the VOLUME 40 ISSUE 9 24 APRIL 2020
LOST IN TRANSLATION
FIRE FROM ASHES
O, IT’S MANIFOLD!
Providence public schools, multilingual pedagogy, and the coronavirus crisis
A conversation with sound maker Nicolás Jaar
Corporeal poems and flash fiction
Indy
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Twin XL Sylvia Atwood These days, words haven’t felt right for the taking. A tired world is a heavy weight for any tongue to carry, and lately, my lips have been stretched thin by silence. I keep trying to fit my words someplace between the beautiful and the taciturn, keep them aimed towards something needed and real. Yet they rarely end up where they’re headed, and I know it’s because I’m too afraid to set off in the first place. Tell me: how do you feel strong enough to find language for the moment we’re living in?
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Week in State Feuds Leela Berman
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The EFF and the Anticolonial Struggle Iryumugaba Biko
––– A passage from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass,” a treatise on Indigenous wisdom and environmental duty. She is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. “But then the Words That Come Before All Else begin to flow, and you start to answer.”
Metro 03 09
A Socially-Distanced 2020 Census Kion You Lost in Translation Leela Berman
––– Maybe we can try it like this. 'BubbleShape.dat' every 2 Tell me: what is it you need?
Features 04
Get It in Writing Amelia Anthony
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Gold, Alone Marie Lachance
Arts 05
Briding the Gulf Lucy Duda
Science+Tech 07
Ashes from Fire Alex Westfall
Literary 11 17
O, It’s Manifold Natalie Zummer
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The In-Between Spaces Miranda Ruiz
Mariposas y Marsha en los tiempos de Inseguridad Isabela Minaña Lovelace
MISSION STATEMENT
The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism. Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond. The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.
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STAFF WEEK IN REVIEW Emily Rust | NEWS Anchita Dasgupta Peder Schaefer Tristan Harris | METRO Ricardo Gomez Miles Guggenheim Deb Marini | ARTS Zachary Barnes Eve O’Shea Isabelle Rea | FEATURES Audrey Buhain Mia Pattillo Nick Roblee-Strauss | SCIENCE + TECH Bilal Memon Izzi Olive Andy Rickert | LITERARY Catherine Habgood Star Su | EPHEMERA Liana Chaplainm Sindura Sriram | X Jacob Alabab-Moser Ethan Murakami | LIST Ella Comberg XingXing Shou Cate Turner | STAFF WRITERS Alana BaeR Leela Berman Mara Cavallaro Uwa Ede-Osifo Eduardo Gutiérrez Peña Evie Hidysmith Kaela Hines Muram Ibrahim Anabelle Johnston Jennifer Katz Emma Kofman Evan Lincoln Zach Ngin Jorge Palacios Nell Salzman Issra Said Kion You | COPY EDITORS Josephine Bleakley Muskaan Garg Sarah Goldman Marina Hunt Christine Huynh Seth Israel Thomas Patti Ella Spungen | DESIGN EDITORS Daniel Navratil Ella Rosenblatt | DESIGNERS Anna Brinkhuis Amos Jackson Kathryn Li Katherine Sang | ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Eliza Macneal ILLUSTRATORS Sylvia Atwood Leslie Benavides Gemma Brand-Wolf Natasha Brennan Bella Carlos Ryn Kang Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Pia Mileaf-Patel Claire Schlaikjer Floria Tsui Veronica Tucker Katrina Wardhanna | BUSINESS Caín Yepez Abby Yuan | WEB Ashley Kim | SOCIAL MEDIA Muskaan Garg | SENIOR EDITORS Ben Bienstock Ella Comberg Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Tara Sharma Tiara Sharma Cate Turner Wen Zhuang | MANAGING EDITORS Matt Ishimaru Sara Van Horn Alex Westfall | MVP Leela Berman
@THEINDY_TWEETS
WWW.THEINDY.ORG
week in state feuds
States whose biggest beef with each othe r typically involves passing a pigskin have gone one step further during this global pandemic by limit ing interBY Leela Berman state travel. Restrictions first began cropping up in ILLUSTRATION Jessy Minker mid-March in states with prominent vacation econoDESIGN Daniel Navratil mies, like Hawaii and Florida, and culminati ng with our dear little Ocean State in late March. This is a far cry from the modus operandi, where state s bicker about who has the best pizza and roadtripp ers are viewed as voyagers, not villains, at hear t. In a nation that was sorely unprepared for this pandemic—with a dilapidated healthcare syste m and a president in denial of the virus’s severity— decis ions about how to address COV ID-19 came down to governors and individual citizens. Some assessed the situ- state boundaries have tightened with the spread of ation and decided to continue their vacations , while COVID-19, the vitriol some Americans like to reserve others fled from hotspots to try to stay safe. Rather for people they assume to come from foreign counthan blame failing infrastructure for the virus’s tries has been extended to out-of-staters. The news rapid spread, many directed their rage at certain caught on, with headlines including the provocative individuals. phrases “Rhode Island Police to Hunt Down New Rhode Island took one of the most pointed stanc es Yorkers Seeking Refuge” and “The Governor Who early on. On March 26, before most other state s had Dissed New Yorkers.” instituted required quarantines, Governor Gina Door-to-door searches for New Yorkers were Raimondo announced that those traveling from New aimed at reminding them and anyone tempted to York must self-quarantine for 14 days after arriving follow in their footsteps that not following orders in Rhode Island or risk a fine and potential arrest. would, in the words of Governor Raimondo, “come New Yorkers, many fleeing from New York City, were with penalties.” Perhaps she was alluding to the kind largely traveling to Rhode Island beach town s like of public shaming that keeps cropping up around New port. State police and the National Guar d were the world. Whether from police brutally enforcing enlisted to stake out the border, major highways , train quarantine policies or people turning on their neighstations, and airports. Cars with New York license bors with aspirations of vigilante justice, staying at plates were pulled over, drivers’ contact infor mation home is not only celebrated on Instagram stories collected, and copies of Raimondo’s executive order but surveilled the world over. In India, police have handed out. To ensure complete submissio n, the beaten those who disobey quarantine, or made them National Guard perused rental homes and summer do squats and push-ups. Hong Kong punished rulecottages, knocking on doors, searching for those breakers with heavy fines of thousands of dollars. The from the Empire State and demanding that they quargovernment of Nova Scotia encouraged local resiantine—gotta catch ’em all! dents to call the police if they suspected somebody In a New York Times inter view, one beac h of breaking quarantine. Individual people, fleeing town local described seeing a trooper car, lights from harm, become scapegoats in the new pandemic flashing, following a car with a New York license regime. plate. Others shared photos on Facebook of cars As for Rhode Island, during a CNN interview, with New York license plates in parking lots, perhaps Governor Cuomo threatened to sue the state, publicly out of resentment, fear, or a base desire to tattle . As calling the pointed law “absurdit y.” The American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island said that police stops based on license plates violated fourth amendment rights. All very unfortunate for those hoping authoritarian measures would help stop the spread of the pandemic in Rhode Island. The Rhode Island solution to this state-on-state drama? Simple: a new authoritarian and exclusionary measure applied equitably to people from all states! Raimondo expanded the quarantine requirement to
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
any visitors or residents returning to Rhode Island. Seven states, including Rhode Island, now require all visitors to self-quarantine for two weeks. Another eight states, including heavyweight big states Texas and Florida, require quarantines for visitors from certain states—mainly, New York and New Jersey. Relative to Little Rhody, these states managed to get by with a little less media attention. Apparently, Rhode Island’s downfall could be located in the execution, with police forces actively searching out cars and homes. Perhaps the lesson is not to start battles with a state about 20 times your size? All these rules were passed via a handy gubernatorial executive order. Raimondo, explaining her decision to the New York Times, said she was less concerned about the public perception of this kind of measure than the image of overflowing hospitals. “I’m focused on outcomes, not optics,” she elaborated. While time will tell if these sorts of quarantines are effective measures for reducing the spread of COVID19, it is clear that these feuds make enemies at a time where we all desperately need (physically-distanced) friends. If the lack of good news is getting you down, know that some states still seem to be getting along. About a week ago, Washington, Oregon, and California donated PPE to New York state (this Indy staff writer humbly thinks that the West Coast is, indeed, the best coast). In recent weeks, a handful of states on both coasts have agreed to coordinate their openings from shutdowns. Perhaps both state feuds and state collaborations come from a similar place: trying to find some sort of solution with little support from the federal government. What’s important to remember is that we’re all in this together, no matter what your license plate might say.
