-Mouse traps with a crumb of cheese x enticing enough
-Jesus (the First Carpenter) x nails/wood/thorns
-Bug Jesus (Carpenter Ants) x queening out with the hive
1. Take the wood and assemble your cabinet with glue and hinges and screws. Also maybe paint, maybe glitter, and with enough feet.
2. Let Plum win at tic-tac-toe.
3. The cheese is for you. Mind the trap.
4. Fill it with racists and malice.
Masthead
MANAGING
Jolie
Plum
Luca
WEEK IN REVIEW
Ilan Brusso
Ben Flaumenhaft
ARTS
Beto Beveridge
Nan Dickerson
Paulina Gąsiorowska
EPHEMERA
Anji Friedbauer
Selim Kutlu
Sabine Jimenez-Williams
FEATURES
Riley Gramley
Angela Lian
Talia Reiss
LITERARY
Sarkis Antonyan
Georgia Turman
METRO
Cameron Leo
Lily Seltz
METABOLICS
Brice Dickerson
Nat Mitchell
Daniel Zheng
SCIENCE + TECH
Emilie Guan
Everest Maya-Tudor
Emily Vesper
SCHEMA
Lucas Galarza
Ash Ma
WORLD
Aboud Ashhab
Ivy Rockmore
DEAR INDY
Kalie Minor
BULLETIN BOARD
Qiaoying Chen
Gabrielle Yuan
DESIGN EDITORS
April S. Lim
Andrew Liu
Anaïs Reiss
DESIGNERS
Mary-Elizabeth Boatey
Jolin Chen
Sejal Gupta
Kay Kim
Minah Kim
Seoyeon Kweon
Saachi Mehta
Tanya Qu
Zoe Rudolph-Larrea
Rachel Shin
COVER COORDINATORS
Kian Braulik
Brandon Magloire
STAFF WRITERS
Layla Ahmed
Tanvi Anand
Hisham Awartani
Nura Dhar
Keelin Gaughan
Lily Ellman
David Felipe
Audrey He
Martina Herman
Elena Jiang
Daniel Kyte-Zable
Emily Mansfield
Nadia Mazonson
Coby Mulliken
Daphne Mylonas
Naomi Nesmith
Caleb Rader
William Roberts
Caleb Stutman-Shaw
Natalie Svob
Tarini Tipnis
Ange Yeung
Peter Zettl
COPY CHIEF
Samantha Ho
COPY EDITORS / FACT-CHECKERS
Justin Bolsen
Jackie Dean
Jason Hwang
Avery Liu
Becca Martin-Welp
Lila Rosen
Bardia Vincent
ILLUSTRATION EDITORS
Julia Cheng
Izzy Roth-Dishy
ILLUSTRATORS
Mia Cheng
Anna Fischler
Mekala Kumar
Mingjia Li
Ellie Lin
Cindy Liu
Ren Long
Benjamin Natan
Jessica Ruan
Jackson Ruddick
Zoe Rudolph-Larrea
Meri Sanders
Sofia Schreiber
Elliot Stravato
Luna Tobar
Catie Witherwax
Lily Yanagimoto
Alena Zhang
Nicole Zhu
WEB EDITOR
Eleanor Park
WEB DESIGNERS
Kenneth Anderson
Mai-Anh Nguyen
Annika Singh
Brooke Wangenheim
SOCIAL MEDIA TEAM
Imran Hussain
Sabine Jimenez-Williams
Kalie Minor
Nat Mitchell
Eurie Seo
Emma Zwall
FINANCIAL COORDINATOR
Simon Yang
SENIOR EDITORS
Arman Deendar
Angela Lian
Lily Seltz
MVP
BURB
MISSION STATEMENT
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, anti-capitalist, 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.
*Our Beloved Staff
Wild Goose Chase
How I like to read
c I first saw the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver on my friend’s older sister’s Instagram story. The poem was a photo of a page in a book, bathed in warm golden light and set against the default background: a blur of similar golden warmth in a gradient from lighter gold at the top to darker gold at the bottom. I remember I was moved. For this was a poem! And quickly, I swiped away. Onto more and different images and text!
From time to time, I’d go looking for this poem. Its perfectly stupid opening line (“You do not have to be good”) had remained stuck in my head. I would be caught in a sort of distracted spell, opening and closing tabs on my browser, thinking to myself over and over: “You do not have to be good.” So many times, I typed “Wild Geese by Mary Oliver” into a new tab, trying to make sense of why, precisely, I did not have to be good. Each time, my eyes wandered up and down the poem for a bit, vaguely weighing whether it was enough of a reason that the “world goes on” or that the “wild geese, high in the clean blue air, / are heading home again.” Doubtful, I’d click away. Onto more and different poetry!
Reading poetry on the internet is like reading the final pages of a novel. Just as one searches the novel’s end for the ending of the novel, one is always searching amongst every poem for poetry. It’s about reading with a desire, usually a vague one. It’s about being in the mood for poetry and seeking satisfaction. It’s about quick movement, momentary discovery, disarray and disorder. Unlike the realization of the end of a novel, there is nothing finite or conclusive about discovering a bit of poetry. The internet has all of the words in the world. By the time a poem is found, it’s time to start looking for another, to give into distraction, to wander about.
Distraction is something Walter Benjamin talks about in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Like my reading of poetry on the internet, my reading of Benjamin has been quick, disordered, fragmentary, and probably mostly distracted. Perfect! Near the end of the essay, he describes a “greatly increased mass of participants” encountering art in “disreputable form[s].” This sounds like the increased accessibility of poetry proliferated in new forms across the web. Benjamin then draws a binary between “distraction and concentration,” making the claim that this “greatly increased mass” encounters art distractedly. He rearranges the “ancient lament that the masses seek distraction” instead of “art [which] demands concentration from the spectator” by arguing that the masses are distracted spectators of art. Benjamin further characterizes this distracted mass by way of a metaphor of absorption. The concentrated spectator is “absorbed by” the work of art. The distracted spectator “absorbs” it. In this way, the distracted reader absorbs the words, makes them their own, allows them to take on personal significance. Distracted reading on the internet allows for a certain cohesion between the words on the screen and one’s real life. It’s a dirty kind of self-insertion, the sort of reading I might typically consider shallow or navel-gazey. In this case, I’m inclined to call it a breakdown of the boring, old subject-object divide, a blurring of poetry and life! On the internet, distracted reading feels somewhat inevitable. Shifting between works on a digital interface, it’s almost as if all of the poetry is placed alongside all of the other poetry, and also all of the other things as well. Possible encounters are endless, and contextualization is confused. On Instagram, poetry is read within or among images.
Infinite combinations! In digital publications and poetry archives, poems are often read alongside links to other ‘related’ poems, which themselves are presented alongside other ‘related’ poems. One could keep reading ‘related’ poems forever. There are remarkably complex and mysterious webs of relation between the poem one is reading at any given moment and all of the words and images one encounters before and after it, or even simultaneously.
My favorite website is a beautiful example of this mysterious digital assemblage and a perfect platform for the sort of distracted, wandering reading practice entailed therein. It is an unnamed poetry archive hosted by the University of New Mexico Department of Physics and Astronomy. The main page of the site offers 107 cobalt blue hyperlinks set against a bright white background. Rudimentary splendor! Each link leads to a poem, an image, or a poem and an image. A lot of the images are Surrealist paintings or photographs of birds. My favorite link that leads to an image is called “4 vincent van gogh starry night.” It brings me to The Starry Night, as grainy as could be. My favorite
link that leads to both a poem and an image is called “36 eec without the mercy of.” It brings me to an E.E. Cummings poem that is, in part, about a certain “namelessness,” placed side by side with a photograph of a nameless woman wearing a beige hiking hat. The same nameless woman appears elsewhere, in the background of a Pablo Neruda poem that is presented as “Poem for Frances on the occasion of tw+fas.” There is something personal about this archive, as though these poems have been assembled according to a certain set of unknowable social terms. The poems and images are unmoored from the more conventional context that analog poetry archives, publications, or collections might provide. The organization of this site is really quite mysterious, curious, unknowable. There’s lots of E.E. Cummings, lots of Pablo Neruda, and lots of Mary Oliver on this site. “Wild Geese” is here, or as the site calls it, “71 Mary Oliver Wild Geese.” The poem is presented alongside a painting attributed to someone named Larry Fanning. I’ve never heard of Larry Fanning. His painting is a winter painting. I used to think of “Wild Geese” as a
( TEXT BENJAMIN FLAUMENHAFT DESIGN RACHEL SHIN
ILLUSTRATION MINGJIA LI )
summer poem. My eyes wander between the poem and the painting. The word “Meanwhile” appears three times, always at the left margin, always at the starts of sentences. There is detail and depth in the foreground. There is utter flatness in the background. Detail here, flatness over there. Poems are flat in print. Words on a piece of paper. The phrase “soft animal of your body” falls into the phrase “love what it loves.” There are the words: “landscapes,” “prairies,” “trees,” “mountains,” and “rivers.” There is one landscape. There is one river.
Soon, I let the soft animal of my body love what it loves (more and different content) and go searching for a new poem. There is one Sharon Olds poem that I think I’ll click on because I recently listened to a podcast on which she talks about poems about sex. This poem is called “A Week Later.” There are too many words on this page! And there’s nothing about sex. The final clause is good: “I saw the luck / and luxury of that hour.” What hour? The hour that is “A Week Later?” Wow: luck and luxury. Two L’s. Nabokov puts Lolita in your mouth. Lo. Lee. Ta. And what hour is it, anyway? It’s so late! And I am tired! But to read poetry distractedly. Luck and Luxury. At the bottom of the page, there is a list of numbers corresponding to the other pages on the site. I choose number thirteen. Lucky number thirteen. It’s an excerpt from Oh What a Paradise It Seems by John Cheever. I guess there’s prose on this site as well. Or is it number seven that’s lucky? Which is the lucky number? Lucky number thirteen. Lucky number seven. Poem number seven is “Of Mere Being” by Wallace Stevens. I’ve never heard of this guy. There is a Dalí painting on the page as well. I hate Dalí! There’s nothing automatic about Dalí at all. The painting has the famous drooping clocks, but it’s different. There’s a grid in the foreground, extending forever off the page. Toward me. I zoom in so just the poem is showing on my screen. I find the “You” and make it an “I”: “[I] know then that it is not the reason / That makes us happy or unhappy.” I get a text from my mom. “How are you feeling?” “The bird sings.” “You know then that it is not the reason.” +++
When Ben Lerner came to campus to give a talk in remembrance of the late poet and professor Keith Waldrop, he relayed a story about Waldrop’s general offline-ness. Lerner had been thinking about the images of the planes hitting the Twin Towers on 9/11 and wanted to know what Waldrop had thought about them. Remarkably, Waldrop had never seen these images. Lerner used this story to suggest a reading practice away from keyboard, positing literature as an antidote to the fast-paced, algorithmically-determined media landscape. I’m entirely bored by this sort of argument. If reading literature is supposedly opposed to reading the internet, what are we to make of literature on the internet? Can we entirely separate literature from our digitally mediated present? If so, would we even want to? I, most certainly, would not! I like close reading, and paying attention, and engaging with poems as they are written. But I also like having fun. Sometimes, I simply want to have fun. Reading poetry on the internet is fun! One is in the mood for poetry, searching for satisfaction, and, in so doing, encountering poems mysteriously recontextualized, helplessly fragmented, and resultantly blurred, one poem from another and each poem from the reader, from life.
BENJAMIN FLAUMENHAFT B‘27 doesn’t much like the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver.
A DEAL FOR THE DECADE
The visions and betrayals of Providence’s Comprehensive Plan
c On Thursday, November 7, the Providence City Council passed the final version of the Comprehensive Plan, a 179-page document that will guide the next decade of the city’s growth and development. The vote, which passed 11-2 with two absences, marked the end of a two-year process punctuated by over 80 community forums, five public hearings, and a handful of heated exchanges between the council and the office of the mayor, Brett Smiley.
