sits on the second seat from the left, crossing her legs and placing her bag primly on the seat next to her. The seats are uncomfortable, but not any more uncomfortable than they look.

Mrs. Gupta has to appreciate the stylistic choice at the very least—the chairs are curvaceous and upholstered in white leather. They go well with the stark whiteness of the office, although Mrs. Gupta herself would have chosen something slightly different, and added more chairs for a clinic of this size. Still, she knows the wait will not be too long, and for that reason alone she sinks into the chair, careful not to rumple the hair at the back of her head,

and prepares to sit for five to seven minutes.

Three minutes pass. The tasteless wind chimes jingle again. A woman comes in with her young son, who is sporting a horrible pinkish rash on his skinny arms. They poke out from beneath his Incredible Hulk t-shirt, the color clashing horribly with the Hulk’s particular shade of green. He scratches at them until his mother smacks his hands away. “Bié nà yàng zuò,” the mother hisses, and the boy drops his hands to his side and hangs his head. Mrs. Gupta stifles a smile.

His mannerisms are just like those of her youngest, Ajay. Ajay has always been a dramatic child and still has fits of volatility from day to day, but she is pleased that he has channelled his vivacious spirit into something more productive.

Only last month, Ajay was named the captain of the school’s debate team. Mrs. Gupta is still filled with pride when she thinks about it. He had been competing against Mrs. Shah’s son, Vivek, and beat the boy by a respectable margin. Mrs. Gupta has never brought it up at their weekly tea—she is far too tactful for that—but allowed herself a slight air of smugness when Mrs. Datta congratulated her in front of Mrs. Shah. Her son is a hard worker and more than deserves his role. Why on earth should she not be proud of him?

The mother and son are told to wait, too, and converge on the row of seats. The mother directs her son to sit to the right of Mrs. Gupta, and she herself sits to the right of her son. The boy is suddenly less

33 •

Image courtesy of Teen Ravine. charming as he begins swinging his yellow-Croc’d feet and wriggling in his chair. Worst of all, his pink, flaky arm comes dangerously close to brushing up against Mrs. Gupta’s sleeve. She leans as far away from him as she can without appearing rude, but does not move to the seat to her left. After all, she should only be seated for another few minutes.

Two more minutes pass. The wind chimes sound again. A pimply teenager enters the clinic and murmurs a few words to the receptionist. Her face is red, inflamed and a little repulsive, and she whispers embarrassed words about acne treatments, flushing an unsightly puce. She then turns and surveys the row of seats with tired eyes— they rest, for a moment, on the seat occupied by Mrs. Gupta’s bag. The girl steps forward timidly, as if to ask for permission to sit, but Mrs. Gupta does not deign to answer.

She is already troubled enough

• 34

by the child to her right, who has now taken to scratching his arms again while his mother peers at her phone, distracted. The girl hovers for a moment more, hope seeping from her posture, before drifting toward the inside of the clinic, where there are presumably more chairs.

Seven minutes have now passed and Mrs. Gupta has run out of patience. She stands and advances on the receptionist. The receptionist, who is responding to an appointment cancellation on the telephone and trying in vain to have the client reschedule, raises an apologetic finger, motioning for Mrs. Gupta to wait for a moment.

Mrs. Gupta does not want to wait for a moment, but is not incensed enough to interrupt the receptionist’s phone call, so she merely seethes where she stands and keeps her gaze trained on the receptionist, willing her to hang up. The receptionist squirms under her gaze,

admits defeat to the client on the telephone, and finally hangs up.

“When will the doctor be ready to see me?” asks Mrs. Gupta.

“She’s almost ready, Mrs. Gupta,” responds the receptionist, fiddling with the sparkly pin affixed to her hijab. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. Oh! Before you see her, could you fill out these consent forms?”

“Fine,” says Mrs. Gupta tersely.

The receptionist’s incompetence is almost comical, but she is loath to see the humor in the situation. After all, there is nothing funny about wasting Mrs. Gupta’s time.

The receptionist ducks under her desk and fishes around for a sheaf of papers. She holds the papers up like a trophy for a moment before sliding them across the counter to Mrs. Gupta. “Could you read these over and sign here, here, and here?”

Mrs. Gupta takes the papers and reads them over while standing by the receptionist’s desk. Standard indemnity forms—nothing she hasn’t seen before. She takes the 0.5 Pilot pen from the receptionist and signs the papers, catching a glimpse of her own hands as she does so. She finds herself horrified at the state of them: a pale crescent of unpainted nail protrudes from her nail beds, unsightly against her week-old nude manicure. She has two choices now: scrub her nails clean with nail polish remover to preserve some standard of tidiness, or book another appointment with her manicurist. Given her schedule this week, she will have a hard time fitting in a trip to the nail salon, so she makes a mental note to remove her nail polish when she gets home.

“Here,” she says, sliding the papers back to the receptionist.

“Please let me know as soon as the doctor is ready.”

“Of course! Sorry for the wait,” says the receptionist, tapping the papers against her desk to align the edges.

Her heart races. She has planned and waited and scheduled and stressed in the time leading up to this moment—the moment in which Dr. Gill will be with her.

She knows exactly what she wants to say.

Mrs. Gupta returns to the row of seats, picks her bag up and sits at the left-most seat, leaving a chair between herself and the little boy, who has now taken to picking his nose. She rebukes herself for ever seeing a similarity between him and Ajay.

The boy’s mother glances up from her phone. Her face shifts from impassivity to anger in a fluid moment. “Alex!” she snaps. The boy drops his hand to his lap, surreptitiously wiping his finger on his shorts, and sits up straight. Mrs. Gupta, yet again, sees her son in him, though this time he echoes the mannerisms of her eldest—Kabir, too, feigns innocence in much the same way. As time passed, Mrs. Gupta moved from catching him with his finger up his nose to catching him returning home after his curfew; but his expressions of guilt and innocence remain unchanged even as his punishments decrease in severity. Her boys ought to have fun, after all, and Kabir has just been admitted to Princeton. He deserves a good time after making his parents so proud, and Mrs. Gupta doesn’t mind turning a blind eye to the occasional bottle of vodka or two missing from her wine fridge.

If he must drink, it’s better that he builds up a tolerance before he leaves for college.

A nurse appears from the inside of the clinic. She clears her throat.

“Mrs. Gupta?” she calls. “The doctor will see you now.”

Mrs. Gupta takes her time. She stands, gripping the handle of her bag with one hand and smoothing the wrinkles from her trousers

with the other. She has done her utmost to keep her linen crisp through her journey from home to the clinic, but is conscious of a slight creasing around her knees that is too late to remedy. Very well. She holds her bag to her side, lifts her chin, brushes a sharp strand of hair from her brow and follows the nurse through the innards of the clinic.

