The College Hill Independent Vol. 43 - Issue 10

THREE THOUGHTS ON ZINES AND ZINE-MAKING!

THE INDY*

Volume 43 Issue 10 10 December 2021

an offering from Audrey Buhain, Zine Librarian and Archivist @ Sarah Doyle Center One. Making zines is not so much about an established zine community or zine history that you need to enter, but about a shared need for expansion that brings us to zine making.

To me, zines are born from the shared understanding that a published book is not capable of, or adequate for, expressing that which we wish to express. The impulse to personalize both the artistic content and the container of that content is central to zines.

And from this shared impulse, a local / digital community may be formed. Both middle-class white women and queer femmes of color have, in equal turn, offered various forms that zines can take on — but these function as precedents, and do not dictate what is possible.

Two. Your zine is a map / memory of a contemporary moment that might otherwise go undocumented.

Whenever people say that a zine can be filled with anything, that just feels too dang broad! So maybe it would be better phrased as, a zine can be filled with any type of connection you want your content to make. Cross-aesthetic, cross-genre, cross-disciplinary, maybe even anti-disciplinary. These are the unexpected connections which honestly reflect the still-forming process of understanding the present moment. In this sense, zines serve as canvases for not just content, but context.

Three. Zines evade categorization, which is what makes them so radical!

AUTOFICTION AND RECOVERY UTOPIA PARKWAY GOODBYES ARE FOR

THE FOLDABLE ISSUE

*

The College Hill Independent

In conjunction with SOMOS and VISIONS, the Indy held a collaborative zine workshop for artists to find community with each other and learn from one another’s creative practices. We played bananagrams, folded origami, and learned about the relationship between underground organizing and independent publishing.

07 09 12

This week we created a miniature zine out of the front and back cover of this issue of the Indy. We chose this format because we believe zines align with our personal and political goals. In the following pages, we’ve included work produced through this workshop, as well as other work by students of color at Brown and RISD. We hope you enjoy.

Categorizing zines by content can be pretty tenuous — not just because zines exist in multiple categories (e.g. feminism, environmentalism, disability justice) but because one zine can be at odds with another, even if both are connected. For instance: it is tempting to categorize zines which address Chicanx identities, Latinx identities, and Filipinx identities produced by people from North America, South America, Central America, and Southeast Asia together. Yet the x can function as a point of tension, signifying gender-neutrality to some and signifying Anglophonecentricity to others. It’s not only zines, but the conversations prompted through communal zine making, which are radical.

“SHRIMP” HANNAH PARK There are instructions to making your Itty Bitty Indy on page 18

THE INDY*

Volume 43 Issue 10 10 December 2021

This Issue

Masthead*

00 “MURKY WATERS”

WEEK IN REVIEW Alisa Caira Asher White

Kelly Zhou

“SHRIMP”

FEATURES Ifeoma Anyoku Emily Rust Gemma Sack

Hannah Park

02 WEEK IN AFFIRMATIONS Alisa Caira

03 AUTOFICTION AND RECOVERY Lucia Kan-Sperling

05 UTOPIA PARKWAY Gemma Sack

NEWS Kanha Prasad Nick Roblee-Strauss ARTS Jenna Cooley Nell Salzman EPHEMERA Chloe Chen Lauren Lee

08 “GRILLMASTER D” Cici Osias

METRO Leela Berman Ricardo Gomez Peder Schaefer

09 TOE TAGS

SCIENCE + TECH Lucas Gelfond Amelia Wyckoff

11 SELF PORTRAIT AS A TWO LISTS OF GOODBYES TO SAY WHEN ONE IS LEAVING

BULLETIN BOARD Lily Pickett

12 GOODBYES ARE FOR

X Yukti Agarwal Justin Scheer

CJ Gan

Alyscia Batista

13 A PROGRESSIVE CIVIL WAR OR BUMP IN THE ROAD? Nell Salzman

15 ANTI-CAPITALIST COMMUNITY CARBON CAPTURE Kolya Shields

17 THE INDY’S 2021 WRAPPED & ZINE INSTRUCTIONS Indy Staff

DEAR INDY Amelia Anthony LITERARY Alyscia Batista CJ Gan OUTREACH COORDINATOR Audrey Buhain MVP Our Staff <3

SENIOR EDITORS Alana Baer Audrey Buhain Andy Rickert Peder Schaefer Ivy Scott XingXing Shou STAFF WRITERS Hanna Aboueid Rachel Carlson Lily Chahine Bowen Chen Jack Doughty Osayuwamen Ede-Osifo Danielle Emerson Mariana Fajnzylber Tammuz Frankel Leo Gordon Rose Houglet Jana Kelly Nicole Kim Bilal Memon Loughlin Neuert Rhythm Rastogi Issra Said Kolya Shields Sacha Sloan Ella Spungen COPY EDITORS Rebecca Bowers Swetabh Changkakoti Megan Donohue Elizabeth Duchan Jayda Fair Sarah Goldman Zoey Grant Anushka Kataruka Madison Lease Jasmine Li Abigail Lyss Addie Marin Kabir Narayahan Eleanor Peters Janek Schaller Gracie Wilson Xinyu Yan

DESIGNERS Anna Brinkhuis Briaanna Chiu Ophelia Duchesne-Malone Clara Epstein Jieun (Michelle) Song Sam Stewart Floria Tsui Sojung (Erica) Yun Ken Zheng WEB DESIGN Andy Rickert ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Sage Jennings Hannah Park ILLUSTRATORS Yukti Agarwal Sylvie Bartusek Gemma Brand-Wolf Ashley Castaneda Hannah Chang Claire Chasse Luca Colannino Michelle Ding Quinn Erickson Sophie Foulkes Camille Gros Joshua Koolik Lucy Lebowitz Olivia Lunger Talia Mermin Jessica Minker Kenney Nguyen Xing Xing Shou Joyce Tullis BUSINESS Jonathan Goshu Daniel Halpert Isabelle Yang — The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI in Seekonk, Massachusets.

*Our Beloved Staff

The Committee on Dear Indy

Mission Statement

19 THE BULLETIN & ZINE

From the Editors Scattered lamplights illuminated gentle flurries on our walk home that last night (morning) we left Conmag. The snow had barely coated the ground but was just enough for us to leave a little trail in our wake, imprints of our hours spent swatting flies and scrapping lines, fumbling with and over InDesign.

The footsteps traced down the Main Green, where we sat and basked in the sun on those first Wednesdays of September. Past Cove St., where we stopped to catch a glimpse of SJP and reveled in the late night bright lights together.

At Pitman, six became four, and our dancing queen bid us goodnight. With frosted eyelashes, we confess that we’ll miss trading secrets over our identical boba orders.

A few blocks later our silly duo split once more as the tank goes tumbling down Sheldon. Armed with a trifecta of emojis and secret artistic prowess, they leave much more than the mere outline of their disintegrating soles as they dip into the night. “home?” “home!” we call out to each other, though we suppose we always were.

-AJ

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

COVER COORDINATOR Iman Husain

MANAGING EDITORS Mara Cavallaro Anabelle Johnston Deborah Marini

18 DEAR INDY

01

DESIGN EDITORS Isaac McKenna Gala Prudent

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anticapitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

WEEK IN REVIEW

Week in Affirmations

TEXT ALISA CAIRA DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN ILLUSTRATION JOHN GENDRON

The year is ending, the College Hill Independent is ending (temporarily) ((just for a month or two)), and, we get it, you’re petrified. Thankfully, your ever-steady Week in Review editors (guiding lights, most important mentors), are here to, once again, show you the way. With the end of the year, comes the almost debilitating increase of “New Year’s Resolutions.” And, for guidance beyond just a single day of the year, we can thank Urban-Outfitters-witch-esque “Affirmations.” Armed with both, it would be quite impossible for anything to go wrong before the Indy returns. At which point, we may once again lead you in the right direction.

We may also lead you completely astray. Don’t wait to find out! Read the affirmations below instead. After reading, and reciting twice daily for an unknown amount of time, life will certainly be better, by at least a little bit.* Your 2021 Wrapped was not embarrassing.

You did not spend all of your money at your local coffee shop of choice.

You will have a great year.

You had a great year.

Your Twitter got funnier.

Everyone likes you. Even if maybe they don’t.

You are making that old trend everyone else has moved on from work for you.

That cute person you passed on the street is also thinking about you.

Your crush texts you back.

You are not iron deficient.

You are not cringe.

You are based.

You listen to podcasts, but not in an NPR way.

You own an Indy tote bag.

Your affirmations work.

People do not think you are stinky.

Your deodorant did not get recalled for carcinogens.

You know better than to not use deodorant.

Everyone likes when you cook.

People genuinely care about your stupid, little insta stories.

You will not sell out.

Alternatively, you will sell out and have a really great excuse for it.

You do not have trust issues.

You do not stalk yourself online.

You read the entire Indy every week.

Your iud did not intensify your hormonal problems.

You do not listen to sad white girl music (anymore).

You respond to text messages consistently.

You have a rich inner life, and a steady internal monologue.

You do not believe we are fundamentally alone.

You tell funny, interesting stories at parties.

You did not spend 400 dollars on a couch just to list it on Facebook Marketplace for free.

You do not feel the need to write a manifesto.

Your roommates do not despise you for not doing the dishes. *Once again, the Week in Review makes no promises as to whether or not these affirmations will actually better your life. The Week in Review can

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 10

02

AUTOFICTION & RECOVERY ARTS

Tao Lin’s Leave Society On August 5, 2013, writer Tao Lin took 2.5 grams of psilocybin mushrooms and tweeted: “I’m leaving behind all this lit game shit. I’m laughing. I dunno what I’m leaving behind in specific terms but I’m cutting it all off bye”.1 This tweet doesn’t make clear exactly what “leaving” meant for Lin at the time (though he did delete most of his internet presence and throw away his computer shortly after posting it).2 However, it marked the beginning of a process of self-growth, one that would significantly affect Lin’s writing as well as his life.

Lin’s ambivalence about his place in the lit[erary] scene is understandable. His work falls primarily under the category of autofiction, a genre in which events from the author’s own life comprise the chief narrative elements.

Often first attributed to French writer Serge Dubrovsky in the late 1970s, the term has been used to describe a wide range of authors and styles, making it hard to pin down. In an article for Vulture, Christian Lorentzen argues that the fictionalized protagonist’s “status as a writer or artist” is what differentiates autofiction from other forms of autobiographical writing. In any case, Lin’s inscription within the genre more complicatedly intertwines him with his characters than the average novelist. Having come to

prominence in the early 2000s during the rise of “alt lit,” a literary movement influenced by and mediated through internet culture, Lin’s past works such as Shoplifting From American Apparel (2009) and Taipei (2013) center depressive young male protagonists who take prescription drugs, walk around New York City buying salads, and navigate their relationships through lengthy, ironic conversations via Gmail chat that range from annoying to funny to profound.

