The College Hill Independent Vol. 34 Issue 6

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT06 A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

MAR 17 2017

34

COVER

A Couple of Tables Minsoo Thigpen

NEWS 02

Week in Clothing Betrayal Lance Gloss, Sam Samore, Brad Breymoore

03

Camped Out Piper French

METRO

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 34 / ISSUE 06 MAR 17 2017

05

Hairspray Politics Eve Zelickson

ARTS 09

Not My Cup of Tea Marianne Verrone

FEATURES

FROM THE EDITORS

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March is never really a warm month in Rhode Island, but it’s definitely the wrong month for a snow day. We didn’t even get to play in the snow—by the time we had turned our pajamas right side in, the snow had turned to freezing rain, and a river of slush was running down our block.

But as they say, all good things must come to an end.

The snow turns to sleet, Nice Slice is closing, so is Paper Nautilus, and as for us? We’re staying snuggled under our covers until spring.

TECH 07

SOLAR POWER Anna Bonesteel

METABOLICS

See you then.

— JA & DP

I NJ Emily Sun

11

99.9% Nico Sedivy

13

Put Me In, Coach!

Indy Staff

INTERVIEWS 08

Space is the Place Lance Gloss

LITERARY 17

Term Stefania Gomez

EPHEMERA 12

Hopscotch Wen Zhuang

X 18

MANAGING EDITORS Will Tavlin Kelton Ellis Dolma Ombadykow

ARTS Ryan Rosenberg Will Weatherly Saanya Jain

NEWS Piper French Hannah Maier-Katkin Roksana Borzouei

FEATURES Julia Tompkins Erin West Andrew Deck

WEEK IN REVIEW Sam Samore

METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Elias Bresnick

METRO Shane Potts Jane Argodale Camila Ruiz Segovia Jack Brook

SCIENCE Fatima Husain Liz Cory

TECH Jonah Max Malcolm Drenttel

X Liby Hays Nicole Cochary

OCCULT Lance Gloss Robin Manley

LIST Alex Mapes-Frances

INTERVIEWS Patrick McMenamin LITERARY Stefania Gomez Isabelle Doyle EPHEMERA Anna Bonesteel

Letters to the editor are always welcome. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

STAFF WRITERS Eve Zelickson Marianna McMurdock Signe Swanson Josh Kurtz Zack Kligler Brionne Frazier Chris Packs Kion You

shrek2forever Fabiola Millan

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Gabriel Matesanz

DESIGN EDITOR Chelsea Alexander

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Frans van Hoek Teri Minogue Ivan Rios-Fetchko Maria Cano-Flavia Pia Mileaf-Patel Kela Johnson Julie Benbassat Anzia Anderson Isabelle Rea Claire Schlaikjer

DESIGN & LAYOUT Celeste Matsui Andrew Linder Ruby Stenhouse

COPY EDITOR Miles Taylor

SOCIAL MEDIA Jane Argodale Signe Swanson

WEB MANAGERS Charlie Windolf Alberta Devor BUSINESS MANAGER Lance Gloss

SENIOR EDITORS Alec Mapes-Frances Sophie Kasakove Lisa Borst Jamie Packs MVP Gabriel Matesanz THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT — 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG / @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN CLOTHING BETRAYAL Sam Samore, Lance Gloss, and Brad Breymoore ILLUSTRATION BY Julie Benbassat DESIGN BY Andrew Linder BY

NO GUARDIAN ANGELS

PANTS ON FIRE

The trials of master illusionist Criss Angel have been manifold. He once spent 24 hours inside a phone booth-sized tank of water in Times Square. He has lain beneath a circle of randomly falling swords and correctly guessed which would descend in order to roll out of the way. On Friday, March 10, however, Angel was bested by something that gets the upper hand on all of us now and then.

It’s a common experience to feel like you have nothing good to wear, or to realize half an hour after putting on an outfit that it was completely wrong. The trope of the nightmare about forgetting to put on a pair of pants is indicative of the anxiety surrounding clothes. Consider the TLC reality show What Not to Wear, in which participants are nominated by friends, family, or coworkers as fashion disasters who have to be sartorially constructed by hosts Stacy London and Clinton Kelly. How amazing and sad—that what you wear seems so important to people that they might feel the need to stage an intervention.

Criss Angel, indeed, knows a thing or two about what not to wear. TMZ reported that last Friday, Angel was in the midst of a show at the Luxor Hotel and the theater was packed. His illusion involved being suspended upside-down in a straitjacket from which he had to escape. On this day, however, Angel could not get free, and after about ten minutes the magician passed out and was subsequently hospitalized. Normally, Criss Angel and straitjackets have a harmonious relationship. But on March 10, Angel was betrayed.

His wardrobe staple, that garment for whom he had so much affection, and felt so much intimacy, sought to see him dead.

Angel, ever the rebel, checked out of the hospital that very night, against his doctors’ wishes, and performed again the next evening, successfully completing the stunt. It’s as if, one day, your favorite pair of jeans ripped in front of a crowd of people. The temptation might be to do away with jeans altogether. What you could learn from Criss Angel is that sometimes, the next day, you just have to put on another pair of pants.

After all, it’s cold out.

March 9 was much like any other humid winter’s day in Miami, Florida. By 2PM, the temperature had climbed to 80° F. A bead of sweat dripped down the brow of lawyer Stephen Gutierrez, 28, as he gesticulated before a jury. His client, said Gutierrez, had in no way intended to ignite his car on fire—it must have combusted spontaneously. Thus, the insurance payments that the client had collected were not out of the ordinary. They were his due, as the victim of fiery circumstance. Gutierrez was building up steam, speaking more confidently. Then, as he spoke, his trousers began to smoke.

With a cry of amazement, he leaped for the courtroom door—only to return minutes later with a badly-singed pocket. No, he said. This was not a demonstration. Rather, the e-cigarette in his pocket had overheated, causing his pants to catch fire. The jurors, nonplussed, convicted the Miami-Dade resident Claudy Charles with second-degree arson, and filed out of the courtroom bewildered.

Much like a law degree, second-degree arson is no joke. This has not prevented reporters from seeing the irony of a blaze amidst an arson trial. Even fewer have missed out on the opportunity to invoke the sagely schoolyard rhyme, “liar, liar, pants on fire”—artfully performed by the Castaways in their 1965 hit music video, “Liar, Liar,” featuring red pants, a red guitar, and a mischievous closing wink.

Most commentators have also taken the opportunity to lament the dangers of e-cigarettes. This explosion is no anomaly in the world of techno-nicotine. The lithium-ion battery used to vaporize the pleasurable chemicals might fail at any time. Just what danger do America’s 2.5 million e-cigarette users face from failing batteries? “Literally, an explosion. A super-hot explosion,” said Dr. Anne Wagner of the University of Colorado Hospital Burn Center in a conversation with NBC. From 2009 to 2014, 25 e-cigarette users were injured by such explosions in the United States.

One aspect of the story has somehow eluded critique: the pants themselves. Nearly 100% of adults in the United States report to going about their daily business fully-clothed—most commonly in wool, cotton, linen, polyester, silk, and blended fabrics. All of these are flammable, with the exception of polyester, which is unlikely to ignite.

However, if lit, polyester causes some of the worst burns.

With all fingers pointed at the casual inhaler of electronically-superheated nicotine vapor, we must recall our own culpability as the only animals on Earth wearing combustible costumes wherever we go.

Stephen’s pants? Polyester.

-SS

TWO SIZES TOO SMALL It can be unpleasant to discover that a favorite pair of pants has become too snug. Perhaps they accidentally went through the dryer, or perhaps your body has changed. In any case, a good pair of pants often feels irreplaceable, so I have occasionally found myself struggling through the day in a too-tight pair, only to end up bloated and farty in bed, dreaming of looser days. A plane ride is a time when a tight pair of pants can be particularly uncomfortable— no room to adjust, strange fluctuations in internal pressures, unaccountable shifts in temperature. It is always an experience that has me reconsidering the skinny-jeans movement.

For Juan Carlos Galan Luperon, tight pants presented a much more serious problem. The Huffington Post reported that last Friday, Luperon arrived at New York’s JFK International airport from the Dominican Republic. In a press release, US Customs and Border Protection stated that, “During his examination, Mr. Luperon exhibited numerous signs of nervousness and his pants appeared to be rather snug.” In CBP’s typically invasive manner, they made Luperon remove his pants, whereupon they discovered the cause of the tightness: Luperon had flown with ten pounds of cocaine strapped to his legs, worth an estimated $164,000, for which he now faces narcotics smuggling charges. CBP then tweeted a photo of Luperon’s legs, wrapped around with lumpy packages of white powder, like a more potent Michelin Man. I wish that Luperon had been able to find a looser pair of pants. I wish the CBP didn’t exist. The whole thing reeks of self-righteous law enforcement officers taking pleasure in humiliating others. So much more about them is tight: tightasses, tightwads, hearts two sizes too small.

-BB

-LG

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

02

BY Piper

French

Maria Cano-Flavia DESIGN BY Ruby Stenhouse ILLUSTRATION BY

Fifteen year-old Khalid* has been trying to get to the United Kingdom for almost a year now. He left his family in Afghanistan nearly 11 months ago and arrived at ‘the Jungle,’ the now-notorious, unofficial refugee camp in Calais, France, a few months later. In the Jungle, he slept in a single-person tent that flooded whenever it rained, risked his life trying to stow away on trucks bound for England, and tried to keep in touch with his family, calling his grandmother and baby sister whenever he had enough credit on his phone.

Since November, Khalid has been living in St-Brieuc, France in a center for unaccompanied child refugees that was created after the Jungle was evicted and destroyed on orders from French authorities. He has been waiting for news from the UK Home Office, the department responsible for immigration and counterterrorism in the UK, about his asylum case. Khalid was eligible to be reunited with his uncle in the UK under the Dubs Act, an amendment to a 2016 immigration act that ordered the Home Office to accept child refugees from Calais after consulting with local authorities. Sponsoring the amendment in May 2016, Baron Alf Dubs pledged that the UK would accept 3000 child refugees. For Dubs, a Labour politician and former Member of Parliament (MP), the issue is a deeply personal one: he once was a child refugee, rescued by a British stockbroker from Nazi-occupied Prague along with 668 other children.