The nurse leads her into a small surgical room and directs her to lie down on the paper-covered examination table. “Dr. Gill will be with you in a moment,” she says. Mrs. Gupta is tired of hearing it, but she nods and places her bag on a low table by the door. She lies down, trying to keep her pants from wrinkling as she does so, and stares up at the ceiling.

Her heart races. She has planned and waited and scheduled and stressed in the time leading up to this moment—the moment in which Dr. Gill will be with her. She knows exactly what she wants to say.

She turns her head to the side, unable to stare up at the bright ceiling lights for any longer, and looks at the framed medical certificates on the wall with watering eyes. Dr. Gill is highly qualified, it seems: medical school in England, and further dermatology training in the National University of Singapore. There are framed thankyou cards, some scrawled in crayon and some in bubbly adolescent scrawl, and various photographs of the doctor with esteemed clients. Mrs. Gupta glances at a photo and decides to look back up at the ceiling instead.

The door opens, and Mrs. Gupta hears the rustle of a surgical robe. A vague outline of the doctor’s head comes into focus above her, haloed by the harsh ceiling lights. The doctor is wearing a blue bouffant hat, safety glasses, and a surgical mask, and Mrs. Gupta has to squint to confirm that it truly is Dr. Gill.

“Sandeepa Gupta?” asks the doctor. Her voice is unpleasantly soft and curiously devoid of character and tone. Mrs. Gupta strains to hear it over the blood rushing in her ears.

“Sandy,” she says.

“Sandy. And you’re here for Botox?” She has keen eyes, Mrs. Gupta notes. They weren’t all that visible in her hazy Facebook profile picture, and are still shrouded by the safety glasses she wears, but they pierce Mrs. Gupta all the same as they trace the lines of her face.

“Yes.” “All right. Could you sit up for me and indicate the target areas?

We can work out the injection sites from there.”

This is not how Mrs. Gupta planned for it to go. She sits up and numbly goes over the pre-Botox routine with the doctor, deciding on the quantity of Botox and the number and position of the injection sites. She wonders if she’ll be able to emote at all after this. She hopes not, given what she plans to do next.

“All right,” says the doctor, after scribbling something onto a clipboard with firm, practiced strokes.

“I’ll go fetch a dose and we’ll get started in a moment. Do you mind

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Mrs. Gupta’s heart stutters in her chest. She imagined hissing cutting words to a red-lipped, wrong-footed young woman who only spoke to stammer apologies. if I have a trainee nurse in for observation?” She doesn’t inflect it like a question—indeed, she doesn’t inflect it at all, leaving no room for refusal. The doctor is almost at the door when Mrs. Gupta shakes her head.

“I’d rather not,” she says.

The doctor pauses, and then nods. “All right, then,” she says, her tone as flat as ever, and leaves the room. She returns, as promised, with a few needles and bottles of a solution Mrs. Gupta assumes is Botox. She has never wondered what the substance itself looks like, and doesn’t now find herself curious. Instead, she looks at the doctor as she stands over a table and extracts a needle from its packaging, inspecting it for a moment before pressing it through the rubber lid of one of the bottles, each movement measured and precise.

“I know you’re fucking my husband,” says Mrs. Gupta.

Dr. Gill taps the air bubbles out of the syringe nimbly. “Okay,” she replies.

Mrs. Gupta had not planned on it going this way, either. When she envisioned it, time after time, night after night, she planned on a volatile confrontation in which she came out the clear victor. She imagined daring Dr. Gill to even think about coming near her husband again. She imagined tears and triumph and storming out of the clinic settled, once again, in her skin.

Dr. Gill takes her silence as the end of the conversation and walks towards the examination table. “I’m

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going to start with the—” “Is that all you have to say for yourself?” demands Mrs. Gupta, sitting up. “You—you’re having an affair with my husband!”

“I know that,” says Dr. Gill, not lowering the needle.

Mrs. Gupta is dumbfounded.

“You know... You knew it was an affair?”

“Yes,” says the doctor.

“You knew he was my husband?”

“Yes. Well, I didn’t know he was your husband,” admits the doctor, “but I knew he was married.”

“What?” breathes Mrs. Gupta, horrified. Her hands tremble—she wants to slap the doctor. She wants to hide her face. She settles for clasping her hands together in her lap, tight enough that her knuckles turn white. “This whole time... You knew? Did he tell you?”

The doctor sighs. “Does that change anything for you?”

Mrs. Gupta’s heart stutters in her chest. She imagined hissing cutting words to a red-lipped, wrong-footed young woman who spoke only to stammer apologies.

This doctor, with her flat voice and blunt words—how could she have expected this? She recalls Mrs. Shah’s encouraging words at their last tea, and curses her name. “No,” she says, endeavouring to keep her voice flat, too. “It doesn’t change the fact that my husband had an affair. Why?” “Why did he cheat on you?

Or why with me?” the doctor asks. She stands by the examination table with a needle and seems almost as if she’s

inquiring into Mrs. Gupta’s medical histor y.

“How dare you?” Mrs. Gupta hisses, though her voice shakes.

“Why did you sleep with him? Why did you ruin—” She stops herself there. Dr. Gill is not enough to ruin Mrs. Gupta’s perfect life. An act of God is not enough to ruin Mrs. Gupta’s life. Her husband won’t leave her, and she certainly won’t leave him. Does this change anything for her at all?

“I’m sorry,” says the doctor, though she does not sound as if she means it.

“Right.” Mrs. Gupta turns away.

She looks, instead, at the framed certificates on the wall. She pays special attention to them, this time, hoping to will away the burning in her eyes. Dr Preeti Gill, Medicine, Newcastle University, 1977... She blinks. 1977? She looks back at the doctor. Beneath the bouffant hat and safety goggles and surgical mask, Mrs. Gupta can now make out crow’s feet at her eyes and deep wrinkles in her forehead. She studies the doctor’s hands, blunt nails outlined by blue surgical gloves, and at the wisp of steel-grey hair curled at the doctor’s temples. No— this is not what she had expected at all.

“Listen, Sandy,” sighs the doctor.

“Whatever you may think of me, I’ve been doing this for a long time.

Dermatology, that is. I’m here in my capacity as a medical provider.

I can administer your Botox and you can leave to face your husband, or you can leave now and face your husband anyway. Or not. Whatever you choose, tell me now, because I have a six-year-old boy with eczema waiting outside for treatment and he has basketball camp at 5:30.”

Mrs. Gupta lies back against the examination table. She looks up at the white lights, dry-eyed. “Okay,” she says. “Basketball camp. Can’t miss that. Where are we starting?”