(A typical such exchange, from Shoplifting from American Apparel: “I’m creating a plan to be really good. So far I’m doing Pilates.” / “That’s great” / “Are you serious” / “Sort of … I mean, if I thought there was anything ‘important’ or something it would be being good.”) Narrated in a detached, monotone voice always located somewhere in the Venn diagram of hilarious, totally unsympathetic, and painfully real, they all seem to describe alternate versions of the same character: someone who wishes to cut himself off from—and yet is still unbearably tethered to—his daily reality, floating above his own mundane everyday activities in a bleak, at times unhinged, haze, sporadically punctuated by moments of intense emotional turmoil.

Lin’s own prominent internet presence contributes heavily to the perpetual blurring of fact and fiction in his books. An archive of his online activity from the years before Taipei

was published includes many, many tweets, the subjects and prose styles of which share significant similarities with those of his novels. (“Good day to kill myself , but also not , I have like 1500mg adderall” (11/19/12); “typed ‘panicking’ in gmail chat as follows (consecutively): ‘pacniking’ ‘paniacking’ ‘paniackgin’ ‘pacniacking’ ‘pnacinking’” (11/21/11).) This erratic online record of his life has not only tethered Lin’s public image to the seeming avatars of himself in his novels, but signals a personal function of his self-referential writing beyond the purely creative and into the confessional––perhaps more so than for other autofiction authors.

However, in 2013, something changed. In addition to developing an increasingly sparse and less turbulent internet presence, Lin began writing his first nonfiction book, Trip (2018), which structures histories and analyses of various psychedelic drugs around a chronicle of his own “recovery” from past self-destructive behavior through psychedelics. In a passage about the fateful shroom trip which produced the quoted tweet, Lin describes resolving to “leave society––its drugs and language and ideas and habits and opinions and websites.”

Almost exactly eight years later, in 2021, he published Leave Society. The story follows the character of Li, an author in the process of writing both a nonfiction book about psychedelics and an autofiction novel. Over the course of the

TEXT LUCIA KAN-SPERLING

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATION LUCIA KAN-SPERLING

Content warning: mentions of suicide

03

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

1.

2.

Tweet is no longer available online; quoted from Trip (2018) by Tao Lin, p. 76 See Trip, p. 78.

ARTS

book, he tries to better himself, physically and mentally, through diet, alternative science and medicine, and periodical trips to see—and repair his relationship with—his parents in Taipei, Taiwan.

Leave Society thematizes the protagonist’s writing process much more explicitly than Lin’s past work, making the distinction between Tao Lin and Li even harder to discern. However, in combination with the book’s genuine concern with the struggles of self-improvement, this ambiguity, rather than heightening the gloomy self-detachment of Lin’s previous books, produces a poignant sincerity. The novel is an honest look into the mind of someone desperately trying to become better (but not always sure whether it’s working). +++ A prominent narrative feature of Leave Society is its many descriptions of the book itself being written. Throughout the story, Li is constantly documenting his daily experiences for later use in his autobiographical novel. He frequently records voice memos—of his conversations, his parents’ conversations, a phone call with his chiropractor—and transcribes them afterward, adding to an already-extensive archive of notes about his everyday life.

Lin has categorized the book as “meta-autofiction”; this seems an apt term to describe the moments in which scenes are punctuated

by Li’s future subjectivity, at the time of writing the novel. During one of his stays in Taiwan, Li starts a voice memo before entering into conversation with his parents. Quippy and familiar, they discuss Mandarin semantics, Li’s childhood, and their dog, Dudu (all recurring topics throughout the book). However, the dialogue is interrupted by a description of Li’s father “mumbl[ing] something that was inaudible in the recording, in which he sounded muffled and distant because he was the farthest from Li’s phone.” The narration thus suddenly wrenches out of the diegesis of the scene into a future temporality in which Li is not experiencing the conversation directly, but listening to a recording of it. In moments like these, the story seems to lift above itself, splitting Li’s subjectivity into 1) the Li experiencing the event (here, in the recording), 2) the Li writing about it, and 3) the point of view of the third-person narrator–– possibly Li, possibly a version of Lin himself.

Nevertheless, this uncanny layering of distinct yet mirror-image voices still serves to direct attention back to Lin’s authorial presence: a writer writing about a writer writing. Implicit in this meta-writing sequence is the self-reflection that necessarily occurs when one narrates—and therefore relives—one’s past, positioning the novel itself as not only a creative project, but one of self-betterment.

When Li first visits his parents, he notices that his mother looks like she has undergone plastic surgery, but tells himself to “consider what to say and say it later, like maybe the next day.” However, just “a minute later,” he remarks, “Between your eye and eyebrow looks different … Did you do something to it?” It is then stated that “[d]rafting this scene years later, he’d realize he hadn’t noted and didn’t remember his mom’s verbal response. She held her balled fists in front of her cheeks, as if trying to hide.”

In addition to exemplifying the humorous irony that punctuates the story’s narration, here seeming to make fun of Li’s lack of tact, this passage creates a clear link between Li’s— and Lin’s—identity as a writer and the path to self-improvement both seem to be embarking on. The sudden disengagement from the scene, zooming out to describe Li “drafting” a version of the dialogue that has just happened, intensifies the intimacy of the exchange, rather than cutting it off. In this description of the writing act, the emotional subjectivity of the figure of the author is woven into the narrative, inten-

sifying Li’s poignant confrontation with the vulnerability of his mother. The scene makes clear that by writing about this conversation, Li is called upon to reflect on it with renewed empathy, one that can only occur through a certain level of detachment. This is perhaps why Lin’s chosen genre of autofiction is so compelling; the reader is pulled into the interiority of the writer, made to contend with the opposing forces of empathy and estrangement. +++ Empathy is one of the central pillars of Li’s self-rehabilitation process, particularly with respect to his parents. At one point in the novel, Li notes to himself, “Remember: Mom isn’t the insane, paranoid one. I am!” He and his parents have several arguments throughout the book, often punctuated with moments of adolescent rage on Li’s part: once, he slams his father’s computer shut and threatens to throw it. After these clashes, however, he unfailingly sends honest reflections on what has just occurred to his mother via email: “I shouldn’t have closed Dad’s computer and yelled…”

Li’s relating to his mother emotionally

“In deciding to end his novel on an uptick, he is imagining one for himself, too—hoping to write it into existence.” through writing, rather than speech, is also a recurring motif throughout the book. It is described that as a teenager, he communicated with her through “despair-drenched” messages written on notepads, blaming her for his unhappiness and detailing how she should “fix him.”

This behavior seems to have morphed into adult Li’s email correspondence with her: even when they are together in Taiwan, some of their most moving interactions happen over email.

Teenage Li also wrote notes to himself. In an attempt to feel empowered, “to not be a helpless, unhappy, unknown recluse,” he concretized his reminders to “never blame anyone again” by putting them on paper. As an adult, Li continues this process, writing to himself about his own behavior as well as that of others.

One night back in Li’s apartment in New York, where he voluntarily isolates himself in favor of his recovery, “he unexpectedly scrawled a crude, schematic, scary-looking face ruiningly over the intricate patterns of a near-finished mandala, then sobbed while drawing the face repeatedly over itself, pushing down hard with a brown-colored pencil.” Directly afterward, at his computer, he “typed what had happened, briefly wondering what would’ve happened if he hadn’t stopped to type.”

For Li, the act of writing about himself clearly has a deeper function than simply aiding his project of change; it is the way in which he is able to process his own life. Notes, emails, his autofiction novel—these are all his own literal, verbalized attempts at relating himself to the world in a non-destructive way.

It thus makes sense that Leave Society can feel at times like tunnel vision—the narration is unable to escape the depths of Li’s mind, neuroses and all. His intense interiority can become overwhelming, always teetering on the brink between dedicated optimism and unsettling isolation. One self-prescribed aspect of his recovery is the resolve to eat foods that will reduce his inflammation and body pain; he thus quits starch and replaces it with foods like fish oil, nuts, and fermented vegetables. In New York, he once eats a bag of potato chips, then feels “chip-induced pain” in his body for the

next week. On the same page, he takes modafinil, a prescription drug. The consequences of Li’s “first starch in two months” being placed parallel to a disturbing drug relapse is funny, the narration seeming to acknowledge Li’s excessive preoccupation with his diet. However, this obsessiveness also speaks to the very real human experience of replacing one addiction––in this case, pharmaceutical drugs––with another–– acute fixation on health––in the hope that it will hurt less. +++

At one point in the story, when Li mentions to his parents that he writes about their arguments, his mother asks him whether he sometimes bickers with them on purpose. Li says no, but reflects internally that “[i]t was probably impossible ... to not be influenced by his wavering belief that maybe conflict was good for his novel.” Later on, he tells them that he has been recording their conversations for his book, to which his mother replies, “Then we need to be careful of what we say.” Though lighthearted, these moments gesture at the potentially destructive effects of viewing all aspects of one’s life as possible narrative fodder. Li’s awareness of his future audience at least partially gives his everyday life a veil of performativity, threatening to confine his (and others’) actions to the project of producing a story and alienate him from his own experiences.

Ultimately, though, Leave Society is, if not a completely optimistic book, at least an assuredly hopeful one: as Li predicts about halfway through while looking through his most recent notes, it points toward “end[ing] on an uptick.”

At one point, he imagines that his life is itself a novel, called Li: “Maybe Li’s soul had browsed Li in a metacosmic library, flipping through it and other novels, before deciding on Li, but he couldn’t remember the reasons for his decision.

Maybe he could remember by writing about himself, he thought, falling asleep.”

Through Li’s sincere reflection on what his writing could produce for himself, Leave Society explores the possibilities of narrativizing one’s own life as a way of giving it meaning. In deciding to end his novel on an uptick, he is imagining one for himself, too—hoping to write it into existence.

+++ When Tao Lin took psilocybin in 2013, he didn’t know “what [he was] leaving behind in specific terms.” With the publication of Leave Society, it would appear that these terms had been clarified. But what does this title actually mean for Li/Lin? It sounds like a naive imperative, and perhaps it is. However, maybe embarking on the project of “leav[ing] society—its drugs and language and ideas and habits and opinions and websites” is just that: recognizing that we have learned the ways in which we exist in the world, and believing that it is possible to unlearn them. Writing fiction allows one to enter an alternate subjectivity, a different way of looking at the world. Li is ultimately just applying this method to his own life to mediate his process of change.