—LB
WEEK IN REVIEW
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A SOCIALLY DISTANCED 2020 CENSUS BY Kion You DESIGN Matt Ishimaru
HOW RHODE ISLAND IS ATTEMPTING TO COUNT EVERY SINGLE ONE OF ITS RESIDENTS The United States Census Bureau has historically declared April 1 as a national "Census Day," a time to unite the nation in the shared importance of completing the census. Complete Count Committees (CCCs), localized census advocacy groups composed of community leaders and government officials, would census data could be more or less remediated on a have hosted rallies and marches to promote the 2020 national and state level, it is the local, neighborhood census, launched earlier in March, and would have tract level that would be most vulnerable to statistical emphasized the 1.5 trillion dollars in federal funding variance. "We have a very large, predominantly Latino at stake. However, with stay-at-home orders in place population in various parts of the city," he said. "I think across most of America, CCCs have had to radically it's more likely that it will be undercounted on that rework their campaign strategies. In Providence, a scale." city at serious risk of being undercounted, Census Day Among Providence’s Latinx population, which shifted online. makes up 42 percent of the city’s residents, an addiSabina Matos, the president of the Providence City tional roadblock to full census participation is latent Council, kicked off the hundred person Zoom meeting fear around giving personal information to the governby emphasizing the most crucial point: Census data ment. Moreover, the proposed and since-removed determines how much federal money Rhode Island "Citizenship Question" on the census—a fear-mongets over the next decade. She presented the stakes as gering gesture by the Trump Administration—has "four billion dollars allocated to the state for healthcare, instilled even more wariness among immigrant housing, roads, environmental protections." Mayor communities. Dr. Logan also mentioned that due to Jorge Elorza spoke next, emphasizing the redistricting current pandemic conditions, a proper count may be impact of the census, saying, "We are on the brink of more of an issue among immigrant, working-class losing a congressional seat, unless everyone gets out communities. "Some people are going back to Mexico," there and gets counted." he said. "Some people are hiding. Some people are not Luis Estrada, a Rhode Island CCC leader, spoke normally where they are." about how census outreach, which has been ongoing James Diossa, the mayor of Central Falls in Providence for over a year, had been thwarted by and co-chair of Rhode Island's Complete Count COVID-19 at its most critical juncture. "Here's the Committee, told the Independent that despite being truth," Estrada explained. "We're stuck in a situation in a crippling pandemic, the census still needs to get where our traditional field operation...is no longer a done. "I think it's absolutely a priority," he said. "This valid operation for us." In past years, if households did will have a ten year impact." Accordingly, Diossa said not self-respond to the census—which in 2010 was over that Rhode Island's CCC has adjusted their outreach one third of households nationwide—one of 500,000 strategy from traditional, in-person field operations to enumerators hired by the Census Bureau would have methods such as mass robocalls, liaising with public knocked on their door to obtain information. Door schools, and blasting translated materials into the knocking usually starts in May, but this year census local media. Their outreach strategy is evolving in real field operations have come to a complete halt, with time, as government and community organizations June 1 as a tentative comeback date. On April 13, the across the state rush to test online methods for effecBureau asked Congress to extend the delivery of final tiveness and efficiency. census figures from the end of this year to April 30, Diossa is viewing Rhode Island's stay-at-home 2021, but the proposal is currently pending. orders as a potential positive for response rates, given Because 2020 is the first year the census has gone the fact that the census is now online. "This is a unique primarily online, rather than through mail, the Census opportunity," he said to the Independent. "People Bureau has provided real time response rates across should have time to fill out the census. There's really the nation. The city of Providence has lagged behind no excuse." However, Diossa also recognized the diffiboth the state and nation, falling in line with a trend culty of getting the importance of the census across among lower income, majority-minority urban areas. to his largely Latinx, immigrant population, many of As of April 22, the national self-response rate is at 51 whom are new to a decennial census system and are percent. Rhode Island as a whole is at 48.3 percent, but already experiencing instability as essential or unemProvidence is over ten percentage points lower, at 37.2 ployed workers. "You have to be very direct," Diossa percent. The consequences of a potential Providence said, and stated that the messaging that resonated and Rhode Island undercount are dire: According to most with his community took the form of something the Rhode Island CCC's Get Out the Count Plan, an like, "With your participation, you are allowing us incorrect count would affect the allocation of a third to participate in improving schools, healthcare, and of the state's annual budget. Moreover, Providence roads." County had already undergone a census test run, when As a whole, those most hurt by stay-at-home it served as the Census Bureau's sole guinea pig in orders will be groups without fixed addresses, groups advance of 2020. Its results were dismal, with self-re- that must be physically visited to be counted: Native sponse rates ending up at 52 percent. Some residents communities on rural reservations, people experimay even believe that there is no need to fill out the encing homelessnes, those temporarily staying in 2020 census given their participation last year. others’ homes. As a result, just as much as the census is a statistical examination, it is inevitably a political +++ one. And cities like Providence, with large low-income, minority populations already reeling from the The entire city of Providence is classified by the Bureau economic consequences of COVID-19, will require as a "Hard to Count" census tract, due to factors such more funding and outreach so that the Constitutional as language barriers, low literacy, and a lack of internet mandate for the census is given its due diligence. access. Accordingly, residents of color have been consistently undercounted: In 2010, Rhode Island's +++ Black population was undercounted by 2.6 percent, its Latinx population by 2.1 percent, and its Asian popu- More optimistically, as people adjust to social lation by 0.8 percent. Dr. John Logan, a professor of distancing, new grassroots strategies to perform sociology whose research depends on census data, told online census outreach have been circulating across the College Hill Independent that although inaccurate the nation through social media. The New York
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Immigration Coalition is encouraging the use of Instagram Live to film yourself filling out the census and distribute it across online circles. The Asian American Federation has advocated meeting different racial groups on their commonly used social media applications: WeChat, for the Chinese community and KaKaoTalk, for the Korean community. The Latino Community Foundation has even launched a census-inspired lottery game called “Censotería.” Personally, I have been flooded with Instagram advertisements from the Census Bureau, as well as YouTube advertisements featuring cameos by local Providence personalities: Mayor Elorza, NBC 10’s Mario Hilario, Bekka Berger from Hot 106, and the Big Nazo aliens. On Twitter, dozens of Providence nonprofits blast census infographics everyday, emphasizing the federal funding that goes to their specific arenas of social work. Ultimately, both Dr. Logan and Mayor Diossa emphasized that at the moment, the census is clouded in uncertainty. If census data ends up skewed, the equitable distribution of resources and democracy could be thrown off for the next ten years. In this vein, the 2020 census falls in line with just about every other private and public good and service put into jeopardy over the past month. Towards the end of his interview, Dr. Logan threw this question of uncertainty back onto the Independent. He asked, in regards to reporting on the census, "How do you make your work informative when you have ambiguity?" Perhaps we can look to the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force Leader Dr. Anthony Fauci, who told Vanity Fair regarding the future of our country, "I will say what’s true, and whatever happens, happens."
KION YOU B’20 encourages every single person to get counted, and to tell their friends to do the same.
24 APRIL 2020
GET IT IN WRITING BY Amelia Anthony ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt
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MAXIMALIST JOURNALING IN CRIS AND CALMNESS
cw: abuse, gaslighting If someone you are about to date for a long time mentions that they have previously read their ex’s diary, that may be the only red flag that you will ever need. +++ At home and stationary in quarantine, I cleaned out my bedroom desk, an accumulation of over a decade of childhood and adolescence. Organization has never been my strongest suit. I found stickers and uncapped markers and love letters from my high school boyfriend and tiny bottles of alcohol I hid to throw away later. I also found the stash of old journals that I have been writing as letters to my future self since age five. Dear Journal, they begin in the early periods. I lost my first tooth today :) Mommy was washing my face for school and there it was! I cried. I got a star sticker on the chart (graph). This is really short! Bye, Amelia As I grew up, my daily diary became unrestrained and unlined. Instead of inscribing my life in summaries, I would pick a random page, turn it sideways, and write “poetry.” As the year went by, my journal would become full and cramped, with poems and paragraphs and ephemera scrawled on or glued to each page. Reading my diary from sophomore year of high school is so visceral now, because I was writing with such truth and spontaneity that it conveys exactly what it was like to be 15 in the way that I was 15 then. These snippets form a collection of what it means to be me at each moment in my life. I wrote down everything I wanted to remember, ever. (This is a tendency I’ve never lost.) Lists of my best friends and songs I liked at the time. Everyone I had ever kissed, in chronological order. Compliments that I valued. Secrets I was keeping. Books and movies to read. Jokes to tell and retell. Everything gets written down. I’m not actually a forgetful person. In general, my memory serves me well. Yet something about humankind’s inability to remember everything unsettles me. Growing up and experiencing more of life, especially the good of it, fills me with an anxiety that I will forget even just one thing that has happened to me. So my journals fill up quickly— rendering them maximalist in their inclusion of detail and minutia. This is partially a preventative measure. If you keep meticulous-enough documentation of your actions, of your transgressions and their consequences, rarely will you make the same mistake twice. +++
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I have forgotten a lot of what it was actually like to date the person I dated freshman year of college. The day-to-day details that I left out of my journals are missing. During my healing process, I wished I had kept more accurate notes about everything that happened to me so that when therapists characterized the relationship as abusive I could have empirical evidence to prove to myself that it was. I found it so unbelievable that something like that could happen to me. Naturally, I wanted proof that I had been manipulated so severely. Part of healing after a relationship like this is forgetting. It is about erasing all the evidence: deleting texts, screenshots, photos. It is about letting moments, especially the good ones, fade away with time, both in detail and intensity. Certain streets in Providence and New York City used drip with so much memory that it was physically uncomfortable to walk them alone. It is about taking the time to rewalk them and rewrite them. The other part of healing is remembering—remembering all the steps throughout the relationship that foreshadowed its demise and downfall. And the journal is great for this. When I break up with someone, I create a list of 50 reasons why I hate them. Ranging from things so petty they should never leave the page (picky eater, ugly crier) to deal-breakers that leave me kicking myself (hates women), the list serves as an explicit reminder. I am not sure what to do about the Y situation, is a sentence I wrote in my journal more than once that summer. Endlessly equivocating, I explained away the harm by writing down three sentences of justification for each sentence describing manipulation. Now, I literally could take a red pen and circle the flags. +++
Despite my tendency to attract chaos, nothing I’ve lived through is particularly memoir-worthy. Instead, writing down my life has been largely a private and therapeutic endeavor. I use it to process, reflect, and remember. Journaling is often high on lists of self-care practices. The journal is a nonjudgmental confidant. In times of crisis, I find myself writing in it more. This is, without a doubt, one of the first times where my everyday life has suddenly become extraordinary and decidedly historical. No one except us has lived during a time of national quarantine in contemporary America—which is crazy! With the situations that govern us right now—statistics, regulations, and quarantines—changing on a daily basis, it can be hard to keep up. Creating an accurate documentation and asserting one’s own truth in the midst of all this can be a way to get a handle on it all. Sometimes the absolute truth can be just too much to pen down though, when the weight of one’s world is difficult to synthesize. When it feels this way, I assert that random collecting can be just as worthwhile and rewarding. It also can be easier to write down your daily schedule in bullet points, rant about how terrible the Tiger King and I episode was, or make a list of things to cook with the strange assortment of food in your fridge. This type of journaling is still an accurate and relevant documentation of life right now. Be gentle with yourself and let the details of the everyday pain and truth work their way in when they can. It is difficult to imagine what will be eventually said about this period. Even so, writing it all down a journal is the first, unfiltered step towards being able to see some meaning or pattern. In a world situation where it can feel hopeless to work towards such uncertain ends, writing about life now is a commitment to our future selves. All of it feels so important and historical—so err on the side of including everything. This type of record-keeping can ground us in the present. It is useful for writers and non-writers, forgetters and rememberers. With this in mind, I write more furiously and screenshot every Zoom call I am on. It is easy to sleep or binge-watch away each day, but I try to promise my future self good material, both for writing and for reflection, by paying sharp attention now. AMELIA ANTHONY B’22 sleeps journal next to her pillow.
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This summer I was heading to work on the J train in New York City and received a call from my best friend in Los Angeles. I was alarmed—it was before 6am on the West Coast—so I answered immediately. Sobbing, she choked out a story about meeting up with her ex. The encounter quickly turned sour and toxic. Her ex tried to manipulate her by lying about what had happened moments later, accusing my friend of harm she knew she definitely didn’t do. My friend was terrified—worried about this thing she knew didn’t happen. I told her to do the thing I would do in this situation: write down exactly what you just told me so that you know what is true. A diary, in this way, can be great protection against gaslighting. Keeping a written record of contracts and incidents is always a good idea; get it in writing is too often a lesson learned late. But recording what happened is equally important for remembering what is true for yourself.