The development of a Comprehensive Plan is mandated by Rhode Island law and executed every ten years. This iteration comes at a particularly pivotal time for the city: while Providence is poised for a decade of business and residential growth, it is also grappling with a dire housing crisis and environmental problems that disproportionately impact the city’s most vulnerable communities. The Comprehensive Plan addresses these issues and more by providing a set of guidelines, policies, and goals that the City Council will use to steer their lawmaking in the coming years. The land use chapter—considered the centerpiece of the plan—is legally binding and will dictate the city’s newest zoning rules. As for the other chapters, the onus falls on the Council and the mayor’s office to craft and approve the policies that the plan suggests—which is far from a guarantee.
The current City Council is frequently heralded as the most progressive that Providence has seen. From the start of the Comp Plan process, there was hope that this year’s plan might reflect the cohort’s attention to working people’s issues often pushed to the wayside. But an array of obstacles laid in the way: the specter of a mayoral veto, for one (Smiley has been notoriously hostile to certain progressive causes)—but also a diverse cast of stakeholders who would each demand different outcomes from the process.
To that end, the plan’s development was initiated by a nearly two-year-long process of intensive community engagement. Starting in 2022, the city hosted a series of workshops, events with community partners, and opportunities for online feedback—all with the goal of identifying the issues most pressing to residents from across the city.
Building from this outreach process, a draft of the plan was released by the Smiley administration’s Department of Planning and Development in June of this year and passed over to the City Council. This fall, extensive amendments to the plan were debated in five public hearings attended by impassioned residents, nonprofit leaders, and lobbyists. By early October, some veteran organizers and journalists were celebrating the plan as “visionary” and “historic” for its approach to
(
TEXT COCO KANDERS, CAMERON LEO & LILY SELTZ DESIGN ANDREW LIU ILLUSTRATION BENJAMIN NATAN )
issues of environmental and housing justice.
The tenor shifted abruptly when, on October 16, Mayor Smiley threatened to veto the entire plan over the inclusion of an amendment banning the construction of new gas stations, a widely popular and practical proposal. Much-needed restrictions on polluting industries in the Providence Port were also put under threat. Barbs were exchanged between administration and council; negotiations were held behind closed doors. The final plan, approved by the Ordinance Committee on October 21 and passed by the full City Council on November 7, maintains some of the original environmental justice proposals while making notable concessions to both the Mayor and to industry lobbyists.
Coming off the wake of these last-ditch negotiations, the final November 7 council session ran like something of a post-mortem. Before the vote, which was all but assured to pass, council members took the opportunity to express gratitude towards their colleagues and the residents who had been involved in the process. Many commended the plan for its ability to integrate a chorus of opinions and needs from across the city. “This plan is the result of all those contacts those residents made with us,” said Majority Leader Pedro Espinal.
Iterations of the phrase “it’s not perfect, but…” were repeated about a dozen times, and by almost every council member present. And indeed, that seemed to be the resounding sentiment of the hearing—a testament to the difficulty of creating an ambitious plan responsive to sometimes-opposing needs and capable of making it past the Mayor’s desk.
“Is it perfect? It’s never gonna be perfect. It’s like making a pizza, and all of us are making a decision to come up with the best pie. We’re all gonna have pepperoni and mushrooms and all kinds of stuff… pineapple. It's the same thing with legislation,” said Councilor Juan Pichardo. “I'm proud of the work we’ve all done.”
Some council members were more critical of the final plan. Near the end of the hearing, Councilor Peterson told the assembled:
“This plan paints a really inspiring picture. But it does overlook one critical element: and that’s addressing the critical needs of our working-class poor.”
“As this body of 15 of the most progressive councilors the city has ever seen… I'm happy to say that we’ve brought new energy, we have visionary ideas for our city’s policies, and I really do believe it’s invigorated our fight for equality, for justice, for a better future… But as much as I believe in all of this potential, I also believe that sometimes our policies are falling short of our
promise to support the working class.”
In response to Peterson’s critiques, Councilor Miguel Sanchez reminded his colleagues that they had had the opportunity to shape and alter the plan throughout a long process, including five public hearings. “I don’t know how many of you guys showed up to one or two of them,” he said to his colleagues. “Please be part of the process, and don’t show up when it’s time to vote on [the plan] and have all these opinions.” But in a conversation with the Indy, he acknowledged that shortcomings in the plan did remain.
The hearing, and the process as a whole, illuminated the challenges that a progressive council can face when forced to work with a vastly more conservative executive body. The Smiley administration has demonstrated its willingness to heed the demands of lobbyists, and to use any tool at its disposal to stop the council from passing progressive policies it disagrees with.
But according to Sanchez, the process has shown his constituents that at least among City Council members, there exists the will and the commitment to imagine solutions to the problems that residents say they face. “When we rolled out the first list of amendments,” Sanchez told the Indy, “I saw some comments along the lines of residents feeling heard for the first time in their lifetime here in Providence.”
Below, we outline the major innovations of the final Comp Plan and track the document’s evolution since it was first drafted in June. +++
Zoning for supply and affordability
Providence is facing a housing crisis, driven by a growing population and a supply of affordable units that has remained stubbornly inadequate. From 2010 to 2020, Providence’s population grew by nearly 7%, significantly outpacing the construction of new units. And according to Providence’s current zoning, there isn’t much remaining land within the city limits where new housing can be constructed.
Meanwhile, existing units are becoming less affordable: Median rents increased at three times the rate of household incomes from 2010 to 2020. Almost half of Providence renters are now cost-burdened, meaning that over 30% of their income goes to rent and utilities. All of these pressures have pushed more and more Providence residents out of stable housing, with the unhoused population increasing by 70% from 2019 to 2023.
Through zoning reforms and related policies, the 2024 Comp Plan seeks to make
Providence a more affordable city to live in.
First, the Plan would allow “Accessory Dwelling Units” (ADUs) in all residential zones. ADUs are structures like garages and basements that could be converted for residential use, expanding housing options and offering new income streams for city residents. The plan also suggests developing new mid-density housing options that bridge the gap between single-family homes and large apartment complexes, such as duplexes and small apartment buildings. To incentivize developers to build more affordable housing, the plan proposes allowing developers to build beyond what standard zoning regulations permit, provided they set aside a certain percentage of the units for tenants earning below the median income—a form of “inclusionary zoning.”
Everyone the Indy spoke with recognized the essential need to accelerate housing development in Providence. But both Councilor John Goncalves and Marisa Brown, Executive Director of the Providence Preservation Society, warned that without precise policy to guide it, rapid development could profoundly harm the very communities the Council is trying to protect. “Upzoning,” or rezoning land to allow for higher-density housing, can mean demolishing historic properties and displacing the residents who live there. “This plan, without guardrails, particularly around anti-displacement or tougher anti-demolition policies, or stronger actions for historic neighborhoods, is reminiscent of the urban renewal of the 1960s,” Goncalves told the Indy. He says that the initial draft of the plan, written by the Smiley administration’s Department of Planning and Development, didn’t include provisions against displacement and demolition.
In theory, if Providence builds enough new housing units, prices should drop for everybody, including the working class. But the Councilor warns against treating Providence’s housing situation with such simplicity. “It’s very naive to think that even if we had more supply in the marketplace, landlords are going to altruistically lower their prices,” he says. “The ‘trickle down’ aspect is not going to happen.”
For that reason, Goncalves is proud of how the Council reshaped the original draft—adding inclusionary zoning, anti-displacement, and anti-demolition provisions to the text.
But Brown, from the Providence Preservation Society, still has frustrations about how the Comp Plan turned out. “We definitely wanted to see stronger language around adaptive reuse,” she told the Indy—referring to a mode of development in which existing structures are altered and built-out to accommodate more residents.
“All of the housing can’t be new
construction,” Brown said. “We’re going to need to figure out how to use old buildings.”
Brown also wishes that the plan had included an explicit acknowledgement of Providence’s fraught history of urban renewal and gentrification. “I have my own hopes and dreams about the kind of language, vision, commitment to people, and sense of humanity that I hope to find in our Comprehensive Plan, that I don’t think I found. I wondered to myself: is that an unreasonable hope?”
After the Comp Plan is passed, the Council’s next step will be to implement specific zoning reforms within the code of ordinances. Sanchez told the Indy that he looked forward to focusing his efforts there once the Plan had passed.
No new polluters, no new gas
The City Council’s October 9 amendments package included several provisions aimed at helping Providence combat the climate crisis and move the city towards a healthier and more environmentally just future. Yet these amendments—which Julian Drix, chair of Providence’s Sustainability Committee, called “visionary”—have also been the site of intense contention in the month following their introduction.
First, the October 9 package would have prevented new polluters from setting up shop near the Port of Providence—an area that journalist Steve Ahlquist says has been used as a “dumping ground” by heavy industry for decades. Asthma rates near the Port are significantly higher than elsewhere in the state, and Rhode Island already has the highest rates of asthma in the country. Sanchez told the Indy that the council had heard from families who were “choosing to [make] the hard decision of leaving their homes [in or near the Port] because of polluting concerns.”
To address this environmental and public health crisis, Majority Leader Pedro Espinal introduced language that read, in part: “The city will prohibit future industrial uses in the General Industrial District… that it determines goes against the public interest of (a) public health and quality of life in near-industry neighborhoods or (b) realizing fossil fuel emissions reduction goals in response to climate change.” The amendment goes on to provide a list of more than 25 “uses” that fall astray of the public interest. Espinal’s intervention was met with enthusiasm by Providence residents.
Yet barely a week after this amendment’s introduction, following pressure from lobbyists, the Council had weakened Espinal’s language. One change was minor on the face, but is likely to have a serious impact: switching “the city will prohibit…”
to “the city may prohibit.” The list of restricted industries was also shortened to include only five categories—each of which is broad enough to allow, in Ahlquist’s words, “lawyers and lobbyists to drive diesel oil-burning chemical-laden trucks through.”
A second amendment, proposed by Goncalves, would have banned the construction of new gas stations in Providence, making it the first city on the East Coast to do so. There are already about forty gas stations within the city’s limits, and new construction would lower property values in the surrounding areas and expose residents and workers to a myriad of toxic chemicals. Yet Smiley threatened to veto the entire Comprehensive Plan unless the gas station ban was removed, claiming that it could constrain the city’s ability to build infrastructure for electric vehicles and calling it “not a responsible eleventh hour decision.”
Sanchez retorted, on X, that the mayor’s threat made “no logical sense at all.” Council President Rachel Miller added: “That the Mayor would risk the entire plan for the potential of building more gas stations is reckless.”
On the gas station ban, the Council and the Mayor’s administration arrived at a compromise. In the language approved during the November 7 hearing, new gas stations are permitted only on land that has been shown not to be appropriate for residential use. In this way, the Council marries two goals: restricting gas station construction and prioritizing the construction of new homes.
But in the aftermath of the dilution of both the gas station ban and protections for the Port of Providence, residents questioned whether their input on the Comp Plan had been taken seriously by the city government. In a vehement testimony at the October 21 public hearing, Ellen Tuzzolo, a Providence resident and mother to a child with asthma, told the Council:
“Many people before me and probably after me spent hours testifying at these types of things [hearings]. I couldn't help thinking that I wish the City and these other regulatory agencies would just be upfront and tell Providence residents, especially from South Providence, that in reality, you care about the profits and making sure we're making toxic operators in the Port happy.”
Lastly, Miller introduced language that would allow the Council to eliminate parking minimums— provisions that require developers to build a certain amount of parking space into any new property. These requirements deter new construction and make completed housing more expensive for renters and buyers. Beyond the housing and land-use implications, parking minimums keep Providence
tied to cars at a time when moving toward alternative forms of transportation is critical for the city's green transition. This language has remained intact in the November 7 version of the plan.
Economic underpinnings
All of these proposals—around housing, environment, and more—have been developed under the assumption that Providence is poised to experience a decade of economic growth. What that growth will actually look like—and who it will benefit—will be guided, at least in part, by the contents of the plan itself.
A major focus of the economic portion of the plan is support for existing and emergent sectors, like offshore wind, the “blue economy,” and bio tech and research. Just last month, the Rhode Island Life Science Hub, a quasi-public state agency, partnered with Brown University, the I-195 Redevelopment District Commission, and developer Ancora L&G to build the city’s first biotech wet lab. The plan would encourage this kind of collaboration between the state, the University, and start-ups in the years to come.
Much of the language of this economic section is vague—but contention has risen over stipulations that very clearly encourage the creation of tax breaks for developers and businesses. Proponents argue that tax breaks will attract businesses from other cities and pull in new employment opportunities. Critics, on the other hand, argue that the loss in tax revenue is something that the city cannot afford, and that public services—from schools to transit—will suffer as a consequence.