Leave Society is a book about someone trying to become better. This project may not, and, in fact, cannot always succeed. However, if we can embrace its sincerity, perhaps we too can become more comfortable with the very human fate of being stuck in-between: between fiction and reality, between now and then, between meaning and meaninglessness, between Li and ourselves, between ourselves and “society,” whatever that means. Perhaps this endeavor can help us become better, as well.

LUCIA KAN-SPERLING B’24 wants to read your diary.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 10

04

TEXT GEMMA SACK

DESIGN DEBORAH MARINI

ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES

FEATS

Utopia Parkway

05

If you take exit 18 on the Grand Central Parkway toward Utopia Parkway, make two sharp right turns, and then turn left onto Croydon Road, you will pass a series of nearly-identical Tudorstyle houses with steeply-sloping pointed roofs, echoing shades of brown, beige, and gray, and neatly mown lawns. Finally, you will reach the block’s only architectural anomaly: a maroon, flat-roofed mid-century modern house without a trace of a lawn. The house is tucked away: its lot is barely half the width of its neighbors, and its steeply descending driveway gives it a sense of being sunken into the ground. It is shrouded by trees so that only its facade is visible from the street. It was the only house of its architectural kind in the neighborhood—Jamaica Estates, in Queens, New York—when my grandparents built it in the early 1960s. To this day, it is only one of few not built in a revivalist style.

Jamaica Estates sits on the edge of Queens, almost the farthest east you can go before reaching Long Island. It was conceived in 1904 by real estate developers as a gated community, meant to be a ‘refuge’ for people of means who wanted both to escape the clamor of Manhattan and to avoid Queens’ less affluent populations.

The neighborhood is no longer gated, yet it retains the feeling of a suburb within the city. Its uneasy proximity to its neighboring communities also remains apparent. Jamaica Estates is a subsection of the larger neighborhood Jamaica, and the median household income of the former is more than $20,000 higher than that of the latter. To illustrate, the neighborhood is perhaps best known as the birthplace of Donald Trump, whose childhood (Tudor-style) home is less than half a mile from my grandparents’.

I feel a sense of strained, self-conscious history settle on me when I go to Jamaica Estates, which is largely because I only ever go there to see my grandmother, who still lives in this house. Visiting the neighborhood forces me to confront tradition and what it means to pass it down. This disorienting ambiance of pastness is also built into the neighborhood’s architecture.

Many of the houses intentionally appear to be of another era, but which era remains unclear.

Nearly all the houses pastiche an earlier period’s style (or styles), but their manicured lawns seem plainly modern and American. Ashamed of their newness, they obscure their origins and justify themselves through homage to history.

My grandmother’s house, my mother tells me, is almost exactly the same as it was when she grew up there in the 1960s and ‘70s. It feels like a museum of American Jewish assimilation: when I walk inside, I am transported back in time to the moment when my grandparents cashed in, quite literally, on the rewards of Americanness.

Yet I can’t help but look for something essentially Jewish in its walls, for history I can use to justify myself. The problem is, I don’t know what I’m trying to excavate. +++ I spoke to my grandmother, Martha, on Zoom recently to ask her about the house. She is 96, and after a stroke that left half her body paralyzed, has been housebound for more than a decade. Her senses of both time and reality have shrunken accordingly. She’s an artist, and has always lived in her own aesthetic universe and been prone to creative narrative embellishment—now more so than ever. All that to say: I cannot verify many of her recollections, despite my mother’s best efforts to set the record straight.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

In the early 1960s, my grandparents, both from working-class Eastern European Jewish families, were relatively new Americans: my grandfather had fled Romania in the 1930s, and my grandmother was the only member of her family born in Brooklyn in the early 1920s.

When they bought the property on Croydon Road, they had no conception of the neighborhood’s lofty reputation. At the time, they were living in an apartment in Forest Hills, another neighborhood in Queens about four miles away, that was too small for their two children. All they knew was that they wanted to find an area with good public schools and to build a house in the contemporary style that they designed themselves. “I don’t think we were giving the neighborhood any thought,” my grandmother explained. This property was simply the only one they could find.

The land was undeveloped because of its highly unusual dimensions: the lot contains nearly a quarter of an acre of land, but it is very narrow and very long, unlike other plots in the neighborhood. When the Jamaica Estates Company started developing the area in 1904, they established strict building regulations that required each builder to purchase at least two lots. The company also established price minimums for the houses built in order to maintain the neighborhood’s affluence. When the Jamaica Estates Company declared bankruptcy in the 1920s, many of the restrictions, including the two-lot mandate, expired, despite the Jamaica Estates Association’s efforts to, in its own words, “protect the character of their community.”

Martha’s primary attraction to the property was its four enormous copper beech trees, two flanking either side of the plot. These trees occupied my grandmother’s attention for most of our Zoom call. She was reticent to describe the process of building the house, but effusive in her descriptions of the trees. In fact, her immediate answer to my first question—“Why did you move to Jamaica Estates?”—was neither public schools nor undeveloped property, but “beautiful trees.” “The most important thing, as far as I’m concerned, was that I was enchanted with the size and beauty of the trees, which,” she explained, were “larger than an elephant’s leg.” “When’s the last time you saw an elephant’s legs?,” she asked. “I’ve never seen an elephant’s legs,” I replied. (I can’t imagine when she has, either.) “Well, it’s something you should have in your mind,” she responded.

Both the trees and the property’s dimensions are vestiges of the land’s original use: it once served as the approach to the estate of one Lord Croydon, an English nobleman who bought property in the area after the American Revolution, my grandmother claims. This is where I have my most significant doubts about her historical accuracy—most property deeds during the colonial and early republican periods were not cataloged, as it was not legally required at the time. I reached out to the Queens Historical Society for more information, but the earliest maps they have that document land usage in Jamaica Estates are from 1907. Whether it’s true, or Lord Croydon is just one of my grandmother’s more holistic inventions, both she and my mother insist that given their uniformity and perfect spatial alignment, the trees must have been intentionally planted as the approach to someone’s driveway, as was customary of colonial estates.

Due to the dimensions of the plot, my grandparents could not have built a house in the fashion of their neighbors (large, gabled,

Judaism, architecture, and memory in Jamaica Estates

surrounded by an oasis of lawn, meant to recall a grander era). But they had no interest in such a house, either. Martha calls them “sedate houses of memory,” which were meant for “duchesses,” “large gowns” and “well-mannered tea parties,” despite the fact that none would ever be seen there. “I felt sorry for them,” she said, not only because their houses had few windows and were difficult to heat, but also because they were expensive. A modernist house, on the other hand, cost less to build and “made logical sense for the kind of lives people are accustomed to living today.” In short, my grandparents’ formal interest was primarily functional.

“New architects had very good ideas, using a lot of visual connection with the outdoors, the weather, anything that’s growing or passing by,” Martha explained. Accordingly, floor-to-ceiling windows constitute most of the house’s back wall. Through those windows, you can see the long, narrow garden that takes up the rest of the property. It has a small stone patio, shaded by a vine-laden wooden trellis, and a stretch of grass dotted with clusters of flowers, bushes, and trees. Martha was adamant that her garden was definitively a garden. She refused to place this garden in the front of her house, lest any of her neighbors mistake it for a lawn. Initially, this refusal was because of the copper beech trees, whose root network and thick, shading leaves made conditions inhospitable. But it was also practically and aesthetically principled. Unlike her neighbors, she never wanted “to become a servant to a lawn,” which she considered “a green carpet that you’re essentially vacuuming all the time.” Like the Tudor revival house, Martha considered the suburban-style lawn ill-suited to her modern life.

Her garden, however, was anachronistic in its own right: it was meant to recall an older era and environment distinctly foreign to mid-century Queens. When she imagined the scene visible through the wide glass panels, she pictured her family in The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov’s last play, set in turn-of-the-century Russia. Her landscaping plans were not “majestic or impressive,” she recalled, but she “would have a large forest of white birch trees.” “I love the linear sense of a white line, bisecting the space,” she explained. (Many of her paintings and collages feature such white lines; I now think of her birch trees every time I see them.)

The Chekhovian universe in which my grandmother staged her house became much more literal than she had anticipated. The Cherry Orchard ends with the destruction of its titular landscape, and most of the birch trees Martha planted were killed by Birch leafminers, an insect that nestles into trees and causes their leaves to fall off, slowly starving the trees. The copper beech trees also had to be cut down. With all her tangents and digressions, I forgot that in all my visits to her house, I’d never seen these trees that she described so lovingly. “So what happened to the trees?” I asked, about halfway through our conversation. “The process of building the house,” she explained, rather sadly, “entailed killing the trees. We didn’t think about it, nor were we told that the trees had to be considered.”

In terms of the necessity of building a garage and plumbing, she means. “Your father was not an architect,” she said. (She’s confusing me with my mother, which happens often.) If he had been, she concluded after a long pause, we “might have paid attention to that detail.”

Like her trees, Martha and her house were also out of sync with their habitat. I mean this in two ways. The first is practical: the house’s flat

FEATS

roof is poorly suited to its climate. Houses in the Northeast are traditionally built with sloping roofs so that rain and snow can slide off rather than accumulate. In contrast, flat roofs, a hallmark of modernist architecture, are much better suited to the climate of southern California, for example, which became a locus of architectural modernism in the US. My grandmother acknowledged that sticking to the rigorous ideas of a modern house, in the case of the flat roof, was a serious mistake: “It’s given us trouble from the beginning,” she explained.

The other incongruity was social. My grandparents’ house was a glaring aberration, and they felt the disdain of most of their neighbors.

“I never felt direct criticism. But they were very stupefied,” my grandmother said. The lack of a lawn, in particular, she remembered, presented a particular “irritation to the traditionalists.”

She recalled one neighbor on her block, Tony Edelsberg, a “very erudite lawyer,” who sneered at her cemented front driveway. In contrast, he spent his weekends, she described, “in what was left of any business suits he had, on his hands and knees in his very green lawn pulling weeds.”

She also told me about a landscaper she hired to consult on the design of the backyard. He thought “he was going to have a good job putting a lawn in,” she explained. “I had to disabuse him of that. I said, ‘I’m never going to have a lawn.’

He looked at me as if I were a leper.”

“I never heard the word blight,” she continued. But the refusal to capitulate to the local style was just too different for her neighbors. Against the backdrop of postwar conformity and suburbanization, “people didn’t want to be different. They were afraid to be different,” she said. “It’s not the first time in my life I felt that I don’t belong where I am. That’s not an

uncommon feeling. Or rather, I’m somehow or other, in a place where I don’t belong. But I was not intimidated by the other houses,” she said.