FEATURES
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BY Lucy Duda DESIGN Alex Westfall
BRIDGING MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art’s contemporary outpost in Queens, occupies an outwardly unassuming space in a converted school building. The museum’s entrance is a squat structure of grey concrete, an exercise in brutalism so understated that I walked straight past it a few times before realizing I had arrived. But the contents of its cavernous whitewashed galleries on that grey day in February could hardly be described as unassuming. Theater of Operations: Gulf Wars 1991-2011, an ambitious and sprawling exhibition, occupied PS1’s entire building from November 2019 through March 2020, closing right before the wave of institutional shutdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic. This was my final trip to a museum before quarantine, and the experience has stuck with me, not just as a last blast in the outside world (all the way to New York!), but as a rich source of philosophical questions and moral quandaries that I now have time—maybe too much time—to mull over. The United States’ 1991 military engagement in the Gulf War officially lasted only 42 days. But its aftermath, including the war in Iraq from 2003 to 2011, has resonated through the decades, heralding a slew of cultural changes that continue to haunt the world today: increased surveillance, drone warfare, and a 24-hour news cycle that profits off mass hysteria. By presenting an array of works by well-known Western artists alongside the perspectives of Iraqi artists who have received less international renown, Theater of Operations presented a startling juxtaposition of aesthetic and everyday experiences on either side of the continental divide. It charts the war’s divergent trajectories, from sanctions and the looming shadow of violence for artists in the Persian Gulf region to American TV pundits endlessly debating oil and terrorism alongside banal popular culture.The show was rife with contradictions, most visibly the aesthetic contrasts staged intentionally by the curators. But there was also the cognitive dissonance of learning about the war from the comfort of a sterile white box, seemingly detached from the outside world, and an acute awareness of the museum’s own uncomfortable relationship with its artists’ political statements. I spoke with one of the curators, Ruba Katrib, who told me that the curatorial team had several goals for the exhibition. They aimed to highlight the toll of US intervention on the Persian Gulf region both during and after the wars, the transformation of military and media technologies, and the lived experience of Iraqi and Kuwaiti citizens, outside the broad stereotypes familiar to American audiences: “terrorists, oil sheikhs, and women covered in black from head to toe,” in the words of featured artist Nuha Al-Radi. In particular, the curators hoped to bring the work of Iraqi and Kuwaiti artists to the forefront and place them in opposition to Western art-world darlings like Thomas Hirschhorn and Martha Rosler, who have been showered with praise for commenting on the war from a
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safe, intellectual distance. Katrib told me that because of the show’s subject matter, “the art press has not understood the show at all…it’s been the non-art press that has really gotten it.” Several reviews from the art world criticized the exhibit for being too blunt in its messaging, raising a debate about whether art sacrifices aesthetic depth when it pursues polemics. Other reviews have praised the show for giving attention to an under-examined history. However, this recognition of the exhibit’s political nature also invites critics to hold it to a higher standard of ethical scrutiny. MoMA has been embroiled in controversy since it reopened after renovations in October of 2019. In anticipation of the museum’s relaunch, grassroots activists and artists began calling for MoMA board member Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, to divest from ICE contracts, private prisons, weapons manufacturing, and fossil fuels. When Theater of Operations opened at PS1 a month later, 37 artists featured in the exhibition signed an open letter calling for MoMA’s board of trustees to cut ties with its chairman, Leon Black. Black’s company owns Constellis Holdings, formerly known as Blackwater—a defense contractor infamous for its war crimes in Iraq. In the ensuing months, several artists continued to protest by having their work removed from the show. They pointed out the hypocrisy of MoMA mounting an antiwar exhibit without acknowledging its own relationship to American imperialism, demanding to know: how can the museum claim to radically critique recent history while remaining complicit in the present? +++ Walking into the labyrinthine exhibit, I could immediately see the curators’ wide-ranging approach and selections at work. There was a clear attention to sensory balance and catharsis: I first entered a darkened room with a jarring, sensory-overload video installation, followed by a gallery whose wide expanse of smooth white wall was punctuated by small, richly colored etchings of allegorical figures, and elsewhere encountered a palate cleanser of pieces which dated from the era but related only indirectly to the war. One monumental work, Hanaa Malallah’s She/He Has No Picture, occupied a gallery near the entrance, serving as a chronological and emotional anchor. Malallah used burnt and torn canvas scraps to create a mural with portraits of people killed by American laser-guided missiles at a public shelter in Baghdad in 1991. Only 100 of the 408 victims had a photo, so the 308 others are represented instead by their names converted into a string of numbers, each letter replaced by its value in the Arabic system of numerology, interspersed with laser-cut brass plaques that reflect the viewer’s own face. On the opposite wall, black and white geometric drawings by the American conceptual artist Sol
Lewitt complement the somber atmosphere without competing for attention. Lewitt’s signature technique provides detailed, numerical instructions for drawing that can be followed without the artist present, usually drawn directly onto the wall, and eventually erased or painted over. He uses the technical and creative labor of the people remotely assembling his works to play with questions of authorship, standardization, and ephemerality in the way society values art. The two artists face each other across the gallery in monochrome harmony, but the visual dialogue between the works also generates a subtle tension between the personal and mechanized aspects of art and war: who gets the luxury of seeing minimalism, detached rationality, and calculated precision as aesthetic choices, when for others they represent the imminent threat of dehumanizing violence? As the exhibit went on, this affective and philosophical contrast in artists’ relationship to wartime culture became increasingly evident, just as the curators had intended. American and European artists, who experienced the war primarily from a distance, tended to lean into the brash, garish imagery of early-2000s popular culture and political commentary. In his essay “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard argued that the media’s oversaturation with images and discussion of the war—especially its framing as a “war” in the first place, implying a level of organized combat occurring far away from civilian lives—actually prevented people in the West from understanding it as a real and immediate atrocity. In line with Baudrillard’s thinking, the exhibit’s Western artists showcased their understanding of the wars as a site of capitalist corruption and technological alienation, but in doing so contributed to the very information overload their works sought to critique. French photographer Jean-Luc Molène’s La Guerre - 17 janvier 1991 (which translates to War - January 17, 1991), for example, shows a seemingly ordinary day on a Parisian street, with the title and a few subtle splashes of red the only hint of conflict. Similarly, American artist Cory Arcangel’s “Bomb Iraq” is a simple desktop computer game that prompts the player to launch missiles at a blank blob of a country, demonstrating how the impersonality of drones makes it possible to carelessly end lives. These artists sought to confront the war’s banality in everyday European and American life, but simultaneously created new artifacts of that detachment. When they did confront the brutalities of war on the ground, American and European artists overwhelmingly portrayed the violence through the trappings of military technology—armored soldiers, guns, and bombs. Even a work like Tony Cokes’ Evil.16: (Torture.Musik), which places the viewer in a room blasting American rock music at top volume alongside neon lights and projected text, describing and simulating a method routinely used to torture Iraqi detainees, wields its high-tech political commentary like a blunt instrument.
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GULF
MOMA PS1 AND THE ART OF WAR
These detached, sardonic pieces created an uncomfortable dissonance when placed alongside poignant, vulnerable works produced by those living through the wars on the ground. Prominent in Iraqi artists’ work, but almost entirely absent from that of Western artists, was the long period of sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United Nations. The presence of American troops on the ground in Iraq had clearly violent (if unequal) implications for both countries, whereas the sanctions had no effect on Westerners’ access to daily necessities or creative resources. The celebrated Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s massive full-room installation Hotel Democracy, a towering structure comprising two stories of miniature hotel rooms, contemplates democracy’s contradictions from a cerebral distance with the aid of images culled from mass media—along with the luxuries of time, space, funding, and the ability to purchase 44 television sets. The piece radiated an imposing but impersonal gravitas. During the sanctions period in Iraq, however, even pencils could be hard to come by. A new creative medium proliferated known as dafatir, which are small notebooks crammed with drawings, paintings, and collage. Dafatir are portable, easy to conceal, and diaristic, presenting deeply moving personal accounts and explosive imagery with limited space and materials. Some dafatir used accordion-like pages to create a single continuous image and narrative up to five yards long. After viewing works like Hotel Democracy, which had already been displayed and received extensive publicity prior to this exhibit, it was gratifying to see the dafatir accorded due respect and breathing room, fully unfurled and claiming whole galleries to tell their stories. +++ What is the goal of an exhibit like this? Many of the works were visually striking, and the political stance was relatively clear, but for whom and for what did this exhibit happen? Was it an academic exercise? An activist one? If it aimed to speak truth to power, how did it make sure someone was listening? How was it trying (and succeeding/failing) to reach its community in Queens and beyond? I don’t have satisfactory answers to these questions yet, and I don’t necessarily expect the museum to, either. The experiential and social value of museums can’t always be distilled down to rational, practical, or utilitarian answers. But I’ll continue to ask these questions until I begin to get a response that at least approaches satisfactory—which, for now, I can’t quite say about MoMA. A few things stood out alongside the art pieces while I wandered around the exhibition. One was the relative sparseness of labels throughout the show. While the current thinking around gallery text is that “less is more”—that most visitors are more engaged by a brief open-ended description than a lengthy analysis—I was surprised to find that many pieces had no
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
label at all. I was fortunate enough to attend a tour by one of the curators, during which I learned, among many other things, that etchings of a dove that I had taken for granted as a generic peace symbol were in fact a bold antiwar protest for which the artist faced severe consequences. Most of the people at the museum that day seemed to be, like me, part of an academic tour group, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether an unaccompanied visitor would come away with the same contextual understanding. Although visitors can venture over to the bookstore to peruse the exhibit’s companion essay collection, the valuable context it contains is largely absent from the gallery walls. Artwork with labels, artwork without labels, lengthy essays separated from the art—as someone who works in a museum, I realize all this talk risks devolving into fussy industry navel-gazing. But there was one more thing that stood out to me in this exhibition: the periodic appearance of no art and no explanation. That is to say, a blank patch of wall or a dead TV screen with a tiny placard indicating only that “this work has been removed at the request of the artist.” While PS1 has been a sister institution of MoMA since 2000, the staff I spoke to ardently stressed that the two museums have separate boards and governance structures—implying that PS1 has no control over (and is not controlled by) the toxic philanthropy of Fink and Black. However, PS1’s response to protestors reveals the limits of the museum’s autonomy. Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz’s requests that the museum pause his video were repeatedly ignored; when he visited in January to pause it himself and display a statement explaining his decision, the museum quietly removed his sign and restarted the video. Similarly, when artist Ali Yass announced his plan to tear up his drawings, the museum removed them from the exhibition before he got the chance, stating simply that “there are no circumstances under which MoMA PS1 would accept the destruction of artworks.” The museum’s censorship of Iraqi artists protesting the very issues the exhibit claims to confront is particularly disappointing. These incidents also raise further questions about power dynamics in museum spaces, since PS1 is a non-collecting institution (meaning they exhibit artists’ works but do not purchase them), supposedly offering artists ownership of their own creations and a platform for their political voice. Ironically, the exhibition’s run has been an unintentional demonstration of imperialism in action—how difficult it can be for a historically powerful institution to cede the hegemony it is accustomed to holding, even in service of its own stated moral principles.
dispassionate distance created by technological, televised warfare. The striking effect of a tiny notebook unspooled into a tapestry of time and experience, the stark side-by-side juxtapositions of works from opposite sides of the world, and the inescapable physicality of the war as portrayed by Iraqi artists could only be captured by seeing the pieces in a physical, in-person setting. But I also couldn’t escape the feeling that something was missing from the exhibition. Given the museum’s limited hours, there weren’t many visitors that day, and as we all drifted slowly around the cavernous building in a reverential silence, it felt more like a mausoleum than a space for ongoing critique and creation, resting on the laurels of having made a statement. Each time I passed by a blank space with the simple label “this work has been removed at the request of the artist,” I thought about the explanations they could have displayed—the artists’ urgent, ongoing response to the very injustices portrayed throughout the exhibit—and how much more dynamic this would make the exhibit feel. Theater of Operations closed as scheduled—the first weekend of March—but many other exhibits around the world have not been so lucky. What was already a soul-searching moment for museums, which have long approached public engagement with the mindset of “if you build it, they will come,” has been made all the more urgent by the pandemic. Questions about representation, financial ethics, the museum’s responsibility to its local community, and the uncertain future of live arts in a digital age are now impossible to avoid. But the world’s response to the loss of its in-person experiences, and the enthusiasm with which the public has greeted museums’ quarantine outreach projects, provides a clue to a way forward. Museums are at their best when they engage openly and productively with pressing contemporary issues, not simply by holding objects up for display. After all, why should the public trust a museum that argues for its own survival on the basis of art’s political power but won’t even answer to its own artists? If museums want to carve out a role in the 21st century as a worthy home for art, community, and public discourse, they need to demonstrate their value as a space where creative choices can have real, physical and political consequences.
LUCY DUDA B’20 is ghostwriting Baudrillard’s posthumous sequel, “The Pandemic Did Not Take Place.”