Many further worry that, without the proper
regulation, the employment opportunities and other benefits brought in by a flourishing business sector will not reach Providence’s existing working class communities. Two programs proposed in the plan attempt to mitigate this concern: First, a rollout of Career and Technical Education programs in local high schools would connect students with hands-on experience in high-demand fields. Second, the enhancement of an existing “First Source” program would ensure jobs brought in through city projects would prioritize Providence residents. This latter program, however, has already existed for almost four decades without enforcement. Like many other proposals in the plan, the extent to which they are enacted this time around is uncertain.
The plan further encourages support for small businesses, which Councilor Pichardo identified in the November 7 hearing as the “economic engine” of the city. One sub-section states that the Providence Business Loan Fund should be used to bolster the city’s smallest enterprises, and city support should be focused towards businesses run by people of color. These propositions would, in theory, help direct the dividends of some of Providence’s growth towards working and middle class residents.
Similarly, the plan aims to bolster the growth of Providence’s locally-driven arts scene. The language of this section inspires an “equitable and regenerative approach”: financial support for artists, participatory budgeting, shared work and living spaces. The plan calls for more arts festivals, mural commissions, and artist installations across the city, and particularly within arts districts.
But there’s a tension to manage here, too—as arts districts grow more popular, housing prices
there are apt to rise, threatening to displace the very artists that drive the creative economy. Once again, the question of who Providence’s growth benefits will be determined by the ability of the Council to proactively enforce laws protecting the livelihoods of existing workers and residents.
Goncalves reminded the Indy that while the Comp Plan is an essential guiding document, the Council doesn’t stop working once the Plan has been passed. “This is going to be on the books for ten years. So if three years from now, or five years from now, there’s a provision that just doesn’t work, we can always go in and change that.” Zoning ordinances can be amended; new protections for working-class people can be passed into law.
And the proposals included in the Comp Plan won’t be magically implemented—it’s legislation and enforcement that will turn the plan’s guidelines and goals into concrete reality. In the months and years following the 2024 Comp Plan’s passage, it will be the responsibility of Providence residents, including students, to continue to engage in the legislative process and to push the city government to follow up its best policies with enforcement. And finally, residents must hold Mayor Smiley accountable for his bad-faith interventions in the Council’s efforts to innovate on behalf of its constituents.
COCO KANDERS B’27, CAMERON LEO B’25, and LILY SELTZ B’25 for people over polluters.
O Superman Oil on canvas, 7x3ft., 2024
c On the 15th of February, 2013, a meteor crashed into Chelyabinsk, Russia. Caught on the dashcams of motor vehicles across the Ural, the meteor was the second largest object to ever enter the earth’s atmosphere. It was the first time that we had seen the estranged son of the cosmos, and mourn its likeness in our sons. As it fell, it shone brighter than the sun. We cannot help but watch objects fall from the skies, after 9/11, after death in the borderlands, after hope, after disease, after birth. “O Superman” is mourning the love for a radical other. Love that is force, love that is justice, love that is mom.
TARINI TIPNIS B’26 is in communion with Laurie Anderson, meteors, and the shadow.
The Sorry Spectacle
Genocide Recognition Politics and Reparations
( TEXT ANGE YEUNG & PETER ZETTL
DESIGN JOLIN CHEN
ILLUSTRATION JACKSON RUDDICK )
c In 2021, Brown University President Christina Paxson announced an update to the Slavery and Justice Report, which expanded on the original 2006 report through “14 commissioned essays and a summary of the University’s response to [it]”. According to Paxson, “honoring that report […] and bringing it into the modern day context is […] one of the most important things we need to do.” Ironically, three years later, she finds herself the subject of harsh criticism for ignoring the lessons that the student body learned from the report’s content: that financial support for perpetrators of crimes against humanity constitutes complicity in them. Brown’s complicity in the genocides in Palestine and Lebanon reveals a strange relationship between past apologies for historical crimes and the actions that actually ensue. This raises the question of when, or if, the administration will find itself obligated to apologize for its current actions. If so, would it still continue its complicity in future war crimes? And, in that case, what would be the value of such an apology?
Issuing apologies for historical acts of genocide began in the late 20th century, coinciding with heightened global awareness of past human rights abuses. One of the earliest repara tive acts occurred in 1965, when Germany held its own Holocaust trials in Frankfurt, convicting former Nazi-functionaries of aiding and committing acts of genocide. While the administration of the first German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, was reluctant to confront their own complicity in the Holocaust, international pressure forced them to confront the coun try’s genocidal actions. This culminated in these first trials conducted by the German government against itself, as opposed to the 1945 Nuremberg trials which were conducted by the Allied powers. The 1965 Frankfurt trials concluded in the sentencing of several former (Hitler’s party) officials to lifelong imprisonment, and they were pivotal in the development of Germany’s confrontation of its own past. Trials like these marked the beginning of pressure on other countries to issue concessions and discuss reparations for survivors of crimes against humanity.
The slew of apologies that ensued often lacked effort and didn’t achieve much. In the 1990s, for example, Australian prime minister Paul Keating issued a formal apology for the government’s treatment of its Indigenous “Stolen Generations.” From the 1910s to the 1970s, children of Indigenous
families were forcibly removed from their homes and sold in newspaper advertisements as de facto slaves. According to the government, the purpose of this was to integrate Indigenous peoples into modern society, which meant forced assimilation into European culture. The apology for these forced removals was criticized for its lack of reparative action, limited engagement with Indigenous voices, and concern with symbolism over substance. As The Lancet commented, “sorry is not enough.” This
“deeply regrettable.” This apology was filled with language typical of apologies for colonial violence, notably the use of passive constructions. Sentences such as “torture and ill-treatment were suffered” distance past administrations from atrocities committed in adherence to their orders, recognizing that some injustice has occurred while making sure to not directly incriminate the perpetrators. This would link these crimes to contemporary leaders and the current government. Terms like “ill-treatment” also soften descriptions of these brutal acts, framing them as administrative errors rather than violent offenses. As a whole, the apology aimed to reduce the response its audience would feel and mitigate potential political, legal, or financial implications. At the same time, it acknowledged the suffering endured by victims while stopping short of full accountability or an admission of guilt. It also pursued an ulterior agenda, only coming after a renewed British interest in building stronger economic relationships with Kenya. The language and agenda of this apology are therefore emblematic of their broader context and historical precedents in that they satisfy both moral and political objectives. The timing of these apologies all follow a similar pattern: once the victims have died or been silenced, governments vow to make wide, sweeping changes as part of their condolences. These attempts at reparation rarely come to fruition and are largely performative at best, as can be seen in the case of Canadian reconciliation efforts with Indigenous groups. From the surface, it appears that the government has made many steps forward; a national holiday calling for “truth and reconciliation” with Indigenous communities has been established, Indigenous history courses have been made graduation requirements in some provinces, and the federal government has adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Yet despite these actions, the reconciliation efforts the government proposed haven’t manifested tangibly. On the first National Truth and Reconciliation Day, Prime Minister Trudeau was spotted frolicking on the beaches of Tofino, British Columbia (B.C.) instead of attending the private meetings in Ottawa he had scheduled. Moreover, Trudeau ignored multiple invites to spend the day with residential school survivors and families from the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc nation, who had uncovered the remains of 215 children at a residential school site earlier that year. Even though the UNDRIP Act—which mandates that the government cooperate with Indigenous groups to meet the goals of the UN declaration—passed with a rare
unanimous vote in October 2019 in B.C., Indigenous rights are still constantly under threat. In the October 2024 provincial election, the Conservative Party of B.C. campaigned on a platform that pushed for repealing the UNDRIP, one of few laws that holds the government accountable to providing free, prior, and informed consent to Indigenous communities about actions that would affect their lives. On the federal level, efforts to follow through with reconciliation have been equally disappointing. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released their final report with 94 calls to action to “redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation.” As of 2024, only 13.8% of the calls have been completed, despite claims from the Canadian government that over 85% are complete or well under way. In fact, 40% of the calls have been stalled, or have not been started at all. According to Dr. Eva Jewell and Dr. Ian Mosby at the Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenousled research and education center at the Toronto Metropolitan University, if progress on the calls continues at the current rate, Indigenous peoples will be waiting until 2081 to see reconciliation.
Even when apologies for genocide and colonial violence are issued and the question of reparations comes up, discussions are often driven by international pressure rather than a nation’s self-reflection and confrontation with its own history. The post-World War II framework laid by the United Nations (and subsequent human rights conventions) raised global expectations for countries to recognize and address historical injustices. The first manifestations of this became visible in 1945. At the Nuremberg trials, high-ranking NSDAP politicians were sentenced for their roles in the Holocaust by an international committee of judges. However, the ideology itself continued to flourish even after the war ended. It wasn’t until decades later, in the 1960s, that Germany independently evaluated its past, following student-led protests that broke out across both sides of the divided country. As for Japan, acknowledgements of its imperialism and crimes against humanity weren’t issued until after decades of pressure from South Korea and China. The Kono Statement, released in 1993, acknowledged the suffering of “comfort women” in military brothels. Since then, however, their acknowledgments have often been inconsistent, with many being retracted or contradicted by Japanese government officials. This led to accusations of insincerity and strained Japan’s regional relations, with China and South Korea remarking that the apologies were a means of simply appeasing them rather than a confrontation of the past. While Germany’s more self-critical treatment of its own genocidal legacy has helped it rebuild its diplomatic image as a nation dedicated to human rights, it’s important to note that this development was motivated by pressure from the international community and students— neither of whom had perpetrated the Holocaust. When historical perpetrators of crimes against humanity support a form of reparations, they usually
try to minimize the financial and political harm they endure. The “one-time pay-off trap” describes a singular financial settlement or compensation designed to address historical wrongs in a way that discourages or limits further claims in the future. In essence, this approach seeks to shut the door to future reparations and serves governments and corporations as a means to alleviate guilt and fulfill legal obligations rather than meaningfully rectifying the impact of the historic injustices they have perpetrated. Take, for example, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971, which was the culmination of long legal battles between Indigenous groups and state and federal governments to have their claims to land recognized. Following the discovery of oil reserves in Northern Alaska, the federal government passed the ANCSA, which paid approximately 950 million USD and transferred ownership of 44 million acres of land to corporations owned by Alaskan Native shareholders. By threatening corporations with the possibility of having their land taken away if they didn’t turn a profit, the government resolved land claims while simultaneously forcing these corporations to maximize their resource extraction. What was seen as a “progressive” resolution was, in reality, a ploy for the U.S. government to assimilate Indigenous peoples by making sovereignty over their land conditional on how much they could exploit it. The legal tangle resulting from the ANCSA has led to widespread disagreements and lawsuits, particularly because of conflicting interests of shareholders who live on the land and the corporation boards trying to turn a profit from it. This is complicated by the 1994 Federally Recognized Indian Tribe List Act, which recognized over 200 Alaskan villages as tribes. Although this granted tribes a degree of sovereignty and governing power, because tribes are still separate from regional corporations, they have no revenue to build up services and governance. ANCSA did not open doors to comprehensive reparations and long-term justice, and instead complicated progress through ensuing legal repercussions. What forms should “proper” reparations take, and who decides what constitutes their characteristics? The efficacy of reparations must be determined by the impacted communities themselves. Not only must their voice take precedence in these discussions, but they also must be involved in decision-making processes that reflect their priorities, whether through councils, participatory budgeting, or other frameworks that grant these communities autonomy. Since evaluating the “success” of reparations is complex—what might seem adequate initially may fall short over time as generations change and new challenges present themselves— reparations should be conceived as an evolving process rather than a finite task, with flexibility to grow alongside the communities they aim to serve.
No form of reparations will ever be truly able to reverse the damage of a genocide, but that does not give the people who caused it permission to wash the blood from their hands. Genocide does not end when the killing stops; its violence crawls into the lives of survivors and their descendants through discriminatory and oppressive legislation. The responsibility of governments is two-fold: to make genuine efforts towards reconciliation and healing, and to take every possible measure to prevent further harm from being done. Even when governments take steps towards mending their violent legacies, it is crucial to identify the hypocrisy of the conditions in which they carry these processes out. While the Canadian government agreed to devote $47.8 billion dollars to Indigenous Child and Family Services (CFS) this July, they simultaneously funded the creation of $61.1 million worth of ammunition as part of a $20 billion American weapons deal for Israel. As Canada continues to manufacture weapons to profit from genocide, Indigenous communities like the Neskantaga First Nation have waited 10,878 days for for their water to be drinkable again. These communities continue to be left behind.