I asked my grandmother if she ever felt out of place because she was Jewish—the form of out-of-placeness I feel like we have been dancing around. “I didn’t—I don’t feel out of place for being Jewish,” she tells me. Not because there were many other Jews living there, however—as she recalls, there were very few Jews, and the neighborhood was primarily Irish and Italian Catholic, though she claimed that “it had a little bit of every flavor.” (My mother, on the other hand, remembers Jamaica Estates being much more Jewish.) Martha was getting tired at this point in our conversation, and her answers to my questions were becoming much less coherent.

Practicing Judaism, in either a religious or a cultural sense, was not particularly important to either of my grandparents. They didn’t move to Jamaica Estates because they were looking for Jewish community, so they didn’t feel disappointed or excluded when they didn’t find it. My mother asks why they suddenly decided to send her and her brother to Hebrew school before her brother’s bar mitzvah, despite never having belonged to or attended a synagogue before. In response, I get perhaps the clearest answer about what my grandmother believes to be the significance of passing on Jewish tradition: “Because if they [her children] didn’t get it [Jewish education] from us, they would have to get it from someplace.”

It was, of course, not only, or even primarily, the judgment of the neighbors that determined who felt out of place in the neighborhood, but rather the developers, real estate brokers, and mortgage lenders that decided who could live there. “We found to our sad surprise that banks

were as conservative as the people who bought the Tudor houses. We had a hard time getting a mortgage,” Martha tells me, because their house plan “wasn’t in the character of the neighborhood.” However, they did get the mortgage, and at a favorable rate, since my grandfather had served in the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II and qualified for the financial benefits provided by the GI Bill.

Despite persistent antisemitism in the 1950s, Jews like my grandparents were, by and large, allowed to reap the benefits of the GI Bill— to take out loans at favorable rates, permitting those who participated to accumulate wealth that would be passed down to subsequent generations. In short, to assimilate; to build houses, communities, and lives in ethnically-blending and upwardly-mobile neighborhoods, like Jamaica Estates. As American Jews’ prosperity on the whole increased significantly in the postwar era, Jewish class mobility became a sort of American parable. “Jewish middle-classness was just the kind of success story Americans loved to hear and tell about themselves,” explains historian Lila Corwin Berman.

The same was not true, of course, for Black Americans, who were systematically denied the benefits of the GI Bill that catapulted white ethnic minorities into the middle class.

Developers often refused to sell to Black aspiring homeowners, real estate brokers refused to work with them, and banks often refused to lend mortgages to them. Jamaica Estates was no exception.

“There were a few Black people in the Estates, who I don’t think were welcomed with any kind of, uh, banners and trumpets,” my grandmother tells me.

Despite the distinctiveness of my grandparents’ house within their neighborhood, it was still a vehicle for their attainment of middle-class status and their cultural assimilation. Their unusually contemporary aesthetic sensibility may have appeared different, but they weren’t, necessarily (or at least not visibly enough that they were isolated from their neighbors or prevented from moving in the first place). The gardener who wanted to put in a lawn may have looked at my grandmother as “if [she] were a leper,” but she was not treated like one—she and her husband and her children had friends and belonged to community groups. My grandparents’ fundamental desire to shed much of their particularity and particular history and to belong to a community based on zoning restriction, zip code, and public school was not, I believe, so different from their neighbors’. +++ In a 2011 lecture titled “Is There a Jewish Architecture?,” critic Paul Goldberger claims: “There is no real and established way to build in the Jewish tradition, or at least no way to design and construct buildings that has been handed down through the ages and which embodies the essence of Jewish ritual and culture.” However, he maintains that “the Jewish tradition is not, in general, as dependent on visual elements as many others. It is not inclined to elaborate spectacle.”

Goldberger’s argument would suggest that, in contrast to an ornamental style like Rococo, Judaism, as a set of intellectual and aesthetic principles, shares a fundamental affinity with architectural modernism, which is known for its minimalism, rational design, and form-follows-function doctrine. It doesn’t take much probing to notice the potential consonance

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TEXT GEMMA SACK

DESIGN DEBORAH MARINI

ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES

violence from ever reoccuring. While an invocation of memory, “never again,” is also a dictum to march forward and to leave the past behind— never to rehearse or relive it. This directive that the past shall never repeat is also used to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in the name of Jewish ‘safety,’ indicating the potential hollowness of such a view of history. Must all Jewish history be so tragic that our injunction is to eclipse it?

My grandparents certainly did want to “get away from history.” When my grandfather arrived at Ellis Island, he willingly changed his name from Anton to Arthur, and as soon as he learned English, he claimed he had forgotten how to speak Romanian. (My mother only learned that his real name was Anton when it was printed on his tombstone; my grandmother claims she never heard him speak Romanian, except once, when delivered a monologue in the language under the influence of hypnosis.)

He and my grandmother were not, as I mentioned, particularly concerned about passing down Jewish traditions, or any traditions at all, to their children.

There are floor-to-ceiling shelves in my grandmother’s bedroom filled entirely with canonical Jewish books in pristine condition. These books have always haunted me; when I open them, their stiff spines crack as if they have never been bent. I asked my mother and grandmother why they have all these books if no one was ever interested in them. “Well, Arty may have been reading them on the fly,” Martha laughed. My mother interjected that her father had an idea that being well-educated meant reading certain books, yet he never had the patience to read them.

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between an International Style—which could belong anywhere and evoke nowhere in particular—and (((rootless cosmopolitanism))).

Many scholars and critics have made versions of this claim, highlighting the modernity of Jewish architecture and the Jewishness of modern architecture. Some point out that many influential architects from the Bauhaus school were Jewish. Many of these architects fled Nazism in Europe and immigrated to the United States or Israel, popularizing the International Style in both countries, respectively. In an interview with the Daily Beast, curator Donald Albrecht argues that “European Jews gravitated toward modernism as a way to get away from history.” “Especially in Europe,” he claimed, “history has [a] very negative connotation for Jews,” and accordingly, “historicism has a comparably negative connotation.”

I have a hard time believing that the desire to “get away from history” is intrinsically, or even contextually, Jewish. Memory is in fact compulsory in Judaism, at least liturgically. Poet and critic Adam Kirsch writes that “‘Zakhor,’” the “Hebrew word for ‘remember,’” is “a command delivered many times in the Bible.” Accordingly, he argues, “it is possible to see Judaism itself as a technology of memory, a set of practices designed to make the past present.”

However, I also doubt that the implications of this command, particularly as popularly interpreted, are self-evident and coherent either in theory or in practice. This internal contradiction is most apparent, I believe, in the concept of “never again,” the post-Holocaust injunction to remember the past in order prevent such brutal

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

I’d like to think that my grandparents are indicative of “Judaism” or “Jewishness,” no matter how much they wanted to forget, escape, or transcend it. There are, of course, many Jewish experiences; Jewishness as a history and culture is even more discrepant than Jewish invocations of memory. In other words, my grandparents’ partiality for architectural modernism might reflect something Jewish about their sensibilities, but does not indicate that Jewishness and modernism share some fundamental kinship.

After all, many Jews have built houses in many different architectural styles, even in Jamaica Estates. In the last few decades, the neighborhood has seen a significant influx of Bukharian Jews, who are historically from Uzbekistan, and have been largely isolated from other Jewish populations until the late twentieth century. More than 1,000 Bukharian Jews now live in Jamaica Estates, and surrounding neighborhoods are home to many more: Forest Hills, the nearby neighborhood where my grandparents used to live, is sometimes nicknamed ‘Bukharlem.’ As many of the Ashkenazi Jews of my mother’s generation have moved away, Bukharians and other Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews now constitute the dominant Jewish culture in the area.

In a 2007 speech to the Bukharian Jewish Congress, former Senator Joe Lieberman described the population’s mass migration to the US as nothing short of Biblical: “God said to Abraham, ‘You’ll be an eternal people,’” concluding that “God has kept his promise to the Jewish people.” The promised land, I suppose, can be found on either side of Utopia Parkway (Jamaica Estates’ western border), whose apt title is quite on the nose: in 1905, only a year after the land that would become Jamaica Estates was purchased, the Utopia Land Company bought 50 adjacent acres, intending to build a cooperative community for Jewish families from the Lower East Side who wanted, like their would-be neighbors, to escape Manhattan— though these families were instead fleeing the tenements. The company went bankrupt before construction began, and only the wide throughway retained its name.

Many of the new houses in Jamaica Estates, built by Bukharian Jews and other new arrivals, have departed further from the developers’ turnof-the-century English-pastoral aesthetic vision.

Most are archetypal McMansions in a vaguely

Mediterranean Revival style; they are usually adorned by columns, patchworks of beige stone, turret-esque structures, and enormous garages.

Many of their builders share my grandmother’s antipathy to lawns, though in a very different manner—the houses are often built out to the very edge of the lot, and what would have been a lawn is paved over to make room for more development.

If my grandparents’ fondness for modernism reflects their intellectual and cultural influences, Jewish and otherwise, Jamaica Estates’ new Jewish residents’ taste for suburbanized, American-style Mediterranean Revival architecture does as well. This style, typically associated with the white upper-middle class, exemplifies what aspirational American wealth is imagined to look like today. In many ways, this conspicuousness is not so unlike that of Jamaica Estates’ original residents, though the facade of wealth has evolved. These mansions very loosely mimic European architectural forms of the past, but in their assemblage of styles, they are unmistakably new and unequivocally American. +++ Jamaica Estates, you can probably gather by now, is a place where preserving historic character takes precedence over aesthetic innovation or experimentation. Yet the neighborhood association can obstruct neither the forward march of history nor the real estate market.

What used to be the house of Tony Edelsburg, the “very erudite lawyer,” was bought by an eccentric amateur horticulturist whom my grandmother refers to only as “Crazy David.”

His is the only property on the block more out of place than hers: its lawn is so overgrown with lush tropical plants, trees, and hanging vines that it is impossible to make out the house behind it— it probably contains more biodiversity than the surrounding ten square miles. The most recent neighborhood outrage I can remember originated when David planted bamboo, which proliferates rapidly, indifferent to zoning restrictions and the borders demarcated by driveways and topiaries.

The neighbors were up in arms, and I’m sure Tony Edelsburg was rolling in his grave about the affront to lawn culture.

My mother wonders if, when my grandmother dies and she and her brother put the house on the market, whoever buys it will tear it down and build something else. After all, neither of us can imagine who of the people who want to move to Jamaica Estates today would want to live in a house like that. We hold out hope that perhaps the times have changed—New York real estate prices might suddenly make the neighborhood desirable to new and different people.

Or, perhaps that history will repeat itself: like my grandparents realized in the 1960s, due to the dimensions of the lot, anyone who wanted to build a mansion on it would immediately lose interest.

Either way, Jamaica Estates is both unrecognizably altered and unmistakably consistent.