+++ Later, scrolling through a PDF of the exhibit catalog, I was struck by how unsatisfying the tiny pixelated images were in contrast to the real thing—especially for an exhibit predicated on breaking down the
ARTS
06
A CONVERSATION WITH SOUND MAKER NICOLÁS JAAR
FIRE FROM ASHES
A twinkling piano riff grows louder as it folds into itself. Soon after, the sound of a human sniffle, the slow creak of a door, a body shuffling about, then settling. The high-pitched keys dissolve into the ambient crackle of a microphone: “Thanks for being here, everyone.” Every noise is so exact that I forget we’re not in the same room, that I’m among 7,000 others on a website typically reserved for streaming video games, listening to a live broadcast by Chilean-American musician, Nicolás Jaar. Raised between Santiago and New York City, Jaar graduated from Brown University in 2012 with a degree in Comparative Literature. He released his first full-length record as a junior, touring the global club circuit on school breaks and assembling songs between exams. Jaar is a prolific creator, and his work resists labels and categories: He has scored a Palm D’Or-winning film; he’s co-produced MAGDALENE, the acclaimed album by vanguard-pop artist FKA twigs. Jaar is curating a residency for sound artists in a converted food storage shack in the West Bank, and under his alias Against All Logic (A.A.L.), conjures tracks that signal the familiar warmth of a dancefloor— the 4/4 beats that instruct bodies to move synchronously as dawn breaks outside. When Jaar releases music under his birth name, however, his tracks drift freely in the space between electronica, sound collage, and ambient noise. Stillness emerges from unconventionally slow beatsper-minute: While a house or techno track will often clock out at an average of 128 bpm, many of Jaar’s songs linger in the cool range of 80 to 100. He insurgently uses samples to probe the political: One song from his 2011 record Space Is Only Noise re-appropriates the oft-misogynistic language of 2000s Latin-American pop, and another from 2016’s Sirens stretches the fluttering chords of ’70s Paraguayan folk harpist Sergio Cuevas. Jaar’s latest album, released March 27, is titled Cenizas. When I asked him to distill the project into a sentence, he characterized it as “a place full of ashes of an old fire, and we still don’t know
SCIENCE+TECH 24 APRIL 2020 07
how to clean up the mess.” “Cenizas” is the Spanish word for “ashes,” an image apt for tracks that merge destruction with regeneration through their whispering, monastic harmonies, dripping, glitched percussion, and Coltrane-infused piano echoes. This same sentiment arises in the record’s lyrics: On the opener “Vanish,” the repeated phrase “Say you’re coming back” evokes with incessance a kind of circular time, one that rejects linear progress. This refusal is revisited on the record’s final song, “Faith Made of Silk,” where Jaar sings “Look around, not ahead / a peak is just the way / towards a descent” over and over again atop a sprinting drumbeat. It’s through these tracks that Jaar confirms the following inquiry as fuel for his work: Can electronic music imagine a new political world? I noticed that to accompany his live-streamed sounds, Jaar broadcasted his computer screen in real-time. While users in the chat function championed the techno scenes of their respective hometowns, a cursor toggled sound levels on Ableton Live, scanned YouTube for footage of quicksand, and sifted through desktop folders. At the close of the two-hour set, Jaar pulled up a clip from a 1985 lecture at the United Nations by philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. I remember the prosody of this moment: Krishnamurti’s urge that “Peace requires a great deal of insight, a great deal of inquiry without condemnation,” rhythmically colliding with the sound of young kids playing and Jaar’s own unreleased, flickering synths. It was then that I understood the virtual space Jaar had created—one in which sonic fragments from across the globe and throughout time converged in one place. Maybe this was electronic music’s power: its capacity to breathe new life into something with a history, to collapse several temporalities and places into one, to broadcast it back to a public scattered across the globe. There was a certain collectivity—as if the sounds we were hearing belonged to nobody in particular and all of us at once. A glimmer of possibility. Nico was generous enough to speak with me from his home in Europe about sonic negative space, learning without a path, and art’s place in unsettling the hierarchies of today.
Jaar: I’ve actually been making music the same way for 16 years. The only big difference recently is that I have worked with some people to create objects that I sample and make sounds with. I can’t call them instruments because it’s a matter of making the objects in order to sample them—not to ‘play’ them. But maybe that’s what’s changed; now I need a kind of alien physicality to what I make music with. I’m getting less and less comfortable referencing the past or distinct musical traditions. (But of course it's very hard not to!) Westfall: There is a sense of movement, place-making, and dislocation in the multilingual lyrics, sonic nods that reach far across the world, and direct references to political histories. What role do landscapes or geography play in your work, and what kind of geography do you hope your music imagines or constructs? Jaar: Whenever I used to try to accurately answer the question ‘where are you from?’ I would get stuck. I’m not American but I was born in [New York]. I’m not Chilean but both of my parents are and I lived there during my childhood. I’m not Palestinian but the Jaar family is. I think things got simpler when I realized that it didn’t have to ‘make sense’—that ‘sense’ itself was maybe the issue to begin with. In my last [live-streamed] set, I played ‘religious’ music from different parts of the world, and also a YouTube clip from [Jiddu] Krishnamurti, who questions the idea of anything sacred “originating in thought or any organization.” He speaks of “truth as a pathless land” which is maybe the best way I can answer your question in regards to 'geography.' I’m very moved by the idea of a ‘pathless land’ when I think of our particularly intense moment of global chaos. We need to learn how to learn without a path.
Westfall: You released the album Sirens just over a month before Donald Trump was elected, and Cenizas came out in the midst of a worldwide public health crisis. I wonder if you think the role of the artist feels significant in times like this, where there’s maybe both a collective sense of chaos and possibility. I am curious if you see music—yours or in general—carrying the +++ function or potential, a responsibility even, that goes beyond the scope of the music itself—and if so, what Alex Westfall: I’d love to know more about your time that might look like to you. at Brown and in Providence. How did your studies and creative practice shape one another? Jaar: I think there are multiple roles an artist or musician can have in a time of crisis. But...when has it not Nicolás Jaar: I was actually speaking with a friend been a time of crisis? from Brown today and I told him that I really regretted Of course, right now is an unparalleled time, but dropping out of this class called ‘Thing Theory’ that we for example, the disproportionate deaths of African shopped together. He stayed in it and it really shaped Americans and Latinos in the US due to COVID-19 his thinking in a beautiful way. Meanwhile, I’m just is the outcome of an ongoing crisis in the health and getting around to reading some of the books from that infrastructure of this country whose foundation is class now! A part of me wishes I had gone deeper into based on racist hierarchies set in place long ago and my studies, actually. It’s hard to realize how special it dutifully maintained over time. The causal chains that all is when you’re there. Little, insignificant things play led us to this moment are just as part of the current much bigger roles than they should, but I guess that’s crisis as the 'current crisis' itself. The inhumanity that just youth…! has supported the country for hundreds of years gets louder in moments like this, but it is just as present Westfall: The periods of silence in many of your tracks in times of 'normality' (a normality we could just call feel meditative, spiritual. What do these moments of 'neoliberal crisis'). stillness signify for you, and how do you approach As far as 'art' is concerned…I have difficulty incorporating this kind of “negative space” when separating art from life: if I was to do so, then there creating something? would be clear boundaries between what I make and who I am. For better or for worse, these boundaries Jaar: I never listen to my own music, but the other do not exist. In 2014-15, when I was making Sirens, I day, spurned by my sixth week in quarantine and frus- was very preoccupied with the rise of fascists movetrated by how Spotify aggregates everything in order ments throughout the globe. After hearing the horrors of popularity and creates playlists with titles like “This of the Chilean dictatorship firsthand during my youth, is X…” I decided to make a kind of ‘selected discog- I was (very naïvely) shocked that these forces could raphy’ playlist of the past 11 years and for the first time gain such grounds in our present times. And so, the I re-listened to some songs from five, seven or even entire record ended up displaying this shock and these 11 years ago. It was a very, very strange experience. preoccupations. I couldn't help it, it was present in all So many of the songs have this moment where every- I read and all I consumed. This is why there are songs thing breaks, fragments, and goes into a vacuum, and about Trump (“The Governor”), Palestine (“Three Sides then it all comes back again but in a different form. It’s of Nazareth”), the Pinochet dictatorship and its legacy comical how many of the songs do this; I didn’t know (“No”), racism against Muslims in the US (“Killing Time”), this. It’s all the same song, over and over again! But and my pessimism about the future (“History Lesson”). maybe this structure is my dream or hope for myself or A year after that record came out, the dystopian for us, to be able to experience complete disintegra- world of Sirens seemed frankly quite 'tame' compared tion and to build something new from a place of calm- to the reality of 2017. This new dystopia—with roots in ness and stillness. very old systems—gave way to something else for me, on a more intimate level. I felt that if I had grown up in a Westfall: Have discoveries in technology affected your society that could end up in such a state, there would production process? I’m curious if working digitally be aspects of its negative energies that also linger offers you something that working in analog can’t—and inside of me. This dissolution of 'inside' and 'outside' is how you might consider both forms in conversation. really what informs Cenizas.
BY Saanya Jain ILLUSTRATION Illustrator DESIGN Designer
To answer your question more directly, I think we, first as humans (and then as artists, or cooks, or engineers, or scientists or whatever we 'do'), have an “infinite responsibility” to question, criticize and topple the cruel hierarchies that make up our contemporary life. The barriers to freedom are monuments violently erected both inside ourselves and outside in the world, and I think the tearing down of one can affect the other. I think art and music can make cracks in the barriers, but not without help. We need entanglements between activism, art, technology, and science if we are to make decisive changes. We need polyphony.
ILLUSTRATION Alex Westfall DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt PHOTO Courtesy of Nico Jaar
first read it at Brown in 2010”: “One name for another, a part for the whole, the ALEX WESTFALL B’20 is learning how to learn without historic violence of Apartheid can always be treated as a path. a metonymy. In its past as well as in its present. By diverse paths, one can always decipher through its singularity so many other kinds of violence going on in the world. At once part, cause, effect, example, what is happening there translates what takes place here, always here, wherever one is and wherever one looks, closest to home. Infinite responsibility, therefore, no rest allowed for any form of good conscience.”
—“Dedication to Chris Hani,” Jacques Derrida, Specters NOTE: Jaar borrows the term “infinite responsibility” Of Marx from a text that has “stayed with [him] ever since [he]
SCIENCE+TECH THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT 08
LOST IN TRANSLATION
BY Leela Berman ILLUSTRATION Yukti Agarwal DESIGN Daniel Navratil
Two comprehensive reports researching the conditions in the Providence Public School District (PPSD) came out in 2019. In June, researchers at John Hopkins University released a report that outlined how the school district inadequately supports students, which led to the state takeover of the Providence public schools and a flurry of action and events at Brown University to consider the role the University might play in supporting the public school system. A year earlier, in 2018, the Providence Public Schools were notified by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that the district was in violation of the Equal Education Opportunities Act by failing to effectively identify and support English language students. In response, the then-School Commissioner requested that the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) investigate the situation for English learners in the PPSD and provide suggestions for realizing the standards outlined in a settlement with the DOJ. The CSCS produced a report focused specifically on the quality of education, support for, and identification of English learners in PPS, and noted that supporting English learners was a persistent and long-term need in the PPSD. Much like the John Hopkins Report, which harkened back to a 1993 report entitled “Providence Blueprint for Education” (PROBE), the CSCS report followed up on a 2012 study completed by the Council. The 2012 report warned that the school district was underprepared to support English Language Learners (ELLs). Not much had changed by 2019. It is easy to get lost in the language of these reports, which focus especially on “instructional, staffing, and fiscal issues” to meet DOJ compliance. Shifting between legalese and statistics, they construct a narrative of achievement— one focused on “measured” success as defined by meeting a series of criteria as measured by the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) ACCESS for ELLs exam. The CGCS report, and English language learners in general, are absent from many articles about the recent school takeover. This is true despite the fact that about one-third of students in the PPSD are English learners—as opposed to about one-tenth of students nationwide—reflecting a long-standing erasure of English learners within media and government attention on schools. Despite the importance of understanding how the city is caring for its ELL students, the CGCS report’s sole focus on improving exam-based English achievement ignores the fact that multilingualism itself—fluency and comfort in multiple languages and cultures—can be an asset and a victory. The current focus on language learning is one that seeks equity, but English-learning students are still invisible in larger political and educational conversations. Pushing past the framework of achievement raises the questions: what would a critical model of language pedagogy look like? Is English language learning assimilation? Amidst a global pandemic and widespread reliance on remote learning, what does language learning look like? English Learning has been institutionalized in Providence and beyond, and that very institution is in flux and requires adaptation—during the pandemic and after.