Although there has been a shift towards acknowledging historical crimes against humanity and discussing reparations for them, they are almost always characterized by insincere efforts to appease the descendants of victims while consolidating external perceptions of self-reflection and protection of human-rights. At the same time, the entities issuing these apologies all too often continue perpetrating similar crimes against other peoples in other parts of the world. Generations of Palestinians and Lebanese civilians will be burdened by the aftermath of the unfolding genocide that Brown University, despite its boasting about the Slavery and Justice Report, is complicit in through its financial ties. Advocating for temporary ceasefires or sending tents to Gaza is like trying to stop climate change by throwing an ice cube into the ocean. It is simply not enough when considering that, for the first time in history, we have access to instant first-hand accounts of what victims experience. In 20 years, or maybe 50, governments across the globe will frame this complicity as an unlucky fluke, and maybe even offer money and speeches to the victim’s descendants. If they truly want to rectify their historical guilt, ending complicity in ongoing crimes against humanity must be the first step.
ANGE YEUNG B’28 & PETER ZETTL B’28 personally spotted CPax frolicking on a private beach at the Breakers.
Week In Slavic-Mexican Fusion
c It is not often that today’s gentlemen of distinction host a dinner party. The task is rather, most often, that of a woman of little discretion and of a high sensitivity to low viscosity fabrics. Nan can’t wear tights (for sensory reasons) and Maria has the keys to the Brown Club of the Western Cape. We co-parent a trilby, but we’re looking to rehome her. One of us is in charge.
One of us is a gentleman of distinction, and the other one is a woman of little discretion. Well, maybe we’re both; he/she is in these days. Importantly, we’re not Ben and Ilan. We’re juniors! We’re neat, clean, shaved, sober, and we’re ready to rock your Week (in Review). But this isn’t just any Week in Review, silly! This is a recipe. A recipe for FIESTA!!!
Last week I, Maria “Alexandra Maria Gomberg Shkolnikova” Gomberg, found myself missing Slavic food and Mexican food at the same time. I have encountered this problem in the past, but having grown up in Mexico City (home to a shocking variety of Slavic restaurants with Mexican twists), my cravings were always easily assuaged. Unfortunately, this year I live in a kitchenless Mingle1 in Providence, Rhode Island, so unless I was willing to settle for a couple of Takis chased with a Smirnoff Ice, I knew I would have to get creative. I have a few friends with off-campus kitchens, however most of them fundamentally lack the culinary skills needed to pull off what I really had in mind. I wanted cheap Mexican piss-beer, tacos, and agua fresca, tastefully plated alongside all of my favorite mayonnaise-based salads. I wanted crunchy quesadillas dipped in meat Jell-O, churros stroganoff and birria borscht. I wanted to have the option to put chamoy in my kefir and cilantro on my herring filet. I wanted pierogies con queso with a side of Blinis Rancheros, and at the end of the night, I wanted a nice cold glass of bathwater vodka and a solemn rendition of Cielito Lindo on the balalaika. I wanted Slavic-Mexican fusion, and I wanted it Now
There was one problem. I am a terrible cook. So not only did I need a kitchen I could get dirty, I needed a helper to take on the brunt of the labor. I needed a willing collaborator, a co-conspirator, a chump. Fortunately, I knew just the man for the job. This is how, unwittingly, Nan Dickerson became the first ingredient in this recipe. My friend with an immersion blender and a crippling inability to deny anyone a favor. Within minutes of receiving my coercive little text2 he had committed to the development of a multicourse menu inspired by my wonky ethno-cultural background. We settled on making mole—a comically complicated stew, the recipe for which Nan plagiarized from a YouTube channel where a spirited old lady cooks on a fire pit somewhere in rural Michoacan. At a loss for edible Slavic dishes,
1 Minden single.
2 Dear Nan. It’s me. Maria. You know, your friend without a greencard who you refuse to marry out of a deep generational selfishness? I have a favor to ask! I need to use your kitchen and your reproductive labor. If you refuse me I will re-download Instagram to call you a carceral apologist! Good luck getting hired at Small Format Coffee. Toodles.
we also agreed to make some Muscovite potatoes on the side. The Slavexican fusion feast was on. Unfortunately, Slavexican fusion feasts tend to be a tad more involved than one first assumes. In order to assemble the right ingredients, Nan and I were going to have to scour all four corners of this “city” we call “Providence,” “Rhode Island.”
Wait a minute, stop it Maria. It’s my turn to talk.
I’m Normal Nan, they call me that because I keep my shit at right angles to everything else. My house is at a right angle to the street. My mouth is at a right angle to my face. I use a protractor to lay out silverware. G-d knows where I am at all times, and boy is she clingy. I’m nobody’s chump, and if I ever planned a bank heist it would make national news. I do NOT hold softness in my kitchen, move the fuck out of my way, now. Put your cooking clogs on. I said NOW. We’re going to throw a dinner party, and it’s going to be good. I know what we need, and where we need to go to get it. I have a plan and everything.
Plan:
Ingredients list:
A pushover.
Beer
Shitty beer
Guac
Salsa (verde?) (roja?) (Christmas!)
Lime (hopefully verde)
Four types of imported dried chilis
A single pill of valium from CAPS3 Integrity Chicken? (we should probably get a veg friendly alternative) (we didn’t) Salt and Pepper, to taste.
Guest List:
Indy feats
Someone’s ex (Verde with envy)
Indy Metabolics
Former Indy world (☹)
Someone’s friend from home
Someone’s ex’s ex 1 (one) enemy. (Not telling who)
Our friend(s)
A 5 ‘10 Water Sign Amazon with a short haircut, looking for love (dm us for more info).
On the morning of our feast, I cashed in a favor with our friend Skylar “Subaru” Skylar, who picked us up in Jimmy Car-ter. Only a little coercion was necessary. You don’t want to know what I’ve got on her. Skylar keeps the keys to the car on her Jimmy Car-abiner, (alongside the keys to the City
3 CAPS clinician Dr. Mallory Practice, MD, MX, PSyD, MRS, BS, is my bitch. We go fishing in the Pawtucket river on off weekends. He doesn’t believe in endometrial lining, and I don’t believe in freshwater fish. I think we’re going to get married for Medicare reasons (that’s what I call our Xanax selling scheme, don’t tell the DEA please).
( TEXT MARIA AND NAN DESIGN SEOYEON KWEON ILLUSTRATION SOFIA SCHREIBER )
of Philadelphia, but that’s a story for a different week). I opened the Jimmy Car-doors and buckled in for this pedestrian-friendly adventure. We were passing around Jimmy Car-bonated water in Nan’s Jimmy Car-afe. I was imagining all the onions Nan was going to Jimmy Car-amalize while I would remain Jimmy Car-efree. We had a black and white film camera, a polaroid, and forty-seven loose note cards. We were ready to start an archive, and to queer it too. Nan also brought a lucky pair of unpolarized sunglasses that gave him visions of supermarket price fluctuations. Basically, consider us locked the fuck in. First stop: Central Meat Market. This is the truth about us: We like our meat tender and our queers hard.
A scholar of Lenin’s Body, a lapsed bisexual, and a ex-butch ex-middle schooler walk into a Portuguese supermarket. They have three hip reusable canvas bags and are not afraid to use them. Hands up! Central Meat Market is on that corner of Gano street which is only ever frequented by local little league players and their Dunkin’ addicted guardians. It’s truly an unassuming shack of a building that your one friend from your freshman seminar is really proud of knowing about. After about thirty minutes of foraging through four sparsely populated aisles, we ended up leaving the store with a handful of dried fava beans, some star shaped couscous, and a medium-to-large jar of olives. I had also successfully shown off my B1 Portuguese language skills, and endeared myself to the kind-hearted butcher with a soul patch.
Fun fact: If you are ever in a pickle (haha pickle) you can actually buy condoms at Central Meat Market (haha meat), but that wasn’t necessary for this particular occasion. Just thought you should know (haha know4). On to the next location!
With our goods (salt, fat, acid, heat) in one hand
4 (In the biblical sense)
and our bads (nerds, guilt5, Juul6, shame7) in the other, we headed across the highway. Nan and I were well on our way to the best supermarket in a reasonable, car-required radius of campus. You could probably walk if you’re into that sort of thing. I mean, Jesus walked on water, but this is only kind of like that in the sense that you might get martyred mid-crossing by an SUV playing reggaeton on its tuned up speakers. If somebody figures out how to cross a four way intersection with no stoplight, please feel free to show us city kids how it’s done. Who doesn’t want to experience an all-American hit and run?
Speak for yourself, Maria! we aren’t green card married yet, you’ll get nothing out of the life insurance. I’m a standard Irish-American white boy, I’ll get sunburned in hell!
A “scrappy” Mexican Slav, a man with no Driver’s License (woke) (woke mind virus), and a closeted redhead walk into Good Fortune Supermarket.
Some user on r/Providence said that Good Fortune had the imported chilis we needed for our stew. Ultimately, we ended up leaving the market with a month’s supply of canned green tea, hella snacks, and nothing from our shopping list. They’ll eat serrano peppers straight out of the bag, right?
A Sarah Doyle Center Instigator/
5
Lesbarian, A Transgender Catholic, and a shopping cart walk into a Bar.
This is to say: I was tired of shopping, so I diverted our pilgrimage to Narragansett Brewery for a thirty rack of Autocrat Coffee Milk Stout. Hashtag: #ShopLocal. This concoction contains neither coffee nor milk and is the color of shoe polish. The back of the can affirms “One Swallow Will Tell You.” What the swallow tells you is that the beer is bad. Fuck it, Micheladas (original recipe) (authentic) (muy Sabor) (no Worshister Sauce). Needless to say, we like our beer rimmed and our racks big. Cooking Mole ended up being much too formidable a task. We can’t prove to you that we made it, or that we made it well, but you will have to take our word for it.
Hey, no negative self-talk! I am a powerful wizard, and the immersion blender is my wand. I am doing alchemical transformations on weekdays and under-the-table injections on weekends. I am a seagull surfing aromatic air currents, stolen french fries locked in my jaw. The mole was glowing at 3,000 lumens by the time we took it off the stove, we were making the final adjustments with welding helmets on. We couldn’t take any photos of it. Have you ever tried to take a photo of the sun? I will keep mole on my bedside table as a nightlight for the next three weeks. I tried to take field notes, but I got sauce on all
the pages. Forget queering the archive, I’m stewing that shit. If I accidentally served you bits of printer paper, I’m not sorry. We had eleven guests and about nine and a half chairs. We had food. Well, we had beer, which is a food because it’s made out of grains.
Every single dish in my perpendicular house is dirty. G-d, why did I say yes to this? Fortunately we had an Austen, an Elliot, and a James to help us wash the dishes. I don’t put dishes in the dishwasher because I reject the framework of an “appliance” to be “used.” It’s kind of like how I don’t use my friends to live out quirky social fantasies—right Maria??!?!?!
Anyway, all in all, the Slavexican Fusion Feast was a success. Let’s do it again! The next dinner party is going to be asynchronous and purely conceptual, so as to dirty fewer spoons (we only have four, after all). We ask that you sit in a dark room, possibly a small box or bathtub, and imagine you are eating an orange. The invite will be sent out via a network of freshman twinks, be not afraid. Find the RSVP form attached under.
GOTCHA.
MARIA GOMBERG B’26 & NAN DICKERSON B’26 are not getting invited back.
Dancing Docility
ballet, agency, and the pas de deux
c It’s the summer of 2021 and I’m in the blue-walled studios of Ballet West Academy in Salt Lake City, Utah, staring at myself in the mirror and trying not to think too hard about the breath on my back.
Our instructor, Jeff, has lined us all up by height in two rows: women in the front, men in the back. He tells the “ladies” to turn around and look at the boy we’re now facing. This is our new partner. We’ll share him with another classmate, since there’s twice as many women in the class as there are men.