Last week, after a protracted process of commitment and retraction, the Home Office announced that it would cease to accept children to the UK under the Dubs amendment. Only 200 of those eligible have successfully arrived in the UK—the last 150 children will reportedly arrive in the UK before the end of March. Meanwhile, there are a reported 90,000 child refugees scattered across the European continent who remain homeless, without shelter, support, or resources. +++ Before it was destroyed and its residents were evicted in October 2016, the Jungle served as a gathering spot for nearly 10,000 people, mainly from Sudan, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Syria, all attempting to make their way from continental Europe to the UK. I first met Khalid a week into my time working in a community kitchen in the Jungle under the auspices of the organization Help Refugees.

The group was created by a group of British volunteers in response to the British and French governments’ twin failure to provide for refugees in Calais. Khalid’s tent was only steps away from the kitchen’s much larger tent, and he came in nearly every day to help us chop vegetables, practice his already good English (English was his favorite class in Afghanistan), tease us, and ask for our advice on matters of the heart. Occasionally, he would collect euros from each of us, disappear for a while, and then rematerialize with flatbread and a dozen eggs, which he cooked with onions and tomatoes to make Afghan eggs for the workers.

The community kitchen functioned as a social space for many young men, including a number of unaccompanied minors—“bambinos,” in Jungle slang. The camp was a difficult place for everyone who was stuck there, but the issues facing children were especially acute. Unaccompanied

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NEWS

minors were especially vulnerable to sexual abuse and the coercion of smugglers; self-harm was rampant. Young boys lived eight to a tent and spent all night next to the highway, attempting to sneak onto lorries bound for the UK, which they referred to simply as “trying.” They would come into the kitchen the next afternoon, yawning and shaking their heads, saying: “no chance, no chance.” They treated it like a game, but it was an incredibly dangerous one. About a week after we arrived in Calais, a 14-year-old boy died after falling from a truck he had snuck onto; many others were hurt or killed on the highway.

As the Jungle grew in size and international media flocked to the area and broadcast the camp's conditions to the world, the site became an increasingly large political problem for the French government. For those on the left, both domestically and internationally, the camp was the perfect visual symbol of Europe’s failure to protect vulnerable people fleeing war and desperation. For those on the right, the Jungle represented the threat of unchecked migration. The camp’s forced closure seemed inevitable: not a matter of if, but when. President Hollande visited Calais in late September and promised it would be gone before the end of the year.

When French Minister of the Interior Bernard Cazaneuve finally announced the intention to evict and bulldoze the camp starting October 17, the public responded with outcry. NGOs estimated as over 1000 unaccompanied minors were still living in the camp. Faced with pushback, the Interior Ministry promised that it would not evict the camp until it formed a concrete plan to deal with the unaccompanied child refugees, some of whom were as young as ten years old, according to Médicins sans Frontières (MSF). As the proposed date drew closer, no such plan had materialized, and evictions were pushed back a week.

Finally, on October 23 the government announced they would go forth with its evictions the next day. The promised “plan for the children”—hastily slapped together and almost stunningly ill-conceived—involved local French officials shepherding anyone who could be identified as a minor into the guarded shipping containers that had previously housed the Jungle’s more vulnerable residents.

They would be kept there throughout evictions, until the authorities could determine a more permanent solution.

In essence, the French strategy confined children to the physical center of the camp, forcing them to bear witness to the systematic destruction of a place that had been their home for months, even if it served as a poor substitute for one. Furthermore, the local French officials made decisions about the allotment of wristbands—which determined who was allowed into the containers—in a haphazard and arbitrary fashion. In the end, adult men slept inside containers while some young children were excluded were because they looked older. A number of volunteers observed an employee of the French government handing them out based on nothing more than her assumptions of a person's age.

I wasn’t allowed into the camp during evictions, but I returned on Thursday evening after the evictions had concluded and the French government declared the camp

officially closed. Fabienne Buccio, a local official working in the camp, announced: “There are no migrants in the camp.

Our mission has been fulfilled.” Walking down the road into the camp, I passed several boys pushing an empty shopping cart under a dull moon. A few hundred yards further there were children who hadn’t been able to get wristbands, wrapped in blankets, sleeping in the dirt on the side of the road. The minute we began to unload food from the back of our van, a huge line materialized; we served food continuously for over an hour to hungry and thirsty boys.

The children were kept in the shipping containers for ten days, with little adult supervision, insufficient food and water, and no idea about was going to happen to them. On November 1, 2016, in the midst of this total uncertainty, the French government abruptly announced that all of the children in camp would be taken by bus—some to the UK and others to centers for unaccompanied child refugees (CAOMIEs) around France—the following morning. The children would be “processed” by French government officials. Most were sent to the UK. +++ People were excited, hopeful that progress was underway at last. Khalid hoped to rejoin his family in the UK within a few weeks. But as soon as the international attention on the Jungle dissolved, the Home Office began renegging on the promises it had made. Only one or two of those busses actually made it to the UK—and the overwhelming majority of the children who weren’t sent on the first round of busses are still in France, even if they are eligible under both the Dubs and Family Reunification act. Khalid and many others underwent several rounds of interviews with the Home Office, but astonishingly few children were actually resettled.

In December, the Home Office Minister Robert Goodwill categorically excluded all child refugees over 12 who were not from Sudan or Syria—countries whose citizens have experienced a 75 percent rate of asylum success in the UK— from consideration under Dubs, and implemented other age restrictions as well, excluding 16- and 17-year-old refugees of any nationality from eligibility. Lord Dubs predicted that the decision would have a huge impact on children waiting in CAOMIEs around France, driving them back to Calais to try to cross over to the UK illegally.

Finally, on February 8, 2017, the UK government announced a cap on the number of child refugees it would accept under Dubs: 350, or about a tenth of the number of children originally intended to be resettled. Home Office Secretary Amber Rudd claimed that the Dubs was acting as a “pull factor” for child refugees, saying that it has “incentivized” their journey across Europe. In discussions of contemporary migration, “pull factors”—attributes of a destination that might draw people across borders—are contrasted with “push factors,” or reasons for leaving a place of origin.

Rudd attempted to justify the Dubs decision by saying that the amendment “encourage(d) people traffickers.” Help Refugees insisted that the opposite is actually true, writing:

MARCH 17, 2017

NEGLIGENCE

IS NOT NEUTRAL

The plight of child refu

gees in Calais

“People smuggling can only exist in the absence of safe and legal routes.”

Rudd also cited a lack of housing and resources in the UK, but local councils dispute this. They claim the Home Office has ignored their offers to house child refugees and even threatened “retribution” if they publicly criticized its negligence and inefficiency. Stephen Cowan, the council leader for two West London districts, told the Observer: “The Home Office have gone out of their way to thwart every single attempt to act not just on the spirit of the Dubs amendment but on its specific terms.”

In the midst of the UK government’s retreat on the Dubs amendment, Khalid’s application to be reunited with his uncle was inexplicably rejected, despite his eligibility for asylum under both Dubs and the Family Reunification act.

Because he was given no reasons for the decision, he is not able to submit an appeal. +++ Harriet Blackmore, a British volunteer who worked in the community kitchen in Calais, told me, “Dubs was a lifeline to young refugees. It meant protection from traffickers, police brutality, right-wing attacks, sexual abuse and exploitation, it offered safe passage to young people who are risking death crossing to the UK. Young refugees are trapped in technically ‘safe’ nations, but they are by no means adequately protected.” Responding to the Dubs withdrawal—and Khalid’s case specifically—Blackmore founded the advocacy group Voices for Child Refugees (VCR) with Sonia Curtis and Francesca Romberg, two other Jungle volunteers. They released a statement, co-signed by a number of NGOs and advocacy groups, condemning the decision as “reprehensible,” and also started a petition urging Parliament to reopen the debate. The petition quickly accrued over 60,000 signatures.

On February 22, VCR organized a ‘sleep-in’ outside the Prime Minister’s residence on Downing Street, in solidarity with child refugees who are being forced to sleep outside in freezing temperatures because of the Dubs decision.

There, along with a copy of the petition, VCR delivered a letter to UK Prime Minister Theresa May, written by Khalid. “I am writing this letter with lots of hope,” he begins, “and I also hope that someone will hear my voice.” He details his experience leaving Afghanistan and coming to the Jungle, and describes how his life is on hold in St-Brieuc: “I only eat and sleep and I am so sad now because I don’t have any family members with me.” In the face of rhetoric from Rudd, May, and other British politicians that emphasizes the complexity of the refugee crisis as a justification for the UK’s failure to resettle child refugees, Khalid’s requests to the British government, ultimately, are crushingly simple: “I really want and also need a chance...to do something with my life. And I want to be with my family.”

Faced with the spectacle of the sleep-in and a petition with 60,000 signatures, MPs voted overwhelmingly to reopen the debate. However, when it came time for a full

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

January, an Eritrean boy died on the Motorway—the exact same strip of motorway” that was the scene of so many other injuries and deaths throughout the Jungle’s existence.

Yvette Cooper, an MP for the Labour party, confirmed Meuwese’s on-the-ground observations in a statement: “The home secretary talked about clearing Calais; [the child refugees] are heading back to Calais, and back to Dunkirk: back to the mud, back to the danger, back into the arms of the people traffickers and the smugglers, the exploitation, the abuse, the prostitution rings—back into the modern slavery that this parliament and this government have pledged to end.” parliamentary vote, the referendum failed: On March 7, members of British Parliament voted 287–267 to scrap the Dubs Amendment entirely. +++ Meanwhile, Lord Dub’s prediction that the Dubs decision would drive children to attempt the Channel crossing through illegal means has come true. People are returning in droves to Calais, especially children. Help Refugees Donations Coordinator Renke Meuwese estimates that approximately 400 of the 500 or so refugees currently in the area are minors. They are returning to even less infrastructure, support, and safety than before; many are sleeping in fields or on the side of the road. Meuwese said that many of the children have left their accommodation centers in desperation after the Dubs decision, but it was difficult to gather any precise census data because they are “on the run a lot,” constantly forced to move location by the police and prevented even from spending the whole night in one place.

Established NGOs such as MSF that were working in the Jungle have ceased their operations in the area, and those that remain—including Help Refugees—have been hampered in their efforts to provide basic food and clothing to the refugees. On March 2, Calais Mayor Natacha Bouchart actually banned the distribution of food to refugees, effectively criminalizing the efforts of aid workers in the area. The strategies that the French local government and police have employed with regards to the refugee crisis in Calais as attempts to deter people from gathering and staying in the area are becoming increasingly brutal: Meuwese reported that the police are now using a new type of tear gas that sticks to clothes and continues to burn past the initial release.