It contains a few more styles of houses and residents of more nationalities, but its history remains evident. In a 2015 interview, Donald Trump, reminiscing about his childhood in Jamaica Estates, admitted as much. “The world is much different; turn on the television,” he said. “That’s called life in New York, and I think that’s a wonderful thing.” For perhaps different reasons, I think so, too.

GEMMA SACK B’21.5 never wants to vacuum a green carpet.

CICI OSIAS “GRILLMASTER D”

X

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Toe Tags ILLUSTRATION ASHLEY CASTAÑEDA

EPHEMERA

Farewell and congrats to our graduating seniors

DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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-AB

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-AA

GP and I are flâneuring in Soho: headscarf and sunglasses to dodge the Raya matches. We just left Cha Cha Matcha, wher e GP never has to pay, an d she’s deciding if she wi ll come back to Brown, and if getting a Barthes tattoo is a bad idea. A year pa sses, and in Providence a str anger reads her tarot, sa ys GP is caught between world s, or something to that eff ect.

Indecisiveness signifies a failure to commit, bu t not for GP. Her problematic is immanence, not abse nce.

Having found a way to the heart of so many wo rld s, how could anyone choo se? My theory, which ha s been in development for alm ost 5 years, involves th e way GP lends her whole Being to whatever’s directly in front of her. If you’ve heard Ga la speak—in section, ar gu ing with a guest lecturer, standing up for Sahbabii in a me eting for Spring Weekend—you ar e lucky. But if GP has lis tened to you, you are luckier. Sh e may be between so ma ny worlds, but she makes yours fee l like it’s the only one in the universe. Calling her a friend, I am one of the luckiest.

-AR

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LIT

g

o o d

b y e s a r e f or G

o o d

b y e s are for when

TEXT ALYSCIA BATISTA

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

ILLUSTRATION CHONG JING GAN

o

11

u r eyes are blinking heavy as we’ve spent too

much time o n giggles and not enough on the work I’m indebted to d o in g. tomorrow I’ll worry about turning thoughts into phrases but for

n

o w,

i m

let me continue

ag

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ne

to look into your eyes longingly looking into mine and

what it might feel like if the passing time could

stop

g nawing at my skin, much like your teeth are doing to my lips.

after a minute, you t ur n a Wa y and tuck yourself in as I hear you whisper

ALYSCIA BATISTA B’23 is struggling to stay

awake.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

g oo

dn

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LIT

SELF PORTRAIT AS TWO LISTS OF GOODBYES TO SAY WHEN ONE IS LEAVING of my bed, flying through the ceiling and spinning off this earth every night and every morning. Goodbye to colorful nails and long hair. Goodbye to the little specks of light, like petals that are either falling or flying, that glisten on the writhing tides of the bay, like little lights on an airport tarmac, although I can never tell if it looks like a landing strip or a runway. And goodbye to the skunk that shambles along the dumpsters on my way back home when it’s late and quiet, our initial mutual fear having since given way to uneasy respect. As we walk by each other, its tail, a shock of white, waves a wary little fare thee well.

1. here: 2. there: Goodbye to the scraggly mossy arms of rain trees that trace a snaking skyward parabola as they prepare to cup a heavy, falling sky. Goodbye to the morning call of the koel that wakes me up in an early mist and thin, bright threads of light, its voice the color of a traffic light’s amber warning (I have always thought it would be spelled owo, owo, owo—a sound with a startled, alarming, but nonetheless friendly face). Goodbye to the abstract composition of the straight line of your shoulder meeting the elliptical orbit of your cheekbone, set softly aglow by the dusty blue of dusk. Goodbye to the staccato drumstomp rhythm of my mother’s feet when she races into my room to proclaim

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 10

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH PARK

CHONG JING GAN B’23 prefers “see you soon” to “goodbye”.

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

something she has just discovered that she must share with me regardless of what I have to say about it or what I am currently doing—her voice a triumphant cry, like a child discovering excitement for the first time again. Goodbye to the cool and hard floor of my childhood friend’s bedroom floor, and the view of that ceiling with that crescent-shaped water stain in the same spot that it always is.

Goodbye to the clingy air of the tropics that coats my skin like a warm, sweaty blanket that I can never shrug off, dragging at my back as it hisses don’t go. Stay. Goodbye to the stressed shapeless clumps that my hair congeals into in anxious equatorial humidity. Goodbye to awful, horrendous patriotic songs that I know by heart anyway, with that sappy, tacky quality of a bad fridge magnet that you will never throw away.

Goodbye to the u’s that I use to ornament my words like bits of cheap plastic tinsel. Goodbye to my voice that is flat and sharp and fast and hard and feels like a snug, well-fitted boot.

Goodbye to the home that your voice forms when it is soft, and whispered, and expands in all its smallness to fit me inside it. Goodbye to sluicing, pouring rain, beating rain, thunderous shaking rain, dolloping equatorial rain, sticky rain, that drums on my body to the beat of my heart, that traces the exact shape of my body and smudges its edges at the same time. Goodbye to the festering stink of petrichor after the rain that hangs thick in the air. Goodbye to the fire that burns in the kitchen every evening,

TEXT CHONG JING GAN

Goodbye to a freshly cleaned kitchen counter glistening in the sloping sun. Goodbye to the little strip of wobbly yellow light that slouches itself in the empty space where the wall meets the floor. Goodbye to its slow, steady crawl from one end of its world (my closet) to the other (my door), the way it determinedly arrives earlier and earlier every day, inching forward bit by bit. Goodbye to the steady providing faith of every covered pot and pan that sits bubbling and simmering on my stove. Goodbye to the little miracle that occurs every time I gingerly, nervously remove that trembling lid, setting off a suddenly theatrical plume of sizzling fragrance. Goodbye to the magical, alchemical mystery of slowly sweated onions, crushed and saucepan-gurgling garlic, little igniting splashes of soy, the sharpness of a sprinkle of scallion, the binding, absorbent quality of shaoxingjiu, and the gentle, perfuming touch of steam.

Goodbye to the familiar friendly forms that fill the comfortable sinky spot in the middle of the couch, the first sight that greets me when I open the door, still damp with the outside’s cold and tiredness. Goodbye to the empty-stomached sourness of the hours between midnight and morning, filled with treacly, lapping waves of dread. Goodbye to snow. Goodbye to the sun that feels like yolk on my bare shoulders.

Goodbye to my unwieldy adopted American tongue, which curls and rounds around vowels and dangles z’s everywhere and flops around loosely like a pair of ill-fitting slippers. Goodbye to ill-fitting pavement, cracked and fissured like tectonic plates stitched together in a ragged patchwork. Goodbye to the cherry blossom petals that fall in the spring, dance across the street and slip into those cracks and disappear beneath my feet, deep into the earth, where they will exchange whispers with the tree roots and the detritus. Goodbye to shivering by the river, curled into my own coat, with a friend’s cold breaths close by my cheek, with the yolksun bleeding out into the water. Goodbye to the dry, crisp climate that untousles and relaxes my hair into neat little parted strands. Goodbye to the feeling of having nothing holding everything together, of the street peeling up, of the leaves vanishing, of my body sliding away from the surface of everything. Goodbye to the feeling of being free under my skin, for the first time, for a moment when the sky was blue and the grass was soft and whispering with life. Goodbye to the falling flock of snow that descended on me one day last winter, when I was out walking, sweeping me up in their swirl, and then, abruptly, flying—leaving me, alone, my face still wet from their touch. Goodbye to the warm, firm blanket that holds me down from flying out

when the sun irradiates the edge of every plate and fork with a blazing shimmer.

Goodbye to sunshine that beats, that pounds, that scorches, that dries, that burns, that spews across the entire sky in protest of its leaving, that makes everything sharp and vivid. Goodbye to the feeling of belonging in your flesh.

Goodbye to the feeling of wanting to peel off your skin, slowly and methodically. Goodbye to every little silent figurine that greets me every Sunday when I wake, cleaned one by one by my father, carefully and gently, before anyone else has awoken. Goodbye to their unnervingly still, comforting multitude, their unchanging, firm poses. Goodbye to the propagating explosion of green on our window sill that my mother slowly but surely expands. Goodbye to those plants that are always a little yellow, a little wilted, but that she still refuses to give up on—watering them patiently, turning them to meet the sun, or tucking them away into the shade, all the while watching them like a hawk. Goodbye to those plants that keep growing until she must keep giving them larger, larger homes, until it seems she cannot find a large enough pot for any of them. Goodbye to irreparably chapped lips whose dry, dead exterior I cannot help but constantly twist and tear off, as if at some point I will find a beautiful, shiny pair of lips that will smile beautifully and speak in every tongue that should be mine, perfectly. Goodbye to my grandmother’s suanpanzi that she kneads and forms by hand from mashed yam and flour, soft and chewy with flecks of black fungus and mince pork stuck to it, each little abacus disc in my mouth counting down to the next time I will leave. Goodbye to train stations that still smell like past pains, and a time when the greatest worry in my world was if the boy who always made me laugh wanted to hold my hand too.

Goodbye to long train rides where the whistling shriek of wind rushing through the tunnels and the gasping train tracks could wedge me firmly enough in the gap between stations on the map that I could feel like I did not need to long for a place to belong. Goodbye to every ship dotted on the horizon of every beach, like a dotted line perimeter marking where my world ended, where I was trapped, where I was safe.

Goodbye to the ding-dong doorbell sound that buses make when I nudge them to stop, each bus with its own distinct little tone, as if each is answering in their own little voice, goodbye, but also, welcome, as you brace for that halt, that hissing open. Goodbye to the mirage of yellow left in the wake of an oriole diving through the space overhead where tree canopies do not quite dare to touch, that little dizzying glow that I can barely ever glimpse and yet still see every time I close my eyes, wedged in the space between my eyelids and my heart, falling, but also flying.

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TEXT NELL SALZMAN

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

ILLUSTRATION SARAPHINA FORMAN

METRO

A PROGRESSIVE CIVIL WAR OR BUMP IN THE ROAD?

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On December 2, the Huffington Post published an article by Daniel Marans analyzing the ways that the Rhode Island Political Cooperative (Co-op) is “driving a wedge between progressives.”

Marans reported accusations that the Co-op—which puts pressure on long-standing conservative Democratic leaders in Rhode Island and takes positions that would make Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders proud—has a tunnel-visioned approach to campaign strategy and unrealistic expectations of what progressives can accomplish in Rhode Island. He critiques the Co-op’s “top-down” strategy, litmus test nomination techniques, and candidate vetting process. Pointing to internal conflicts within the Co-op, Marans questions whether taking uncompromising stances on progressive issues and employing hard-edged political strategies to translate them into law causes more harm than good.