“We’ll target the laughter lines first,” says the doctor. Mrs. Gupta nods. u

Plunderer

of t h e

Sun

By Ayla Schultz

Poetry

the shape she leaves when she peels herself away (head, shoulders, right foot pressing the floor) ____ Life is a series of choices, so make ‘em count cause once they’re gone, if you missed your mark there’s no turning back 1 ____ Rewinding, my legs reflected beneath bathwater, bubbles parting as knees break the surface Hear the pop, the ripple of cracks as surface tension atrophies The smell of lavender, like her perfume which she sprayed in hotel rooms, in rental cars, like in Santa Fe where the wheels broke down and we finally faced the sky Feel the weight, my weight, that which gravity pulls, that which keeps me from breaking, from floating away Feel the storm in the Badlands, green-sky-screen-door-blown-off-rain (that hungry, that mire, water mine, mine, mine, beat my windows bare) ____ Give me another existence with a unwrinkled couch, another life with a lamp to shadow the living room table I bought a TV I bought a new sweater I bought thread to stitch her arms back to my body ____ I bought tickets to the west, ride a horse to Mexico — find where John Wayne got shot in 1953 Feel the sand, the burn, the blister as we pull together feel, feel, feel Live at Santa Fe, we never turn back

1 Quotation attributed to Plunder of the Sun (John Farrow, 1953).

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B O O KS A n al y t i c al E s s a y

Bog Butter, Arson, an Old Woman, and a K ite Seamus Heaney’s Reckoning With the Past

By Olivia Marotte

Originally published on Oct. 28, 2021.

I

write this essay at an Evangelical-Christian-affiliated coffee shop in my hometown of Conway, Arkansas. There are many spots like this to choose from (for some reason, all of the coffee shops are in some way affiliated with Christian organizations), but I prefer the breezy, deserted back porch deck at Blue Sail Coffee. Given its close proximity to Hendrix College, whose students often gather at Blue Sail to study and socialize, I can’t help but recall an anecdote about the late poet laureate Seamus Heaney, humorously recounted by my stepfather who was a student when Heaney visited the College for a public talk in 1990. After finishing his talk, the Irish poet wanted a drink. A Scotch, in fact. When Heaney was told that he would need to travel about twenty miles to find the nearest liquor store because

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Conway is a dry county, he shouted, “What the fuck is a dry county?!” Currently home in Conway for fall break, I will say that Heaney had a point.

Please, for just a moment, allow my 19-year-old self to be positioned with regard to this renowned, prolific, and dead poet.

I’m pretty sure that’s the point of art, anyway.

At my college (1,160 miles away from Conway), I freely discuss Christianity and the dangers of its intersections with capitalism and politics. The stronghold of the Evangelical Christian lobby is the primary source of my frustration with Conway and the very reason why Seamus Heaney couldn’t sip a refreshing Scotch after speaking to Hendrix students about his poetry 31 years ago. I view Conway now more than ever with a critical eye.

My past self lies here in Conway, but who am I as a visitor here in the present? Since I’m not sure I want to answer that question about myself just yet (my therapist can take a stab at that one later), here I’ll focus on Seamus Heaney’s self-analysis instead.

Reading Heaney’s poetry allows us to meditate upon his struggles with the concepts of identity, time, and our vast and complicated search for the past. As we delve further into Heaney’s work, however, it becomes increasingly clear that water, earth, air, and fire often served as dynamic symbols, bridging gaps between us, as contemporary readers, and Heaney, as a 20th century Irish poet. While deciphering the complex emotional and philosophical suggestions throughout Heaney’s poetry, and their expression through the four

elements, we’re capable of understanding and, ultimately, empathizing with the mysterious bog (if you will) of our own jumbles of passion, sorrow, and curiosity.

WATER “What the fuck is a dry county?”

— Poet Laureate Seamus Heaney, circa 1990 In his poem “A Drink of Water” (1979), Heaney immediately establishes his subject: an elderly woman who musters what little energy she has left to draw water from a well.

Water plays an important role in its ability to inspire recollections of the past. The woman is at the end of her life and she makes no effort to conceal the physical impairments that complicate her task. We can assume that the sole purpose of the old woman, as far as Heaney is concerned, is to provide water for the community of which Heaney is a part. The bounds of her described characteristics are limited to ungraceful physical traits that almost sound like mockery, a point exemplified by the lines “She came every morning to draw water / Like an old bat staggering up the field” and “...the treble / Creak of her voice like the pump’s handle.”

Much like the latter line suggests, the old woman’s observable qualities are almost indistinguishable from those of her water-obtaining tools, at least in Heaney’s memory.

In conflating the woman and the water pump, the poem uses auditory stimulation to enhance its metaphors: Heaney includes diction such as “cough,” “clatter,” and “creak” to establish a sense of clumsiness which does not stem from inexperience but from aching joints and exhaustion. It’s through this language that Heaney compares the woman to the apparatus she wearily operates: the pump’s “whooping cough” is a personification of the apparatus, blatantly used to remind

Edward McGuire’s portrait of Seamus Heaney.

us of the woman’s old age and the physical debility associated with it. In addition to this cacophonic language, however, Heaney relates filling up the bucket with water to a “slow diminuendo,” romanticizing this mundane activity with musical vernacular. Similarly, Heaney associates the woman’s voice with a “treble creak.” Instead of solely relying on onomatopoeia-esque diction, Heaney composes a poetic symphony.

Despite these details, we are told

nothing of the woman’s past. Her only defining trait is her dedication to her task, which has been repeated as many times as to suggest permanent physical impairments as a result of long hours and strenuous physical labor. Without her, Heaney and his community would be unable to access water, not only as a substance necessary for mere survival but one revealing Heaney’s reflection (I almost imagine him staring into his glass of water and observing the reflection of his

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Though written 42 years ago, Heaney’s poem inspires our identification, connecting us in our universal—and mutual—reflections upon our own ephemerality. middle-aged face). Though it’s not explicit what this reflection in Heaney’s glass stirs within him, we can speculate that he feels simultaneously nostalgic, grateful, and convicted by the woman’s legacy to choose not to take even a drink of water for granted. Water is a connecting property in this way—and a burden.

The old woman’s dedication to her task is physically taxing yet necessary; who’s to say that her death—which is implied at the poem’s conclusion (“Remember the Giver” are the words that Heaney notices fade off of the cup’s lip.

This persistence of memory evokes a sense of mortality)—isn’t hastened by this seemingly quotidian responsibility? While it is, in this case, a physical burden, it’s also a mental one, and not only for the old woman: a simple drink of water sobers Heaney enough to reflect upon his role as a receiver of hospitality. Whereas at the beginning of the poem he comments on the old woman’s objectively unflattering qualities without acknowledging the benefit of her labor, Heaney is eventually inspired by his sip of water and the “admonishment on her cup” (he tellingly refers to the cup as hers, not his own). In this moment, Heaney gains awareness of his previous judgments of the old woman and ultimately regards her with respect and reverence. Despite its life-giving qualities, water nevertheless contains the possibility of death, clarified by the old woman’s own efforts to draw water from the well that culminates in her eventual demise. Throughout “A Drink of Water,” Heaney actively reflects on this fragile duality and,

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perhaps more subtly, upon his own life, reckoning with the past—and future—as he reaches the humbling age of forty. Though written 42 years ago, Heaney’s poem inspires our identification, connecting us in our universal—and mutual—reflections upon our own ephemerality.