The French government’s increasingly cruel treatment of refugees has done little to deter them—they will continue to try to get to the UK clandestinely because many of them see no other option, especially after the Dubs decision.

“They are risking their lives,” Meuwese said: “At the end of

+++ The UK Home Office’s inaction and bureaucratic inefficiency in resettling child refugees under Dubs has actively created the current humanitarian crisis in Calais. The latest decision by Parliament to scrap the Dubs amendment is yet another example of extreme negligence towards a group that is vulnerable in nearly every way in which a person can be vulnerable: young, alone, suffering from PTSD and depression based on their experiences in their home countries and during their journey, without financial resources, speaking little English or French, easily exploited and abused. No amount of inhumanity on the part of the Calais mayor or the local police will deter children from their attempt to get to the UK now that the most promising legal route has been closed off to them—it will only result in more injury, illness, trauma, and death.

Harriet Blackmore told me, “In the case of young refugees, we see a government easily deprive people of color a childhood, or the protection and care that comes with it... people are advocating to neglect the rights of these young people, often on incorrect information and incorrect arguments.” She emphasizes that VCR and other advocacy groups aren’t giving up, though: “We will continue to advocate and stand up for the rights of these vulnerable people.

We ask the government to act on compassion over quota, and will keep fighting until they do.”

In the meantime, Khalid and the others are still waiting.

PIPER FRENCH B’17 thinks that 350 is nowhere near enough.

IZZA DRURY B'17 contributed reporting. *Names have been changed.

NEWS

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il t a j E H ves to

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as S m f I T ge o

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On R P atio

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BY Eve

Zelickson ILLUSTRATION BY Zachary Deocadiz DESIGN BY Andrew Linder Rhode Island has 23,000 people on probation. That is 2,793 people per 100,000 residents, the second highest probation rate in the nation. This is in part due to the length of Rhode Island’s average probation sentence, which is 6 years, three times the national average, according to statistics from the Bureau of Justice. In 2015, Rhode Island’s Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center found that the state’s average length of a probation term for property and drug-related felony offenses was 4.5 years, compared to a national average of 2 years.

In Rhode Island, 1 in 20 adult males and 1 in 6 Black adult males are on probation. According to a study by the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Movement, Rhode Island has put over $137 million in Providence towards arresting and incarcerating its residents, most of which is directed at people of color; Providence’s West End, home to a large Latinx community, has the highest level of incarceration in Rhode Island, and the state’s Department of Corrections spends $19,340,000 a year policing the neighborhood. Although probation and incarceration seem like discrete elements in Rhode Island’s criminal justice system, probation’s supposed rehabilitative function is made difficult to carry out, and therefore increases the likelihood that people on probation will end up back in jail or prison.

Rhode Island’s high probation rate, coupled with underfunding, means that those on probation are not afforded the resources needed to prevent recidivism.

This is in part due to probation officers’ large caseloads, which are above the national average and impair their capacity to provide meaningful services. The CSG Justice Center found that while 87 percent of Rhode Island’s sentenced population is on probation, less than 40 percent receive active intervention from Rhode Island’s Probation Department. While some have argued Rhode Island is more progressive because it utilizes probation more than incarceration, the former largely

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METRO

contributes to the latter. In fiscal year 2015, over half of those sentenced to incarceration were people who had violated their probation.

In July 2015, Governor Raimondo formed a bipartisan group called the Justice Reinvestment Working Group, a combined task force of state policymakers, members of the judiciary branch, correctional officers, prosecutors and defense attorneys, behavioral health administrators, and community advocates. The group hoped to create legislation that would address issues of outdated probation policies and ineffective practices in hopes of decreasing recidivism and officer caseloads. The six reform bills, proposed at the end of the congressional session, incorporated plans to modernize probation by reducing the average length of incarceration for probation violations, creating varying tiers of intervention based on a person’s risk and needs, funding more transitional programs, and incentivizing behavioral health care providers to ensure access to treatment for high-needs individuals. The CSG Justice Center predicted that the legislation would reduce the active probation population in Rhode Island by 46 percent and halve active caseloads per probation officer from an average of 155 to 76 cases.

The legislation, originally proposed in 2015, promised forward motion after years of stagnancy in Rhode Island’s approach to dealing with the problem of incarceration. In spring 2016, the Senate overwhelmingly approved the package, but the bills died on June 18 after the House failed to act on them before the end of the session. House Speaker Nicholas A. Mattiello (D), who controls which bills are discussed on the floor, wasn’t convinced the legislation was thoroughly researched. He told the Providence Journal that the justice reform package was “never a priority for the House,” and that he opposed making Rhode Island “a test case for a national model on criminal justice.”

To people like Judge Judith Savage, who cochaired the Justice Reinvestment Working group and

worked on the bills for over a year, the death of the legislation demonstrated the disheartening opposition to reform of any kind. “It is so important this legislation be passed because of the significance it would have on communities who have bore the burden of incarceration, probation, and re-entry,” Savage told the Independent. “No one can defend our recidivism rate. It is clear that whatever we are doing is not working, so focusing on making those convicted more successful and productive is what the whole process should be about, and this legislation had the potential to make some huge strides in that.”

Despite the bill’s defeat, on June 23 the Rhode Island Supreme Court ruled on new regulations that riffed off the legislation’s original goals. The new regulations capped the length of nonviolent offenses at three years, provided a way for those who have served three years to petition the court to have their sentence ended, and raised the state’s burden of proof for re-sentencing people who violated their probation terms. Most reformers, like Savage, are hopeful about the changes, but tinkering with a machine that never operated properly may not be a solution at all. +++ The grounds of the Rhode Island Department of Corrections is organized into four major domains: the Office of the Director, Administration, Institutions and Operations, and Rehabilitative Services. The sheer size of the grounds makes one reflect on the many elements responsible for making someone a probationer: officers, discharge planners, administrators, computer systems, paperwork, files, restitution fees, no-contact agreements. There is a sense of stagnancy on the grounds, something the Probation Department is, in some ways, trying to push back against. Idling quietly off Route 37, the complex is designed to restrict, separate, control, and oppress. Quiet is a good thing here; the grounds

MARCH 17, 2017

were built to subdue the noise of havoc, of crime. The grated windows, large metal locks on doors, and tall chain-link fences are physical representations of its determination to contain.

The Probation Department itself is, despite its banal appearance, a lively place. People wander in and out all day. Big decisions are being made on the first floor in the Risk Assessment Unit where protocol has been constantly evolving since the Supreme Court ruled to allow probationers who have served three or more years to petition for an end to their sentence.

Probation officer Beatriz DiRissio has worked out of an office on the second floor for eight years now. DiRissio, in charge of the domestic violence caseloads, is currently assigned 110 people. Rhode Island probation officers on average handle 155 cases at a time, though DiRissio thinks a manageable number would be 60.

DiRissio conducts check-ins, referred to formally as reports, with probationers throughout the week. She tries to see people who have recently been discharged from the Adult Correctional Institute (ACI) every two weeks. If they are homeless, she’ll meet with them weekly. If they have an income, a stable home life, and have started their mandated treatment, she will see them once a month. “You have to be flexible. Most of my cases are struggling to find jobs, support their families, and overcome personal obstacles,” DiRissio told the Independent in her Cranston office last November.

These check-ins involve assessing people’s risks and needs in order to ensure high-risk individuals receive higher levels of supervision. DiRissio classifies her caseload according to how violent each case is and the person’s number of prior offences. For every domestic violence case, the court mandates the Batterers’ Intervention Program (BIP), a five-month program comprised of 20 two-hour classes that teach people how to identify abusive behavior, react to situations in a non-abusive manner, and communicate with their partner. There are currently only five treatment

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

providers in the state that offer the court-mandated BIP. The waitlist for this program is long. Additionally, the program is not funded by the state and requires participants to pay for their own treatment at each session, placing a large financial burden on the participant.

While the program works to address domestic violence, it is not a replacement for substance abuse treatments or mental health services, yet Rhode Island courts often mandated it without either.

DiRissio stresses that it is difficult to mandate programs designed to prevent recidivism that haven’t been sanctioned by the court. Even if DiRissio manages to pass a motion that authorizes treatment for drug or alcohol abuse, the majority of probationers don’t have health insurance, are unemployed, and thus have no manageable way to afford the treatment without it becoming a daunting financial burden. DiRissio explains that the job demands a certain amount of subservience—the acknowledgement that your ability to help is limited by the uncompromising structure of incarceration.

Due to the limited funding provided to preventive and skills-based resources for those in the probation system, officers become their guidance counselors, cheerleaders, law enforcers, and therapists. An officer’s first aim is to ensure their clients follow the terms of the probation sentence. This involves completing mandated treatments and attending regular report meetings.

The officer’s second aim is to work with their clients to prevent recidivism. However, there are no guidelines for how to accomplish this. In a system with scant resources, overflowing caseloads, and limited time, prevention proves hard. The completion of court orders alone is often not enough to achieve true rehabilitation and make it so that probationers aren’t reincarcerated.

Especially with people on her caseload who lived under threat of homelessness, DiRissio made every effort to set them up with housing and employment, but a few years later the same people would end up back in

her chair. “I would constantly check the arrest list and see names of the same guys I thought I had helped,” she explains. She has come to realize that there is a cyclical nature to the probation system, and it is hard not to take it as a personal failure. “I wish I could say it only happened once and awhile, but I’m afraid it’s more than I’d like to admit.”

With thousands targeted by the system itself, and hundreds battling to work effectively inside it, Rhode Island’s probation department is struggling to carry out the preventative and rehabilitative work it was built to do. Many activist groups in Rhode Island have organized to protest and respond to the Department’s shortcomings. These groups focus their efforts not on reforming the structure, but aiding those inside it, shouldering much of the work the system is unable to.

Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE) is one such Providence-based group that organizes families in communities of color to work toward social, economic, and political justice. Their “Behind the Walls” campaign unites incarcerated people with their family, friends, and a network of former inmates to ease re-entry and reduce recidivism. The program builds strength and solidarity among people affected by the Prison Industrial Complex and elevates their voices and stories. It does so by directly involving those formerly incarcerated in the process of identifying and addressing systemic problems. DARE articulated a four-point probation reform platform that included elements like limiting sentencing on violations to the time remaining on probation, and extending Good Time to those on probation. State legislators would do well to heed the advice of activists at organizations like DARE. They know their communities best.

EVE ZELICKSON B’19 encourages you to donate to Black and Pink and DARE.

METRO

06

SOLAR PANEL STUDY GUIDE Anna Bonesteel ILLUSTRATION BY Jeff Egner BY

To preface: I study painting.