Jeff is a funny guy. When he gives corrections, he’s often imposing and harsh, but his cruelty is always undercut by his quick-wittedness. Today, he starts the class off by telling us, “Ladies, don’t forget: if anything goes wrong in a pas de deux, it’s always the man’s fault! Your job is to do what you always do: dance. And trust that your guy will keep you upright!”
The girls in the class are supposed to be reassured by this advice. Women can do no wrong! We run the world! And it’s not bad advice, really. The job of the partnered dancer (who is always a ‘woman’), is much easier than that of the partner. All you have to do, really, is dance normally and trust that you’ll be kept ‘on your leg’ (meaning, balanced over the box of your pointe shoe) by your partner. The only way you can make a mistake that is ‘your fault’ is by taking initiative, or at least by not giving yourself over completely; sudden movements invite tangled hands and crushed toes. Only one person can be in control at a time.
For the record, I was pretty bad at partnering. In all my years of pre-professional training, I never got entirely comfortable being manipulated like that. Something in me was naturally resistant to being lifted, turned, and waltzed across the stage. During pirouette practice, I instinctively dodged my partner, who was supposed to stand behind me and rotate my hips the way you spin a top. It was always subtle, unconscious; I’d spot in the wrong place, hike up my hip, twist my shoulders. Relinquishing control made me nervous.
When you watch a classical pas de deux, the male partner dissolves into the background as if by magic. Unless you’re looking purposefully, you probably won’t notice how ugly he has to get in order to make the woman beautiful. He squats, shuffles, lunges, legs turned in, toes unpointed, hoisting his partner up by her armpits, her hips, her buttocks. His movements are functional and unaesthetic, sooner found in a weight room than on a stage. But nobody’s looking at him, anyways. They’re looking at the ballerina. In pas de deux classes, I was often told that the job of the male partner was to ‘present’ the woman to the audience. He creates her through his disappearance; she is manipulated and guided in order to appear light, ethereal, and utterly unattainable, more an ideal than a person.
dancer lacks agency. She is a breathing statue, a pliant, romanticized object to be gazed at by the audience and manipulated by her always-male handler. She’s constricted by pointe shoes, meaning that she literally has to rely on her counterpart to maintain her balance. Historian Ann Daly writes that whereas the “partner is always the one who leads, initiates, maps out the territory, subsumes her space into his, and handles her waist, armpits, and thighs,” the feminized dancer “makes no movement of her own; her position is contingent on the manipulations of her partner.” The perspectives of both the choreographer and the spectator are sutured onto the man, who manipulates the body of the female dancer in order to “create the beauty he longs for.” The fantasy of the pas de deux lies in the fact that it’s a site of control. Its purpose is to steer the unreachable, idealized woman while obscuring the fact that she is being steered at all.
Perhaps in no piece is this gender dynamic more salient than in George Balanchine’s “The Unanswered Question,” which is staged as a four-minute encounter between a desirous man and an aloof woman-sylph. She is clad in only a white leotard, her hair loose and her feet bare. She is led onstage on the shoulders of four men dressed head-to-toe in black. Her pursuer looks up at her from one knee, hands stretched out above his head, exultant, before lowering himself onto his back. The invisible handlers drop the girl into a seated position above their heads. She tilts her chin up to the ceiling and then lets the rest of her body follow, falling back in a perfect O before letting the men flatten her out so that her head hovers just above her pursuer’s feet. They guide her body along the floor, allowing her to skim just inches away from her pursuer before lifting her back up and out of reach.
Throughout the entire piece, the woman’s feet never touch the ground: she impassively allows her body to be elevated and contorted into impossible, precarious positions by the four men, who are nearly indistinguishable from the dark backdrop, save for their heads and hands. Her pursuer on the ground reaches and lunges after her; he claws at his own body, tortured and lowly. It’s no use. She exists on a plane above and beyond him, her face icy and unmoving. According to the “Unanswered Question,” the ideal woman is passive, radiant, and untouchable, a literal blank slate.
Allegra Kent, the original muse for “The Unanswered Question,” writes in her memoir Once a Dancer that “the color white was symbolic in a Balanchine ballet. [“The Unanswered Question”] was the latest version of his constant recasting of the enigmatic ‘girl in white.’ The spiritual. The otherworldly.” Indeed, for centuries, the woman in white—or, really, the white woman—has been the prevailing symbol of ballet. Almost every ballet from the Romantic and classical periods features a “ballet blanc,” or a “white act,” in which the entire corps de ballet—the non-soloist female dancers who form
( TEXT NADIA MAZONSON DESIGN KAY KIM
ILLUSTRATION ELLIE LIN )
the literal ‘body’ of the ballet—appears in all white, usually in order to represent ghosts, dryads, sylphs, or some other beautiful, supernatural being. The principal effect of the ballet blanc was achieved through the uniformity of its dancers, who were stripped of distinguishing features and character, creating a dynamic that, as scholar María Angélica Rodríguez writes, “is constituted precisely by the absence of a relationship with blackness and enforced by rigorously excluding black bodies from the stage.” The ballet blanc constructs and propagates an ideology of elite, white femininity while simultaneously preventing the audience from recognizing that it propagates anything at all. Classical ballet cannot speak about the ways in which it manufactures gender and whiteness because its purely gestural vocabulary precludes explanation or delineation. Whatever ballet constructs is constructed without self awareness, instead casting itself as a universal, abstracted aesthetic of “pure,” unadulterated beauty.
One of the many ways in which George Balanchine—the New York City Ballet co-founder and choreographer commonly referred to as the “father” of American ballet—revolutionized dance is through his rejection of the “story ballet” (usually some sort of romantic tragedy and/or marriage plot) in favor of abstract “leotard ballets,” which did away with costumes, sets, characters, and narrative. This was, in effect, a heightened version of the ballet blanc. In removing of all traces of story or differentiation between individuals, Balanchine’s new ballet presented itself as an expression of pure gesture and aestheticism; he wished for audiences to “see the music” and “hear the dance.” To this end, Balanchine modified ballet technique in order to make it more extreme, athletic, and spectator-focused. Positions and eyelines were modified so as to be always facing the audience; lunges and plies became deeper; musical phrasing became more syncopated. This abstracting of ballet dangerously posited itself as ‘pure beauty’ without narrative or ideology, concealing the exclusionary nature of the image it presented. The “Balanchine woman” is certainly much more athletic and durable than her delicate Romantic counterpart; his soloist choreography for women is exciting, virtuosic, and lightning-quick. But the way in which Balanchine conflates beauty with an idealized, unattainable white femininity which may be “subdued” or “tamed” by the male body is largely the same. This is especially true in “The Unanswered Question,” where the piece’s costuming assumes that the dancer’s skin will be white enough to glow against a dark backdrop, thus positing that whiteness is a necessary part of this ethereal femininity which Balanchine elevates in his works. The Balanchine woman, Daly writes, is “specifically a white, heterosexual American Woman: fast, precise, passive. These qualities, exem
Curiously, many of Balanchine’s former dancers and disciples seem to be under the assumption that this laudation of the (white, heterosexual) female body was actually a twisted form of empowerment. In her memoir Holding on to the Air, Suzanne Farrell writes, “that Balanchine spent his life building pedestals for his ballerinas to stand on is no secret, and although some might protest the position as one of inequality, no one who has been there has ever complained. It is the most humbling and beautiful place I have ever been. Balanchine was a feminist long before it was the fashion: he devoted his life to celebrating female independence.” I seriously doubt that Balanchine would describe himself as a feminist—nor should he have, all things considered—but it is true that he viewed his elevation of women as a celebration, or perhaps a lament, of their (seductive) power. “Ballet is woman,” as one of his most famous aphorisms goes. For Balanchine, “woman” was an elusive category. His relationship with women was deeply troubled and troubling; his mother left his family as a child, and throughout his life he cycled famously though ‘muses,’ who served for him both as objects of inspiration and desire. These dancers were typically selected personally by Balanchine from the School of American Ballet (the feeder to his New York City Ballet company). He married four of them, all of whom were still in their teens or early twenties, and courted several more. He pursued Farrell, whom he called his “alabaster princess,” from the age of fifteen onwards, and eventually forced her out of the company when she got engaged to a fellow principal dancer. He strongly discouraged the rest of his female dancers from dating, marrying, or having children. To be a ballerina was to cut yourself off from the ‘secular’ world. Your body was a temple of Terpsichore; it did not belong to you.
The first ever ballet school, L’Academie Royale de Danse, was founded in 1661 by King Louis XIV of France, whose reign was marked by a vast destabilization of the existing nobility system in order to consolidate state power within the monarchy. During this period, the image of the body politic—the idea that the French state literally coincided with the physical body of its king—became crucial for legitimizing monarchical authority, resulting in what dance historian Jennifer Homans calls an “increasingly intense political and religious adulation” of the kingly body. Dance, then, became a vital tool of statecraft, control, and veneration of the noble body. Louis was obsessed with ballet, and during his reign he commissioned and starred in around 40 court productions. Prior to
then, court ballets were a social affair; although they certainly were conceived of, first and foremost, as pageantry, performers occupied the same plane as spectators, who often joined the dancing toward the ballet’s end. Under Louis’s reign, however, certain innovations, such as the stage, the proscenium arch, and illusory set pieces such as clouds and chariots, were introduced in order to separate the spectator from the royal body, which was elevated to a state of near-godliness through the spectacle.
At the same time, emerging from within l’Academie Royale de Danse was a new systematization of ballet technique largely based on codes of court etiquette, which dictated deference, obeisance, and chivalry. It was at this point that the five fundamental positions of ballet were created and the ballet class began to emerge as a succession of exercises in standardized order, as it remains to this day. For the king, such standardization was a means of exerting control over the bodies and mannerisms of nobility, creating hierarchies of space, gender, and movement within the court. As part of his efforts to concentrate power in the monarchy, Louis and his officials instituted expulsions of ‘false’ nobles from the aristocracy, creating an obsession among the nobility with blood purity and subservience to the king. This early form of ballet was highly concerned with etiquette as a means of categorizing bodies through social and physical control; the extent to which one could master proper etiquette through the ‘molding’ of their own body was used to distinguish ‘elite’ bodies from pedestrian ones. Mastery of ballet, in short, could ‘prove’ one’s fundamental nobility.
Much like how it functioned in the seventeenth century, the ballet class in its current form is designed to bring bodies under control and exclude those that cannot meet its standards, such that the dancer may be interpellated into narrow, gendered categories. In 2017, acclaimed choreographer Alexei Ratmansky posted an image on Facebook of a woman in a tutu hoisting a man in the air, accompanied by a caption that read, “there is no such thing as equality in ballet: women dance on point, men lift and support women. women receive flowers, men escort women offstage. not the other way around (I know there are couple of exceptions). and I am very comfortable with that.” The image, of course, implied that the possibility of a ballerina lifting a male dancer—a deliberate inversion of gendered agency—was ridiculous and inherently unfeasible. And in some sense, Ramansky is right. Although it’s obviously possible for a woman to lift a man, it’s not feasible in the sphere of professionalized ballet, where feminized bodies, produced through feminized training, are lean and hyper-flexible rather
than ‘bulky.’ Ratmansky, then, posits as natural what is actually constructed by years of body shaping; training one’s muscles to conform to an index of positions and movements which differ based on the sex one is assigned to at birth. Although in early years, ballet technique classes are largely uniform for male and female dancers, at around 11 or 12—the onset of puberty—training begins to diverge greatly. While women are ushered into pointe classes, men are segregated into classes designed to enhance their jumps and turns; while the young, nascent ballerina is taught to emphasize light, precise pointework and extreme flexibility, the emerging danseur is taught strength, virtuosity, and power.
Doing ballet from a young age changes your body permanently. My feet are not supposed to bend the way they do, nor is my back. My friend Elise, who also did ballet growing up, instinctively stands in a hyperextended first position. Dance scholar Sophie Merit Müller writes that ballet is considered to be an “applied science of body crafting” in the sense that ballet technique classes literally (and permanently) shape the dancer’s body into codified, homogenized positions. “Ballet training,” she writes, “can be likened to surgical practices. Again, there are differences: Ballet bodies are not shaped with a scalpel, but with exercise, and the work relies on the embodied person’s vigilance, rather than that person’s (anaesthetic) evacuation. Also, while surgery (and medicine in general) aims at making broken bodies whole again, ballet is interested in constantly and never-endingly improving already very able bodies.”