WIND Heaney’s 2010 poem “A Kite for Aibhin” was written toward the end of the poet’s life, a fact that becomes increasingly clear as one reads it. In its tender subject matter, this poem finds success through its contemplation on memory, mortality, and the past. Air—wind, to be exact—is the driving force of the poem and is indicative of Heaney’s exploitation of the elements as vehicles through which he may reckon with temporality. Though previous poems consider more detached or objective reflections, “A Kite for Aibhin” instead illustrates, with startling intimacy, a pivotal transition in Heaney’s relationship with his daughter.

As the title itself suggests, the poem is largely preoccupied with the imagery and symbolism of a kite, one that is associated with Heaney’s meditations upon his life and its ultimate fragility, both of which he can experience much more acutely as his role as father and his relationship with his daughter each shift. At first, the wind supports a kite and allows it to soar “high against the breeze” while Heaney and several others endure the outdoors to witness this phenomenon.

After a period of observation, Heaney launches his own kite (referred to as “our,”as if to establish a

community with his readers), and it falters as it’s first released into the open wind: the kite “hovers, tugs, veers, dives askew,” and then, eventually, after much anticipation, finds freedom in the sky’s vast arena of unpredictable wind. All the while, he faces Anahorish Hill, which, for an avid reader of Heaney, is understood as his Garden of Eden—a symbol of his happy childhood and the fond memories that occurred there. In this way, the inevitable release of his daughter from his care and into the world is associated with his own detachment from childhood affairs, a cause for self-reflection.

Heaney’s kite “rises” to “loud cheers from us below.” Beyond this passage, Heaney constantly repeats the word “rises” as his poem progresses, especially at the beginning of the fifth stanza—as a consequence, the poem’s heartbeat seems to hasten. This agility, however, does not imply a tonal derailing but, rather, a shift in Heaney’s control of language. In the subsequent stanza, Heaney is so overwhelmed by being unable to control the kite that he omits the punctuation he once employed throughout the poem, as reflected in the last stanza: “The longing in the breast and planted feet / And gazing face and heart of the kite flier / Until string breaks.” As the emotional climax of the poem, this stanza successfully heightens a sense of longing, one that increases as the kite ascends. However, once the string supporting the kite breaks, it “takes off, itself alone, a windfall,” hinting at Heaney’s observation that his daughter is now completely detached from his control and

Irish bogland landscape. Courtesy of Sherry Ott. paternal supervision. It’s unclear whether this regard is meant to register as triumphant or regretful, but by stating that the kite is a “windfall”—an object subject to the whims of the wind—Heaney nevertheless faces the need to place his faith in the kite and in his daughter, acknowledging that he must assign greater weight to his confidence in her ability and strength than to his perception of her youthful vulnerability.

In “A Kite for Aibhin,” the vast mystery that is the open air symbolizes the transition Heaney’s daughter makes from being held on Earth with paternal care. Earth, where memories of her childhood were created and likely persisted in Heaney’s mind during this event in which he sets her—the kite—free.

The wind and air, while invisible, reflect the new reality he must gradually accept after abandoning the comforts of the past. The air is a ubiquitous element, and, although his daughter is no longer within his immediate vicinity and domestic sphere, he may be consoled by the enveloping wind that they share, the same wind that allowed his daughter to pursue an independent life. Now, while the free air in this metaphor signifies liberation and

change, it also reeks of uncertainty.

Heaney successfully “letting go” of his daughter is one challenge, but anticipating her future and vicariously managing her struggles is another.

(Upon reading “A Kite for Aibhin,” I can’t help but recall the epigraph engraved on Heaney’s headstone on his grave at St. Mary’s Church in Northern Ireland: “Walk on air against your better judgement.” Perhaps these same words of encouragement were offered to Heaney’s daughter as the string that attached her to father was ultimately severed by the pull of the wind and, ultimately, personal growth.)

FIRE Rather than envisioning himself as an active participant within his 2006 poem “Rilke: After the Fire,” Heaney simply describes the moments as they unfold. His narration style, unlike previous poems, is steeped in an omniscient and pervasively melancholic perspective of the poem’s subject. Throughout the poem, we’re invited to partake in the crisp, burnt smells and in the colors of autumn that Heaney describes: “Early autumn morning hesitated / Shying at newness, an

emptiness behind / Scorched linden trees still crowding in around / The moorland house, now just one more wallstead.” The autumn air presents a sense of tranquility, but at a cost.

Heaney’s descriptions of bystanders arouse a level of ambiguity for the reader regarding the given scene’s dynamic—children gather loudly around the rubble of the “moorland house,” falling silent once they encounter the “son of the place,” and it can be assumed that the home once belonged to this man’s father. Instead of offering an explanation for the children’s silence, Heaney shines a spotlight on the “son” as he rakes a “can or kettle / From under hot, half burnt-away house beams” as bystanders continue to observe the scene of destruction with a combination of judgement, fear, and potential disgust.

Accessing the son’s feelings, Heaney describes the son’s obligation to explain himself or the situation at hand as arduous, as he “turned to the others present, at great pains.”

The son feels as though he has “a doubtful tale to tell” (what a curious case in and of itself!) and, evidently, isn’t poised to accept the sympathetic sentiments from the community around him. Why

41 •

Heaney’s own archeological exploration of the past often translates into his fear that even one mistake may define him for eternity. does he feel shameful? Why has he, a man understood as a victim of a fire, suddenly been ostracized from his surrounding context? We receive no explanation from Heaney— simply an analysis of the new social dynamic that’s been created by this incident: “For now that it was gone, it all seemed / Far stranger: more fantastical than Pharaoh. / And he was changed, a foreigner among them.” It’s worth interrogating whether this observation is Heaney’s or the son’s whose perspective had been accessed

by Heaney earlier. Either way, in assuming the role of a bystander, Heaney may nevertheless remain complicit in the son’s internalization of exile, given Heaney’s lack of action against this harsh projection of judgement by others watching the scene with silent scrutiny.