It’s necessary to give this small byte of background information, as I’m using an editorial voice that can’t pretend to be an authority on much of anything, especially thermodynamics, and my conscience holds me to a certain standard, truth-wise.

I have a narrative theory that needs a scientific test: the technology of coincidences on a formal level, the speed of bullshit, the uses of story-telling. I have a scientific question that requires a bit of narration to pull together. So, the operation handshakes quite nicely. +++ The first time I encountered a solar panel in a real pondering way was late last October. Jeff and I had gone on a long drive down North Main, querying about some Craigslist junk, picking up old tires and stuff.

Before finding the panel in question, we had stopped at a Drive-through Dunkin Donuts (DDD) to power up.

Jeff ordered a hot coffee, and I ordered an iced one—I guess there was some interpretational indecision about the velocity of Winter’s approach.

At the DDD, the coffee-matter does not matter.

It exists only as its quality, size, and condition—my iced coffee became, in the transaction, an “ICED,” and Jeff’s small, hot coffee became a “SMALL HOT.” Someone had made a mistake with the computer, and an extra “small hot” was prepared for our order.

Holding both heat frequencies on the drive through Pawtucket, I had an idea for a hot new coffee flavor, “WARM.” It would speak the weird frequency-spanning language of something losing heat—maybe a bit like a lizard’s cold-blooded and flickering tongue.

Artists do not think much about temperature.

In fact, the temperature-factor is figured around the art-object. In glass and wood boxes, in storage, etc., it’s all plotted (boringly) to “stay still.” +++ The solar panel was westward-facing in a strung-out cul-de-sac, just past a junkyard of smooshed plastic cars. After keeping an eye on them for what has now been a little while, it feels like solar panels are on every available surface. What made this one noticeable beyond material ubiquity was its specialized hardiness and its temperamental, hobby-like craft. It wasn’t on a roof, first thing; instead, the tenant had constructed this sort of A-frame support for the panel itself, and a lower-down, V-shaped nest for its battery and wiring.

A solar panel user can choose how deep in the grid they stick themselves. On the drive back, I was bouncing with the seven coffees in my palms, and Jeff and I began wondering what it would take to really go solo. I mean, to skip the obvious ways of divesting oneself of a conglomerate electromagnetic overseer—like not using power in the first place, or scrounging around for solar subsidies and rebates—and kicking the Resistance up some major notches. This would mean working out a way of living in the (power-generating) moment—but a moment that’s “done-oneself.” Resistance unreliant on rhetoric—beyond crude individualism.

“Load defection” is the term power companies use for a solar user stockpiling personal power instead of reinvesting excess energy in the grid.

I heard in my Contemporary Art class the other day that after WWII, art was identified as the last and only hand-made thing following the mecha-industrial wave-crash.

Handmade, personal power: painters and off-thegridders both churn through a cultural-DIY lifestyle.

It is a slippery slope from good-hearted sustainable individualism to hosting a sick [solar] power complex.

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TECH

+++ After seeing the first solar panel, I decided to make one. This did not feel like such a whack job idea, because there is good precedent. Solar panels are lightfilled, power-generating panels. A good percentage of each Rembrandt painting is about light (as Craig says, “the symbolic use of light was Rembrandt’s deal”). A good percentage of Rembrandt’s paintings, also, are on panel.

The thing is, solar panels look like “the grid,” so endeavoring to be “off of it” is a bit of a linguistic inaccuracy—or, a joke. In the 21st century, some paintings are all punch-line, but good paintings can avoid pulling fast ones. I think a slow formal query can override immediate impulse, and luckily, here, they seemed already to have it all. The flatness, the strange reflectivity, the fractured, opulent blue. In terms of the object’s construction, I started to think of the solar panel painting as an Agnes Martin-Jasper Johns supercombine.

The truth of the matter, that the solar panel painting would actually be a life-size, wooden, and inoperative solar panel, was a slow joke that revealed itself as sustainable as I worked through the problem. +++ Some paintings I like are generative. There’s a grade-school kind of interactivity about them, plus, a real heat. In Alfred Jensen’s work, for example, the paintings aren’t so much about expression or meaning as much as they are about hammering out a logic, a number-current, that interlocks above the surface to push this fairly specific network that is both giddy and criptic. Human eyes ricochet about the painting-boardthing as they try to figure something out.

Solar panels are independently generative. The entrance of this independence complicates the role of human eyes, which naturally attempt to resolve a formative back-and-forth with extant objects. The slow-but-steady, cow-like attitude of the solar panel tilts off-balance the usual crux of debate. Interactivity presumes two opposing walls against which to bounce.

What is bouncing around the painting if our eyes are not there?

If a tree falls on the A-frame support in the cul-de-sac, and no one’s…?

With a solar panel, the answer to the first question is brief. Sunlight.

Under light, the flat of the painting becomes a perverse forest, and human eyes attempt to analyze the generational energy of the sun’s watch, the atomic condition of a calculation.

The thing about paintings and solar panels is that you really shouldn’t be handling either of them. +++ I visited a few solar farms in December, trying to gather some information for my arts and crafts project. The farms are massive—really unlike the household panel groups I would find on walks and looking out car windows. I spent some time online, tracking these things down. Solar farms don’t have names or coordinates most of the time, and nothing was indexed particularly well. I had to chronologically trace news articles that described new farms as being “now,” the largest in the state.

Luckily, the day I went, I was in a good mood.

Visiting a solar farm is like visiting a field of cows, where all the cows are either asleep or dead.

Malcolm and I rented a Prius. We visited three farms, some large (2 football fields) and some smaller (1). I took pictures only with a 35mm camera. This turned out to be a good move. At one of the solar com-

plexes, “No Photography” was allowed, but I could not delete photos off my film and the back of the camera is tricky to get open. The guard, I imagined, would have had some mild-to-moderate moral panic about asking me to destroy the entire roll.

Sunlight doesn’t poke holes in things, but what if the resulting abrasion was so incredibly slight that it was not perceivable by tool or instrument?

The security at the largest farm was military-grade. The roads were bare. Bald. Figures in the landscape seemed taller, the center of attention was dense and particular, the great breadth was underused.

Our perceptive dominion maintained the sight/site relationship; what held the terrain would otherwise be prone to lapse. Light overtakes heat, as a connective value. As long as there is no precipitation. +++ Connector-code of the light to the space problem: The light pokes holes, Connector–ode. The purpose of which is to beautify by complicating.

And then, to compile.

Cars may be morphologically grouped into the animal sort they represent or would sit with at the dinner table. Homology has a negligible effect on empathy, until one encounters a cow. +++ 1. Solar panels are arranged like cows on farms.

2. There is a new row of parking meters on Brook Street, and they are implanted directly into the sidewalk. Solar powered, like you might predict. They really get in the way. I say, they stand there and block our path, like people in line. Jeff says, like people, you feed them. I say, yes. +++ I did actually make a solar panel painting. To start with, I did a lot of materials research. I didn’t want to make a solar panel with silicon, but, in order to generate, I needed to make some substantial material discoveries. Probably the best one I had was that, if you mix graphite powder with an acrylic base, the paint becomes A. conductive, and B. beautiful.

Et cetera. It is still large and in charge, leaning against the wall with an ungainly sloop. I haven’t decided what should happen with it next. I think the solar panel painting is longer term than I imagined. It’s a real image-sculpture now, and I am invested in it. It is OK as a monolith; it is easier to look at this way and could almost be a person. Ideally it would be installed outside. I might run some tests; I am not sure how the presence of actual sunlight will affect its artistic and communicative performance. +++ In the moment of a communicative performance, one variable—sustainability—generates the envelope.

Watching from the car-window, Ma’s Donut in paw, back burning from the glare of Newport’s hard windmills. In transitional spill theory, hot coffee, knocked over, is not hot, but a problem.

Disarming a solar narrative directive could be just a change of clothes, like misreading the temperature outside.

ANNA BONESTEEL RISD’18 is looking at what the cat dragged in.

MARCH 17, 2017

ROOT THERAPY

A conversation with Dr. Mindy Fullilove on restoring emotional ecosystems BY

What kind of timescale is involved in accumulating an emotional ecosystem?

Lance Gloss

ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel

Matesanz DESIGN BY Celeste Matsui Mindy Fullilove is a psychiatrist, researcher, and Professor of Urban Policy of Health currently teaching at the New School. Dr. Fullilove has studied the psychological and health impacts of urban renewal and environmental injustice for more than 35 years. Her early work includes a series of groundbreaking studies on the AIDS epidemic in US cities. In her 2005 book Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It, she details a century of forced displacement for communities of color in American cities, and its toll on personal and social well-being.

In her most recent book, Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities (2013), Dr. Fullilove ties together a nine-point strategy for urban restoration. These nine tools—including “unpuzzling,” “unslumming,” and “showing solidarity with all life”—bring the perspectives of clinical psychiatry to bear on the problems of today’s cities. The Indy caught up with Mindy before she spoke at the Brown University School of Public Health as part of the Black History Month lecture series on March 6.

Here, she discusses the emotions that come with living in a place, and what happens when communities lose that sense of place. She traverses long distances and millennia, emotion and politics. To treat binaries and social fracture, Fullilove prescribes innovation, the restoration of place, and “the infinite.” The endeavor at hand? Inventing the future. +++ The College Hill Independent: You define root shock as a “traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of one’s emotional ecosystem.” How do you define the emotional ecosystem, and how does it relate to prevalent notions of community?

Dr. Mindy Fullilove: Community is one of those overworked words that means sort of whatever people want it to mean. But if we take a pretty broad definition, it’s a group of people that have something in common. So anyone can be a community. People who’ve lived together in a certain place are a community—but so are all people who wear brown shoes. One way to get beyond community is by asking, ‘how do people live with each other?’

Many theorists thinking about the idea of ‘place’ talk about it as both a group of people and a location, and also the ways in which they live together in that location. As we construct our lives, ‘place’ takes on emotional meaning, and a web of relationships develops. So how we live together is an ecosystem, about which we have emotion.

As a psychiatrist, it was important to me, in hearing people’s stories about the loss of their neighborhoods, how emotional that was.

The places we live are not like that cup on the table, that you pick up and throw away. Places are lived, embodied, daily experiences, and when someone loses their places, they really feel a loss of a part of the self.

Place isn’t just a part of the self that’s interior. It’s not just physical, it’s more in the nature of the shell of the hermit crab, who can take on new shells but always needs one.