As a ballet student, I was often told that only certain types of cross-training were suitable for female dancers—exercises like weight training and running put us at risk of developing “bulky” muscles rather than lean ones. Meanwhile, male pre-professional ballet students have visits to the weight room built into their schedules. Also salient is that femme-presenting dancers are expected to craft their bodies more than their counterparts. It’s essentially impossible for women to get jobs at ballet companies if they don’t already have perfectly arched feet, 180 degree turnout, sky-high leg extensions, and immaculate technique. Meanwhile, men are not expected to maintain the same degree of technical proficiency, nor are they expected to meet such rigid physical standards, partly because there are way fewer men in the industry. They can get away with having sloppy feet, low extensions, or uncontrolled arms as long as they can jump high and throw a woman above their head. In short, there is less emphasis placed on the aesthetic quality of the masculinized body in ballet. And just as ballet technique is designed to create an efficient, standardized, and gendered body, so,
too, is the very structure of its training designed to produce the self-regulation of both bodily and social mannerisms, preventing the dancer from recognizing her own autonomy within the frame of the ballet class. To this end, the ballet class is ensnared with all sorts of tiny, inane etiquette rules, which vary wildly depending on the teacher. Sitting down, leaning on the barres, or even yawning can all be considered disrespectful. One of my instructors at a summer program, for instance, would blow up in a fit of rage if anyone turned their back away from the front of the room during class; to do so was a sign of utmost irreverence.
This spatial distribution of the dancer in relation to the teacher presages the dancer’s relationship to the proscenium stage upon which they are being trained to perform. The instructor/choreographer stands at the front of the room, where the mirror is. Their perspective then functions as a sort of mirror itself, an objective eye that can see the dancer better than they can see themself. Their control is absolute. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes at length about the project of the “docile body,” the result of methods or “disciplines” which “[obtain] holds upon [the body] at the level of the mechanism itself—movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity.” The docile body is one which has internalized external systems of subjugation at the very level of gesture, to the point where one begins to engage in a sort of auto-regulation of bodily comportment. Ballet, of course, is synonymous with discipline and auto-regulation. Dancers are taught to engage in “self-correction” or self-surveillance through the use of the mirror; to improve is to internalize the critical eye of the instructor, such that one becomes both subject and object of their own gaze, “[joining] the analyzable body to the manipulable body.” One optimizes the strength and facility of the body through the restriction of movement into the pathways ballet prescribes. Technical “aptitude” is defined by the extent to which one can subject it to a gendered, racialized form of domination.
Just as dancing the “female” role in a pas de deux requires one to relinquish agency and ownership over their body, entering the space of the classroom requires one to do the same. My ballet teachers often told us that we should always “leave the outside world at the door” of the studio. This was therapeutic in one sense: technique class became something like a meditative space for me, since within the hermetically-sealed space of the classroom, I necessarily had to let go of whatever was troubling me in my daily life in order to just move, just be inside my own body. It was the same on the stage. There’s something so freeing about losing yourself in music and movement, to feel as if you’re reaching toward something bigger and higher than yourself. It’s why I dance.
But sometimes this directive also felt invalidating. If I was stressed about school, or my tendinitis was hurting me, or I was struggling with my mental health, how could I not let those things affect me? I didn’t stop being the same person just because I’d stepped into the space of the classroom.
Indeed, ballet dancers are implicitly instructed to leave not just the world but themselves at the door. In order to reach the state of complete physical control required by ballet, one must abnegate oneself both physically and mentally. The dancer is expected not to let their identity or lived experiences shape or inform their performance in the classroom. Another of Balanchine’s most iconic aphorisms is: “Don’t think, dear. Just dance.” To succeed is to lose oneself in movement, ritual, and music. The ballet dancer is always straining to shed the pedestrian self, to shave down the excess of her own movements, to become a tighter, sharper, more efficient creature. In this way, we can say that the ‘female’ dancing body is manipulated by the choreographer in the same way that she’s manipulated by her male partner in the pas de deux. The most efficient body is a pliant body, one which can execute whatever a choreographer demands. Identity dissolves under the spotlight; the dancing body is a vessel, and the dancer a medium or an instrument worked upon by the choreographer. +++
So how do we create a more radical, ethical version of classical ballet, a craft which is by definition resistant to evolution? How do we make ballet better when these ideals of docility and white femininity are
quite literally inscribed in both the classical ballet canon and the very vernacular of its technique? Both individual dancers, choreographers, and professional companies are making efforts to create spaces for dancers of color and to subvert the gendered hierarchy of ballet. For instance, in 2022, nonbinary dancer Ashton Edwards, who grew up training as in “men’s” classes, made headlines for beginning to perform corps de ballet roles on pointe at Pacific Northwest Ballet, one of the most prominent American companies with a primarily-Balanchine repertoire. Since then, several other dancers at PNB have followed suit. Now, at schools attached to companies like PNB and Boston Ballet, some male-identifying dancers are allowed to train regularly in pointe shoes, while at companies like American Ballet Theater, the Royal Ballet, and Miami City Ballet, female-identifying dancers are being accepted into “men’s” technique classes in order to enhance their jumps and turns.
Of course, these are individual cases, only the beginning of structural change. Furthermore, just because dancers are now beginning to be allowed to choose which side of the gender binary they perform does not deconstruct the fact that the binary exists in the first place. To be quite honest, I don’t know if this deconstruction is even possible within the framework of classical ballet, which so heavily depends on the canonical ballets whose centerpieces are the heterosexual pas de deux. There is also the problem of the technique itself. Ungendering ballet would require us to radically rethink what societal roles we are interpellating ourselves into when we choose to train certain parts of our bodies over others. For the most part, men in ballet do not go on pointe, save for in comedic parts. What would it look like, for instance, if male-identifying dancers were to wear pointe shoes without a trace of irony? What would it look like if women were to lead them? Could we see this as anything beyond a subversion or parody? And beyond this: can we do ballet without performing gender? What role would the pas de deux take in this form of ballet?
A number of choreographers and companies are attempting to answer these questions. One such example is Ballet22, a small company of male-identifying and nonbinary dancers (the majority of whom are also non-white), who perform on pointe in both classical and contemporary repertoire. In addition to performing pieces from classical ballets, the company has also committed to commissioning new works by queer choreographers every year. Another more mainstream example is The Times are Racing, a contemporary ballet by New York City Ballet’s resident choreographer Justin Peck, which was widely commended for its inclusion of a pas de deux with gender-neutral casting. In this piece, the partner/partnered dynamic was unsettled; although there was still one dancer who tended to be the ‘lifter’ as opposed to the ‘liftee,’ the dancers also took turns leading one another, requiring each to learn both to steer their partner and to relinquish control to them. Of course, it’s not radical to posit that ballet choreography must not necessarily be gendered, but the fact that it was done to critical acclaim at a site which is practically hallowed ground for Balanchine acolytes is perhaps enough for some sort of hope.
Beyond Peck (who, it should be emphasized, is one of many other choreographers currently producing experiments in same-sex partnering and alternation of agency), we might also consider what it might look like to reconfigure the story ballet into new forms. The story ballet is typically based on textual material, often a folk tale or a novel with a love story at its center. So what would it look like instead, then, to choreograph new story ballets based on works which do not revolve around heterosexual romance? The pas de deux does not necessarily have to be a site reserved solely for exploring the relations between a man and a woman. Where are the queer story ballets? And why must the ballet necessarily include a love story at all? It’s not at all impossible to imagine that we might use a dance between two people, unequal in agency or not, in order to represent other types of social relations, such as friendship or parenthood, through an exchange of gestures.
Finally, all of this change on the stage is meaningless if it’s not backed up with equal force behind the scenes, both at a professional level and within the classroom. Black and brown dancers are greatly underrepresented at major American companies.
Furthermore, although women vastly outnumber men in the professional ballet world, men hold almost four times as many artistic director positions as women in the top 50 ballet companies in the United States. Dancers of color are even farther and fewer between in leadership positions. In recent years, a number of prominent ballet companies have committed themselves to diversifying both their companies and artistic staff, but these efforts must be accelerated. At the same time, it should also be recognized that diversifying who gets to sit at the top of the hierarchy does not necessarily make the force of the hierarchy less potent. As long as the extreme relationship of power between the director/choreographer/instructor and the dancer is reproduced, there will be no true change. Case in point: Tamara Rojo, the first-ever female director of the San Francisco Ballet and the former director of English National Ballet, has been consistently dogged with accusations of creating a “hostile work environment” and forcing dancers to work while injured. She has also been criticized for her relationship with Isaac Hernandez, a then-principal at ENB who is sixteen years her junior. It all smacks a little too eerily of Balanchine. In order to imagine a more radical version of ballet, we have to vastly rethink how we conceive of power both within the ballet class and the professional company. How can we destabilize the all-seeing eye of the instructor, choreographer, or artistic director? How do we grant dancers more agency in their own training?
So, again, imagine that I’m back in the blue-walled studios of Ballet West Academy. This time, we’re all wearing pointe shoes, regardless of gender. Our teacher has divided us into two random lines: I’m in the back, which means that it’s my turn to be a leader. Today we’re learning how to “turn” our classmates on pointe. Everyone partners everyone, regardless of height, which means that it’s especially imperative that we find ways of adapting the technique and the choreography to ourselves, rather than the other way around. The process is difficult, but rewarding—trying to sense how my partner responds to my movement, experimenting with ways to keep us both on balance. We’ve made it a democratic exercise, in a sense; the instructor suggests corrections based on what she observes, but she also asks us to outwardly name where our bodies are in space (“Push me a bit farther over on my leg, maybe?” and then, “Too far, too far!”) in order to make the turn work. Learning to mold the technique to our bodies requires collaboration and reciprocity. Rather than remaining silent, we are encouraged to talk through the movements with one another—to communicate what we notice, where we need support, what needs correcting.
Tomorrow, we’ll all take pointe together. Then the day after, we’ll all take a specialized jumping class. Everyone does everything; that’s how we get stronger. In the past I might’ve been concerned that this kind of training would build my muscles badly—that it would break the illusion of my bodily lines. But it’s not about appearance in the same way it used to be. The most “aesthetic” dancer is the one who is healthy, expressive, and physically capable. In any case, uniformity is uninteresting: the beauty of this version of ballet technique, rather, is that it occurs in a multiplicity of bodies. We move along the same spatial pathways, but we do not look the same. The technique is not a site of control, nor does it endow us with a manufactured, idealized difference borne in exclusion. Instead, its structure provides us with a grammar of gesture, allowing us to translate music into movement, to express how we approach and relate to one another. The ballet body—or, rather, the body doing ballet— becomes a site of connection rather than restriction: elevated, yes, but never put on a pedestal.
NADIA MAZONSON B’27 still wishes she had hyperextended knees.
Winter Collection Medium: Ink and Digital Dimensions: 18" x 22.5"
ANNA FISCHLER R'25
( TEXT WILLIAM ROBERTS DESIGN ANAÏS REISS ILLUSTRATION BENJAMIN NATAN )
how to
pluck clay from seafloor mold into pot with tongue fill with self-sod leave by window
in six months, display at county fair
yearn
rerun
some dull, bare facet of mine some same, self-same shard of I, same some achiral
I have about faced the same always dull, too
ROBERTS B’26 thinks these poems are too long.
WILLIAM
Message
c I like to imagine him raving about it to his wife or girlfriend somewhere in the Magnolia country: “Got another call from that unknown number,” he would tell her while sitting at the dinner table or reclining in a sun-drenched windowsill or relaxing on the couch with his dog at his feet. “Same time / every week / like clockwork / never says nothing, just breathes into the receiver like a total jagoff / Think it’s some sort of sick power trip? / Cops can’t find him / Must be one disturbed individual.”
I don’t know what kind of life he’s got set up for himself there but I heard it through the grapevine that he has a tattoo now (Momma would cry) and a vintage Impala (Daddy would faint). But these are just details. It’s the emotions of the scene that matter; the tremble of heat, the clenched fists, the mouth-froth, the white palms, and Matty’s anger, the churning roiling smell of it. But even then he would never yell or hit because Matty’s just not that type of person. As a kid, he was sensitive, and by sensitive I mean debilitatingly sad. When our no-good-piece-of-shit father smashed our mother’s gooseneck tea kettle on the kitchen tile, I caught Matty in the morning weeping over the pieces like it was his femur or tibia that had shattered or something that caused him physical pain. We Gotta Bury It, Dennis, he cried, We Gotta Bury It, so the next morning we went out to the backyard and scooped a small hollow between the roots of the yard-oak with our fat palms. Matty tucked the pieces there and said three Hail Marys. Privately, I wondered what sort of Heaven existed for tea kettles. Did they have sugar and gold leaf and essence of eucalyptus there, or were those sorts of things just work for them?