The role of fire, an element of destruction and intensity, plays a pivotal role in the development of this poem, particularly when associated with circumstances regarding the son as opposed to bystanders at the scene. Fire acts as an agent of truth and a point of no return: once the moorland house has been burned to the ground by its unstoppable force, the son, being suspected of arson, can never recover from his past. Throughout the poem, this figure is referred to as “the son,” nameless and without personal attributions except for his suspected arson. His potential merits of the past are fragile and fleeting when weighed against the accusations of the present. Now,

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the son’s past is simply a figment of his own imagination: what was before seems “fantastical,” and any attempts to restore it seems futile and inaccessible. Much like the moorland house’s permanent damage and the disfigured metal containers (even though the son attempts to uncover them from the rubble), so has the son’s reputation been permanently scarred by accusations of arson.

Beyond this, it’s similarly relevant to consider that this poem is Heaney’s translation of the 1908 poem of the same name by Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Why, then, did Heaney choose this poem to translate over other possible ones? Rilke’s poem is imbued with a dark, lonely, and enigmatic texture; perhaps Heaney related these feelings of isolation but not on the same exaggerated scale that Rilke uses. While engaging with this poem, it’s difficult not to sympathize with the son, and I imagine that Heaney feels the same. His own archeological exploration of the past often translates into his fear that even one mistake may define him—as it defined the son—for eternity.

EARTH When considering Heaney’s confrontation with the past, a central element continually haunts his prose: the bog, as well as its physical and metaphorical implications. In his 1969 poem “Bogland,” Heaney penetrates the surface of the superficial and descends into the bog for which the poem is named; this body of

bog is a metaphor for the vast, rich, and mysterious past belonging to Ireland. Written after the Republic of Ireland had seceded from the United Kingdom in 1922, this poem contends with a new struggle: the Troubles.

The late 1960s saw an explosion of tensions in Northern Ireland between the Unionists (predominantly Irish-Protestant), who wished to remain with the United Kingdom, and Irish nationalists (mostly Catholics), who sought independence from the United Kingdom in addition to the incorporation of Northern Ireland into the Republic.

Heaney’s poetry during the Troubles may be—in fact, certainly has been—read through a blood-red political lens. Despite this, Heaney maintained a somewhat apolitical perspective throughout his work, one that shouldn’t be reduced to monolithic or hard-cutting political commentary but as a complex and nuanced analysis of the human condition as it experiences history. “Bogland,” then, is difficult to separate from its dramatic political moment, but the poem should simultaneously be critically considered for its universal applicability as well as for Heaney’s signature bleak optimism. The poem opens by stating that “We have no prairies / To slice a big sun at evening” and that “Our unfenced country / Is bog that keeps crusting / Between sights of the sun.” In these lines, Heaney seems to indirectly characterize Ireland by comparing it to a country populated with prairies. The United States, for example, is overflowing with these landscapes, and the discovery of its frontiers by explorers was a beacon of expansion and hope for the future.

The true contrast Heaney attempts to highlight through these lines, however, is that while countries such as the United States were

concerned with the future of their new nation, the pursuit of the past is how Ireland uncovers meaning and a separation from outside influence. By using the word “we,” Heaney establishes a protective if not nationalist tone. Irish land is “unfenced”—reckless and wild—and, try as one might, this bog cannot be tamed or predicted, and is beyond subjugation (much like Irish nationalists). Further establishing an insider/outsider dichotomy, Heaney shifts into his next stanza by stating that “They’ve taken the skeleton / Of the Great Irish Elk / Out of the peat…,” suggesting that British colonizers of Northern Ireland have attempted to unearth some of Ireland’s most sacred relics without respect for or regard to their rich histories. In these moments, Heaney’s description of what lies beneath the surface begins.

“Bogland” continues with a description of the nature of bog butter, a naturally occurring substance excavated from peat bogs in Ireland and Great Britain, of which the “sunk under” has been curiously recovered as a white substance, and whose “kind,” black shade on the bog’s surface has “[missed] its last definition / By millions of years.” At this point in the poem, Heaney authorizes himself not only as an expert on wild Irish terrain, but also as a preserver of its unique history.

This sense of expertise further reveals itself as he derides the “they” figures—or, in this case, British colonizers—by assuming an assured (and smug, as I prefer to think) tone that “[t]hey’ll never dig coal here”; instead, they’ll uncover the “waterlogged trunks of great firs / Soft as pulp.” Try as they might to profit off of Irish land, “they” will only encounter remnants of the natural beings which have made Ireland culturally and environmentally rich, and this subsequent disappointment on the colonizers’ behalf is all the more empowering to Irish nationalists like Heaney. He

The bog, however, is just the surface of Ireland’s past, and while it is not completely understood, its solidity is a source of security. continues, explaining that “Our pioneers keep striking / Inwards and downwards”; here, his focus shifts to Irish excavators of the past, a solidarity that is punctuated by his use of the pronoun “our.” As they continue to dig, it becomes much more evident that the past is more layered than expected.

Out of all the natural elements, earth seems to be the most loaded and vast, both metaphorically and physically. Heaney understates the “bogholes” as merely “Atlantic seepage”; when this effect of water is juxtaposed to or supplemented by the bottomless “wet centre,” or the earth that lies beneath the bog, the notion that the earth contains all of Ireland’s secrets is intensified.

The earth is formidably solid, unwavering and stubbornly mysterious in nature. Even the most powerful colonizers are no match for its ability to withhold millions of years of history deep inside its core, and Irish citizens may take comfort in the fact that they are well-protected by the rich soil and layers of bog beneath them, formed by mysterious but natural processes. The bog, however, is just the surface of this past, and while it is not completely understood, its solidity is a source of security.

CLOSING THOUGHTS Seamus Heaney will never quite reach the “wet centre” of the past he longs to understand and perhaps relive. In analyzing the relationship between history, personal events, and the four elements, though, he may be able to feel—if not understand—the

universal attraction of the past which he so eloquently (while admittedly a bit enigmatically) expresses throughout his nearly fifty-year long career.

There is merit, however, to this artistic reservation given that each of Heaney’s poems asserts some level of desire for dominion over the past. Northern Ireland’s culture and history are unique and necessitate defense to sustain them in the face of opposing political forces. Poetry is, in many ways, a fierce defense against the threat of forgetting the past, and Heaney wields this tool (or shall we say his spade?) with dignified vulnerability.

I’ll say it again. “What the fuck is a dry county?!”

This question is one I now can ask more curiously, especially after using these four poems of Heaney’s to explore my own past and present.

Heaney’s work urges us to be skeptical: why do we hold on to certain elements of our personal histories?

Should we hold on? When is it time to let go?

I’m not sure that I want to let go of my hometown of Conway, despite the fact that coffee shops are run by conservative-Christian millennials and alcohol can’t be bought for 20 miles outside of city limits. Perhaps this is the most valuable lesson that Heaney has taught me throughout my personally dialogical approaches to his poetry: my hometown, my past, is worth challenging and engaging with. Heaney was alarmed and enraged when he didn’t get his Scotch at Hendrix College, but he still inspired hundreds with his words that April night in 1990. u

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MUS I C Music Review

Nowhere to Go But Down

Donda, Certified Lover Boy, and American Celebrity in 2021

By Alexander Del Greco

Originally published on Oct. 26, 2021.