My places are essential of myself. I can move to another one, but I’ve got to have one. A place to which I’m bonded. An exoskeleton.

The Indy: So places are both social and spatial?

MF: And emotional.

The Indy: It seems that it might take a long time to build the deep relationships to place that you are describing.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

MF: The urbanist I study with in Paris, Michel Cantal-Dupart, says that a city is a place you could visit for a day or a lifetime. The timescale of emotion can be very quick—you could spend an hour in a place and fall in love with the place. Or your whole life, right? People live in a place their whole life and never get tired of the way the sun rises in the morning and sets at night—the way breezes flow through. This is one of those places where time is meaningless. It’s an emotional exchange. The boundaries of time expand to give space for the emotion.

The Indy: Many of your studies cover the history of a place over a century or more, and suggest that these emotional ecosystems have a trans-generational persistence.

How do the places of ancestors or predecessors play into an individual’s sense of place in the present?

MF: Take the Aboriginal Australians, who got to Australia some forty or fifty thousand years ago. They have a very vivid transmission of their stories about place, and ways of understanding the land around them that are quite remarkable. To be a living inheritor of that tradition now, and to be able to read the land in that way, is to have the wisdom of the ages as a part of who you are.

Heritage is genetic, but it’s also cultural. This cultural transmission is a huge gift.

And then there are societies that have moved a lot, that are more disconnected from a cultural knowledge of the land. There are other cultures that moved over and over—the Roma peoples, the native peoples of the Americas moved, the Lenape who were right here, they moved in very regular circuits. It seems to me that the attachment there is not to a single place, but to the whole journey, or the place that is journeyed. It is a different way of being connected. The house that can move.

The Indy: In your work, you also make many trans-national comparisons. There are those that you’ve just discussed, and you’ve also looked in-depth at social worlds in Rio de Janeiro to understand urban trends in the United States. Do you encounter pushback from folks who see this breaking analytical boundaries—binaries between deep history and modernity, or a between a global North and South?

MF: I don’t like binaries. They never work, right? It’s never black and white, old and young. It’s always gray. I keep out of binaries of any kind.

The Indy: Is there a way to use binaries constructively?

To appropriate binaries as a way to resist their oppressiveness?

MF: No. I think the resistance to the binary is to go for the infinite. I think you have to get out of it. I’m very opposed to them. But this is because I’m biracial. My mother is white, and my father is Black, and this was a huge problem for me as a child. There was a time growing up in New Jersey when you could only be Black. And I was like, this doesn’t make any sense to me. I have rejected binaries ever since.

There was an article in the New York Times [by Moises Velasquez-Manoff] the other day, about people who are biracial. The essay’s thesis is that they look at the world differently. For example, biracial babies are faster at facial recognition. They are more likely to seek the infinite, to transcend binaries. I think transcending binaries is essential to being able to function in the world. Binaries are traps... all that stuff is a dead-end.

The Indy: So binaries a dead end, and we are going to need other tools for placemaking and identity-formation, if we are going to deal with this history of repeated dislocation for communities. Do you recognize certain core principles for an urbanism that fosters belonging, mental

health, and potential?

MF: The word that I like is restoration. People who do work in what we call natural ecosystems—getting ponds to function again—that’s the word they use. To bring places back to functioning. I like the idea of restoration, and I think urban restoration is trying to understand how the city works. It’s like a clock. Something gets broken, and we have to ask, how do we get the wheels moving again?

Social psychiatry is very concerned with fracture.

There’s a long line of people who have written about this, so it’s something that’s in the fore of our concerns.

America is deeply fractured. This has been happening for a long time, but I think all of us—myself included—can get a better gauge on the fracture than ever before. The issue before us is: how do you get the whole nation to do something? People have stopped speaking to each other. Even Facebook is thinking, ‘maybe everybody is too much in their bubble and we’d better start thinking of ways to get them outside of it.’ Okay, so we get to see the threat of fracture, and the harms that can come of people thinking in those binaries. The threat of binary thinking and fracture has no boundaries. So how do we restore connectedness writ large? That’s the pressing question.

A good idea to begin with, drawing on what I’ve gotten from great urbanists that I’ve worked with, is that we have to think about larger wholes. We can’t just think inside our small places. We have to ask, ‘what is it that we don’t understand?’ Once we understand what we don’t understand, then the question is, ‘how do we draw things together?’

The Indy: For you, does an era of globalization—migration, financial capitalism—represent a new pace of fracture? How does that affect your approach?

MF: Well, what I’ve been thinking a lot about is the question of who voted for Trump, and why did they vote for him? The biggest group are people with a high school education, who have ill health and bad jobs. They have the ill health and bad jobs because of deindustrialization.

It seems to me that globalization is a front for factories moving to other countries where they can pay lower wages. What do we do about that? People who had their jobs and now have terrible jobs feel like they got shafted, which they did.

On the other hand, when people are feeling resentful, and they think that stereotypes and discrimination and hatred are the solution, they buy into appeals to that. As in, ‘Yeah you’re resentful. You know who did it?

The bad hombres from Mexico!’ Yeah, sure, it’s the bad hombres from Mexico; let’s build a wall... That kind of thinking draws deep into American history, going back hundreds of years.

But the problem of people being shafted because of industrialization is very real. We’re still asking, ‘how do we invent the future?’ I happen to live about a mile from Thomas Edison’s factory of inventions. It’s an amazing place, have you been there?

The Indy: No, I haven’t!

MF: When you’re in New Jersey, you’ve got to go. It’s a factory of inventions—an assembly line. On one end, an idea goes in. On the other end, a patent comes out. He said he had assembled everything there, and could do from a lady’s watch to a locomotive in a few days. These would have taken months, but he had brought all the chemistry and photography and materials on site. Everything he could have had at that time.

This is a model for inventiveness. People have terrible jobs, we have global warming, people are angry at each other. We need to invent! And invention is going to come out of us not being locked into dichotomies.

INTERVIEWS

08

SUNKEN PLACES The embodied horror of Get Out

BY Marianne

Verrone DESIGN BY Gabriel Matesanz content warning: anti-Blackness, misogynoir

“I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man In his review of Jordan Peele’s horror-satire Get Out, film critic Brian Tallerico remarks that the movie “feels fresh and sharp in a way that studio horror movies almost never do.” Previously, horror films have placed the audience in the frustrating, anxiety-ridden position of following the protagonist as they make unwise, and often outright dumb, decisions in paranormal scenarios. In a scary movie, there is the constant urge to cry out to the protagonist, to warn them to remove themselves from the situation at hand: Call for help! Don’t go in the closet! Get out!

But protagonist Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) keeps his safety and comfort in mind as he navigates visiting the parents of his white girlfriend, Rose Armitage (Allison Williams). At the start of the film he hesitates when he learns that Rose has not informed them of his race, remarking, “I don’t want to get chased off the lawn with a shotgun.” His stay with the Armitages includes a strangely confrontational family dinner, a nightmarish garden party, and several run-ins with the zombified Black household servants. In the final act of the movie, upon realizing the violent intentions of the Armitages, Chris attempts to escape the family’s home. By responding to each bizarre occurrence with reasonable concern and to each threat with direct action, Chris is a refreshing break from the senselessness of horror protagonists of the past.

Get Out complicates the classic structure of horror films such as Halloween (1978), Poltergeist (1982), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), in which the comfort and familiarity of suburbia is made eerie and unsettling. The opening sequence in which Lakeith Stanfield’s character is abducted from a white suburb promptly establishes that, for Black people, there is (and has always been!) fear and unease in predominantly white spaces. Moreover, Stanfield’s trepidation in what most consider a ‘safe’ neighborhood subverts the American cinematic trope of the ‘dangerous Black/brown neighborhood.’

The film is saturated in horror flick imagery, constantly referencing clichés like jump scares, cracked doors, and television static; but the brilliance of Get Out stems from its recontexualization of traditional elements of the horror genre to accentuate Black American experiences. Horror movies necessitate supernatural

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themes and surrealist techniques to transport audiences to unknown, otherworldly spaces. Yet the supernatural is what grounds Get Out in reality, allowing the film to comment on the continuity between historical and modern anti-Blackness. It is both the absurdism of scary movies and the fear they provoke that extends to the absurdism of racial stratification and the very real horror and trauma produced by racism. Perhaps the most frightening part of Get Out is its proximity to reality. +++ The ‘mad scientist’ character is a familiar archetype of horror and science fiction movies whose earliest cinematic depiction appears in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) as Rotwang: a talented scientist who invents a robot to replace his lost love. From Dr. Frankenstein’s aspiration of playing God to Frank N Furter’s desire for a hunky companion, the scientific use of others’ brains and bodies to satisfy selfish inclinations recurs across the cinematic canon. The ‘mad scientist’ archetype arises in Get Out as Rose’s father, Dean (Bradley Whitford), a neurosurgeon who repeatedly asserts his unconditional support for Obama. After the Armitage patriarch was defeated by Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympic trials, the Armitage family formed the Order of the Coagula: a cult that abducts and auctions off Black bodies to be used for brain transplants. Dean’s operations result in an extended lifespan for the white brain donor and a state of stifled consciousness for the Black victim. Members of the order have a variety of reasons for participating—motives which mirror the ways Black bodies have been desired and exploited throughout U.S. history in the forms of slave labor, sexual objectification, athletic prowess, and cultural capital via appropriation. Just as Dean prepares to extract Chris’ brain from his skull, so too are expressions of Black intellectualism, political participation, and humanity routinely disposed of.

Dean’s role as the ‘mad scientist’ directly parallels the extensive history of medical experimentation on Black bodies. Scientific racism has been used to substantiate biological difference between the races, support the institution of slavery, and justify the use of Black bodies in research. Slaves were regularly sold as specimens to undergo cruel and inhumane studies. For example, J. Marion Sims, the “father of modern gynecology,” would conduct operations on the genitalia of enslaved women without using anesthesia.

The supposed ‘savagery’ science attributed to Black women had convinced scientists of their perceived inability to feel pain, making them ideal subjects for the obstetric and gynecological experiments of the 19th century. Abuse under the guise of research spans from before the colonial era into the modern day in the dissection and exhibition of Saartjie Baartman’s body, the non-consensual extraction of Henrietta Lacks’ cells, the unethical Tuskegee Syphilis Study, private pharmaceutical companies testing on inmates in prison, and numerous other disturbing instances. Peele’s use of the ‘mad scientist’ trope serve as a reminder that agonizing experimentation on the bodies of Black people was justified through pseudo-scientific language, means, and purposes advanced by white people for the ‘common good.’ +++ During Chris’ first night in the Armitage home, Rose’s mother Missy (Catherine Keener) hypnotizes him, giving her the ability to paralyze him at will simply by stirring a spoon in a teacup. In harnessing Chris’ vulnerability—the death of his mother when he was a child— Missy discovers an entry point into his mind.