EMERGING: The language Language Learning
of
English
The institution of English learning first emerged as a legal one. The 1967 Bilingual Education Act was the first federal act to recognize the specialized needs of students who were not fluent in English and was inextricably connected to the Civil Rights movement and the push for educational rights. The fights against school segregation and linguistic discrimination went hand-in-hand. The 1974 Supreme Court
09
METRO
PROVIDENCE PUBLIC SCHOOLS, MULTULINGUAL PEDAGOGY, AND THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS
ENTERING: The language of achievement and deficit
case Lau v. Nichols determined that schools denied a “meaningful opportunity” to students who could not speak English, violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and in turn, that schools must provide these students with supplemental learning. The Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 prohibited discrimination and required that schools take action to support equal participation. In the span of a decade, it was made clear at the national level that the language barrier rendered education unequal: students who did not know English were being taught in English. The ‘simple’ solution was to support students in learning English. How is this task carried out within the confines of a school district? Everything on the PPSD website is listed in both Spanish and English. There is no button to translate—all information is already bilingual. The district refers to an array of students as Multilingual Learners, who are reached by a variety of programs. There are four English as a Second Language (ESL) programs for varying levels of English ability and two bilingual programs, which allow students whose native language is Spanish to learn in Spanish and English simultaneously. Not all of these models are available at every school, forcing some families to make complex choices about whether to travel an excessive distance to find a school that meets their needs. Furthermore, these models are not complete: there has been some debate in recent years, for example, about whether PPSD should create a separate bilingual program for Portuguese speakers. These programs attempt to reach a vast multilingual community with a wide variety of different languages and needs. The day-to-day of these programs might look different at each school, but one thing is the same across Rhode Island: the examination used to identify English learners and score the “level” of English learning the students have achieved. The exam is called ACCESS for ELLs, and places people into five levels of a sociocultural context: entering, emerging, developing, expanding, bridging, or reaching. Because this exam assesses the language
proficiency of students, it is also the assessment used to measure the effectiveness of the programs. According to the CGCS report, many English learners are still at the ‘developing’ level after seven years in the program. The equality dreamed up in the ‘60s has yet to be fully realized—and just last year, a group of Rhode Island republicans tried to make separate “language academies” for ESL students in an ordinance that was undeniably segregationist. The silencing of ESL students and the erasure of their programs perpetuate a racialized and linguistically-ordered hierarchy of education, one that continues to this day. At the end of one data set, the CGCS report states: “23 schools—more than half of all schools in PPSD—had enough ELs enrolled to warrant substantial instructional, staffing, and financial attention.” However, the report concludes that despite the huge presence of students learning English in the PPSD, “For all intents and purposes, about one-third of the district’s enrollment is invisible.”
24 APR 2020
DEVELOPING: improvement
The
language
of
I worked in a bilingual classroom as part of a Brown University tutoring program earlier this year, working once a week with a handful of third graders on math. On the first day, I did not know I had been assigned to a bilingual classroom and expressed concern to the teacher about whether I could effectively tutor, given that I am not completely fluent in Spanish. She reminded me that math itself is a language, that it was just important that the students learned the math. This teacher’s comment is important: multilingual students are not just learning English, they are also learning a wide array of subjects and adapting to the social contexts of their school environment. The students I was working with loved that they knew more Spanish than I did, which served as a reminder: they were developing the skills to go to school in two languages. In the post-state-takeover world, teachers have been an immediate focus, because they can support students even in a system that still needs longer-term fixing. A new program announced by RIDE will try to address the need for ESL teachers. This program provides reimbursement for Providence teachers to receive ESL certification, and four colleges— Rhode Island College, the Rhode Island School for Progressive Education, Roger Williams University, and the University of Rhode Island—committed to providing seats for Providence teachers in their programs. While Brown has a Masters of Arts in
Portuguese Bilingual Education or ESL Education and Cross-Cultural Studies, it does not provide actual certification for educating at either the elementary or secondary level. While teachers can be a key resource in combating the structural administrative, funding, and staffing issues that lead to the ostracizing of multilingual students, they cannot be the sole means of supporting English Language Learners.
EXPANDING: The language of critical pedagogy In the essay “How to Tame A Wild Tongue,” Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa writes: “Attacks on one’s form of expression with the intent to censor are a violation of the First Amendment. El Anglo con cara de innocente nos arrancó la lengua. Wild tongues can’t be tamed,
they can only be cut out.”
learning are a necessity for institutional and political equity.
She details how when she was in school, she would be yelled at by teachers for not speaking “American,” BRIDGING: The language of coronavirus despite coming from a family that has lived in the support Americas for far longer than the United States border has been defined. Language is political. For many Equity has become a prominent conversation during years before and after the first court cases and legisla- the global pandemic, and the PPSD is no exception. The tion about language and education, English fluency for district immediately transitioned to remote learning, students who spoke other languages was the political with substantial thought put into supporting emergent and pedagogical goal for educators, legislators, and bilinguals. Soljane Martinez, Educational Coordinator even some families. For many, this meant that English at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, wrote learning, be it in an ELL program or in the everyday, to the Independent: “As you can imagine, a district was a border regime which could lead to linguistic that large, having to shift EVERYTHING online in loss and, in Anzaldúa’s eyes, cultural destruction. In a matter of days is no easy feat—and they have done some ways, this story of linguistic loss is personal—my an AMAZING job.” The Annenberg Institute is mother came to the United States from Mysuru, India supporting the district with “translation of resources when she was five years old. Over the years, she lost and materials in a variety of languages that the district the ability to speak kannada, which she spoke fluently simply does not have the people power to provide,” and then. Although she by no means considers this cultural hoping to use the many languages spoken by students, destruction, it is clear that linguistic assimilation was staff, and faculty to collaborate. Martinez emphasized the goal. that “there are very specific languages needed...If we One theoretical shift in considering and naming could get even one person from each language to come students who are learning English suggests a pathway forward and volunteer to help, we'd be ensuring that forward for linguistic equity, as opposed to expecting EVERY family of PPSD was receiving timely commuassimilation to English. Ofelia García, a leading nication and resources in their native language.” This scholar in the field of multilingual education, believes highlights one of the complexities of supporting a that bilingual students can be viewed as a resource multilingual population—even if many of the multirather than a deficit, and that viewing learning English lingual students and their families speak Spanish, not as a deficit means English language learners are all of them do, and all students must be supported. A ignored and under-resourced. In her seminal work, district hotline allows for three-way translation. she suggests a new name: “Calling...children ‘emerThe Multilingual Learning Team for the district gent bilinguals’ makes reference to a positive charac- could not be reached for comment, but the website teristic—not one of being limited or being learners… for distance learning indicates that English learning the term emergent bilinguals refers to the children’s will be supported in part via software like Imagine potential in developing their bilingualism; it does not Español, Imagine Learning, and Rosetta Stone. The suggest a limitation or a problem in comparison to distance learning website is comprehensive and those who speak English.” Growing up in a multilin- details a series of plans for a minimum of 330 minutes gual family, navigating between multiple languages of instructional learning each day, including “English and cultures, and the practice of processing multiple language development for multilingual students.” languages are skills of cultural import. While “emer- “Multilingual learner supports” is one of the four main gent bilingual” is not used within the Council of Great categories on the distance learning website, and many City Schools report, one might see the “multilingual of the supports are focused on providing resources students” umbrella on the PPSD website as gravitating and information about the crisis and school updates toward the emergent bilingual theory, as are the bilin- in as many languages as possible. Just like how there gual development classes that some schools offer. is a gap between the theory and practice of equitable Furthermore, emergent bilinguals can develop a language learning, there will likely be gaps—and sense of critical consciousness, if education considers improvisations—in this proposed method and how to deeply how language and culture are politicized. The best support multilingual students during this time. It United States, which so often exploits immigrants will rest on the many involved parties—teachers, famiwhose families have lived here much longer than lies, school administration, and translators—to bridge the US settler-colonial project has existed, has no this divide. official national language. One only needs to look up “speaking Spanish in public” and scroll through REACHING: The language of possibility a stream of videos of people harassing others for speaking in Spanish to see, however, that this proc- This article grapples with a series of questions that lamation does not translate into lived experience. do not fit into the conventional model of achieveLanguage becomes a form of racialized control, a way ment-focused understanding. In the reports, in legisof establishing economic and social borders within the lative histories, and in movements toward educational nation’s constructed physical borders. equity both past and present, it becomes clear that Back in the third grade classroom, a map of the from theory to practice, practice to examination, law United States hung prominently on the wall. Students to situation, and expectations to reality, much gets lost congregated in the room at the end of the day, gath- in translation. ering their backpacks and then looking up, seeing As with many other issues of educational equity, the map. They began pointing to the places—off the despite the “on paper” ideals of multilingual educamap—where their families were from. One noticed tion, emergent bilinguals continue to be dismissed and that Puerto Rico wasn’t on the map. It is not only ignored. At the same time, many efforts—such as the emergent bilinguals who are made invisible, but also effectiveness of a dedicated teacher, a philosophical their sociocultural backgrounds, as they often must re-framing of language learners as “emergent bilinnavigate multiple cultures, places, and communities. guals,” or ensuring all families receive coronavirus These absences are felt profoundly. Perhaps schools information in a language they are comfortable with— are afraid of reckoning with these absences, of opening continue to push forward. In Providence, however, the language with which they teach and learn to some- structural and financial upheaval is required to thing more than just achievement. These absences completely support these efforts. are one more “gap” perpetuated in a school system It is difficult to predict what will happen post-corofounded on segregation and inequity. navirus, when schools reopen and RIDE begins to Conversations about emergent bilinguals so often move forward with fulfilling the DOJ settlement from focus on their achievement or their deficits, their invis- 2018, in which RIDE agreed to effectively identity and ibility or their unknowability. Often, conversations in support English-learning students. What is clear is that the media ignore the complicated process of learning emergent bilinguals are an essential part of conceptuEnglish, and how that can be culturally loaded. alizing a changed PPSD and thinking past the language In the CGCS report, one refrain was that “prin- of achievement. Now, their success, like that of many cipals are worried that ELs will affect the achieve- students, is judged by their exam-based proficiency. ment scores of their schools.” This belies the fact that They are institutionalized and legalized. Online, it is to effectively grapple with speaking two languages easy to find articles listing language-learning apps one (or more!) is an achievement within itself, and that can use to learn a new language during quarantine, but rewarding schools based on achievement leads to the shockingly harder to find stories of those categorized perpetual underfunding and intentional ignoring as English learners within schools. They should be of the most marginalized communities. Instead, sidelined no longer. “achievement” must be expanded to see that emergent bilingualism and a critical pedagogy of English One day, LEELA BERMAN B’23 will have a conversation with her grandparents in kannada.
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METRO
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O, IT'S O, It’s Manifold I. They embalmed all the women in one Museum. Critics write, What a surfeit Of hidden beauty! Competence pulses Through limbs, loins. Exhibit 3b reveals Quality that derives only from repeated Effort. Thin red strokes juxtaposed with More elliptical hues of purple, blue— Expertly placed to jolt you. II. Our skeletons were entombed By fats and flesh and anything Brainless. Heaps and heaps of Adipose tissues made metallic
My God, it’s Skeletal Poolside with his mother I reminisce His pelvic anchor. My buoyant ribs. Brains a-whir to keep the meat fresh, Our bodies twirl helically, tendrilled. Somewhere inside are golden bones— Hopelessly stiff as voraciously honed. Blueprinted. Before long we’ll sicken Of fleshy gymnastic and resort to the Skeleton. Exhaust every monomer of Collagen, neutralize every eighth ion Of calcium carbonate, sabotage its Restriction to the frame. Taste our Marrows, nutty, swish it all into our Salivas, sit by the pool a while.