This world of mine was dubbed ‘Kitchen Heaven,’ a place where broken dishware could go to find eternal peace, and over the years our father steadily filled its ranks—plates, bowls, ashtrays, a vintage cake stand—first pulverized to dust, then silt, then microscopic particles as he grew increasingly bolder. It was only when he started practicing on hips and teeth that Matty finally decided to leave.
Often this type of remembering makes me feel extremely sick, and I mean sick as in sickness in the stomach that presses up your throat like you have to puke except there’s nothing to puke up and my doctor told me the only cure for this condition was to start seeing a shrink so last year I got one: Dr. Shrewd. Ph.D. Matty would find it funny if he knew. I’ve avoided telling her about my phone-calling ritual ‘cause frankly I just don’t need the judgment.
It’s Just Chatter, Dennis, she tells me, tapping her shoe up against the leg of her office chair. Don’t Feel Guilty—how could I not feel guilty, when I cut up Matty’s luggage with a jimmy knife the first time he tried running away? In the end, he had to use his blue cotton pillowcase, stuffed full of socks and Slim Jims and crumpled fists of cash. As he walked out the door, I studied that pillowcase from my bedroom window with a focus and intention I’d never known before. I was certain I’d have to identify it fished out of a lake or ditch somewhere off the interstate. But now that I’m older, I regret not looking at his face more closely. His features are all soup to me now. A tangle of broth and black eyes. I like to think Matty started hating me then, but the truth is that it began much earlier. Growing up, the two of us were like soldiers. Every day we fought and died in the trenches of suburban masculinity. We took our comforts where we could find them: smuggling beer cans, pickup games, drives to the corner store.
But aren’t soldiers allowed to be afraid?
Isn’t that what being a real soldier means?
When Matty’d get smacked around or slammed into the counter, I wouldn’t hide. Wouldn’t fight. Instead I’d stand in a nearby door frame and shout Go Dad! Go Dad!!! Fists pumping in the air as Matty was kicked around like a pathetic whimpering dog. Show Him Who’s Boss! It was important to me to stay on his good side. I remember Matty limping to my room one night—Dennis, It Hurts—he moaned through the wall, and I backed away with my palms open as if a demon were trying to make contact.
I’m Sorry, I whispered uselessly. I’m Sorry. Matty was crying so loud he probably couldn’t even hear me. I Don’t Want To Get In Trouble.
My shrink tells me these things don’t necessarily make me a bad person, but I’m not entirely sure what that’s even supposed to mean. Is my dad a bad person? Is his dad? Where in the family line do the bad people end and the merely broken people begin?
I’m not asking for forgiveness, here, or even understanding. I just need you to know that my phone calls to Matty aren’t meant as a punishment. When I stagger out to that pay phone every Sunday and clatter those dimes into the coin slot, it’s not for me to torture him. It’s for me to know that I can still make him feel something. To know that it’s me, the stranger 300 miles away, he turns a froth about to his girlfriend every week. To know it’s me he ruins dinner over.
I often wonder about what would happen if he ever recognized his little
)
brother in the silence on the other end of the line. Would he weep for me the same way he wept for that tea kettle we buried in our yard so many summers ago? I bet, if we ever went back, we could still find those porcelain shards tucked away in the exact place we left them. Maybe we could arrange them into a beautiful picture of some kind—a vibrant ecstasy of whites and blues that we could crawl inside and live in. There, devotion would be uncomplicated. Matty and I would not speak because everything would already be perfectly understood—every agonizing sentiment, every missed apology. In Kitchen Heaven, we could finally be a proper family. Cupboard buddies / teatime friends / oolong warriors / loving brothers / beautiful sons.
ANNIE JOHNSON B’28 is shamelessly plugging her website (anniejwrites.weebly.com).
( TEXT ANNIE JOHNSON DESIGN MINAH KIM ILLUSTRATION LILY YANAGIMOTO
WHERE WORDS FAIL
Political portraiture as a tool for pragmatism
The illiterate worshiper gazes upon his catechism and knows not what dotted i’s and crossed t’s mean for his salvation. The illiterate worshiper looks to the crucifix behind the altar and into the eyes of Christ, eyes measured in delicate brushstrokes or pinpoint chisel breaks of stone to convey the possibilities of eternal salvation.
c To sit still and stiff for hours, holding an expression you have manufactured so that it is properly captured on canvas, tapestry, or tile, is a statement that will last longer than your lifetime, and, if powerful enough, will be copied onto t-shirts and cheap stickers on RedBubble. If you are lucky, you might not have to sit in robes of velvet facing the painter opposite you, trying not to make deep eye contact as his eyes flit from brush to yours. Back and forth and down to the palette, furiously trying to render a glint from your eye onto the canvas. If you are lucky, your eternal portrait was captured by a camera, in a moment where you weren’t focused on exuding your cry for power, but actively pursuing it. Maybe the camera captures something more human, or maybe the paintbrush puts the truth of emotion and context on canvas without a word.
Other than banners or flags, there are few things as universally conducive to power as the individual portrait. The simplicity of an imposing figurehead is commanding and digestible to those who don’t easily stomach semantics and deliberation. One man’s gaze can be translated from photograph to canvas to stone, and still carry the same meaning. When considered at a basic level, portraits thread throughout mass movement, sometimes acting as a surface level definition of entire political philosophies. Portraits of past leaders are the chosen decor of those nostalgic for some past representation of power, those with strict concern for presence rather than an understanding of the doctrine of their chosen figure. Portraiture carries meaning with efficiency in its ability to spark memories of action that follow the veneration of image, eliciting a bitter upturn of the nose or an excited nod of acknowledgement on immediate glance. If recognizable, a portrait can carry centuries of meaning without a word.
Perhaps the most identifiable portrait is that of Christ. The image of the crucifix has remained constant from antiquity to the present, and has never ceased in communicating its intent. Regardless of denomination or contention on the physical representation of God, nearly all Christians take up the portrait of Christ in a chain around their neck, hard lines of ink on their forearm, or porcelain above their bed. Two lines make for a simplistic portrait, one that carries with it universal understanding. Two lines represent the act of an individual’s death for the salvation of the world, and a cry of devotion to God. No matter the viewer’s belief, this portrait commands the viewer to acknowledge this offer of eternal salvation. Is the reduction of Christ’s image to a single cross an attempt to make its call more concise? More digestible? More commanding? How did flesh nailed to cedar, pine, and cypress become so compressed, so lacking in image?
Historically, the rejection of idolatry works to bring Christians closer to the Word of God, creating a new conception of worship untainted by visual distraction or spurred by the beauty of frescoes and tile. So we take the color from the flesh of Christ, rinse red blood from his crown of thorns, and remove his body from view. Christ is meant to be represented through written and memorized catechism, untethered from manmade aesthetics and the sinning eye. Creative depictions of Christ and his cast of characters are deemed earthly distractions from his
doctrine. The use of visual aid in worship is understood to be worship of artificial beauty and not God himself. Emotion from the crucifix’s portrayal is derivative and a glorification of earthly talent. Those steadfast in their rejection of idols cite the command against their worship, where idols only weakly attempt to represent Christ. There lies a claim that any human hand cannot possibly create a true representation of God, and that any act of portraiture of Christ is an arrogant demotion of God to a visceral level. The assignment of color and shape to the spiritual is understood as an attempt to worship the beauty of the portrait itself.
+++
The modern depiction of any figurehead, whether it be political, cultural, or otherwise, is often deemed as veneration of the individual. For a politician to pose for an oil portrait or put any effort into their visual representation is an act of vanity, and a distraction from the position of practical power they have been graced with. On critical glance, the use of image seems to be a method to inflate a figure beyond their means, often leading to a dangerous worship of power and severe damage to society. When thoughtfully applied, the attachment of action to a figure can result in meaningful action. Regardless of undeniable conclusions associated with figureheaded movements, it is inarguable that image rests as a precursor to tangible political change.
The association of so many negative outcomes with the use of political portraiture prompts an avoidance of the heavy manipulation of image and subsequent criticism of opponents for their own use of image. In an attempt to escape accusations of narcissism, politicians scramble to replace their image with sweeping promises that are ultimately devoid of action. Nonspecific to the voice that utters them, blanket statements of policy and devotion fall flaccid in their reception, unable to effectively draw the emotions of the voting bloc. In their hyper-attention to popular jargon and terminology as a diversion back to their constituents, leaders that fear their own image fail to channel power and motivate progress, thus prompting stagnation. The figurehead who
( TEXT NATALIE SVOB DESIGN RACHEL SHIN ILLUSTRATION MINGJIA LI )
leans into image and projects his reflection outwards, crafting a portrait that is more powerful than himself, meets success in communicating a doctrine to the masses and is often outlived by his own depiction.
Critics of political portraiture cite the narcissism of dictators, evident in statues of long-dead leaders that dominate otherwise sterile city streets, stone eyes casting a gaze of conviction in their power over anyone who walks under them. Actions of these leaders are amplified and echoed through their domain by their image, needing not a word to remind citizens of the pragmatic action that follows the flesh and bone replicated in marble.
Where leaders give too much attention to creating a non-image from theoretical progress and unchecked promises, there is room for outside manipulation of image. Caricature and disproportionate propaganda results from an outright lack of attention to the building of individual image. The visual defamation of a leader is directly resultant from a lack of incentive taken to build presence and image power, leading to a disincentivization to mobilize for progress among constituents. The caricature of a figure takes precedence over any verbalized position they may take, denigrating their position in its entirety. In conjunction with an utter lack of political progress and attempts to draw power from strict language, there is no allure to a leader. Their portrait would pull no gaze.
Image is avoided because attention to its cultivation is automatically rendered an ignorance of the issues that plague the people. Cultivation of image is understood to be a narcissistic pursuit of raw power, contrary to the humble facilitation of progress. There is truth to the claim that the allegiance to a well-represented figurehead is simply the worship of image and the power that visual presence holds over an audience. But where a pious allegiance to theoretical doctrine fails to incite mobilization, an actionable image succeeds. A figure made human and visceral in image, accompanied by some tangible process, can unite constituents under a unique banner, made more promising and hopeful by the creation of a leader with a unique identity.
Those who do not subscribe to the political language presented by their potential leaders find trust in charisma and presence, where intent is stated with conviction and made digestible, unique and new to the mouth that utters it. The manipulation of image works in line with the need to center theoretical progress in the vehicle that is to practically execute it
The act of portraiture can often be characterized as an act of frivolity, only working as distraction from the intended doctrine. To demand that a political movement should be defined by your face, to feed the people only on your image, is undoubtedly an act of vanity. But for a leader to have no personality, no initiative, and no will within their presence is a failure in the pursuit of progress, dooming the noblest of doctrines to unfulfilled ends. When image works in conjunction with an agenda, it is a tool of dynamism. The level of command an image is able to exert over its audience cements it as a pragmatic motivator of change.
The practical hold of images motivates devotion where the overcomplication of words fails. But manufactured beauty cannot simply replace the image that is derived from the witness of progress. When image is authentic to action and possibilities can be transcribed onto the visage of an individual, image elicits a fervor seldom found in empty catechism.
NATALIE SVOB B’27 likes a full-bodied mug.
Let’s make something clear, Indie doesn’t really identify as a feminist. Be it the white women in pink beanies or an internal rejection of her past idolatry of Buzzfeed’s Ladylike, something about the umbrella of feminism slowly faded from favor, as Indie opted for something a little more relevant. Put simply, she read In Our Mother’s Gardens.
That being said, over the last couple months she’s been humming with a vigor for justice. She’d strayed so far from “feminism” because it was always too white, too American, and all too concerned with periods. Dare I say…“cringe”? Indie thought she’d evolved, thought she was wise enough to partake in critiques of complex systems of oppression, high-brow in her insistence of the nuance. Indie thought she’d moved on.