Specifically, Missy directs Chris’ attention to his failure to save his mother, even though he had no power to do so. This hypnotic induction is not dissimilar from the manipulation of the Black psyche throughout US history. For example, 19th century ‘experts’ pathologized slaves who expressed desires for freedom, as in the case of physician Samuel Cartwright’s invention of drapetomania: a mental disorder of slaves who tended to run away from their owner. Or today, in the way the systemic oppression Black people experience is fallaciously attributed to ‘black on black’ violence, criminality, and broken families. Iterations of white supremacy work to place Black people in positions of inferiority and then to convince them that these inferiors position are innate and self-attributable.

Chris soon finds himself unable to move his body.

Missy demands that he “sink into the floor,” sending him to the “sunken place”—a state of consciousness in which Chris retains sensory awareness, but entirely looses bodily agency. Her process is quick and not easily noticed: in one moment, Chris laughs in disbelief at the notion of mind control; in the next, he sits wide-eyed, frozen, tears streaming down his face. In a comparably insidious way, anti-Blackness manifests itself cognitively in the

MARCH 17, 2017

form of implicit racial bias that not only impacts how other racial groups perceive Black people, but becomes internalized by Black people themselves. Internalized prejudice is exemplified by Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s infamous 1960 Doll Test, in which Black children overwhelmingly assigned positive characteristics and preference to a white doll over a black doll (identical in all respects except skin color). Racism functions explicitly in overt violence and discrimination and implicitly in psychological harm—with all levels working to lower the self-esteem and self-worth of Black people.

The horror genre offers a lucid and incisive representation of the constant sense of fear and paranoia that white-dominated societies instill in Black people: you never know when you are in danger, because you always are. After being hypnotized, Chris begins to experience an uncanny feeling that something strange is occurring, but tries to rationalize this uneasiness. At the Armitage’s annual garden party, he encounters numerous microaggressions and abnormal occurrences, but blames himself for causing them. He assumes that his perception is distorted, when, as the plot reveals, he is accurately interpreting his dangerous surroundings. However, when legitimate distress and outrage are expressed by Black people, they are unfailingly accused of playing ‘the race card,’ misreading situations, and ignoring the faux color-blind, post-racial America we now inhabit. Respectability politics are enforced on Black people, often by the ‘nice white liberals’ villainized in this film, to limit and police their self-expression. Black people, meanwhile, are brainwashed to regard themselves as lesser, and are then considered paranoid for being conscious of their subordinated position. +++ Perhaps the most surreal element of Get Out is the “sunken place” to which Chris is sent during hypnosis. In one particularly haunting moment, we see Chris is depicted falling slowly, backwards into a dark void. He screams

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

endlessly as he falls, but cannot be heard. He desperately attempts to grasp onto anything, but is suspended in empty space. The only source of light comes from a window above through, which Missy peers through. She then shuts the eyes of his paralyzed body, closing this window and leaving him in encompassing darkness.

The sequence echoes the finale of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. As the narrator of the book attempts to escape a mob, he accidentally plunges down the open manhole of a coal cellar. Two policemen mock him and put the manhole cover back in place, trapping him underground in complete darkness. The narrator then ruminates, “this is the way it’s always been, only now I know it… it’s a kind of death without hanging, I thought, a death alive.”

Peele describes the “sunken place” as a metaphor for the “suspended animation of how we look at race in America.” Chris’ paralysis and voicelessness take on symbolic significance, representing the lack of economic and social mobility, inability to participate fully in democratic society, and even incarceration. In an interview with Slash Film, Kaluuya describes his experience filming these scenes: “That’s how being black sometimes feels like,” he says. “You can’t actually say what you want to say because you may lose your job and you’re paralyzed in your life… you want to express an emotion, and then it comes out in rage elsewhere, because you internalized it, because you can’t live your truth… Yourself is being controlled and being managed, by someone who doesn’t have your best interests at heart.” The “sunken place” is visually indicative of expulsion from society, evoking feelings of absolute social exclusion, intense otherness.

Chris floats aimlessly in empty space, robbed of his agency and powerless to the will of others.

I read the “sunken place” as a cinematic representation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of double-consciousness: a sociological concept which refers to the internalized “twoness” experienced by Black people whereby they view themselves as they are, and additionally as they are perceived by white people. In Du Bois’ words,

it is, “a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” This duality is visually depicted as Chris’ consciousness suspended in the “sunken place” as Missy’s white gaze surveils him. +++ In Get Out, Peele connects his fluency in horror tropes to the extensive history of anti-Black violence. In an interview with Complex, Kaluuya discusses how the film brilliantly captures the terror of racism: “This is a social demon that people have to navigate. And it's a horrifying experience living it." The film is exceptional in its portrayal of how deeply entrenched racism is both in the structures of our society and in our psyches. In doing so, one of the difficulties this film poses is that of demonstrating that racism is a demon which is not so easily exorcised. There is no wooden stake through the heart, garlic clove, or silver bullet.

“Racism is within each and every one of us,” Peele says in an interview with Mother Jones. “It's everyone's responsibility to figure out how they deal with this kind of obsolete instinct.” The film provides some commentary on where we must go, leaving the Black audience with a resounding imperative to “stay woke.” The flash of phone cameras used to awaken people from the “sunken place” emphasizes the importance of media in raising critical social awareness. Respectability politics are thoroughly critiqued, instead upholding Chris’ vigilance, militancy, and direct action. However, while Chris escapes, the Black servants, Walter and Georgina, do not. The audience must confront the devastating question of how many people have been lost to the “sunken place,” and how many more await.

MARIANNE VERRONE B’19 is still creeped out by Allison Williams eating Fruit Loops.

ARTS

10

THE VIEW FROM HASBRO SIX Hand sanitizer and clean consciences Nico Sedivy ILLUSTRATION BY Kela Johnson DESIGN BY Celeste Matsui BY

content warning: hospitalization, eating disorder A click, a nasal robotic whir, and two more clicks—all crammed into one second. I’d recognize it anywhere, yet I’m not sure other people would notice it at all. It is the fundamental pitch in the soundtrack of a very particular period in my life.

I spent a week in the hospital when I was seventeen. It was less than a month before my eighteenth birthday, the last hurrah of my pediatric career. This was in 2012, well after the advent of Purell, and hand sanitizer dispensers were ubiquitous in medical facilities across America. There were some hospital info videos pre-loaded onto the little adjustable TV screen next to the bed. Early in my stay, I was curious enough to watch some of them. One was about standards of care; it encouraged patients to remind doctors and nurses to sanitize, should any forget to do so. One automated, motion-sensing dispenser was mounted on the wall outside the door to each patient room in the hospital—no medical professionals would enter a room without sanitizing first. These little hygiene nodes were positioned in such a way that I could hear the dispenser go off before the person who was coming to see me would come into view, rubbing their hands together as they walked. Whatever germs they had picked up elsewhere, they didn’t want to bring into my room. Thus, the sound of Purell dispensing heralded every medical event—the three times per day that my blood pressure was taken, the two psych sessions 1 per day, the team’s daily rounds, meals…

Being hospitalized was intensely boring. An aggressive amount of nothing occurred. My parents brought me my knitting kit once I was allowed to have some possessions. In the single week spent in the hospital, I knit a pair of socks, a pair of mittens, and a weird sort-of-beret hat. I love to knit, but I haven’t finished a project since that winter.

After the first day, I was also allowed to have a landline phone in the room—mostly it was so my parents could call me. I talked to my sister and my aunt, and several times to my best friend at home, and another friend in New York. The New York friend was disturbed by all the rules I had to follow. I’d been given hospital scrub pants to wear (no pockets, in case I tried to hide anything in them). The sink basin was covered over with tape, presumably so I couldn’t vomit into it in a fit of purging.2 The bathroom door was locked, and I had to call a nurse to unlock it anytime I wanted to use the toilet. The nurse stood just outside the bathroom door until I was done, keeping an ear on me. It’s like they don’t trust you at all, my friend told me, offended on my behalf. I didn’t mention that I didn’t trust myself either.

7

name of Lysol products. Consider: an estimated 1000 species of bacteria, belonging to 19 different identified phyla,4 live on human skin. Plenty of these species are not demonstrably harmful, and they either live and let 5 live or actually benefit their human hosts.

For doctors, it makes sense to kill off all microorganisms residing on their skin, rather than risk transmitting illnesses between patients or infecting wounds during surgery. But what about the rest of us?

In a 2013 essay in the New Yorker, David Owen charts the rise of Purell, noting, “you see it everywhere… My doctor uses it several times during every office visit. Cruise-ship operators squirt it into the hands of passengers as they enter dining rooms and buffet lines,6 and it’s become a staple at school picnics and birthday parties.” What makes us so willing—eager, even—to sacrifice beneficial bacteria at the altar of hygiene?

The simplest answer is convenience. It takes less time to rub in some Purell than it does to wash your hands, even though washing is still the CDC-recom-

mended method for preventing diseases. Plus, little Purell dispensers take up less space than sinks, they don’t get water on the floor, and they don’t require paper waste (paper towels) or additional electricity (hand dryers). The automatic variety doesn’t even require touching faucet handles, which themselves are 8 likely to transmit germs. And, yes, nine times out of ten, the collective ‘we’ will undeniably prefer the more convenient of two options.

However, the case for convenience doesn’t address the underlying impulse: what motivates us to wash (well, sanitize) our hands so frequently? What is so important about clean hands?

I note the stated purpose of Purell and other products like it: to prevent the spread of illness and contagion. If we sanitize frequently enough, we can avoid infecting others just as others cannot pass their sicknesses to us. Here I am struck by a symbolic parallel: if germs are problems, then germaphobia is a fear of other people’s problems becoming our own. And indeed, the world I see around me now reflects this interpretation—people everywhere so afraid that they will become vulnerable to that which affects others, squirting hand sanitizer into their palms over and over again in a desperate attempt to stay healthy, to stay safe. +++ In my room on the sixth floor, I felt safe. For months I had labored diligently to keep my issues to myself, swallowing them down with the copious amount of tea I drank so I wouldn’t feel hungry. The straight lines I so badly wanted to see in my body weren’t just aesthetic, weren’t even just gender. They were also limits, boundaries—floodgates that would hold back turmoil, prevent it from spilling out and inconveniencing those around me. In the hospital room, I was contained. It was a relief.