Marans’ piece makes clear that the Co-op has been making progressive strides in Rhode Island since 2019, electing ten progressive candidates to state and local office last year—two for City Council, five for State Senate, and three in the State House. In a recent special election, however, the Co-op-endorsed candidate Geena Pham was defeated in the five-person Senate race on the East Side of Providence to replace Gayle Goldin. Pham and Bret Jacob split the progressive democratic vote 982 to 908, losing to Democrat Samuel D. Zurier, who got 1,282 votes.

Jacob and Pham had similar campaign platforms—investing in public schools, implementing the Green New Deal in Rhode Island, and fighting for affordable housing. Jacob told the Providence Journal he was committed to turning progressive action into policy that benefits the under-represented; Pham said that what set her apart from the other candidates was her anti-establishment stance. As a former member of City Council, Zurier touted his experience working

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with finances and city bureaucracy. After the election, Zurier publicly acknowledged that even though he won, two-thirds of the voter base did not swing for him, according to the Providence Journal.

The loss has touched off a debate––reported in detail by Marans––about how the broader progressive community can collaborate instead of compete, and whether they should.

The Co-op operates under two major tenets: it offers campaign services and it creates a deep community of candidates who can rely on and help each other. Ultimately, through these mechanisms of support, the Co-op allows those who have typically been left out of the electoral process, namely working class people, to have a fairer chance of competing in legislative elections around the state.

In Pham’s race, Co-op staff members and volunteers came together to help knock on doors. “As a first-time candidate and a full-time teacher, I couldn’t take two months off of work to campaign,” Pham told the College Hill Independent. “The Co-op staff and members supported me all the way through my campaign, helping with everything I needed.”

Pham explained that although she applied for the Working Families Party (WFP) endorsement, she didn’t end up getting it. WFP refused to endorse Pham and instead chose to endorse Jacob, who entered the race after Pham. “Jacob had a longer track record of community leadership on [progressive] values, deeper ties to the East Side and Senate District Three, and demonstrated eagerness to be a WFP candidate and further build the party with us,” Zack Mezera, organizing director for the WFP, told the Indy.

He explained that the WFP tries to recruit and endorse candidates who are the most aligned with the party.

For the 2020 election, Mezera elaborated, the WFP chose candidates who were identified with the Political Co-op, UPRISE, and labor

unions. For the special election specifically, WFP recruited people from the community to be part of the endorsement process. Community members looked at questionnaires and feedback from WFP leadership on the East Side in order to come to the decision to endorse Jacob.

“There were multiple strong progressives and it wasn’t an easy choice,” Mezera told the Indy.

“But I think the important thing is that wherever individual groups landed, the demands across the East Side for urgent action—to end homelessness, stop climate change, reform the criminal justice system, and tax the rich—were very clear. Whoever won, Zurier in this case, needs to follow through on those priorities.”

Though the WFP backed Co-op candidates in 2020, their lack of collaboration with Pham likely hindered the progressive movement in this specific race. According to Co-op spokesperson Camilla Pelliccia, Pham was endorsed

by Reclaim RI, Sunrise RI Youth, Sunrise PVD, BLM RI PAC, Climate Action RI, and the RI Democratic Women’s Caucus. Pelliccia reiterated to the Indy that the division was not for Pham’s lack of trying: “We were disappointed that Geena did not win the Senate District Three race, but it was certainly not because she—or the rest of the Co-op community—was unwilling to work with other progressive organizations.”

Observers point out that Pham’s race was only one contest in an off-year election, making it a weak barometer for the state of progressive politics in Rhode Island, but the division still raises questions about how a unified collaboration between organizations can be achieved in the future—as well as questions about who determines what is and isn’t “progressive” in Rhode Island. The real arbiters of progressivism, according to Pelliccia, are voters in the districts.

These are the people that the Co-op is interested in representing. “The Co-op’s mission is to elect a governing majority to oust the cur-

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The Co-op, progressive infighting, and the political future in RI rent corrupt, conservative Speaker and Senate President and pass a platform that ensures that every single Rhode Islander has a livable wage, housing, healthcare, air they can breathe, and water they can drink,” she told the Indy.

Inside the Co-op According to Providence Journal investigative reporters Patrick Anderson and Katherine Gregg, the Co-op is treated like a for-profit organization by the IRS, but listed as a non-profit with the state; it functions much like a non-profit, but doesn’t receive donations. Its sole income source is the fees from its members, which means that all candidates have literally “bought in” to the mission. Anderson and Gregg report that these dues vary widely depending on the candidate. In 2020 Senator Tiara Mack paid the Co-op $13,000, while Representative Michelle McGaw paid just $7,000. AJ Braverman, who worked for the Co-op in 2020 and is now the deputy campaign manager for gubernatorial candidate Matt Brown and lieutenant gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Mendes, told the Indy that this difference in fees is common. Mack and McGaw paid the same amount of dues, but Mack opted to pay more for printing costs.

Braverman elaborated on the financial challenges of working within an electoral system.

“A state-wide campaign like Matt and Cynthia’s comes with a lot of different resources. For that reason, the Co-op only does state legislative campaigns,” he said. Brown founded the Co-op and Mendes was a member when she was elected to the Senate in 2020, but they are no longer members of the Co-op. They collaborate with Co-op candidates, but they don’t pay dues, and they don’t receive services. Despite the difference in scale, state-wide and localized legislative elections both still work within competitive political structures. “What we’re up against is a deeply corrupt political machine. And what we’ve seen is that even if you elect just one or two progressives a year, you can peel powerful people away and can push enough people into positions of power,” he said. The Co-op has an unprecedented slate of 50 candidates for the 2022 election.

Braverman explained that though the Co-op is structured somewhat like a consulting firm, its campaigns are rooted in grassroots tactics and strategies. It helps candidates get the word out—knocking on doors, talking to voters, and making phone calls. Everyone in the Co-op has some role in movement organizing somewhere, Braverman said. For example, Charmaine Webster in Woonsocket is part of an organization called the Watch Coalition that does mutual aid and non-violence work, Geena Pham organizes people to pick up litter across the state, and Maggie Kain maintains a community organizing spot in South County called The Collective.

What distinguishes the Co-op from other electoral groups is the camaraderie the candidates feel toward each other and the personal sacrifices they make to support each other.

Pham reiterated this, telling the Indy that the best part of the Co-op for her is the sense of community. “It is incredibly inspiring to work alongside so many amazing candidates and staff members fighting for collective change; we all rely on each other for campaign support, friendship, and hope,” she said. “Almost every member of the Co-op showed up for me during my election, knocking doors, driving volunteers, addressing letters, and more. I am so excited to support each and every one of them next year.”

Though Marans pushed back on the Co-op’s “top-down” decision-making process, Pelliccia explained that it’s actually a very collaborative effort. Each year, the Co-op holds a series of meetings to collectively build the policy platform that the candidates agree to run on.

Pelliccia told the Indy that the platform this year includes supporting universal health care, ending mass incarceration, building low-income and affordable housing, ensuring that every child has quality education, and passing a bold

Green New Deal. Braverman explained that the process doesn’t end with the election. After writing core principles, candidates continue to meet to build out policy papers and hash out details; candidates then lead and collaborate on different types of projects. Michael Niemeyer, a candidate for state Senate in South County, for instance, planned a rally this year calling for funding from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) for Early Intervention, a program which helped his daughter with developmental disabilities.

Internal debate In his article, Marans points out that the Coop did receive more criticism earlier this fall, following the decision to run Co-op candidate Jennifer Jackson against state Sen. Dawn Euer.

According to Aaron Regunburg, who served in the Rhode Island House of Representatives from 2015–18, Euer is a “long-standing community organizer,” focusing especially on climate issues.

Regunburg wrote a scathing opinion article for The Boston Globe on October 1, condemning the Co-op for their decision to challenge a “progressive ally” like Euer.

She might not, however, be the “progressive ally” Regunburg posits her to be. Though she was the leader on the “Act on Climate” bill which passed the General Assembly last year, this legislation received criticism from groups like Sunrise RI for being a marginal solution that only delayed investments in climate commitments. A comprehensive plan was developed, but it will likely take another two years for state agencies to actually implement the plan. Ultimately, Euer’s slow approach on climate action demonstrates a larger trend—that the Co-op believes in quick, structural change, as opposed to incremental action.

Regardless of whether Euer was the right person to challenge, the race itself was thwarted in September after Jackson made a series of social media posts and public statements protesting the state vaccine mandate and opposing refugees. The Co-op withdrew its backing of her, and she subsequently ended her bid. Then in October, Co-op candidate Tarshire Battle dropped out after a series of similar conservative Facebook posts were dug up.

Both Marans and Regunburg drew attention to these incidents. In his opinion article, Regunburg questioned how the decision to run with Jackson was made, then criticized Co-op leadership decision-making: “Either way, it strikes me as particularly concerning coming from an organization whose leadership is so adamant that they, and only they, are the arbiters of what is and isn’t progressive in Rhode Island—a question that, according to their analysis, turns not on values or ideology, and not on policy goals or legislative record, but solely on whether or not you agree with their specific approach to politics.”

Jackson’s social media posts were clearly outside of the progressive threshold that the Co-op considers in line with their mission, and the organization appropriately separated itself from the candidate. But after hearing criticism this fall, the Co-op refined their vetting process, Senate district 4 candidate Lenny Cioe told the Indy. Co-op members are more involved than they were before in decisions to add or remove existing members, and all candidates now have to go through multiple interviews to meet and be approved by all members.

Cioe explained that the Co-op is constantly refining its procedures and values. “As the Co-op group grew, it changed,” he said. “It has a purpose now. We have exit ramps, we have ramps to join the Co-op, to leave the Co-op. We have a values clause, ways to communicate if there’s ever an argument between candidates.

We know how to respect each other’s space.”

According to Cioe, the Co-op had a series of meetings last summer about the most effective methods for communication and collaboration.

After some bumps in the road this fall, they

had to revisit some of those conversations.

“It’s a growing community, and it’s going to go through growing pains. We make mistakes. We still have a lot of work to do, but we’ve made strides,” Cioe said.

Progressive ‘infighting’ Over the past few months, a narrative has emerged of debilitating progressive conflict in Rhode Island. The split vote between Pham and Jacob and the Jackson/Euer debacles both strongly contribute to this narrative. Though it isn’t entirely incorrect, it obscures the larger picture of progressive momentum in Rhode Island.

In response to Marans’ article, Director of the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy and political science professor at Brown University Wendy Schiller expressed concern to the Indy: “Anytime a national news organization shines a negative spotlight on a political organization, it should be a wake up call to work out any internal differences that exist.” But, prior to the publication of the article, Schiller said that it’s normal for in-fighting to increase when a progressive movement gains power. “We’ve seen it over and over again. When a local progressive movement rises, it will receive pushback from parties inside and outside. It has more to navigate and deal with, so complications naturally come up,” she said.