But we all can be mistaken.x
The worst man you know is arguing with your professor over simple
Follow indie EVERYTHING IS EMBARRASSING Indie’s got a crush and she’s not telling. TEXT KALIE MINOR & DESIGN
What a shame. What ashame(d)? I hate that I can possess so much rage for the banal actions of a man who intended no harm. I hate even more that I’m the one still thinking about it. I suppose that’s exactly why I’ve been returning to feminism, in all its flawed glory. One can occupy themselves with the systemic. One can engage in theory, and politics, and social action. One can look at the big picture and come to understand why. But none of that takes away the rage I feel when the looks of early-morning commuters linger so long I worry they might crash as I walk to the Nelson, or when **** **** talks over me in office hours. It doesn’t take away the crushing, world-altering realization I keep having that it will always be like this. So what if I want to go back to Buzzfeed feminism? So what if I think we should all be ball-busting girlbosses and smash the glass ceiling in our sixinch heels. Let me have this one thing, just for now. Follow
Political Lesbian
Follow
I’m sick of the men here. What can be done about them?
philosophy. The worst man you know is leaning so far back in his chair, hands cooly resting on the back of his head, that he is a mere six inches from your face. Just yesterday, the most pathetic man you’ve encountered thinks yelling at you out the window of his beat-thefuck-up Altima will get him somewhere. You imagine bashing his head in.
Rage is not something I feel often. Rage, I find useless and crass. It doesn’t get me anywhere I am trying to go. Rather, I allow life’s events to wash over me in a fine mist, not getting too cold or too damp lest I start projectile vomiting everywhere. You might contest that I am pushing these emotions down, that it’s unhealthy to remain this unbothered. But I promise that’s not the case. I really do have a sense of peace, not entirely Stoic and not so far from pacifism, but wholly my own.
Except for today. Today I wanted to rip the carotid out the man blocking my way to Trader Joe’s, trying to talk me up.
Lonely Queer
How to deal with queer loneliness?
Lonely Queer Indie
Queer loneliness. What does it look like? What does it feel like in the heat of summer? In the fast approaching dead of winter? I’ve been plagued with an inability to compose any single cohesive thought as of late, and it wasn’t looking good for my trademark poignancy. Luckily, I have an impassioned council of advisors who I convened in a comfortable VDub location, rife with memories of meals past, to aid me in the quest for queer loneliness.
entire world is so satisfied in their identity, how can you admit that you’re missing something? How are you supposed to admit that you aren’t perfect? Shouldn’t it all be good?
Political Lesbian Indie
Political Lesbian, if I were a meaner person I’d tell you that this question is about as cliche as an “I hate my wife” comic strip. But I try to be kind. And besides, you’re right. I’ve found myself, shockingly, in an era of reluctant feminism. I didn’t know I still had it in me to get mad at “manspreading” or “mansplaining” or “manindiepilledbullshitthatisalwaysaperfectcoverformisogyny” but I guess I do. So here I am. And here you are. What’s worse is I’d be reluctant to say that what you’re sick of is men here. Because men are everywhere! There are moments I think letting your resentment grow—a bitter seed in your belly—is justified. I think great satisfaction can be found in feeling angry, and angrier, and then indifferent.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been looking into the 4B movement. And diss tracks. Have you ever tried writing one? Like actually. With an old BabyTron beat, a Notes app, and a dream, I promise it’ll help at least a little bit.
Here’s what we found (I think we’re still looking, but that’s all right. Aren’t we all?).
A crisis of intimacy. I firmly believe that people everywhere are suffering for connection. And I’m prone to speak from a place of mild bitterness, but hear me out. I don’t think this is for lack of love in the world, nor for people seeking it, but I think it’s a twisted kind of assurance problem. Everyone is lonely in some sense, and no one believes anyone else is. What results is a sad and unjustified self-isolation. Bias confirmed time and time again that it’s only you who is lonely. Something internal must be wrong. But what exactly makes queer loneliness different? In my dedicated work, I have boiled it down to two principles.
Un . Brown exists at the turbulent nexus of uniqueness complexes and a disproportionate saturation of queer identity. I don’t mean this to blanket the entire student population but, given I’m writing this in the Indy, I’m making assumptions. When Brown is a forty-percent queer ‘Utopia,’ if your sexy Halloween costume boasts three layers of irony, and your queer friends, your crushes, your
Deux . I think a lot of people have complexes about their own queerness. Because it is not the default. Because it is not always safe. Because it is not always total, nor certain, nor exact. So there is no neat box to fit yourself into once the loneliness creeps in. No corner where you can go to comfort yourself, because the boundaries are all muddied and shifting. And that’s maddening. That is The Lonely.
But what to do??? These questions don’t have any pretty answers. They are constantly solved then unresolved in the vicious cycle that is life. That being said, there is palliative care. Reach into the world. Tell it what you want, even when you yourself don’t fully know. I think people are afraid to love. Wanting to love, being in love, and loving, is embarrassing. But there is a certain level of dignity you must abandon to find peace, to receive what it is you believe you deserve. So let yourself love, all else be damned. There is no more game to play.
P.S. If all else fails, I’d recommend letting yourself indulge in a feverish, nauseating, terrifyingly satisfying cry. A true sob. Make it melodramatic and entirely unnecessary, because sometimes it’s the only thing you can bring yourself to do. Allow yourself to feel small, to feel forgotten and sick. Then go to sleep. When you wake up, I promise the air will feel lighter. I promise you’ll notice the love more.
Bisou, bisou, Indie
Upcoming Actions & Community Events
Friday 11/15 @7PM
Location: RiffRaff Bookstore Courtyard, 60 Valley Street, Suite 107A, Providence, RI 02909
RiffRaff Literary Trivia Night
Spend your Friday night at RiffRaff, where teams of six will be squaring off to test their knowledge in literary trivia! Come early to grab a table and some refreshments. Be ready to share in the joy of clever team names, clever questions, and drinks until midnight!
Saturday 11/16 @1PM-3PM
Location: 400 Harris Ave Unit E, Providence, RI 02909
The Multilingual Writer
Join a workshop with Jessica Araújo, an Assistant Professor of English at the Community College of Rhode Island, aimed at creating a dynamic and inclusive space where multilingual writers can explore and celebrate their linguistic diversity. The workshop will provide tools and techniques to integrate their multiple languages into their writing. Discussions will encompass how one language may offer certain linguistic and cultural vantage points that one singular language may not, to practice multilingual writing in different contexts, and more. Open to writers of all levels and genres.
Monday 11/18 @12AM-5PM
Location: South Providence Library – Main Level Book Sale
Looking for great books at unbeatable prices? Stop by the library book sale and browse a huge selection of books! There are softcovers for just $0.50 and hardcovers for $1.00. Choose from young adult, adult fiction and non-fiction, and more! Cash Only.
Tuesday 11/19 @4:30PM-7PM: Small Format Book Club
Location: Rochambeau Library, 708 Hope Street, Providence, RI 02906
Rochambeau’s Fall Local Author Fair
Presented by the Rochambeau Library, come celebrate an array of Rhode Island authors. Meet and talk with a variety of authors about their books, with the option to purchase the books after. Refreshments provided!
Saturday 09/28 @2PM
Location: RiffRaff Bookstore Courtyard, 60 Valley Street, Suite 107A, Providence, RI 02909
Providence TGNB Community Meetup
This month’s Trans and Gender Nonbinary Community Meetup will be at Riffraff Books. Come to socialize and meet other TGNB folks! Please mask up and test if you are attending, and stay home if you are feeling sick.
Tuesday 11/19 @6PM
Location: 95 Empire St, Providence, RI 02903
POWR Community Meeting
Join Southside Community Land Trust on Wednesday to participate in a community health and wellness event at the Potters Ave Community Garden! There will be a free farmer’s market, food giveaways, activities for children, as well as mental health resources. Come unwind with Providence neighbors! Registration through their Instagram @southsideclt is requested but not required.
Tuesday 11/19 @6:30PM-7:30PM
Location: Southside Cultural Center, 393 Broad St, Providence, RI 02907
Conversations Book Club
On the third Tuesday of every month, come join the talk about books featuring authors and characters from marginalized groups. Meeting virtually, the copies of the latest book are on display and available to check out from the Mount Pleasant Library. For the month of November, they will be discussing Madness: Race and Insanity In a Jim Crow Aslum by Antonia Hylton.
Thursday 11/21 @6PM-7:30PM
Location: Wanskuck Library
Tarot Third Thursdays @ Wanskuck
Do you want to learn and practice using tarot cards? Join this community focused on building confidence, connecting with intuition, and finding personal understanding of the traditional card meanings. There will be lessons on new skills, collaborative exercises, and more. A variety of contemporary, inclusive tarot decks will be provided along with accessible tarot books from the library’s collection. All skills and experience welcome..
Arts
Friday 11/15 @1PM-5PM
Location: Rochambeau Library – Studio
Makerspace Open Studio for Adults
Do you have your own creative project in mind? The Rochambeau Library provides makerspace equipment! They offer Silhouette and Cricut cutting machines, sewing machines, sublimation printing, a Glowforge laser
cutter, and more. To participate, request a training or attend a scheduled class to learn the basics of a specific machine beforehand. After training, come work on independent projects during open studio sessions, hosted on Monday evenings, Wednesday mornings, and Friday afternoons at Rochambeau. Please RSVP at glocke@clpvd.org.
Tuesday 11/19 @6PM-7:30PM
Location: South Providence Library – Adult Area Gift-Makers: Signature Scent Candle Workshop
Join us for the first installment in our Gift-Makers Series! In this hands-on workshop, you’ll have access to a rich array of essential oils—from warm sandalwood and vanilla to vibrant citrus and soothing lavender. Suggested scent combinations will be provided, but you can also mix and match for a one-of-a-kind blend. Keep your candle for yourself or gift it to a friend!
Thursday 11/21 @4PM-5PM: Location: Smith Hill Library – Adult Area Winter Crochet Workshop
Every Thursday, come learn how to crochet and make a matching hat, scarf, and mittens before it gets chilly. Beginner friendly! Email ljohnson@clpvd.org to RSVP!
Thursday 11/21 @4PM-5PM: Location: 11 Dorrance St, Providence, RI 02903 Gallery Night Providence
Gallery Night is an evening of free and open access to galleries, museums, and art spaces throughout the Creative Capital. Come on a guided tour that evening, or explore the galleries on your own! You can also make your own tour by visiting whichever participating galleries you choose. If you’d like to reserve a spot on the tour of your choice ahead of time, a $1 is a guarantee of your spot. Come explore Providence!
Mutual Aid* & Community Fundraisers
*Mutual aid is “survival pending revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.
Friday 11/15 @6PM-7PM Volunteer Coordination Call
Youth Pride is holding a volunteer coordination call to give an overview of what assistance the center currently needs, upcoming events that require volunteer assistance, and going over the basics of maintaining the pantry drives that will keep youth well fed this winter. Please RSVP at bit. ly/volunteerypinov and if you would like to volunteer, email volunteer@ youthprideri.org.
By Friday 11/22
Location: 60 Valley St, Suite 104, Providence RI 02909
Thanksgiving Food Drive for Clinica
Esperanza/Hope Clinic
Join Providence Streets in the challenge to go a week without driving! This initiative aims to expose the obstacles in transportation without a car faced by almost a third of Americans, especially folks who are disabled, elderly, or low-income. Through this challenge, Providence Streets aims to foster conversation about more accessible and equitable transportation. To sign up and participate, check out weekwithoutdriving.org.
Housing Help for DARE Member
Help support one of DARE’s elderly members, who has been facing homelessness for over a month. Donate to https://tinyurl.com/ Shelter4DAREmember so that she can have a warm place to stay.
Location: Small Format, 335 Wickenden St, Providence, RI 02903
Everyone Deserves a Seat at the Table: Free Queer and Trans Harvest Food Boxes
If you or a fellow LGBTQ+ community member that you know would benefit from support for food security this season, sign up to receive a free “everything but the turkey” queer and trans harvest holiday food boxes! Small Format and We Share Hope are teaming up to help put together boxes that can feed 2-4 people. As supplies are limited, boxes will be prioritized for QTBIPOC community members, but will also be offered in a raffle system. If you would like to help with funding and support more folks, reach out to either @smallformatpvd or @wesharehope on Instagram!