It was also an illusion. My methods of self-control were directly detrimental to my health, and they had caused significant inconvenience, not to mention worry, to my family and friends. My plan backfired, and other people had to deal with my problems. Interdependence was a fact I could not change through rigid self-discipline—or Purell.

I cannot help but think about the figurative meaning of the phrase, “to have clean hands,” to have done nothing wrong, to be guiltless. Could it be that we so badly want our hands to be clean that we are prepared to kill our (albeit microorganismal) allies to make it so?

The name Purell itself is also revealing. We want to be ‘pure,’ to be in the right. The irony is that Purell and other alcohol-based hand sanitizers can remove germs but not dirt. Hands that are soiled in the visible 9 sense—be it with dirt or blood—cannot be remediated with a quick squirt.

I try to square this truth with the reflexive, nostalgic sense of security I still get every time I hear an automatic Purell dispenser go off. I know I am lucky, but I am not pure.

+++ There’s an urban legend 3 that warns us against the overuse of Purell and other hand sanitizers, as that which “kills 99.9 percent of germs,” must perforce eliminate microorganisms indiscriminately, whether they are pathogenic or not. Purell is an alcohol-based sanitizer, not an antibacterial, meaning it kills microorganisms by disrupting their cell membranes, a process known as lysis—verb form “to lyse,” which gives us the

1

Meals were a medical event because I was hospitalized for a restrictive eating disorder.

2

Ironic, given that I’ve never been able make myself throw up. I prefer to keep my nausea inside.

3

4

Apparently supported by a 2009 University of California San Diego research study, so perhaps not really “urban” or “legend.”

Phyla is the plural of phylum, a higher-order taxonomic grouping. For bacteria, phylum is the second most general categorization (only one step more specific than referring to them all as “bacteria”). According to a 2009 study in the journal Science, most of the bacteria that live on human skin belong to four phyla: actinobacteria (51.8%), firmicutes (24.4%), proteobacteria (16.5%), and bacteriodetes (6.3%). For those of you keeping score at home, “most” in this context is thus equal to 99%.

11

METABOLICS

NICO SEDIVY B’17 is easily startled by loud noises.

5

In the field of ecology, these types of relationships are known as commensalism (neutral for the host) and mutualism (positive for the host as well as the resident bacteria) and are a subset of symbiosis. As the child of biologists (and admittedly sometimes prone towards the pedantic), it has always frustrated me to see literary use of “symbiotic” to mean only “mutually beneficial.” I understand that it is only a metaphor, but it seems ill-advised to overlook that symbiosis also includes parasitism.

6

Ironically, one of the pathogens that is resistant to Purell and other alcohol-based sanitizers is norovirus, which is notorious for causing outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness on cruise ships.

7

If you are skeptical of the difference in time commitment (after all, I can wash your hands in a few seconds, so can’t everyone?) keep in mind that the CDC-recommended duration for handwashing is 24 seconds, or “long enough to sing the happy birthday song twice.”

8

The role of faucet handles as contagion vectors is one main reason that I am infuriated by public restrooms with automatic flush toilets and manual faucets.

9

One notable exception is dry erase marker residue, which is loosened by alcohol and then wipes right off.

MARCH 17, 2017

a rock about...

this size

On this day, March 2nd, I took a walk and I saw a rock.

A good amount bigger than the rock I saw yesterday.

Every day of the week, back back back, way back, back in 2009, I used to be the best hopper in hopscotch.

On this day, January-something-2009, someone else was better and I remember wishing that the bag would be a bag of rocks intstead.

MARCH M BY

Lil Yachty boat shoes doomsday survivalism creative nonfiction Putin poutine tiny backpacks a dog with a bindle grad school clown school science truth Melania melancholia adult acne Teen Chopped personal pizza political pizza isolationism Tinder Social microdosing Tasty videos footnotes hand jobs Merriam-Webster citizens' militia deep state diva cup Sharkboy and Lavagirl repeal and replace Arthur memes fisting

13

METABOLICS

MARCH 17, 2017

Indy

MADNESS Staff

dongles dialectics sitting for the pledge bidets butt chug political pizza

trickle down West End Girls

East Side Pockets flossing therapy shutter shades yarmulkes valley girls uncanny valley Pokemon Go armchair activism over the counter under the bleachers Barron Trump classroom boners big data tiny bangs retweeting yourself exercise finstas dossiers populism poppers truffle pigs a career in media tapeworms heterosexuality

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

METABOLICS

14

WORD OF MOU Pauline was always calling her boss in the middle of biology class. “Okay, okay,” she would say, and I imagined her giggles appeasing a gruff voice on the other end of the line.

I wasn’t sure what kind of friends we were, Pauline and me, if we were close because we saw each other every school day, or because we were the only two brown girls in class. Yet somehow I was drawn to her, as if I’d caught sight of a reflective object from afar and come closer because its colors confused me. Some girls at school had told me that Pauline was a compulsive liar and you couldn’t believe everything she said. But as far as I could tell, her job was real.

After she hung up she rolled her eyes and smiled, pleased and annoyed that she had to work more.

“It’s another wedding,” she said. We had just swabbed our cheek cells and looked at them under dim microscope light.

“How’d you get hired?” I said.

“I had nice legs.”

“What?”

“I ran into my boss Toni at the market. He said I had nice legs and I should work for him.”

“Do you think he needs more help?”

“I don’t know. Do you want me to introduce you?” +++ I put on the shortest pair of denim shorts I owned. I had been dancing a lot this year and my legs looked good.

My legs were longer than Pauline’s, I thought, even though I felt a little guilty for thinking that. I put on wedge sandals, and dangling peacock feather earrings, so everything was long, long, long. Then I got on my bike and biked to the market.

I saw Pauline first. There was a man next to her, probably forty or so, with brown hair that I guessed had another five years before it went gray. His cheeks were sunken but his eyes were alive. He had terrible posture, perhaps from stooping to serve burgers all the time, like he was doing now. I thought they looked too complicated to be burgers, but that’s what Pauline said they were.

“What’s your name,” Toni asked me.

“Emily.”

“She’s got a nice pair of legs on her,” Toni said to Pauline. Pauline gave an approving nod.

“I don’t know if I have anything regular opening up, but I’ll think about it.”

I wrote my number on a yellow scrap of paper and he slipped it into his apron pocket.

15

FEATURES

+++ In July, when Pauline left for vacation, my phone rang.

“Can you work tomorrow?” Toni said. His voice was scratchy, like the sound of a hair brush through tangles.

At first, I couldn’t find Word of Mouth Catering.

I wandered around an empty lot on Arapahoe Ave, a place I hadn’t noticed before, even though it was a five minute walk from home. The sun made the buildings appear identical: shimmering white sides strung together by wiry shadows. I ducked through a garage door into a kitchen, larger than any I had ever seen. Two table islands floated in the center. I peered at the black trays and clear bowls of food, the vivid colors blurred by saran-wrap.

Toni popped out of a closet. We greeted each other, shook hands. I met some other servers, all young women, many Asian like Pauline and me.

I had expected, even hoped for, a training of sorts. I had imagined myself cooking, or at least arranging food on platters, fanning out tomatoes, garnishing with sprigs of parsley. Yet all of this labor had already been done, and as I packaged each dish and moved it to Toni’s car, I quickly wished away the image.

Where are you from?” Toni asked me while he drove. I watched the fields, a jaundiced yellow, swell and recede in the distance.

“Here, Colorado. You?” “New Jersey. Have you been to the East Coast?”

“I’ve been to New York once.”

“Yeah? Did you like it?”

The summer before I had cut across Chinatown towards the Brooklyn Bridge, my legs aching yet exhilarated by movement. Half-familiar languages lassoed around market stands, anxious cameras, fish in hot oil, men smoking close to one other, braver in the shade.

Sounds that were older than a particular place and time, and passed as internal echoes, as if all the bodies in me were whispering. Yet the thought of describing to Toni the decadent noise, and the pleasure they stirred in me, filled me with distaste.

“I liked it,” I said simply.

He raised his eyebrows. “Really? New Jersey is better. Beautiful green hills.”

I asked him about any kids. He said no; he was divorced. Still, I was convinced there was something magnanimous in him, that drew him to this business, to surrounding himself with people, to gathering them,

in repeated service of their celebrations. I searched for another question, but none came to mind.

“Could you hand me a Pepsi?” he asked. “There should be some at the back.”

I dug around, fingers prying a can from its ring of plastic.

“God, I love these things. I’m basically addicted.”

He gulped the Pepsi down. “You’re quiet, aren’t you?”

He asked for another and finished it before we reached our destination. +++ My eyes rolled over a manicured, spacious lawn, a crowd amusing themselves almost excessively. Faces made fearless by beer and sunblock. Meat enough for seventy spread over a row of grills, seared out of its blood, body, and past until it tasted only of a pleasure some liked to call patriotism. Billowing smoke that stung my eyes.

Toni greeted a large quantity of guests, joking around like they were old friends. I watched him flip sausages.

“Do you need any help?” I asked.

He shook his head, winked. “Go talk to people.

Guests need to be entertained.” +++ I remembered when Pauline said that Toni liked her because she flirted with guests. The swarm congealed as I approached it. It could just be small talk; I didn’t know why I was making a big deal out of it. I thought of Pauline chattering, words spilling out so fast that sometimes she did not even have time to check if they were true or not. I thought of the agonizing and often hilarious race our middle-school selves enlisted in, wearing push-up bras when there was nothing to push up, admiring the loudest girls, who bared their words as easily as their chests, until I would think of my mother, her voice suddenly soft on the phone, or my father, practicing English by copying the radio, huddled in the dark of his car.

I was beginning to learn that my body could be loud. My legs often spoke foreign tongues to men I passed on the street. They got me this job. As I maneuvered through the mass, I was hoping I could count on them, but they hushed.

I soon returned to Toni. “Need anything? Maybe another Pepsi?”

He eyed me for a moment, then nodded. “You can grab a plate,” he said. “I always let my workers eat.”

MARCH 17, 2017

OUTH I spooned mounds of roasted eggplant flecked with mint, spinach phyllo pastries, and half-moons of cucumbers and mozzarella onto my plate. A man smiled softly at me, like I was younger than I was supposed to be. I avoided his gaze, eating quickly. Pods of oil slid across the Dixie plastic. Their sheen resembled the grease my mother extracted from broth boiled for hours in the slow cooker, until the bones thinned.