I

t hasn’t been a great couple years for the popular image of celebrities. As inequality in the United States continues to worsen, the relative position of celebrities has seemed increasingly grotesque and their drama more trivial. Remember all those celebrities singing “Imagine” by John Lennon at the start of the pandemic, and how much backlash they got? The scandals of #MeToo, the revelations surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, and more have made a dent in the already-precarious reputation of America’s hyper-elite. In turn, the public has lost some of its interest in traditional celebrity pageantry. Look no further than Oscars ratings to prove my point.

As I said, not great.

Like many of you, I’m not exactly spending all my sympathy on celebrities. But I don’t think that being a celebrity is necessarily all that great. This very magazine published an excellent piece last spring

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about the voyeuristic ways that the public watched, and precipitated, the downfalls of young women celebrities like Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton. The amount of attention they receive is not normal. Of course, we should be mindful of the ways that female celebrities are especially victimized.

Today, however, I’m here to discuss two men, two titans of contemporary music, both of whom released albums within a couple days of each other at the beginning of our fall semester. Given the proximity of their releases, the similar stage of their career they are currently in, and the fact that they’re apparently beefing, it’s hard not to look at them in comparison to one another. They are, of course, Drake and Kanye West.

their private jets or attended their parties or orgies. But I imagine it’s a lifestyle that can safely be described as, in a word, hedonistic.

The opening refrain of the first song on Kanye West’s 2010 magnum opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (MBDTF) is, appropriately, “Can we get much higher?” On the second verse: “The plan was to drink until the pain over/but what’s worse?

The pain or the hangover?”

The epic highs and low lows of Kanye’s lifestyle are a common theme across his discography. The peaks are as high as advertised; Kanye tries every flavor of drug at some point and has sex with his supermodel wife (among others).

But no Kanye album, especially not MBDTF, fails to address the struggle flowing beneath the surface. Few mainstream artists Kanye West – Donda are as personal as Kanye. His deI don’t really know what it’s like cades-long battle with addiction to be famous. I haven’t been on and mental health are plastered

everywhere. Kanye’s openness has gotten him in trouble sometimes but, at the same time, has also produced some of the generation’s most defining music.

Religion, too, has been a steady through line across Kanye’s discography, from The College Dropout’s “Jesus Walks” to MBDTF (“We love Jesus but you done learned a lot from Satan... we ain’t married but tonight I need some consummation”) and up to his most recent before Donda, the critically panned Jesus is King. Although Kanye’s faith in God never seemed inauthentic, religion has often been invoked as a juxtaposition to some “sinning” behavior, as in the above line, rather than as a topic in and of itself. Jesus Is King, by contrast, is loaded with 85 references to the bible and heavy gospel influence, and features no profanity whatsoever. It is “Christian hip hop” in a way that his earlier works never really approached.

Most longtime fans of Kanye were disappointed by his sudden commitment to Christian values.

Gone were his outrageous and vulgar one-liners. As he probably intended, listening to Jesus is King felt like attending a sermon. With Donda—named after his late mother—Kanye is clearly a little deeper into his spiritual journey, and the wiser because of it. I’m not sure that Kanye is in a good mental state—in fact, I doubt he is—but this music feels like a better passage in his quest for absolution than Jesus is King. Raw and vulnerable, at once intense and overstretched, it’s everything that Kanye is.

I think a good encapsulation of Donda’s approach to spirituality is that Kanye still doesn’t swear but, unlike JIK, he and his guests are allowed to allude to adult topics but with bad words bleeped out. Whereas JIK felt constrained and one-note, Donda draws on Kanye’s faith to reflect on the hardships he has faced.

Donda opens with Kanye, as he often is, in crisis. Kanye’s voice is

Album cover for Kanye West’s Donda. distorted when first introduced in “Jail,” as he croons over an equally distorted guitar riff about going, well, to jail. “God gon’ post my bail tonight” concretizes the metaphor.

He’s committed some sort of transgression—many, in fact, as he sings about his “priors”—but trusts that faith in God will save him. Then Jay-Z comes in and says, “Made in the image of God, that’s a selfie,” which sounds like something Kanye ghostwrote for him.

Does Kanye, in fact, get saved over the course of the album? I don’t think so, but there are certainly moments of musical catharsis. “Off the Grid” is a braggadocious trap banger, the likes of which Kanye hasn’t produced in at least a few years. Following a steady dose of trap, “Believe What I Say” is a nice oasis, a genuinely pretty love song set over a Lauryn Hill sample. When he sings “Don’t let the lifestyle drag you down,” presumably directed at his equally famous ex-wife Kim Kar-

dashian, it’s the first time that I personally felt like there was something genuine in their relationship, that it wasn’t just a convenient partnership between mega-stars.

Donda’s second half is highlighted in part by the 8-minute-long Jesus Lord. It encompasses everything Donda is—church organ blaring in the background alongside a gospel-inspired refrain, and Kanye rapping as candidly as ever about addiction, mental anguish, and intergenerational trauma. Although Kanye is certainly looking to God for answers, there’s an acknowledgment of the limits of this endeavor.

“And if I talk to Christ, can I bring my mother back tonight?/And if I die tonight, will I see her in the afterlife?” Kanye tells the story of a man consumed by grief following his brother’s death and, eventually, decides to seek revenge on his brother’s killer. But killing—or dying—does not bring anyone back to life, and Kanye doesn’t seem

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Label: OVO Sound, Cover artist: Damien Hirst. fully convinced of life after death.

“But back to reality, where everything’s a tragedy”—all that there is to do is cope with things on the mortal plane. Donda is essentially his means of coping.

Then Kanye, in vintage fashion, opens the next track, “New Again,” with the following lines: “If I hit you with a ‘W-Y-D?’/You better not hit me with a ‘H-E-Y’/It better be like ‘Hiii’ with a bunch of I’s/Or ‘Heyyy’ with a bunch of Y’s.” Despite, or rather because of, the jarring juxtaposition, “New Again” is thematically resonant with “Jesus Lord.” Kanye is, at least temporarily, on the other side of an episode, rapping about buying expensive clothes but then about repenting “for everything I’ma do again.” The cycles of inner ups and downs will continue, and Kanye will continue to do morally questionable things. “Make me new again,” the refrain goes, but it’s clearly not the first Kanye has requested this, and is unlikely to be the last.

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Donda reaches its musical climax in the formidable “Come to Life,” a grand, organ-driven number expressing Kanye’s love for his family.