By one too many sick children Masquerading with chalice in Hand. Brimmed by reception Of touch, language. Swallow.
III. A displacement. Cotton, perhaps. By the centimeter, two milliseconds elapsed. Fellatio has too many syllables. One.
Pterodactyl Girl 90 miles per hour romanticize our Windows, blissful, whisking fistful By fistful the palette once painted: Trees and shrubs, pedestrian hugs, Child shoelaces undone. Time yet To begin satanic blasphemy upon The back—shortest distance twixt Two points: tail bone and tippy top Vertebrae. 20 years added, 30 some Subtracted. Two metal bars collapsing Pterodactyl wings. Her brain sings, Makes Lysergic Acid Diethylamide Worth something.
11 LITERARY
BY Natalie Zummer ILLUSTRATION Alana Baer DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt
24 APR 2020
MANIFOLD POEMS AND FLASH FICTION
Roo Bas I’m in line for coffee with a beautiful woman who holds her head in a way I have never held mine, maybe could never hold mine, and there are 62 cents in my bank account. When she orders a tea I have never heard of, something that sounds like Roo Bas, it makes me want to cry, because for a split second I see my chin tilted a little higher and the Roo Bas that I bought is in my hand and I’m okay.
time it’s there it’s already not, and he is left, again, to sleepless imaginings. An Exhibit They embalmed all the women in one museum. Now the critics are crying, O, what unfound beauty! O, what an ode to the pulverized raspberry! O, what divine mimicry of this incomprehensible galaxy! Purple! Blue! Red! O, how it roils!
Colostrum The neighbor eats onions when he is sad. He’s always Lemons chop-chop-chopping, rattling our forks and skewing Her hand and my thigh are doing the thing that our paintings. He must think the real tears syncing hands and thighs do on dates. Maybe we’re on one, up with the onion tears will amount to tears in the because when she tells me something about lemons middle, less sad. The logic isn’t bad. I find it very very amazing even though it’s not. I can still taste the meringue she fed me across the table, Sometimes his misery bleeds through the wall and and I’m still blissfully ignorant of the fact that she’s into our dinner. Last night, we tasted loneliness in already started to believe—I mean truly believe— the green beans and resentment in the potatoes. His that we are creatures of parallel galaxies, condemned anxiety about the afterlife spiced the entire meal. to miss each other over and over forever, our love so heartbreakingly close to shattering that parallelism, Tonight, my kids are crying. The months I nursed their even though we’ve only been on the one date with lungs ring in the pitch. I sink into it, the way I sunk the lemons. into their infant ribs buzzing my nipples with purpose. They cried, so I didn’t. They cry, so I don’t. I think The Hug about the neighbor, how he is alone, has no one not He hasn’t slept for weeks because he imagines it in to cry for. bed: what little circumference he’ll need to envelop you, your 63.5-inch stature perfect to masquerade scalp whiffs. Most nights he gets anxious, because none of it is sure. Every fifth night he forces himself to picture your Don’t touch me body language as a sort of exposure therapy. Otherwise, he likes to think about his hands—the left cradling a shoulder blade (to know your skeleton), the right pressing the small of your back (to know your flesh), the number of seconds (3) he can keep one on your ass before he won’t be able to deny it was ever there. By the
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
12 LITERARY
BY Iryumugaba Biko ILLUSTRATION Alex Westfall DESIGN Sara Van Horn
THE EFF AND THE ANTICOLONIAL STRUGGLE It has been nearly three decades since Black people in South Africa emerged victorious from the bitter struggle against apartheid through a social movement spearheaded by the African Nation Congress (ANC), the party of Nelson Mandela. Mandela, who spent 27 years in jail for resisting an oppressive racist regime, is remembered for leading a peaceful transition of power from the white Nationalist Party of Fredrik Willem de Klerk of South Africa to the now-centrist ANC by championing a program of unity and reconciliation. However, the impact of Mandela’s decisions has reignited a divisive debate in South Africa over whether he made the right choice by opting for land reform over repatriation during this historic transition. The land reform policy asked millions of Black people to put in more time and labor by filing claims for compensation, and those who had no land had to wait for the government's programs of land redistribution. This is where Mandela made the compromise, for the burden that was to be shared by both Black and White people was left to the Black people. While the security of property ownership was guaranteed for whites—meaning they practically had to do nothing to maintain their properties—who acquired them through colonialism and apartheid systemic displacement, economic freedom relied either on faith and patience or injecting more time and labor for Black South Africans who had undergone 400 years of white terror. As early as 1995, for instance, people like Dr. Henrik Clarke, professor and pioneer in the creation of Pan-African and African studies, were raising questions about Mandela and ANC’s land reform. Clarke exclaimed in one of his speeches that he remained “a little less enthusiastic about Nelson Mandela, for he has never asked for land.” Indeed, Nelson Mandela never asked for land. For Clarke, land is the basis of the nation. In making an inventory of nationhood that contains the hopes, aspirations, and dreams of Black people as well, land is of great importance. If land is not available for Black people to cultivate, build on, mine, or rent, how could they flourish in a territory that is economically hostile to them? +++ That Black South Africans who are indigenous to the African land cannot live in a country that feels foreign to them is what Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) seeks to confront. Colonization was a process of violent cultural and physical confrontation between European settlers and indigenous Black South Africans. The process of economic oppression and displacement created alienation that was characterized by extreme living conditions that undermined the humanity of Black South Africans. It is this alienation that oppresses the ego, that sense of self-satisfaction that inhibits every soul, that EFF deems the root cause of most problems. In the EFF understanding of core problems of South Africa, land is central because it is a marker of justice, the ultimate restoration of African pride. According to Floyd Shivambu, the deputy president of the EFF, “the problem with the ruling party is that they say the problems are inequality, poverty,
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WHAT CAN STUDENTS LEARN FROM SOUTH AFRICA'S FASTEST GROWING POLITICAL MOVEMENT?
starvation, and joblessness. But those are the symptoms. The root problem is landlessness.” Mr Floyd’s articulation re-affirms Frantz Fanon’s assertion in his book The Wretched of the Earth that “for a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all dignity.” It comes as no surprise, therefore, that some young South Africans claim that Mandela was bought out by Oppenheimer and the South African industrialist and mining magnate, among other white businessmen. Some argue that he sold out because of a sense of hopelessness resulting from his 27 years in prison, while others maintain that the decision he made was intended to preserve the social fabric of South African society. The EFF carefully avoids naming Mandela as a “sellout.” The EFF believes that Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Winnie Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and Walter Sisulu can fight to a certain point and it is up for the generation to follow to pick up from where they halted. The fact that Mandela’s wisdom and decision are now being questioned, however, reveals the deeply entrenched conditions of economic inequality that have persisted in South Africa until today. White South Africans who only make up 8.9 percent of the population still own 72 percent of the land. The ANC, which had originally promised to redistribute 30 percent of the land within five years, has only redistributed 8 percent after 25 years. In addition to the recent resignation of Jacob Zuma, the former ANC President of South Africa, who was acquitted on charges of corruption and embezzlement of people’s funds, this failure of redistribution only highlights the systemic abuse of power and mismanagement of resources that has plagued the country for decades. This unresponsiveness created a political vacuum that needed to be filled. +++ “Expansion is everything,” once said Cecil Rhodes. “I would annex the planet if I could.” Imperialism and colonialism mark what Europeans call “expansionism through discovery.” This expansionism signified different realities for the colonized individuals: invasion and displacement. The economic system that justified ownership and expansionism was private ownership financed by European credit markets in partnership with the European state-financed Catholic missionary. When Christopher Colombus
and his successors set in motion a violent pattern that initiated the transatlantic slave trade, and when European leaders met in Berlin in 1884-85 to carve Africa into nations (with a new notion of national sovereignty), they were initiating a process that would create conditions for the expansion of European states. The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in her book On the Origin of Totalitarianism that imperialism assumes that “without the imperialist expansion for expansion's sake, the world might never have become one. Without the bourgeoisie political device of power for power’s sake, the extent of human strength might never have been discovered.” This logic is at the heart of the logic of imperialism and colonialism. The assumption deeply ingrained in this imperialist sense of reality is problematic for two reasons. First, the doctrine of economic growth is predicated on the idea that future resources are unlimited. How did economics, the discipline created to manage scarce resources, end up with a doctrine that assumes that those resources are unlimited in the future? This is the primary contradiction of imperialism. By trusting that the future will yield more than the present, governments and banks can circulate money that would be made from selling increased production of the future to finance current investment. Financing growth with future resources only keeps nations in permanent states of debt, and the unlimited injection of money into the economy is concerning to say the least. Second, even if future resources were unlimited, at what point should the expansion of production and property end? The EFF takes a stand against imperialism because this force is responsible for the misery of most South Africans and Africans in general. It is currently embedded in neo-liberal policies put forth by the Reagan and Thatcher cult that emerged in the ruins of the Soviet Union that advocated for less state intervention. This cult was threatening nations of Africa with words like “Privatize or Perish” or “There is no alternative.” This irresponsible economic practice that sought to minimize the role of the state in regulating economic activities has been beneficial for imperialists while condemning the greater majority of poor and oppressed people. The insidious role of imperial power is integral to the occupation and displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank. British imperialists in partership with Zionist forces are also key cases of how this force manifests. The EFF recognizes that to be successful, it must ally with other social movements against the economic and racial injustice perpetrated
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by global imperialism. It is also this process of “expansion” that paved the way for increased European influence and for capitalists like Cecil Rhodes, whose influence remains in De Beers (a company that he founded) and a network of minders such as Lonmin, which has monopolized the network of diamond markets. Cecil Rhodes, the diamond magnate and an ardent believer in British imperialism, was on the forefront of creating colonies that later became nations and reinforced the pattern of exploiting Black South Africans. The mines he annexed are still being controlled by his companies. +++ In the context of a lack of accountability and imperial annexation in Africa, particularly in the South, the emergence of the EFF as one of the most dynamic political movements of South Africa—and perhaps even all of Africa—is but a small surprise. The main objective of this Marxist-Leninist-Fanonian political party is to achieve economic freedom for South Africa within a generation. To do this, the group demands the repatriation of land from the white South African minority to the Black majority without compensation and by nationalizing key sectors of the economy such as mining. The policy aims to reflect the demographic representation of the nation. EFF believes it is unjust that Black people comprise more than 80 percent of the population but own less than 20 percent of the land. Moreover, the EFF is determined to fight the monopolization of power and economic resources by white Europeans. The struggle for national independence in Africa diminished the power of European direct influence and physical occupation. In many cases, including South Africa, the power moved from the hands of white minorities to political parties founded and run by Africans. This simultaneously took place under the tension of the Cold War where African countries became battle grounds for powerful nations. In South Africa, the struggle lasted even longer, for the ANC attained its victory in 1994. Twenty-five years after apartheid, conditions for Black Africans have still not improved, especially in relation to the hopes and sacrifices of freedom fighters who lost their lives to attain this change. Instead, this inaction and oppressive conditions have led to the terrifying growth of political parties and have created a class of African elites who represent the extension of the capitalist financial global system—led by America and other imperialist nations such as Britain, China, and France. The EFF understands this power struggle through the Marxist lens of class struggle. The voting base for the EFF is the alienated communities who receive neither adequate political representation nor equitable financial compensation for their labor. Capitalists who control the means of production—such as diamond mines, media, and pharmaceutical companies— continue to exploit workers while undermining their contribution to the success of the company on the whole. Workers are deemed insignificant even after paying with their lives. In 2012, for example, the EFF gained momentum for standing up against the South African government and its attendant police force that shot 34 mine workers dead. These workers of the Marikana platinum mine were protesting against Lonmin, a mining company headquartered in London. They were requesting a doubling of their wages from $500 to $1,000. After the South African police fired on the unarmed protesters, the company only increased the workers salaries from $500 to $575. One of the major shareholders of this company is the current president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa. The merging of European capital and exploitative corrupt African elites, as exemplified by Ramaphosa’s involvement in Lonmin, is the dynamic that the EFF seeks to challenge. As reflected by the history of South Africa, race also plays a big role in this struggle. The fact that white people in South Africa comprise less than 10 percent of the population yet control almost 80 percent of South Africa’s economy is unacceptable. This continual ownership of property and resources was not shaken by
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
the fall of the apartheid regime. The EFF believes that this racial injustice must be fought. In his book Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist and political philosopher from Martinique, contended that “if there is an inferiority complex, it is the outcome of a double process: primarily, economic—subsequently, the internalization—or, better, the epi-dermalization—of this inferiority.” Fanon argues that the economic disparities—rooted in historical colonial practices—create conditions of inferiority for the Black people who internalize them. Because the acquisition of property happened through theft and negligence, correcting injustice necessitates giving the land back to its rightful owners: the Black people of South Africa. +++
about 831 protesters were arrested. But the decolonial work does not end in schools. These social movements and student leaders go beyond university halls; it’s a struggle for life and for the freedom to participate in the economy that they ought to call their own. For these students, EFF provides hope in the struggle to liberate the colonized people of the world. Moreover, what draws many students, including myself, to EFF is not only Malema and his militant, charismatic appeal but rather the movement’s ability to articulate the exploitative conditions of the workers and the pressing demands of students. The EFF movement also offers a nuanced articulation of intersecting systems of oppression to the intellectual left. The left must consider EFF as a potential base for its ability to articulate a position that takes into account white supremacy, predatory capitalism, patriarchy, and the demands of youth and the poor, who have been alienated by the white monopoly capital that controls land and capital in South Africa and many other places across the world. For young political activists today, the question of how to define decolonial movements—and on what frontier of power these movements should focus their energy—remains pressing. As Frantz Fanon once declared, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it.” With the rising fears, anxiety, and distrust that have accompanied the coronavirus pandemic and its attendant economic meltdown, the expectations are that the world must emerge from this nightmare changed. The EFF offers us a living example of a social movement that situates decolonialism within a crucial economic context.