By the time I came back home it would be dark, and I would count the bills in my hand, a sum far higher than I had been paid as a nanny. Then I would recount them, relishing the thickness, the heft of them pressed against my palm. I was bothered by a shadow of guilt, an abrasive sense that I had been overcompensated for the work I had done.

The second event I worked was a Russian couple’s wedding. The women had legs like stilts, hair flat-ironed straight, wide eyes and heavy makeup. They drank more vodka than Toni drank Pepsi, and my primary responsibility shifted from feeding his habit to feeding theirs.

I could not shake a sense of inadequacy from my last shift. I tried to talk more, flirt even, as I topped people’s vodka with orange juice. I figured out that I didn’t need to try and like these people; in fact, the more I disliked them on the inside the easier it was to be a tease on the outside. Lies made the quickest approximations of intimacy: that color suits you (ew beige), you’re a resort manager? (you fucking scare me), yeah I’d drop by for a swim (ditto for deep water), let me take your champagne glass (why didn’t you finish it?), and bring you another one so we can talk more (who asks for a second champagne without finishing the first?).

During cleanup I dropped a pack of toothpicks, sending wooden splinters across the cream colored carpet. I busied myself picking up the mess, sensing Toni rush past and stop. When I looked up again, the room had almost emptied, save for two guests smiling that soft smile, the one that underaged me, that named me girlish and naïve. Their shining teeth rehearsed a forgiveness I was sure masked something ugly underneath, something closer to disdain.

That night Toni gave me a ride home. I passed him more Pepsi when he asked, but the sweet tone of his requests nagged me. I was annoyed that he seemed nice, that he was doing me a favor, for this meant I was not just working for him, but also dependent on him. I was no longer sure if I wanted to earn his respect. I wondered what respect looked like for a man like him, to whom respect’s opposite—shame—did not stick. As the bub-

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

BY Emily

Sun

Anzia Anderson DESIGN BY Ruby Stenhouse ILLUSTRATION BY

bles fizzed around his lips, I briefly wished him diabetes in old age, or some other untreatable yet manageable illness. After we reached my home, he parked and pulled out wrinkled bills from his wallet.

“How many hours was it?”

I did the math. “Eight hours times eighteen, so one fourty-four?”

Toni shuffled his bills. “Here,” he said, pressing them into my hand. “Take the extra.”

I said goodbye, smiling hard through clenched teeth, knowing that the handsome tip was for the fact that he probably would not be calling me again. +++ One night in August I dreamt I was ravenous. The garden my mother and I nursed like a sick child all spring was suddenly teeming with red berries. We plucked them, my mother and I. I stained my mouth a deep magenta; she blamed my hunger on the sun.

Having exhausted the garden, we opened the fridge that rattled at certain hours of the night and stared into its glowing cavity. I plunged my hand into a collapsed chocolate cake, peeled slice after slice of cold cut turkey, cracked open a bottle of mustard long expired and consumed the bottle in its entirety, save for the lid, whose pulp I spat onto the tile floor. I ate a package of cellophane noodles without bothering to remove the red plastic seal. I ate corn on the cob until my teeth and gums filled with silk threads.

My mother fed me spare change. I ate the blue rocking chair in her bedroom. My cheeks, ears, arms, ankles, and belly were all swelling, so that I towered over my mother, her body frail and trembling. My clothes frayed, splitting at the seams. My cheeks floated and pressed like balloons against the ceiling, which I consumed in fistfuls. The shreds of my purple sweater sailed straight into my roiling mouth. My jeans split, but my underwear held on. My clammy stomach glowed like the moon on nights after rain. The skin there stretched to the point of transparency; it no longer felt like mine. My mother pressed her ear gently against it. Any more pressure and my skin would burst, sending organs and hair skywards. The sky was clear and it made me hungrier.

I ate the faucet, licked lemon rust off my lips. I heard liquid splash beneath me, and my mother came out with a purple baby kicking in her arms. She gave it to me, a gesture of finality. It’s yours, she said. I held it against my bra and it screamed into my chest. It looked

scrumptious, like a little raisin. I raised it to my lips.

The apocalyptic hunger in my dream did not scare me. What scared me was the memory that I had possessed it before. I was standing in the Word of Mouth kitchen, admiring the mushrooms stuffed with prosciutto, tiny ribbons of pink lacing the earthy brown, or the falafel, burnt orange, fresh from the fryer, still glistening. Cloaked in silence, I slowly sneaked a falafel, then another, hurrying to swallow, my tongue peppered, my lips ringed in spice. I was about to go for a third when I heard Pauline and Toni approaching. Ashamed, I quickly turned away and hit the faucet, pretending to wash dishes in the cavern of the industrial sink. +++ I talked to Toni once more the summer before I left for college. I called him, thinking I wanted to make some extra cash on top of my nannying gig. When I heard his voice it sounded unfamiliar, the way my mother would sound after I moved across the country. For a second I panicked, thinking I had the wrong number. Had he forgotten who I was?

“Yeah, I remember you. You were a good worker, but too shy. You’ve changed, calling me up out of the blue like this. I’ll let you know if something comes up.

You’re on my list.”

One night, I danced in New York with girls I had only known for two weeks. The crowd was thin when we got there but soon swelled until it swarmed the club, dissolved into the flashing lights. The first guy I danced with placed his hands on my stomach with a firmness that made me dance faster, in an effort to flee or to surrender to him I did not know. My body turned detached and alive, its surfaces textured, like a tongue. I wanted to feel this now as I hung up on Toni, but I felt like I did after I came home that night, collapsing onto my bed, a ringing in my head, a throb in my abdomen, the faint echoes of trying to prove something I once got wrong about myself.

I felt a second hunger, one that was not oceanic, but compact, a fist in my stomach, tensed like a mother’s love. This hunger was a longing for things larger than me, and I would spend a long time figuring out what it required of my body, convincing myself that I could satisfy its unnamed pangs through trial and error, through repeated modification.

EMILY SUN B’18 is available for hire.

FEATURES

16

TERM Stefania Gomez ILLUSTRATION BY Isabelle Rea DESIGN BY Gabriel Matesanz BY

I. October After the eviction, we returned to the old house once more to collect the dishes we had left in the washer. It had been destroyed inside, all the walls knocked away, and emptied, except for the clawfoot bathtub. Turned to one room, it looked small. We walked home together in the dark, silent. Something had taken place that we would later identify as significant, as standing in for something else entirely.

Later we nested on Sheldon Street & slowly became women. Yes, at times we drove down Broadway and Westminster on a damp night until we reached the big blue house at the edge of Olneyville Square. No, it was not long until we all—all of us—needed bookshelves.

II. November the Cubs won the series, Rick suffered ‘til the end, we adjusted to the move, I chased a few dumb kids who’d taken my stuff down Broad Street, the university fell to tiny, useless pieces, we marched by picture windowed homes, through bus tunnel, we searched, we arrived, at last, below Federal Hill, bridge wide with us.

III. December Where my mother lives it snowed three inches on New Year’s Eve and then froze. Ten cars tried the Whittaker Street strip of Southwest Portland’s Lair Hill, and we watched as they slid back down against each other and the curb, slow as a movement, wheels spinning all the while.

We inverted a yellow recycling bin on the road to keep other motorists off the hill. The next day, a Rainer, holiday brew, sat dented on top of it, & windshield wipers were raised on each pinned car as if in revelry, as if to brace for the times.

17

LITERARY

MARCH 17, 2017

03/17

List Persian New Year 2017 / Nowruz 1396!

Hosted by the Brown Iranian Students Association, this Nowruz celebration will include dinner, dancing, and performances by Brown students and faculty.

Sayles Hall at Brown U 7 PM – 1 PM, $5 students / $10 non-students 03/18

Shaggy at the Met! The Met, Pawtucket 8 PM, $25 adv / $30 day of

Shaggy is the angel who brought us, among other things, the 2001 hit “Angel” (ft. Rayvon) and the 2000 single “It Wasn’t Me.” Life is one big party when you are still young, but who is gonna have your back when its all done? The answer is Shaggy.

03/18

Samplefest!!!!!!

Free samples!!!!!!

03/19

( ‫) کرابم ون لاس‬

The Same Difference: Film Screening

Eastside Marketplace 12 – 2 PM, Free

03/20

Salomon Hall at Brown U (79 Waterman St.) 3 – 5:30 PM, Free

The Same Difference is a 2015 documentary by Nneka Onuorah about discrimination and gender roles within the Black lesbian community. The screening is part of the Brown LGBTQ center’s Queer Legacy Series, in coalition with the Black Heritage Series and Women’s History Series at Brown.

WWE: Live — Road to Wrestlemania

03/21

DCU Center, Worcester, MA 7:30 – 11 PM, $22+ Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) RI — Monthly Open Meeting

03/22

Friends Meeting House, 99 Morris Ave., Providence 7 – 9 PM Michael DeForge Reading and Book Signing w/ Sad13 and Mickey Z

03/22

Design In Action

03/22 — 26

19th Annual Boston Underground Film Festival

03/23

AS220 7 – 10:30 PM, Free (?)

Know Your Rights!

RISD GD Commons 6 – 8 PM

Brattle Theatre, Cambridge, MA Check schedule for times & prices

Dorcas International Institute of RI, 645 Elmwood Ave., Providence

Join SURJ RI and White Noise Collective RI for their open organizing meeting. SURJ focuses on how best to organize white people alongside PoC in the fight for racial justice, as allies & accomplices, etc.

The meeting will include an orientation workshop for newcomers to the group.

DeForge is a Canadian comics artist and illustrator, introducing his latest book, Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero (Drawn & Quarterly). He’ll be joined in discussion by local comic guy Mickey Zacchilli, and Sad13 (Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz) will play a solo set after the reading.

Faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design consider the relationship between graphic design and political activism. Panel discussion.

“Weird” cinema at a movie theatre that’s dear and sort of near to my heart. Sweet stuff on the schedule (http://bostonunderground. org/films/), mostly independent horror and thrillers, also Southland Tales (2006) which stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a schizophrenic action movie star caught up in a very confusing near-future war between Republican Party secret police and millitant “neo-Marxists.”

Dorcas International is a local organization that advocates for workers, families, immigrants, and refugees. Learn from staff & staff attorneys about the Executive Actions, “about what your rights are regardless of your legal status & what legal resources are available to you locally.” Interpreters will be available.