Kanye repeats the line, “floating on a silver lining”—heaping onto the religious imagery of the album with a message of taking pleasure in the good of life. Unlike earlier in his career, those good things are not the fame or glamour, or the supermodel (now ex-) wife, but his young daughter. It’s the type of song that I hope we see more of from Kanye.

Donda is extremely long, and I skipped over some sluggish bits.

There are some bores. There’s a completely out-of-place Pop Smoke song. Kanye does, however, get a lot out of his features. Baby Keem, Roddy Ricch, Jay Electronica—the list goes on of rappers who deliver good features. And as for Mr. West himself, I wouldn’t call it a “return to form,” because that’s not the type of artist Kanye is. Kanye is always changing his sound, his style, his

outlook on life. His music has a rawness to it that draws back the curtain on superstar life but never suggests simulation or a carefully manicured image of himself.

When he dropped Jesus is King, the sudden return to his evangelical roots felt like the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction.

Whereas the old Kanye presented his life in both its flashiest and its most unsavory ways, the Kanye of JIK felt like he was trying to convince himself through music that reprogramming himself against the grain of celebrity was possible. Yet it was not an artistically fruitful undertaking; Kanye tried to hide that struggle beneath the art instead of through it. Donda, on the other hand, both finds some territory for the several Kanyes to coexist and to put his attempts at coping, renewal, and absolution at the forefront. It’s not his most sonically or lyrically interesting project, but it’s not boring. And after JIK, that’s all I was really hoping for.

Drake – Certified Lover Boy It’s possible that the most listened-to artist in all of human history is one Canadian by the name of Aubrey Drake Graham (There’s a whole raging debate about how to measure this and how to weigh record sales against streams and so forth. Drake leads all of humanity in “certified units,” which is one way of measuring. I’m not going to get into it further).

If you told this fact to an alien and showed them Drake’s music, I don’t think they’d be too surprised in any direction. It’s mostly catchy and pleasant to listen to. It spans a couple styles but doesn’t try anything too daring that might put off mainstream audiences. Alien pop might sound somewhat similar.

Enter Certified Lover Boy. With his seventh album, I was hoping Drake might advance into some new musical and conceptual territory. The guy has sold just about as many records as anyone, so why not experiment a

little bit? Those hopes, unfortunately, were largely extinguished with the release of the album’s cover, which may have been bold but not in the direction I was hoping. The cover’s racially diverse cast of pregnant emoji women only signified a doubling down on Drake’s boring, immature, and ultimately unconvincing “Lover Boy” persona.

The most frustrating thing about Drake to me is that the guy could be anything. He could leverage his musical talent to make something better than this, or start a cooking show, or get really into a niche political issue. But it seems to me that Drake is always trying to be what he thinks a celebrity rapper should be, and the yes-men around him only egg him on.

CLB’s third track, “Girls Want Girls,” is a good example of this phenomenon. Drake raps, “Say you a Lesbian, girl me too.” Far from a bold coming out statement, this is a bar which probably should have been left on the drawing board.

With “Way 2 Sexy,” Drake, Future, and Young Thug interpolate the camp 1991 Right Said Fred hit, “I’m Too Sexy.” The instrumental, never mind the concept of the song, sounds like it should have been left in the 90s.

The bar about lesbians isn’t the only peculiar one on the album. On “You Only Live Twice”—on which Drake gets shown up by his features, well, twice—Drake raps, “I had to fuck a lot of girls to get a kid like this.” It’s a braggadocious bar gone horribly awry. Drake, at age 34, seems to believe children are some sort of reward for successfully having sex. Between the cover, the aforementioned bar, and some others (“We used to do pornos when you would come over but now you got morals and shit”), there seems to be an emergent theme here.

Drake, both musically and lyrically, is stuck in the past, trying to reclaim a young womanizer persona that I’m not sure he ever had (This

is a good place to mention Drake’s concerning friendships with underage girls. Even if we read his intentions as charitably as possible, what exactly does he gain from befriending a teenager?).

It’s here where it’s hard not to think of CLB in comparison to Donda. For all of Kanye’s issues, there seems to be a sense of change—hardly linear but change nonetheless. With Drake, it’s just repetition of the old; only, we don’t get the emotional rawness of “Marvin’s Room” or the youthful charisma of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.

Certified Lover Boy is strongest when Drake does do some honest self-reflection, which he is not at all bad at. The opening and closing tracks reflect on aging and struggling to find a soul mate. “Fair Trade” contains the refrain, “I’ve been losing friends and finding peace/honestly that sounds like a fair trade to me,” and is catchy without being too camp or too boring.

All the memes about Drake that sprouted up a few weeks after the album’s release evince the way that the public sees through Drake’s persona(s). He can rap as much as he likes about putting money on his enemies’ heads, and people might like it, but at the end of the day it’s all a facade. Drake, in some ways, is the purest form of a celebrity, an overgrown theater kid who plasticizes himself into whatever he thinks other people want. The public might not be nearly as credulous as he thinks they are, but it works nonetheless.

The album’s liner notes describe it as “a combination of toxic masculinity and acceptance of truth which is inevitably heartbreaking—Drake” (only Drake would have to specify that he personally wrote something on his own album). After listening, I can only say that I wish it leaned farther towards “acceptance of truth,” and I can’t say I was heartbroken, only underwhelmed.

Closing Notes For all the effort I’ve made in trying to chart the different paths Drake and Kanye have taken as mid-to-late career megarappers, the two albums they released really do share a lot in common. They’re both unusually long; they both rehash themes already explored in each artist’s discography; both of them rushed to include a bar about Giannis Antetokounmpo after he won the NBA finals. For all their idiosyncrasies, these are two similar people with similar upbringings, lifestyles, and musical influences. To some degree, the output reflects these quirks.

Most notably, Drake and Kanye both inhabit the same milieu of stardom. Celebrities aren’t all necessarily cut from the same cloth at first but they are nevertheless socialized similarly. Drake and Kanye have not existed in real life for a decade and a half at least; both exist in a reality TV-like state where their entire lives are made for the purpose of popular consumption.

At some point in his career, Drake stopped presenting his best face for the camera and began to entirely live for the camera. Everything he does feels like a carefully scripted performance; his rapper persona bleeds into his life and then back into his art. This cycle of rehashing and regurgitating forecloses on the possibility of anything new or bold.

As for Kanye—and this may be both cause and effect of his mental health issues—there seems to be a certain ambivalence within him regarding his position towards celebrity life. His music, and life, is a constant war between braggadocio and regretfulness, faith and sin, honesty and deceitfulness, fame and hermitude. He is at his best when he reconciles these feelings through music, instead of using it to conceal them.