Mezera pointed out that many groups do progressive work in Rhode Island, not just the WFP or the Co-op, but also Planned Parenthood, the Democratic Women’s Caucus, Democratic Socialists of America, and more. “I think the story here of this divide is a little much, because we’re all trying to work when there’s a near infinite amount of work to do. There’s certainly plenty of ways that we can overlap, but it’s hard when the increasing in-fighting narrative is what gets all the attention,” he told the Indy.

Mezera spoke about the victories that the WFP has seen since their formation in Rhode Island in 2016—$15 minimum wage and paid sick days, among others. The state is slowly accomplishing the WFP’s progressive goals. And so, while inevitable conflicts and missteps deserve attention and need to be better explained, they also obscure the larger story—that for the first time in Rhode Island history, there is a real opportunity to unseat the speaker of the House and president of the Senate with candidates representing citizens who have been shut out of power for a long time.

State Senator Sam Bell, a Democrat, reiterated the message that progressive infighting narratives are setting back the movement.

“Progressives who believe in supporting the machine, not openly challenging it, have been quite personally critical of a lot of people in the Co-op. There has been an accelerated degree of personal animosity that I think is on all sides counter-productive and not conducive to successful progressive goals,” he told the Indy.

Now, the Co-op is challenging the decades-long rule of the conservative establishment that restricts reproductive rights and blocks serious climate action while cutting taxes for the wealthiest in our state. It’s trying to create a sustainable organization that works with other progressive groups, and simultaneously harnesses electoral power and grassroots organizing strategies. If Brown, Mendes, and the candidates of the Co-op win, they will form a government interested in standing up for working people. That is the story that deserves recognition and reporting.

“The Co-op is so much more than just an organization that gives campaign advice; it is a true community that we all build together,” Pham told the Indy.

NELL SALZMAN B’22 likes to canvas so she can spy into peoples’ windows and see what T.V. shows they’re watching.

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TEXT KOLYA SHIELDS

DESIGN FLORIA TSUI

ILLUSTRATION SAGE JENNINGS

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ANTI-CAPITALIST COMMUNITY CARBON CAPTURE

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How we reclaim green technology

A calm female voice describes emission reductions, efficiency, and clean technology over hyperlapsed footage of flourishing orchids and hundreds of intrepid green sprouts pushing towards the sky. “When it comes to climate change, our actions make a difference,” claims Exxon Mobil as its logo appears in the corner of the screen. Exxon’s 2020 annual report revealed a $10.4 billion investment in new, unexplored oil and gas reserves and the company’s internal documents predict their emissions rising 17 percent by 2024. The ‘clean’ technology this advertisement shills for is Direct Air Capture, or DAC. In contrast to carbon capture strategies reliant on photosynthesis, like planting more trees or fields of fast-growing crops, DAC works like a basic air purifier. Giant fans suck CO2-laden air past filters where special chemicals called sorbents bond to carbon, and the air—now with dramatically less carbon—is expelled out the back. Next, the filters are removed from the machine and heated until the carbon gas is purified, extracted, then bottled up or turned to stone.

It is imperative that we not only end emissions but also remove carbon from the atmosphere. Unfettered emissions have already led to an atmospheric carbon concentration of 415.74 parts per million (ppm), far above the 270 ppm pre-industrial baseline. Climate scientist James Hansen argues we must reduce atmospheric carbon to 350 ppm to ensure a livable world. At our current carbon level thousands of species are going extinct, fragile ecosystems are collapsing, and arctic ice melt is threatening further sea-level rise. Every day that more than 350 ppm of carbon stays in the atmosphere, the risks of extreme weather, ice melt, and ecosystem collapse continue, which are accelerated by positive feedback loops that lead to more warming. More “natural” forms of carbon capture, such as planting plants and letting photosynthesis run its course, should be a key part of this drawdown strategy. However,

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these alone will not suffice.

Wildfires and pathogens threaten the carbon held in forests and other ecosystems, and more importantly, there simply isn’t enough land and water on earth to naturally draw down all the carbon emitted in a timely fashion. Plus, DAC can be efficient in sequestering carbon—each new DAC facility adds to yearly carbon sequestration capacity, with little limit beyond storing the carbon itself. If governments simply waited to implement current DAC technology sometime in the 2040s (or hopefully earlier), we’d be woefully unprepared to make a real dent in atmospheric carbon. The current total yearly carbon capture capacity is around 40 megatonnes, meaning it would take somewhere in between 2,500 and 5,000 years at current rates to capture the 100-200 gigatonnes of carbon necessary to bring atmospheric carbon back to 350 ppm.

Without oversight, carbon capture can even directly lead to more CO2 emissions. Enhanced oil recovery—large-scale injection of captured CO2 into semi-depleted oil fields—has been utilized for over 30 years by oil companies. During this process, the last dregs of crude oil that can’t be drilled out react with the injected CO2, swelling and thinning out, flowing up the well and reviving dormant fields. Suddenly we’ve arrived at twisted carbon-positive DAC. To actually offset emissions, carbon must be turned into stone and entombed, functionally removing it from the carbon cycle, or manufacturing it into products like shoes or jewelry.

However, with the current sky-high price of carbon removal, the only widely profitable carbon usage model is enhanced oil recovery. With current carbon capture costs and the necessity of the profit motive under capitalism, outside of oil recovery, DAC companies’ main strategy has become charity or partnerships with big oil, neither of which have amounted to a large-scale successful business model.

Settler-colonial capitalism and carbon capture Climate change is directly tied to colonial capitalism, and climate interventions must work to counter this violent structure. The moment colonizers set foot in North America, the guiding colonial logic was the extraction of natural resources for profit and the extermination of Indigenous peoples to support this goal. This ongoing structure of settler colonialism separates many Indigenous people from the ecosystems and land they have stewarded for centuries and introduces extractive processes to make money. The Karuk people of California write that “unsustainable Western land management

practices and the rise of political and economic systems for which indigenous people hold little to no responsibility” is a central cause of climate change.

Some corporations argue for further investments in fossil fuels and carbon capture to make up for emissions. However, spending money on carbon capture while allowing emissions to continue is a fool’s errand; we’ll never get close to capturing it all, and it ignores the violent impacts of fossil capitalism, from pollution pipelines crisscrossing native lands to the environmental degradation of fracking. However, if we don’t build up carbon capture capacity today, it won’t be able to sequester enough carbon to get us down to 350 ppm and a livable planet quickly.

There are inherent flaws in DAC under capitalism. In 2018 the bipartisan FUTURE Act was passed, which includes a $50 tax credit for every ton of CO2 sequestered. Currently, the cost of capturing a ton of CO2 hovers around $100, but many argue that with further government spending or technological innovation carbon capture will explode and capitalism will finally beat the climate crisis. However, current US federal regulations only require storage of CO2 for 50 years to qualify. Carbon can linger in the atmosphere for up to thousands of years, so if this captured carbon is sold and/or released after 50 years, net atmospheric CO2 doesn’t change.

When controlled by private companies, there is no practical method for ensuring the carbon captured by DAC is properly sequestered and no way to know whether it won’t be released or sold at a later date.

DAC is also a new face for a decades-old strategy: discourses of climate delay. As Carbon Engineering CEO Steve Oldman argues, “it is wishful thinking to think we can instantly eliminate fossil fuels.” Shell’s February 2021 energy scenario report, which details their plan for net-zero emissions, shows a 30x rise in carbon capture capacity to 12 gigatons a year, all to offset continued natural gas and oil use past 2050.

Shell uses DAC to argue for continued fossil fuel investment even though it captured only .4 gigatons of the 20 gigatonnes of the yearly emissions from coal and gas in 2020. A recent study revealed that if we continued on the path of currently established climate agreements but made ‘war-time’ investments (worth 1.2-1.9 percent of GDP) in DAC, utilizing sweeping government action to implement carbon capture as a climate solution, temperatures would still rise 2.4 degrees celsius by 2100. With this warming, 1 billion people will experience extreme heat stress and the World Bank estimates there will be at least 143 million climate refugees; current

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climate refugees are unrecognized by international law and face xenophobic border policing across the globe.

These harmful discourses of climate delay run alongside continual policy obstruction— Forbes reports that “the world’s five largest publicly owned oil and gas companies spend approximately $200 million on lobbying designed to control, delay or block binding climate-motivated policy.” Is the .2% of annual carbon emissions captured worth the good PR these companies gain from DAC, all while arguing against rapid decarbonization and spending billions on blocking climate policy? The more Exxon Mobil et al. look like they’re decarbonizing, the less political pressure there is to persecute, regulate, and shut down these companies.

Indigenous environmental histories and futurities Contrary to individualist narratives spread by oil companies about human nature and consumption—such as the “carbon footprint” (invented

by BP)—climate change isn’t caused by a universalizing “humanity” intent on consumption and unsustainability. By the 1980s, Exxon knew their business model and emissions were a key cause of climate change, and proceeded to spend billions of dollars on decades of misinformation PR campaigns sowing doubt about climate science, and more billions on lobbying against all climate policy. Climate change is the result of settler-colonial fossil capitalism and profit-motivated extraction, not an inner predilection of humanity towards carbon gluttony.

Taking this perspective allows us to truly consider what systems and structures influence our relationship with the land and our morethan-human kin like animals, plants, and bacteria, instead of being locked into an extractivist “human nature.”

Through controlled burns and fishing, agriculture and community practices, Indigenous peoples have managed and maintained ecosystems far before any so-called “Anthropocene” began. For example, the Swinomish people of Washington state are building the first modern clam garden in the United States. By laying down thousands of shells, the tribe hopes to rebuild a vital food source threatened by sea-level rise and continue traditional practices, all within a logic of reciprocity, as theorized

by Potawatomi author Robin Wall Kimmerer, where humans’ positive environmental impacts stem from seeing oneself as deeply connected to one’s land and more-than-human kin. While writing about the centuries-old controlled burns the Karuk people use to work alongside wildfires on the west coast, the Karuk Climate Adaptation Plan notes that “climate adaptation is an opportunity to restore human responsibility to other species, [using] living memory of human use and responsibility in context of place… [to] strengthen the spiritual, subsistence and management practices that the place calls the people to perform.” For example, land management by Indigenous groups already sequesters 17 percent of the total carbon stored in forests.

How can carbon capture, as a climate technol-

ogy, restore human responsibility to place and more-than-human kin?

The Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Beaver Lake Cree Nation, and the Mikisew Cree First Nation all argue against carbon capture as laid out in the 2021 Canadian Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act. In a response to the act, they write that this legislation allows for the “replac[ement of] absolute GHG [Greenhouse Gas] emissions reductions and allow[s] for continued fossil fuel production and consumption,” which has violent impacts such as pipelines and oil sands pollution. The Indigenous Environmental Network notes that “transporting and storing carbon dioxide (CO2) involves a massive network of perilous pipelines connected to underground injection sites, each with its own set of dangers,” revealing the perils of leaving carbon capture implementation up to private corporations with a long history of colonial violence and defending pipelines.

Anti-capitalist community carbon capture Working people have the autonomy and ability to twist, tweak, and hack technology to their own classed, raced, and gendered position.

Why give the fossil oligarchs and DAC grifters carbon capture when instead we can wrest control and enact democratic post-capitalist community carbon capture. At a minimum, DAC projects should be owned and controlled by workers instead of investors and CEOs. This way, they can be more accountable to the people and communities they’re impacting, instead of simply following a profit motive.

Instead of being controlled by corporations, governments can hand carbon capture projects over to Indigenous tribes wholesale. Decolonial community ownership of DAC can center justice as DAC capacity increases. David Treuer, an Ojibwe author and historian, argues for repatriating national parks to Indigenous tribes.

The US should do the same with DAC. In places in which tribes do not want to manage a DAC plant, it would still be better for carbon capture projects to be democratically controlled—by a regional council, local government, or community organization without a profit motive. Any DAC strategy must be paired with radical emissions cuts, not further fossil fuel infrastructure.

As the Indigenous Climate Network argues, “We don’t need to fix fossil fuels. We need to

ditch them.”

DAC can further a reciprocal relationship with the land; by bringing atmospheric carbon levels down, ecosystem restoration, renewal, and stewardship work can be done on a global scale. Every gigaton of carbon we suck back up makes life safer for us and our more-than-human kin. Indigenous leadership is key in this process—carbon needs to be sequestered in places where it can support local ecosystems instead of hurting them, and Indigenous land stewardship experience is the best way to guide this. What radical possibilities could these partnerships have for our relationship with land?

We could rebuild the mountains flattened for coal mining, reinforce the shores broached by melting ice, and re-wild landscapes right on top of buried carbon, turning capitalism’s violent externalities into places of growth and flourishing. This radical ethic can lead to projects utilizing the relationships built through community carbon capture, from sustainable farming to controlled burns preventing unsafe wildfires.

What can bring about this vital politic? First of all, redistributive climate reparations across the world, as called for by the 35,000 people at the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in 2010 in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Wealthy polluters like the US should send a percentage of their GDP yearly to countries across the Global South so they can build zero-carbon and DAC infrastructure. The state should nationalize dangerous polluting companies, shut down their fossil fuel infrastructure, and hand their carbon capture investments over to communities—local control, Indigenous ownership, and a new paradigm for ecological stewardship. As more and more carbon gets released into the atmosphere, the need to intervene in the DAC sphere gets more and more pressing—to turn emissions-heavy extraction into sequestration. If we play our cards right, this intervention can begin to shift our communities’ relationship with the land by laying the groundwork for living and working with the land, influencing the flow of a natural resource to restore and renew ecosystems instead of destroying them.

KOLYA SHIELDS B’24 is thinking about rebuilding mountains, communities, and relationships.

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The Indy’s 2021, Wrapped FEATS

TEXT INDY STAFF DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU ILLUSTRATION LUCY LEBOWITZ

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When that boat blocked the Suez Canal Hocus Pocus 2 filming in Providence Seaweed’s patio Wins for the BDS movement Yassification “Which vaccine did you get?”

Lil Nas X’s “Call Me By Your Name

(Montero)” video Getting the common cold for the first time in a year Getting to know myself?

Striketober First concert post-vax Elon Musk </3 Grimes Pete Davidson <3 Kim Kardashian Northeast Regional “Capital riot doesn’t represent who we

are as a country” Shrimp in the Cinnamon Toast Crunch “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From the Vault)” Turning 21 Joe Biden farting at COP26 “Kiss Me More” by Doja Cat and SZA GameStop stock thing

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

This is an arbitrarily-ranked list of things that meant something to someone on the Indy at any point this year. We always understood the assignment ;)

DEAR INDY

How to play: Draw a random spiral and count the number of rings from top to bottom to determine your “magic number.”

Go down the list and count options until you reach your magic number and cross that one off.

Keep going through the list until you have one option from each category left.

Fill out the mad lib below to see into your future.

Car Flame car Anime car Spin Scooter Boosted board RIPTA

Love Life A Volcel In a Thruple Dating roommate Being a DJ

Music Taste Shoegaze Phoebe Bridgers Orange Guava Passion Lofi beats to study and chill to Drain Gang Drum and bass

Lunch Spot Chinatown on Thayer Bolt The Met (sneaking in) Grab n’ Go

Job “Consulting” Creative director (remote) Intern (unpaid) Au Pair Indy M. E. “DJ”

Footwear Sneaker junkie sneakers Clogs Tabis Fila Disruptors Solomons

Favorite Author Emily Ratajowski Deleuze Ben Lerner Jordan Peterson Hillary Clinton Night Life Barcade Wild Colonial Seaweeds GCB Fortnight NYC for the weekend Ego Apostle John Peter Bartholomew Judas

Academic Pursuit MCM (Theory Track) RISD Furniture DJ Buzzword Abject Meta-discourse Pedagogical Rhizomatic Atmospheric Decentralized Vice (Pick 2) Nicotine (Vape) Nicotine (Cigarettes) Stealing Lying Gaslighting Procrastinating Anti-masking Posting Annoying Baja’s UberEats Facebook marketplace Sex DJ

TEXT THE COMMITTEE ON DEAR INDY*

Jacket Arc’teryx Carhartt North Face Canada Goose Shirtless

Persona MCM Manipulator Tiktok famous girlie Meme page admin Girlboss Horse Girl DJ

DESIGN GALA PRUDENT

Residence Hen House Frog House 257 Thayer DreamHaus Keeney

Hello! My name is ____________________ (Your Name) and I live at ____________________ (Residence). To get around Providence, I drive my ____________________ (Car). I am currently ____________________ (Love Life) which is working out perfectly for me.

At night, I like to go to ____________________ (Nightlife), especially if I can listen to ____________________ (Music Taste) while I’m there. I’m proud of my style: I love wearing my ____________________ (Footwear) and ____________________ (Jacket), usually while dining at ____________________ (Lunch Spot). My friends describe me as a _________________ (Persona), to which I say, “That’s so ____________________ (Buzzword).” I have been studying ____________________ (Academic Pursuit) and applying my knowledge to my job as a ____________________ (Job). I’m trying to cut back on ____________________ (Vice) and ____________________ (Vice) and follow more in the footsteps of ____________________ (Apostle). I love my life! *

the committee on dear indy is comprised of: amelia anthony, gala prudent, andy rickert, adrian ocone, and justin scheer. the committee meets in the RISD bolt.

VOLUME 43 ISSUE 10

19

MUTUAL AID* & COMMUNITY “CIRROCUMULUS CIRUMSTANCES” RICARDO GOMEZ

FUNDRAISERS

*Mutual aid is “survi va l pending on revolutio n,” as de scr ibed by the Black Panthers. Join in red wealth to create an eco istributing system of care in response to a sys institutions that have tem of failed or

harmed our commun iti

es.

C o m m u Family nity Cares: S bit.ly/D for the Holi ponsor a d a a r e y C s C (by DA RE) COYO Your OTE RI Close t (Cal ld Tire l Off No d w E a t c h c product epting donatio ics RI) s n the Lov and new or us s of hygiene e e Center; and Compass d clothing at ion Day 92 Eas t Av 029 He a e 0 lt n 4 h u . e 548-37 Contact Sheila , Pawtucket R I, 56 to Brow d o n a t e or coll n (401) ect item s.

Kennedy Plaza Survival Drive (by Wide Awake Collective) Venmo WideAwakes-PVD, Cashapp: $MutualAidMondays Support the weekly survival drive at Kennedy Plaza! This drive distributes food, water, hygiene materials, warm clothing and other important items to folks in Providence who need them.

pplies Drive Kitchen Su de RI) ri (by Youth P donations, tchen supplies Looking for ki (chef and butcher), es including: kniv ainless steel cooking , st cutting boards sized pots, sauce pans, m utensils, mediu , mixing bowls, baking as skillets, spatul at is stainless r cookware th supplies, othe flon based. te steel and NOT nate, email: mething to do If you have so rideri.org. info@youthp

Queer and Trans Mutual Aid PVD Venmo @qtmapvd PayPal.me/qtmapvd Support mutual aid for LGBTQIA people in Rhode Island! There is a current backlog of 31 requests, equal to $3,100. Help QTMA fill this need!

nts for people GoFundMe for te elessness (by experiencing hom Andrea Smith) tinyurl.com/tentsri

ards buying All donations go tow ntly living in tents for people curre to be distributed inhospitable places, and street outreach by service providers ntly over 1,000 teams. There are curre ts for individual people on waiting lis ile the state has and family shelter, wh shelter beds, all of only 608 year-round full. which are currently

“FLIGHT” CHLOE CHEN

Tuesdays, 6-8PM: Queer Gourmet at YPI Each week, YPI staff will teach a new recipe along with foundational cooking skills! Register at www.bit.ly/ ypiqueergourmet

743 Westminster St. Monday, 12/13 @ 7-10PM: Artist Showcase: Laura Wold, Prior Panic, Deer Scout This Monday, join community members at Red Ink and support some local musicians at this all-ages show. Masks mandatory.

130 Cypress St., Mt. Hope

Sundays, 3-5PM: Queer Knitting Circle at Small Format Want to learn how to knit or refresh your knowledge? Looking for more queer community? Bring needles and yarn for a lesson! The group will meet every Sunday through Jan. 1!

Location: 335 Wickenden St.

Friday, 12/17 @ 7-10PM: COYOTE RI presents—International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers Join members of COYOTE RI next Friday for a virtual memorial, and to raise awareness around the issue of violence against sex workers.

If you are a sex worker and would like to be a speaker at the event, email Kayla at communications@coyoteri.org.

Join at this link — http://tinyurl.com/bsdufym6 Friday, 12/10 @ 6PM: Punk Rock Documentary, “We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen” A masked movie night in your local leftist library and community space! Roll through Red Ink this Friday to enjoy this classic documentary about the 1980s punk band the Minutemen. Bring snacks, drinks whatever you like!

130 Cypress St., Mt. Hope

UPCOMING

ACTIONS & COMMUNITY

EVENTS

Saturday, 12/11 @ 7PM: RiffRaff Anniversary Party Celebrate four years of RiffRaff this Saturday! There will be much revelry, snacks, a champagne toast, and a raffle for a $100 gift card for anyone who spends $50 on books on Saturday.

RiffRaff Bookstore and Bar, 60 Valley St