The EFF movement is led by Julius Malema, a political and economic activist and politician who was once a protegee of Jacob Zuma (whom he later helped impeach) while he was a youth leader in the ANC (which, according to an ANC report, fired him). But the movement is not about Malema; it is made up of a coalition of students and youths across South Africa. In a speech at the Oxford Union, the largest and perhaps most famous debating society, Malema was asked whether he should change his message, which many new commentators and Western pundits call radical, to appeal to a broader audience. His response was unexpected. “We won’t change the message,” he said. “Why change the message that works?” According to Malema, the EFF knows its constituency. Most of Malema’s coalition is made up of youth who were on the forefront of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, a student run organization that originated from Cape Town University, that sought to bring down Cecil IRYUMUGABA BIKO B’21 does not believe that Rhodes’s statue on university campuses. Its main goal, “expansion is everything.” beyond removing symbolic statues, was to expose the institutional racism and colonialism in South African higher learning institutions. University students requested that the statue be taken down, for it symbolized the colonial legacy and celebrated the European imagination. The Rhodes Must Fall movement evolved into Fees Must Fall, a movement of students demanding free and decolonial education that challenges the fundamental structural premises upon which their curriculum was based. The majority of the students involved in Fees Must Fall were expelled and
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gold, alone on finding beauty in moments of solitude I took a photo of the crown before I knew what it meant. It looked like a flimsy grade-school art project, something my younger cousin crafted out of old Amazon boxes on a restless snow day. I could imagine her using safety-guarded scissors to transform the ordinary into something regal, like watching a frog become a prince or Sleeping Beauty awaken. I was in Manhattan for the weekend with my friend Julia, who thought that both of us enrolling in visual art classes warranted a trip to the Museum of Arts and Design. “How do you think this cardboard crown wound up in a glass display case?” I wondered out loud. Julia laughed, accustomed to my lack of attention to detail, and pointed to the plaque below. The crown, it turned out, was not constructed out of cardboard at all. It was made entirely of gold, down to the staples carelessly piecing it together. Meaning collects in an object as a result of materiality and intention, the plaque reminded me. Disguising gold as cardboard had eclipsed its value— its meaning—entirely. A solid-gold crown is worn by monarchs, deities. A cardboard crown is worn by my Kool-Aid-stained cousin. A crown is not a hat, not a halo. Meaning ascribed. Economists have been grappling with this so-called “Paradox of Value” for ages now. Originally presented by philosopher Adam Smith in the late 18th century, the contradiction asks why gold, a commodity without intrinsic value, is more expensive than water, an element essential to life. According to economists, water is in such high supply around the world that the value of an additional unit of water for any given person is low, whereas the opposite is true for gold. According to the plaque, gold influences all opinions, blinding us to content and form. But I think it is because beauty is necessary to our survival, as well. Throughout my life, this belief has manifested itself in a variety of ways. Last year I took one of those “Strengthsfinder” tests to figure out what meaning I had, or perhaps to reassure myself I had any at all. I rated a series of statements on a scale from “Very Much Like Me” to “Very Much Unlike Me,” and an algorithm spat out my “Strengths Profile,” which listed 34 of my top strengths. My primary strength was not one I was expecting; as my friends’ results read “Courage” or “Love,” mine was “Appreciation of Beauty.” Noticing and appreciating beauty, excellence, and/or skilled performance in various domains of life, from nature to art to mathematics to science to everyday experience. I felt cheated, almost embarrassed to tell my friends, as I feared being perceived as shallow or materialistic. I tried to reflect upon the moments that had played to this strength, and slowly began to realize they were nearly all spent alone. Perhaps it wasn’t that I was attached to beauty in a trivial sense, but rather, ascribing beauty in moments of solitude allowed me to find meaning when no one else was there to provide it.
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+++ At first, being alone is “good,”—necessary, even. I’m told it’s especially good for women. Not only is it important for us to be independent, we need to prove that we are, constantly. When I was young, any glimmer of newly ripe independence was remarkable. It felt like licking ice cream cones on the porch of the shop on Michigan Avenue, driving a few friends across town, making bad decisions I felt proud were finally my own. Later, it felt like downloading maps on my phone before taking a bus deep into the Panamanian jungle, successfully navigating my course, once again proving my self-sufficiency. But as I grew older, the novelty dried up, blurring the line between independence and loneliness. Now, it often feels more rotten than ripe— like doing taxes, or the week-old bag of spinach decomposing in my fridge, slowly melting into a smelly slime. This loneliness is a muscle of mine, surely underutilized. I decided to flex it by moving to Sweden for a semester. (A young woman moving across the world in a desperate attempt to recreate herself? How original!) A week before my flight, I ordered a few items from Glossier, an online makeup shop that boasts products for enhancing your natural features and being OKAY with yourself, TODAY! Maybe I could get that ripe independence back, nicely packaged in a bottle for only $16.99! I fantasized about visiting art galleries while wearing pale gold eyeliner, how chic I would appear in coffee shops with a full, glossy lip. I am well aware this is the exact type of vanity Glossier has capitalized on: milky white oils and pink, gelatinous formulas substituting for new beginnings. As I landed in unfamiliar territory, I thought about how this sudden urge to enhance my natural features implies that there’s something to be enhanced in the first place. That, perhaps, beauty is best interrupted. +++ When I first arrived in Sweden, I decided to limit the number of photographs I took. I did not want to spend time capturing my life through a lens when I could spend it being present, intentional, taking in all the beauty for myself. This decision was absolutely grounded in a desire to escape the stereotype of my generation: we spend too much time living through screens and seeking validation through likes. This critique is neither novel nor unjust. In her essay collection On Photography, Susan Sontag writes that “needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.” Interpreting her words as a cautionary tale—a challenge, even—I proclaimed myself present. I will confirm my own reality, thank you very much. At the Moderna Museet, I imagined that each painting I passed was crafted from pure gold, just like
the crown I saw in New York. At first, it was thrilling to believe I was the sole beholder of such scarce beauty, the kind a photograph could compromise. I worried that a photograph would take the solid gold I saw before me and morph it into flimsy cardboard, making my sacred experience something all too readily shared. As Sontag notes, “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” I did not want to spread this moment thinly amongst my Instagram followers, or anyone who could have shared in this beauty, evaporating its value altogether. But this strange strand of greed did not serve me for long. +++ In my Scandinavian art and architecture class, I learned about Stendhal syndrome, a psychosomatic condition induced when individuals have been exposed to excessive amounts of beauty. Characterized by a rapid heartbeat, fainting, confusion, and hallucinations, this peculiar affliction was named after French author Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name, Stendhal. After visiting Florence, he was flooded with such profound emotion that he found himself “in a sort of ecstasy.” In his journal, he described the experience as an “absorption in the contemplation of sublime beauty,” which eventually became so powerful it consumed every part of his being. Solemnly, he wrote, “Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.” It was all too much. While Stendhal noted that his condition allowed everything to “speak so vividly” to his soul, I felt as though everything was escaping mine. I thought my loneliness was sharp enough to define my voice, but instead it had evaporated it. The craving for shared presence—for someone to tell me what it all meant— had become so ferocious, so human, that it deafened, the same way gold blinds. One fall morning, I gaze out at the Baltic Sea, sucking all of the crystalized sugar at the bottom of my iced coffee through a bright pink straw. The water is high, and the sunshine has just begun to fossilize on its surface—at first furiously dappling, and then, all at once, fixing itself in place. I realize I’m afraid of this beauty. I’m afraid I don’t have the capacity to absorb it all myself, to understand its value, to understand what it all means. Does beauty necessitate evidence or witness? Overwhelmed, I fail Sontag, and snap a photo of the sea. Photography provides me with near-instant relief: if I can’t hold or make sense of it all on my own, at least I have a photograph to share with someone later. Someone whose presence may magically excavate its meaning and do it all justice. I become a compulsive photographer, snapping shots of everything that comes along—a ladybug with broken wings, a far-too-expensive latte, a poster floating down a stream for a concert I missed last night.