I’m not sure which approach is better for the artist, but I have an idea which is better for the art. u

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M O V I ES & TV M o v i e R e c o m m e n da t io n s

The Review’s Movies/TV Checklist What Our Editors Recommend This Winter Break By the Review Editorial Board

The Witcher

Pride and Prejudice

If you’re interested in fantasy, I recommend watching The Witcher on Netflix. Adapted from the novel series, the show follows the turbulent life of Geralt of Rivia, a mutated monster hunter.

The second season premiers on December 17th, which is prime for winter break binging.

Pride and Prejudice (2005) is a multi-sensory treat for the brain. It is visually stunning, with both standard extravagant period film decor and a distinctly non-Swarthmore dose of nature, and musically pleasing, with a soothing melange of piano and violin.

The dialogue is witty, the camera motion is intelligent, the characters are timeless. A big, big, big yes!

— Chase Smith, Editor-at-Large

Ex Machina Ex Machina (2015)’s minimalist screenwriting, cinematography, and sound design lend themselves to the beautifully uncomfortable viewing experience. In this sci-fi psychological thriller, ambiguity does not subtract from its messages, rather it offers room for the viewer to interpret and ponder about the real ambiguous ethics of emerging artificial intelligence technologies.

— Ark Lu, Arts Editor

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Possession There’s a lot of really frustrating aspects of Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981), like the fact that you can’t tell what the hell they’re saying a lot of the time, that only deepen the sort of psychosis that it induces. The lenswork makes every indoor scene feel intensely claustrophobic and every outdoor scene (in a desolate West Berlin) feel cold and ominous. But Possession would be a fraction of itself without Isabelle Adjani’s lead performance indescribably horrifying and worth the price of admission.

— Alexander Del Greco, Music Editor

— Mariam Muhammad, Contributing Editor

One Spring Night One Spring Night is a K-drama that follows the budding romance of a librarian and a pharmacist as they navigate societal expectations. If you need something both calming and deep, with a good soundtrack and the best look books, One Spring Night is perfect.

— Helen Tumolo, Copy Editor

Tenet Until I had seen Tenet (2020), I had been told that it was Christopher Nolan’s worst film. None of the characters had any emotions or development, like none of them had anything deeply personal at stake. Making sense of the plot was as fickle as finding the long end of the blanket at three in the morning on a cold night. And the audio was so jarring that it was as if Nolan didn’t even want his audience to understand the dialogue. However, it’s probably the case that that was the point. None of that matters.

Only the idea. The characters and plot were merely devices to explore one thought: what if time flowed backwards and forwards at the same time? I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been to make this movie. Despite all the criticisms lodged against it, Tenet kept me at the edge of my seat the whole time. And it probably will again and again as I rewatch it to wrap my head around the central idea.

Nolan tried something and he did it well. It just wasn’t what some people wanted, and he can probably live with that. It taught me a lesson: as an artist, if you’re not always trying to one up your previous work, you might as well stop.

— Barkat Sikder, Contributing Editor

Image courtesy of Gorō Miyazaki’s “From Up on Poppy Hill” (2011).

From Up on Poppy Hill

Kingdom If you enjoyed the gratuitous violence and underlying social commentaries of Squid Games, then Kingdom (2019) is the perfect show for you to binge watch during winter break. An epic story about political corruption in medieval Korea, and how one family’s greedy scrabble for power leads to a zombie outbreak that quite literally eats the country alive. Yes, I’m talking about zombies, politics, historical fiction and lots of cool hats—what else are you waiting for?

Winter Break is all about relaxation and comfort, and nothing screams comfort quite like the warm embrace of a Studio Ghibli movie.

From Up on Poppy Hill (Gorō Miyazaki, 2011) tells the story of high school student Umi who, along with her newfound friend Shun, rallies against the demolition of her school’s clubhouse. Complete with a contagious score and stunning, hand-drawn animation of the Port of Yokohama in the 1960s, there is so much to love about this heartwarming little film.

— Ellie Tsapatsaris, Movies & TV Editor

— Angie Kwon, Books Editor

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I May Destroy You Michaela Coel’s limited HBO series I May Destroy You (2020) is a brave and self-conscious narrative of what it means to survive.

It may only be 12 episodes in length, but every hour feels like an odyssey, with Coel taking us through the unforgiving cycles of grief, remembrance, and, eventually, release.

— Anoushka Subbaiah, Fiction & Poetry Editor

Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist

“Polyester” (1981). Image courtesy of New Line Cinema.

Pan’s Labyrinth If you love watching the fantastical melt into the real, I highly recommend Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), directed

by Guillermo del Toro and available on Netflix (and, if you have Criterion, check out his movie Cronos too).

Set in the early years of Francoist Spain, it follows the trajectory of Ofelia, her mother, and her new military stepfather as they relocate to a rural area where rebels are still hiding. The film is full of dark and beautiful moments about what a child sees in the wake of terrible things.

— Fiona Stewart, Personal Essays Editor

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Polyester John Waters’ Polyester (1981) follows Divine as Francine Fishpaw, an alcoholic married to the local porno theatre owner. Like any other Waters film, Polyester is incredibly low-budget and depraved.

Regular Waters ensemble members are featured in this very funny story of love, crime, feet, and betrayal.

— Sage Rhys, Personal Essays Editor

If you’ve ever been caught up in your feelings or heard a song that conveyed your exact emotions, then you need to watch Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist.

Music has this magical ability to seamlessly blend stories and tunes, and for Zoey, music is the way she telepathically hears how the people around her are feeling. The entire series plays out like an ode to music. Season one traces her journey through familial hardship, balancing work and friends, and navigating a classic Hollywood love triangle—all while comically dealing her new superpower: song-reading, or the ability to hear people’s thoughts through song. Ranging from covers like “Help!” by the Beatles to John Legend’s “All of Me,” you’re bound to recognize these absolute bops. It feels like you’re watching the soundtrack of your life play out on the screen. Music junkies, this one’s for you!

— Liv Medeiros-Sakimoto, Features Editor

• EDITOR-IN-CHIEF • Eva Baron ‘22

• E D I T O R - A T- L A R G E • Chase Smith ‘22

• F E AT U R E S •

Liv Medeiros-Sakimoto ‘25

• P E R S O N A L E S S AY S • Sage Rhys ‘22 Fiona Stewart ‘24

• ARTS • Ark Lu ‘24

• FICTION & POETRY • Anoushka Subbaiah ‘24

• BOOKS •

Angie Kwon ‘24

• MUSIC •

Alexander Del Greco ‘23

• MOVIES & TV • Ellie Tsapatsaris ‘24

• CONTRIBUTING EDITORS • Barkat Sikder ‘22 Olivia Marotte ‘24 Mariam Muhammad ‘24 Alex Carpenter ‘25 Ella Harrigan ‘25

• COPY EDITOR • Helen Tumolo ‘22

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