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BY Marie Lachance ILLUSTRATION Eliza Macneal DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt It’s like I’m on a mission to collect evidence of my own consciousness, anxiously awaiting an affidavit, an occasion to prove all I am living through. +++ I traveled to Paris and walked to the Eiffel Tower alone. Experiencing possibly the most romanticized destination in the Western canon by myself was like watching my favorite movie for the thousandth time and realizing that someone had changed the words. Or listening to the album I always listened to on days like that one, except that day someone had put it on shuffle, destroying the integrity of the story, the beauty. Or, actually, it was like peeling a ripe sumo orange, and just the first whiff of the overwhelming juice, just the grit of the peel under my fingernails, was enough to make my taste buds taste what they’d expected would come. But then I dropped it on the ground. And then, my mouth was wet for no reason. What I’m trying to say is that when experienced alone, it is just a tower. Daunting, yet upheld solely by prestige and tourism; colossal, yet only relatively. Acutely aware this was just another meaning I had ascribed to the tower, I reminded myself I was not the protagonist. In fact, Paris Syndrome was first identified in 1986 by Professor Hiroaki Ota, a Japanese psychiatrist living in France. Ota had noticed a number of tourists, especially “young women on their first international trip,” fade into a state of extreme shock upon discovering Paris was different from their expectations. This syndrome, characterized by sharp delusional states, hallucinations, depersonalization, and other unpleasant symptoms, is so widespread that there have been hotlines set up by various embassies to counsel their citizens through the unraveling of their own reality. I wondered what these phone calls sounded like. I wish I had called. I would have told them my number one strength is Appreciation of Beauty. I would have asked why I didn’t have the capacity to understand. I would have asked them to come and meet me, and tell me what it means. And then, maybe they would have asked, “Are you alone?”
work, work to make them feel good all the time—yet somehow this work was pride, and there was a loneliness to it. And it was this loneliness that began to paint the exact boundaries of my body, showing me where my skin ended and that of another began. I lay awake the majority of the night, wondering if these men saw me as a cardboard body painted gold or a golden body appearing as cardboard. Wondering what the difference was. Wondering what value I had, either way. This moment forced me to consider not only the value others placed on me and my body, but how I conceptualized myself, as well. Until this point, I had assumed all of the answers to my questions would materialize externally—that I could trust the voices of Sontag or Stendhal, but could never be certain of my own. But this newfound confidence in my solitude allowed me to realize I was capable of excavating meaning myself. And even if this task occasionally felt +++ insurmountable, I was reassured my life was a meaningful one, just to have bathed myself in such beauty. That night, I slept in a cheap hostel room with six men. To have discovered myself among it. When I left to change in the bathroom, one man let me know that I don’t have to leave the room to undress, you +++ know. As I lay in my bunk bed, I thought about how beauty could be construed as dangerous, too. Staring I wander into a small bar draped with ivy and rusted at the ceiling, I suddenly felt the urge to frantically pipes. I sip on a glass of acidic wine in the corner, where search for my keys, and wriggle them to a safe-keeping the waiter periodically visits me, asking if someone spot underneath my pillow. Feeling their sharp edges will be joining me this fine evening. I wave him off and provided me a semblance of safety, but something think of everyone who told me I would enjoy the wine else too: the sour tinge of pride, pride that my beauty in France. What they failed to mention is that a three was tangible enough to fear. Like my own beauty was dollar glass of wine is most likely going to taste like piss
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regardless of your geographical coordinates. I begin to wish I had someone to share this silent moment with, as a woman enters the front door. She wears an elegant, deep purple, floor-length trench coat and tinted sunglasses. She sits down, close enough for me to overhear her order a hot chocolate and french fries, at a bar, at 10:56 PM on a Friday. Like the waiter, I keep an eye on the door, waiting for someone to join her. No one ever does. She cleans off half of the golden french fries, wipes the excess grease on the napkin in her lap, and cautiously sips the hot chocolate, which is still cooling. She leaves enough money on the table to cover the bill, and I watch her vanish into the same beautiful city we both appeared from.
MARIE LACHANCE B’20 has 35,573 photos on her camera roll.
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BY Miranda Ruiz DESIGN Alex Westfall
THE IN BET WEEN T I M E S My mother used to tell me that we feel the blues because we’re Jews. We connect to the sound of suffering. It’s written in our DNA. I never trusted that logic, but I knew there was something deep between us and this music. The kind of thing that makes the world feel solid and fluid at the same time. When I called her tonight she was listening. 1. 1. 1. 1. 4. 4. 1. 1. 5. 4. 1. 5. She growls. Behind her he hits, kicks, pounds something vital out of himself that immateriality could never grasp. Together they glide above the space they’ve shifted, lifted, enchanted. They’re grooving, and I can hear it through two hundred miles and shitty iPhone speakers. She told me she bought a CD player to listen to all of her blues records after Bill Withers died. It’s been over a day and I still don’t know how he died, haven’t bothered to look it up. Don’t know if it’s because I don’t care or can’t bear it. He’d say she’d say baby, Grandma understands. I’d think okay baby, I trust you. My mother is wearing a jersey tee with black and white stripes and pink hemming, something that a seven-year-old would wear to summer camp. She lifts her wiry lenses with no frames to the bridge of her nose, squints and struggles to get the stems behind her ears. She looks at me with this empty gaze like my grandmother’s, and I half expect us to just sit there not talking, forgetting that people usually FaceTime to say things to each other. My mother scratches her chest, lightly dragging her fingernails across her seasoned skin. She picks off little bumps and blemishes, caressing the collarbone and poking at the tops of the fleshy parts. So close to the heart, so close to the neck, so warm and soft, the skin. She touches her tenderness the same way I do. Our fingers linger around the heat. My mother’s body feels like it’s lost forty years. I don’t recognize her wrinkles anymore. I imagine her skin is taut and bounces back, her stomach and thighs are tight and resilient. I imagine the fold of skin that slinks from the corner of her lip to the middle of her neck doesn’t exist. She’s a young twenty-year-old with buoyancy and jubilance when she scratches her chest like that. Bill sing-screams so deep that I forget I’m a supple twenty year-old. I don’t know what I am in that moment, but I come back soon enough, like always.
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LITERARY
He said I’d say I’ll paint your pretty picture with a song. That I’ll sit and cry with you, my dear, when need be. She tells me Dad’s watching a movie. That he likes to indulge in a lot of media––books, shows, movies––things she can’t enjoy. She tells me it gets a bit lonely up there for her. But she’s writing, writing a lot despite working a lot, cooking a lot, walking a lot. It’s great, a writer’s dream. My father enters the room and they exchange terse glances. He says he’s okay. Pets the dog. They talk about meals and hikes and misremember details to one another. Dad, you look about ready to fall asleep. No sweetie, I’m alright. He said we’ve sat in the sunshine in summers of sadness, lived through the winter when lonely was here. He sings gospel and talks about how this time he didn’t want to die. When the groove got right, the reverend would get the feelin’ so good he’d just hit himself upside the head with the drumstick. His sound diffuses me. It osmotes me. It doesn’t take a whole lot, just a feeling. It doesn’t mean anything about harmony or theory or all that, it’s just a sound. It’s the sound of me and my mother. Our loneliness and the way we scratch our chest. His sound is the sound of my grandmother and me and the way we look at each other with empty eyes. Either he or the memories tell us that all the best times in our lifetimes are the times of yesteryear, taking us back to the lean times, the in-between times, the times when we knew fear. And there it is again, that sing-scream that makes my whole body feel like a nothing, like an everything. Bill (my mother) extends me in either direction into the abysses beyond life. I’m sent to and from my grandmother and my granddaughter, winter and summer, gas chambers and utopia, and the ethers of sound that tie a noose around space and time and squeeze them up into twelve bar blues. We squirm and push. We’re trying like these drummers to smack some sense into the world through restless diffusion or infusion. We scratch our chests to feel our flesh and check in with the clock we never trust. We ask our bodies what they know but reject the answer, telling them instead to do with it what they may. So they push, hit, growl, pluck, diffuse and infuse, extend and contract, sing-scream and gaze with emptiness. He told us and we told him to get down, to let the feelin’ do the rest.
24 APRIL 2020
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
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This week, and for the foreseeable future, the Indy will publish community aid funds and other ways you can contribute to coronavirus relief in lieu of our traditional event listings. If you are able, we encourage you to support these efforts to alleviate the financial and health burdens that coronavirus has taken on communities here in Providence. Para más asistencia en Español, llama el línea de apoyo de AMOR a 401-675-1414 HEALTHCARE RESOURCES These Community Health Centers accept all insurance, and have a sliding-scale system based on income for patients without insurance. • Blackstone Valley Community Health Center: Pawtucket & Central Falls - 722-0081 • Thundermist: West Warwick & Woonsocket - 615-2800 • Tri-County Health Center: Johnston & N. Providence - 351-2750 • Providence Community Health Center: Providence - 444-0570 • East Bay Community Action Program: Riverside & Newport - 437-1008 Free clinics - free and low-cost health services • Clinica Esperanza, Providence - 347-9093 • Rhode Island Free Clinic, Providence - 274-6347 If you have COVID-19 symptoms, there are several locations in Rhode Island where you can get tested. For more information, please visit health.ri.gov/covid/testing/. Several urgent care and primary care providers in RI have set up respiratory clinics to evaluate patients suspected of having COVID19. For a list of these clinics and more information, visit the link above. Clínica Esperanza/Hope Clinic is offering multilingual (including Spanish) drive-up testing. For information, call 401-408-0238. Drive-up testing sites are located at URI in South Kingstown, CCRI in Warwick, and Rhode Island College in Providence. These sites require that your doctor orders a test and a testing appointment is made in advance. These testing sites do not accommodate individuals who arrive on foot or via public transportation. CVS Health is operating drive-through Rapid COVID-19 Testing at Twin River Casino in Lincoln. In order to make an appointment, FOOD AND HOUSING RESOURCES Free meals for kids are being offered at most public schools; see www.health.ri.gov/diseases/ncov2019/about/foodsites/ for more. Project LETS intake form for people in need of immediate housing: tinyurl.com/requesthousing-ri Call United Way Rhode Island’s 2-1-1 hotline or visit rifoodbank.org/find-food/ to find a food bank or pantry near you. PETITIONS AND DONATION OPPORTUNITIES Rhode Island Pride has organized a large food drive, which you can support with a monetary donation. $20 will get food to four people, and $100 will get food to 19 people. More info on their website: prideri.org. The George Wiley Center is fundraising for community members. Donate at this link: tinyurl.com/ybhlh6ky. They are also holding a food drive Monday, April 27, 10 am-2pm. General AMOR COVID-19 Community support fund. Donations go to support sanitation equipment for vulnerable populations, as well as direct financial assistance to families in need. Donate here: bit.ly/2UmYJXr. To get involved as a volunteer, packaging and distributing mutual aid, visit tinyurl.com/amor-covid-volunteer. Prevent Coronavirus in the Criminal Justice System: FANG Collective community bail fund: As jails and prisons become coronavirus hotspots, they present unsafe conditions to inmates, many of whom haven’t been convicted of a crime and are held because they couldn’t afford bail. Help bail people out from the Bristol County House of Correction and the Ash Street Jail through this fundraiser organized by the FANG Collective. gofundme.com/f/fangbailfund Various local activist groups (AMOR, Never Again Action, Sunrise, DSA, Formerly Incarcerated Union, and many more) have organized a petition “asking Gina Raimondo to use her power during this state of emergency to grant parole to anyone eligible, allow medical furlough for all medically vulnerable incarcerated people, and ensure the ACI will provide adequate information and supplies to those held in detention.” You can sign here: bit.ly/2UzVNWg. ICE detainees at the Bristol County Correctional Center have written a letter to elected officials and activist groups raising concern about the spread of coronavirus in their unit, which includes many detainees with serious underlying medical conditions. The FANG Collective has mobilized in response. They explain: “The letter speaks of correctional officers who have continued to work their shifts despite having flu like symptoms, overcrowded conditions at the facility, and a medical professional at the facility telling people detained there that “infection of the whole ICE facility population is inevitable and will occur within the next 30 days.” To get involved: CALL and EMAIL the ICE facility in Bristol County and the County's congressional delegation and demand that the people held in ICE detention in Bristol County be released. Contact info: Bristol County ICE Detention Center: 508-995-6400, select option 6, then option 2; Senator Elizabeth Warren: (617) 565-3170; Senator Ed Markey: 508-999-6462; Representative Bill Keating: 508-999-6462 MASKS If you work in an industry or own a company with medical supplies: Donate them through the RI Department of Health Medical Supply intake form. Help alleviate the nationwide shortage of protective equipment for healthcare workers: bit.ly/2JeIaqf If you want to contribute to mask-making efforts for essential workers, or if you would like to receive handmade masks made by Rhode Islanders, sign up here: www.projectmaskri.com. PLUS: Ocean State Job Lot is giving out fabric for free.
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
